MOST FILMS WE have watched at the Garden Cinema near London’s Holborn have been excellent or extremely excellent. Today, we watched a Taiwanese film called “Days”, directed in 2020 by Tsai Ming-liang. It is one of the slowest moving films I have ever seen. It was not devoid of interest, but it was almost sleep inducing. Lasting about 2 hours, it felt like months, not days.
TWO FADED SIGNS CAUGHT my attention when I was walking along the east side of Southampton Row (just north of Holborn Underground station). The sign is on the southern side of the intersection of Catton Street and Southampton Row. The two faded, painted signs are separated by another which is carved on a stone plaque, and is clear to read. This sign reads:
“This memorial stone was laid by Alexander Maclaren, DD,, Litt D. President of the Baptist Union 1875-6 and 1901-2 on Wednesday 24th of April 1901”
Above this, there is a painted sign that can easily be read:
“To Kingsgate Baptist Church”
Below these two signs, there is another painted sign,a ‘ghost sign’, which has deteriorated considerably, but parts of it can either hardly be read or are illegible. Here is what I made of it:
“The CA[illegible] [2 more illegible words] Kingsgate House Acc[illegible] &(?) Warehouse Church Furniture”
An online article published in July 2020 in Italian (www.thelondonerd.com/tag/statua/) revealed that then, when the sign was more legible, it read:
“The Carey Kingsgate Press Ltd. – Accountancy – Warehouse – Church Furniture”
This web article also includes lovely photographs of the now re-purposed Kingsgate Chapel.
The three notices are on the corner of Kingsgate House, which was built between 1901 and 1903 for the Baptist Church. It was designed by Arthur Keen, architect for the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland. The Baptists used the building up to 1996. Since then, it has been repurposed.
As for the Kingsgate Chapel (the ‘Kingsgate Baptist Church’ on the fading sign), this can now only be accessed by entering Kingsgate House. Constructed in 1856, it is attached to the northeast corner of the building. No longer accessible to the public and hidden away, it is an octagonal building that can be seen on detailed maps of today. When it was in use as a chapel, its entrance would have been just east of Kingsgate House on Catton Street (formerly known as Eagle Street). Close to where its entrance used to be, there is the entrance to the Baptist Bar, which is now housed in the former chapel.
The ghost sign mentions a warehouse and church furniture with an arrow pointing east along Catton Street. This must have been demolished many years ago. I spotted the fading signs whilst returning home late one evening. Now, having found out something about them, I look forward to returning to Kingsgate House and having a drink in the former chapel – if the bar is still open for business.
THE GARDEN CINEMA is in Parker Street, which is near both Holborn Underground station and Covent Garden. This gem of a place opened in 2022. Housed in the building which formerly contained the offices of businessman Michael Chambers, who founded Chambers and Partners in 1989, a research company for law firms around the world, it was the realization of Mr Chambers’s dream to create a cinema for film enthusiasts such as he is.
The ticket office is on the ground floor. Stairs and lifts lead to the basement, where the bar, various small seating areas – some quite discrete, and the two auditoriums are located. The premises are designed and decorated with many Art Deco features and a good selection of sculptures and prints. The darkly coloured wallpaper (with nods to the William Morris style) and subdued lighting give the place a cosy, intimate night club atmosphere. The bar is reasonably priced. The staff are friendly and helpful. This is a cinema complex quite unlike any other I have visited in London – it is both stylish and intimate.
We watched a Romanian film made in 2023: “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World”. Before I discuss this excellent movie, let me tell you one more unusual thing about The Garden Cinema. There were no advertisements (commercials) prior to showing the main film – only several trailers of forthcoming shows in the cinema. This is quite different from other ‘independent’ cinemas, in which the feature film is always preceded by ads including one for the car company (currently Kia), which supports independent cinemas.
The Romanian film, which runs for almost three hours, is a ‘whacky’ and gritty black comedy with serious comments about life in post-Communist Romania. The brilliantly acted film blends skilfully ‘doctored’ flashbacks to life in Ceausescu’s Romania with scenes in Romania since the war in Ukraine commenced. One of the many things that this highly entertaining film emphasises is how the difficult, regimented, but relatively simple life under the dictatorship contrasts with the hectic, corrupt, and very hard life in capitalist Romania. Nothing was easy during Ceausescu’s ‘reign’, but after it ended, nothing has made life any easier. The film made me think that the tyranny of the dictator has been replaced by the tyranny of corruption and exploitation of cheap labour by countries outside Romania. Another thing that I felt was that the film showed how when the shackles of a highly oppressive regime were released following the death of the dictator, Romanian society seems to have gone crazy. Whether this is an exaggeration by the film makers or truly reflects contemporary life in Romania, I do not know. All I can say is that the 163 minutes of the film sped past remarkably quickly because I found it so highly enjoyable and engaging.
Even if I had not enjoyed the film so much, I would have thought highly of the Garden Cinema – a place I hope to visit many more times in the future.
A walk along
Sicilian Avenue is
Always quite calming
Sometime during the summer in the early to mid-1980s, when I was living in Kent, two young people came to stay with me from land-locked Hungary. Because travelling opportunities were limited and money was short in the Communist country, people did not travel abroad as much as people in Western Europe. My two guests had never seen the sea, except in photos and on the TV or cinema screen.
One evening, I drove my guests to the Kent coast to see the sea. We parked by a beach. As soon as we had stopped, the two lads leapt out of my car and ran into the sea fully clothed. That is how excited they were to see real waves and the sea.
After experiencing the sea, they asked me about ‘fish and chips’, which their English teacher in Budapest had mentioned. We walked to a nearby fish and chips shop and placed an order. When the fillets of fish arrived wrapped in crisp golden batter, my friends looked at them, wondering whether or not they had been served pieces of fish. They had never seen fish prepared like this before.
Fish prepared, fried and covered with batter, as it is served in British fish and chip shops is actually not a dish of British origin. According to that mine of knowledge Wikipedia, it was the Sephardic Jews, who settled in the UK from the 16th century onwards, who introduced fish prepared this way. Alexis Soyer (1810-58), the famous 19th century chef wrote in his A shilling cookery for the people, published in 1854:
“There is another excellent way of frying fish, which is constantly in use by the children of Israel … In some families … they dip the fish, first in flour, then in egg, and fry in oil“, which is more or less what happens in a fish and chips shop.
This leads me to the real subject of the article: a reccommendation. There are many highly-rated fish and chips shops (‘chippies’) in the British Isles. The ‘Fryers Delight’ is one of them. This unpretensious shop, whose decor seems unaltered since the day it opened back in in 1958, serves excellent fish with superb chips cut in the shop’s kitchen, all fried in beef dripping. I have eaten there twice, and look forward to my next visit. The staff are friendly, and the prices are very reasonable and the food is good value for money.
The FRYERS DELIGHT, which is open from noon to 10pm every day except Sunday is located at:
19 Theobalds Rd, Holborn, London WC1X 8SL
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