Tag Archives: london

A tree, a composer, Midsummers Night Dream, and the Barbican in London

Posted on by
Reply

BURNHAM BEECHES IS an area of woodland not far from Slough and Windsor. Rich in beech trees, it was purchased by the Corporation of London in 1880. The German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) visited Britain several times between 1829 and 1847. While staying in England, Felix enjoyed spending time in Burnham Beeches. It is said that there was one old beech tree under which the composer liked to sit. Legend has it that it was in the shade of this tree that he gained inspirations for some of his compositions including some of the well-known “Incidental music to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’” (composed 1842).  In January 1990, when the tree was about 500 years old, it fell over during a storm.

Part of the fallen tree was presented to the Barbican Horticultural Society. Like Burnham Beeches, the Barbican (a post WW2 development in the City of London) is managed by the Corporation of London. The remnant – part of the tree’s trunk – stands on a section of the elevated walkway not far from Barbican Underground Station. Next to it, there is a plaque detailing its history and its probable connection with the composer.

What I have described so far appears in many websites detailing the curiosities of London. However, not one of them mentions that there is yet another fragment of this tree within the barbican. This piece of the dead tree is smaller than that on the walkway, and can be found, somewhat hidden by vegetation, within the Barbican’s magnificent conservatory.

I wondered what had attracted Mendelssohn to Burnham Beeches. In an article by Helen J Read, published by the Buckingham Archaeological Society on its website (www.bucksas.org.uk), I learned that Felix was often a guest of Mr and Mrs Grote, who lived close to Burnham Beeches. They often entertained musical and literary figures. Amongst their many guests was the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, who first performed in London in 1847. The singer also had a favourite tree, which, like Mendelssohn’s, was destroyed in a storm.

Regarding Mendelssohn and his tree, Ms Read wrote:

“Mr and Mrs Grote also entertained the composer Felix Mendelssohn. His favourite part of the Beeches was a mossy slope between Grenville Walk and Victoria Drive, at that time covered with pollarded trees. Many maps mark this area as Mendelssohn’s slope, and it is thought that the music for Puck and Oberon from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was inspired by this area. After Mendelssohn’s untimely death, Mrs Grote erected a headstone in his memory but the headstone was removed  … 

…  There is no specific mention in the earlier maps or guides of any particular tree favoured by the composer, but a plaque was later erected on an old pollard tree. The tree blew over and the plaque was moved to one nearby until the storm of 1987, when this tree lost all its branches.”

Judging by what Ms Read wrote, it seems to me that there is a possibility that the fragments of tree, now commemorated at the Barbican as being Mendelssohn’s Tree, might not be remnants of the one beneath which he sat. Even if these bits of timber are not from his favourite tree, they make a charming memorial to a composer whose music gives pleasure to so many people.

Why give them that name?

Posted on by
Reply

THERE IS A SHORT crescent lined with elegant residential houses near to the Kensington Temple church close to the centre of London’s Notting Hill Gate. A few yards west of this there is a short cul-de-sac called Horbury Mews.  The crescent also bears the name Horbury. Although I have passed them often, it was only today that I wondered about ‘Horbury’.

Both the Crescent and the Mews were built on land that was leased to William Chadwick in 1848 by Felix Ladbroke, heir of the property developer and landowner James Weller Ladbroke (died 1847). William, a developer, built many houses on the Ladbroke Estate in Kensington. His heir WW Chadwick constructed the houses on Horbury Crescent between 1855 and 1857. The mews nearby bear the date 1878, which is prominently displayed on one of its buildings. The mews was constructed on a former nurseryman’s grounds. They served to house horses and servants of the nearby houses. Today, they are homes for the well-off.

The name Horbury derives from the nearby Kensington Temple, which was built in 1848-49, and was then called ‘The Horbury Chapel’. The name was chosen because the hometown one of its first deacons was Horbury in Yorkshire.

So, two street names in a little part of Kensington commemorate a small town in Yorkshire. I did not expect to discover that.

A survivor on Oxford Street near Selfridges

Posted on by
Reply

I HAVE PASSED IT SO many times whilst travelling by bus along London’s Oxford Street, and wondered what it is. I am referring to a well-maintained brickwork tower-like structure surmounted by a recumbent stone lion. It is a few yards east of Selfridges department store. Eighteenth century in appearance, it looks incongruous standing flush against an undistinguished modern brick building. The object of interest stands on the eastern corner of the intersection of Oxford Street and a short cul-de-sac, Stratford Place, about which I will write more in the future.

Stratford Place runs in a north/south direction. Its eastern side is lined with a row of Georgian terraced houses. Prior to the twentieth century and the development of Oxford Street as a shopping district, the row of Georgian houses would have extended south with the southernmost of them having a façade on Oxford Street. In 1890, the Georgian villa that stood on the eastern corner of Oxford Street and Stratford Place was demolished. All that remained was the lion-topped gate house (or porter’s lodge), which I have seen so often whilst travelling past on the bus. The west side of Stratford Place was demolished to build a huge Lyons Corner House eatery. The demolition included the loss of the western gatehouse that used to face the still standing one, which has been preserved.

A landmark in London’s Soho since 1949

Posted on by
Reply

DURING THE LATE 1950s and much of the 1960s, my mother created artworks in the sculpture workshops of St Martins School of Art, which was then located on Charing Cross Road near to Foyles bookshop. My mother was a keen follower of the recipes of Elizabeth David (1913-1992), who introduced Mediterranean food to British kitchens. Near to St Martins in Old Compton Street, there were many food shops that supplied the ingredients that were required to follow Ms David’s recipes accurately. There used to be a French greengrocer between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. This was one of the only places where ‘exotic’ salads such as mâché (lamb’s lettuce) could be purchased. Further west along Old Compton Street, there was a Belgian butcher, Benoit Bulcke, which cut meat in the French style, which my mother preferred. She claimed that English butchers were not ‘up to scratch’. Both these shops have long since disappeared. Another Soho establishment, which we used to visit regularly, was Trattoria da Otello in Dean Street. We went there so often that we were treated like old friends. Now, sadly, that wonderful restaurant is no more.

Three Old Compton Street shops frequented by my mother are still in business. They are the Algerian Coffee Stores, whose appearance has barely changed since the early 1960s when I first remember entering it; and a supplier of Italian foods: I Camisa & Son. Lina Stores, which my mother also used to visit still exists, but its branch on Brewer Street (and other newer branches) seems to have become more like restaurants than Italian delicatessens.

During school holidays, I used to accompany my mother on trips from Golders Green, where we resided, to the West End. On most of these excursions, food shopping in Soho was on our itinerary. So, as a youngster I got to know these various food shops quite well. As an innocent child, I associated Soho with food shopping rather than its other more colourful activities.

Every visit to Soho involved a stop at Bar Italia on Frith Street. There, I would be treated with a cappuccino while my mother drank an espresso. From when I first knew it in the early 1960s (or possibly the late 1950s), the overall appearance of Bar Italia has barely changed. As a friend remarked on a recent visit, the cracked Formica counter opposite the bar is typical of how cafés would have been fitted out back in the 1950s.

Bar Italia is almost three years older than me. It was founded in late 1949 by Lou and Caterina Polledri. Lou was born in the Italian city of Piacenza. According to the Bar’s website, some of the above-mentioned Formica was put in place in 1949, when the establishment was for its time ‘state-of-the-art’. The floor is that which was laid down by members of the Polledri family in 1949.

When it opened, Soho had a large Italian community, which much appreciated the Bar Italia as a home-away-from-home. At the far end of the small establishment, there is a television that broadcasts Italian TV, mostly sporting events. Each time I visit the place, the screen sems to have been replaced by a larger one. However, I cannot recall whether there was a television in place when I visited as a child. What I do remember is that next door to Bar Italia, there used to be a Greek restaurant called Jimmy’s, which, for some reason, my mother never took us there.

Once a local for the Italian community, Bar Italia has become somewhat of a Soho landmark and tourist attraction. In addition to coffee and alcoholic drinks that would be available in any local bar in Italy, Bar Italia now also serves hot meals. It also sells Portuguese ‘natas’, which are not typical fare in bars in Italy.  Apart from this change, the prices of its excellent coffee have shot up to levels higher than most London cafés charge. Whereas one can expect to pay from on average £2.80 to “£3.20” for an espresso, Bar Italia is now charging over £4.20. I mention this, but do not begrudge them because by patronising Bar Italia we are helping to preserve a delightful historical London landmark.

NOW watch this lovely little video about the place:

Inspired in the twenty-first century by fifteenth century art

Posted on by
Reply

THE WORD ‘INSPIRATION’ has at least two meanings. One of them is ‘to breathe in (i.e., inhale air). When air is inhaled, many of the oxygen molecules it contains are converted to become other substances, some of which is carbon dioxide that is exhaled. Another meaning of the word is to be mentally stimulated, often by something one has perceived in the world around us. What results from this form of inspiration might not much resemble whatever it was that caused it. Today (the 6th of August 2023), we visited a small exhibition in one room of London’s National Gallery. Showing until the 29th of October 2023, the exhibition is called “Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden”.

The exhibition contains two major works: “La Madonna della Rondine (The Madonna of the Swallow)” painted in about 1490 by Carlo Crivelli (c1435-1495); and “Crivelli’s Garden” painted in the early 1990s by Paola Rego (1935-2022) when she was the National Gallery’s first Associate Artist between 1990 and 1992. There are also some sketches that Rego made for her enormous painting, originally designed to be a mural.

Both the Crivelli and the Rego paintings are excellent, but quite different in style. However, Rego was inspired to create her mural after seeing Crivelli’s altarpiece. Although both paintings are of religious subjects, there is no obvious similarity between the two of them. As Paola Rego said in 1992:

“If the story is ‘given’ I take liberties with it to make it conform to my own experiences and to be outrageous.”

And that is what she has done after having been inspired by Crivelli’s masterpiece.

The paintings at the base of Crivelli’s altarpiece (the ‘predella’) include scenes set in gardens. According to the National Gallery’s website, what Rego did was to reimagine:

“…Crivelli’s house and garden to explore the narratives of women in biblical history and folklore based on paintings across the collection and stories from the medieval Golden Legend. Her figures inspired by the Virgin Mary, Saint Catherine, Mary Magdalene and Delilah, share the stage with other women from biblical and mythological histories.”

She has populated her picture with portraits of people she knew including (to quote the website again):

“…friends, members of her family and staff at the National Gallery whom she asked to sit for her, including Erika Langmuir, Lizzie Perrotte and Ailsa Bhattacharya who were members of the Education Department at the time.”

The resulting work is both beautiful and fascinating, but quite different from the 15th century work which had inspired her.

Whether your artistic preferences are for art created during the Italian Renaissance or in the late 20th century, this small exhibition will not disappoint you. If you enjoy both, as I do, then this inspiring show of artistic inspiration is a ‘must see’ event.

Farewell to an old friend in the heart of London

Posted on by
1

OVER THE PAST 45 YEARS (or more), we have eaten at least once a year at the India Club restaurant in London’s Strand. Occupying the first and second floors of the old-fashioned Hotel Strand Continental, the Club’s bar on the first floor is reached via a steep, narrow staircase. Opposite it, there is an office and reception area where our friend Mr Marker, or one of his daughters, greets us. Another narrow staircase ascends to the dining area on the second floor.

The Club was founded either just before India became independent in 1947, or in the very early 1950s. Close to the Indian High Commission, Bush House, and the London School of Economics, it was designed to be a home-away-from-home for Indians in London. The Club’s website (www.theindiaclub.co.uk/our-story) mentioned that the Club:

“… was originally set up by the India League, to further Indo-British friendship in the post-independence era, and it quickly became a base for groups serving the Asian community … The Indian Journalist Association, Indian Workers Association and Indian Socialist Group of Britain were just some of the groups which used 143 Strand for their events and activities. The building was also a base for the new wings of the India League which ran a free legal advice bureau and a research and study unit from this address.”

One of its founding members was Krishna Menon (1896-1974) who was independent India’s first High Commissioner to London. Soon after it was founded, the Club became popular with non-Indians as well as those for whom it was founded. Supplying Indian cuisine at very reasonable prices, the restaurant became a popular eatery. Until a few years ago, alcohol was only available to paid-up members of the Club. To become a member, and thereby have the use of the bar, an annual membership fee of only £1 was payable. Later, the Club’s restaurant must have obtained an alcohol licence because the requirement to become a member (for the purposes of purchasing booze) was dropped.

Both the restaurant and the bar have always looked like they must have done when the Club was first opened so many decades ago. Consequently, the place has an old-fashioned look about it. Should one of its founding members wander in today, they would have found little changed, except the prices. For us, and I suspect many other regulars, part of the charm of the Club was its unchanging appearance. It seemed to me that the management have deliberately not done anything to spoil the early postwar atmosphere of the place. The Club is adorned with paintings and photographs, mainly depicting notable Indians who lived during the period when India was becoming independent. To quote the website again:

“The interior of 143 Strand, particularly the characterful and distinct entrance, stairwells, reception area, first floor bar and second floor restaurant, remain in the same condition as they were during the occupation of the property by the India League. As a result,143 Strand’s interior allows it’s historical and cultural associations to be experienced first-hand by the public. It is the only building in the capital connected to the India League that has not been redeveloped or re-purposed. It therefore remains living history.”

​

As for the food served at the Club, over the years it has varied in quality according to who was working in the kitchen. Always satisfactory and good value, the Club’s food could never be described as exceptionally good. The menu included both vegetarian and non-veg dishes. I always enjoyed rounding off the meal with the excellent kulfi they served.

A few weeks ago in August 2023, a friend in Bombay (Mumbai) sent me an upsetting newspaper article. It quoted the Club’s owner Mr Marker as saying:

“It is with a very heavy heart that we announce the closure of the India Club, with our last day open to the public on September 17.”

Bearing this in mind, yesterday (Monday, the 4th of September 2023), a small group of us decided to have a last supper at the Club – to say farewell to this wonderful relic. When we arrived at the Club at 6pm, I could hardly believe my eyes. There was a queue of people waiting to dine at the Club. The line stretch from the pavement, up both flights of stairs, to the restaurant, which was chock full of diners. I had never seen the dining room with such a large crowd. The bar was also full of people waiting to get a table. When we learned that we would have to wait at least 45 minutes to be seated, we decided to go elsewhere (to Sagar Indian vegetarian restaurant in Panton Street).

It was various news items about its imminent closure that drew us and all the other people to the Club. Some of them, like Lopa and I, were regulars, but I wondered how many of the other folk queuing that Monday evening had ever eaten at the Club. Did its impending closure, like the film “Oppenheimer” and the play “Dr Semmelweis” – both about figures known mostly to scientists, draw the crowds to a fairly unfamiliar place that had suddenly become attractive because it was soon to be no more?

By car from Kuwait to London

Posted on by
Reply

ON THE FIRST OF August (2023), we went to one of our favourite kebab shops – Raavi in London’s short Drummond Street (near Euston station). There was a large Datsun saloon car parked outside Raavi, and another across the road. Neither of them was in pristine condition.  Both were covered with stickers, and each had Kuwaiti registration plates. On the front bonnet of each of them were the words:

“Kuwait to Paris to London 2023”

Beneath these were words in Arabic. Above the word ‘Kuwait’, there was an image of London’s Big Ben. Above ‘Paris’, there was an image of the Eiffel Tower, and above ‘London’, there was a picture depicting some Kuwaiti landmarks. In Arabic, one reads from right to left. Therefore, reading the Arabic way, the images depict: Kuwait to Paris to London’.

On each of the car’s bonnets, there were flags of different countries and either a boat or an arrow between neighbouring flags. Reading the bonnets from right to left, the route taken by the intrepid drivers of these cars was as follows:

By sea from Kuwait to Turkey; by road from Turkey to Bulgaria to Romania to Hungary to Slovakia to Poland to Holland to Czech Republic to Austria to Belgium to Germany to Italy to France to England to Spain. Then, by ship to Morocco.

The order of the countries seems a little odd. Maybe, a few have been omitted. Because there is an arrow rather than a ship between France and England, and between England and Spain, I guess that the cars travelled through the Channel Tunnel.

I do not know why these cars were parked in Drummond Street, but whoever drove them had made a journey that I am sure I would have enjoyed.

Is nothing sacred?

Posted on by
Reply

A LONG WALL on the south bank of the River Thames faces the Houses of Parliament. It is literally covered with hearts painted in red. Each heart is supposed to commemorate one of the more than 220,000 people who died of covid19 in Britain. Families and friends of the victims can write the names of their lost ones on the hearts on this wall – the National Covid Memorial Wall. For those who work in the Houses of Parliament and those who walk past it, this heart covered wall is a chilling and moving reminder of a terrible period during the recent history of Britain as well as the rest of the world.

A group of volunteers:

“… repaint faded hearts, re-write dedications that are being absorbed into the Wall, remove graffiti, and look after the Wall to ensure that those lost to Covid19 in the UK are remembered as people, not as a statistics.” (www.nationalcovidmemorialwall.org/)

Recently, we watched some of these generous people, some of them mounted on ladders, working with their paint brushes. As we walked alongside the wall, reading some of the names of people who were killed by the covid virus, we noted that not all of the inscriptions were dedicated to remembering the dead. Some of them, it is sad to relate, were tasteless graffiti and statements such as “X loves Y”. It is these thoughtless additions to a wall of sorrow that the dedicated volunteers work to eradicate. Seeing these irreverent and irrelevant ‘blots’ on the wall made me think “is nothing sacred?”

White and nutritious – milk and racism

Posted on by
1

UNTIL I WAS ABOUT 18, I drank a pint of chilled milk in the morning and another when I came home from school. I did not drink all the varieties of milk that were supplied by the milkmen who worked for the Express Dairy Company, but chose the ‘homogenised’ variety, which did not have cream at the top of the bottle. Never once whilst drinking this refreshing slightly watery liquid did I ever imagine that I would one day visit an exhibition about milk. Today, the 29th of July 2023, I viewed an exhibition called “Milk”, which is being shown at the Wellcome Collection in London’s Euston Road until the 10th of September 2023. Amongst the numerous exhibits displayed in this beautifully curated show, the following particularly interest me.

  1. There was a collection of decorated porcelain cream jugs.  Each one was shaped like a cow. Cream used to be poured into the hollow cow via a hole in its back. Then, a lid was placed to cover that orifice. To use the cream jugs, the cows were tilted so that the cream could flow out of another hole through creatures’ mouths.
  2. There was a terracotta model of a mule carrying two trays laden with cheeses. This Ancient Roman artefact dating back to the 3rd or 2nd century BC was found by archaeologists in Southern Italy. In times long before refrigeration, making cheese was one way of preserving milk for future use.
  3. I saw a metal lactometer, which was used to determine the amount of water in milk. My wife said that when she was a child in India, milk used to be delivered to the door. To check whether the milkman had watered it down, her mother used a lactometer just like the one on display at the exhibition.
  4. Our daughter spotted an 18th century etching depicting St Bernard of Clairvaux kneeling before the Virgin holding the Christ Child. As the saint knelt before the Virgin, he received a squirt of her milk from her breast. This was supposed to grant him wisdom and eloquence. When she was studying History of Art, our daughter wrote a thesis about this curious episode – The Lactation of St Bernard’.
  5. A rather uninteresting looking exhibit proved to be most fascinating. It consisted of two milk testing forms, which had to be completed after a farmer’s batch of milk had been tested for diseases, bacteria, fat content, and protein content. The forms on display related to milk produced by cattle on the Dartington Hall Estate in Devon. The Estate was founded to research the merits of various scientific farming methods. One of the founders of the Estate was the agronomist Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974). What made him special in my mind was that after meeting the great Rabindrath Tagore (1861-1941) in the USA in 1913, he later (in 1922) set up for Tagore an Institute of Rural Reconstruction near Tagore’s university at Shantiniketan (now in West Bengal). After marrying Dorothy Straight, Elmhirst and his wife established the Estate at Dartington in 1925. It was modelled on what he had founded near Shantiniketan.

There were plenty of other exhibits that were both visually interesting and thought provoking. A theme that I felt pervaded the exhibition is related to the colour of milk – white. Because milk is often perceived as being healthy, pure, and virtuous, it may also nourish the malevolent ideas of white racists. One of the exhibits showed a video of Trump supporters cavorting around, each one of them waving large bottles of white milk whilst shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Yet, the ancestors of racists like these were perfectly happy to snatch the newborn babies of black slaves away from their mothers, so that these unfortunate women could be forced to breast-feed the babies of the white women of the families who owned them. Their milk was white, but not their skin colour. To compensate for these and other harsh reminders that all is still not well in the racial tolerance scene, the exhibition includes a satirical film from You Tube ( https://youtu.be/cevXg_SlT-Q ), which makes fun of people with racist tendencies.  

Well, it never occurred to me that milk and racism might be considered in the same brackets until I visited the splendid show at the Wellcome Collection. It is well worth seeing not only because of its historical and scientific aspects, but also for its artistic and sociological content.

Getting around the planning regulations in London and Oxo cubes

Posted on by
Reply

DESPITE THE PRESENCE of many distinctive buildings constructed on the south bank of the River Thames since the end of WW2, the OXO tower built in about 1929 is still a noteworthy and unusual landmark. OXO, just in case you do not already know, is a company that is most famous for its meat extract cubes, which can be dissolved to make soups, nutritious teas, and gravies. The company uses a process for making meat extract (in liquid form) that was invented in 1840 by the German scientist Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873). In 1866, Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company (‘LEMCO’) was founded in Britain. At first it produced the liquid form of the meat extract, which was quite costly. So, they developed a cheaper solid form, which was sold as OXO cubes, and they are still available today.

In the 1920s, LEMCO acquired the riverside building (opposite St Paul’s Cathedral), which had been first used as a power station for the Post Office. The company modified it considerably to produce an edifice with Art Deco features. This was designed by the company’s architect Albert Moore between 1928 and 1929. LEMCO wanted their effectively new building to include a tower with illuminated advertising signs. However, at that time, planning permission for skyline advertising near the riverfront was refused.  The architect came up with a brilliant solution to get around the planning regulations.

The square tower was designed with three windows on each of its four external walls. Each set of windows were shaped as a pair of circles separated by a cross shaped like an ‘X’. Thus, each of the four sets of windows spelled the name ‘OXO’. Even during daytime, when there are no lights switched on behind the windows’ glass panes, the name OXO can be seen from quite a distance. Because they were designed as windows, the planning authorities were in a weak position to object, and LEMCO got away with their attempt to use the tower to advertise.

By the 1970s, the OXO building had fallen into disuse. In the 1990s, the building along with its distinctive tower began to be redeveloped for use as housing, retail, and recreational purposes (including a now famous restaurant). At night the windows on the tower now are surrounded by neon lighting and the windows spelling out ‘OXO; can be seen from afar. OXO still exists, but it is now owned in the UK by Premier Foods.