IT WAS FROM ETHIOPIA that historians believe coffee beans were first exported to Yemen, where they were roasted and processed into what we would now recognise as a coffee drink. The earliest recorded use of coffee beans for brewing the drink was in 15th century Yemen. However, soon the drink spread to other parts of the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Persia. By 1600, it had reached Europe. Today, the 13th of April 2023, we were strolling along Shepherds Bush Market, which runs alongside the elevated railway tracks along which trains of the Hammersmith & City and Circle Lines run. The tracks run high above the market supported by brickwork arches. Some of these arches have been used to house shops and in one case an interesting café, which opened in 2020, just before the first of the covid19 lockdowns.
The café is called Delina and is run by Ethiopians. Beautifully decorated with Ethiopian textiles and other artworks, this place offers Ethiopian fare including coffee from Ethiopia. Customers can have their coffee prepared in various common ways such as, for example, Americano, espresso, and latte. I asked whether I could try coffee the way it is drunk in Ethiopia and was given the choice of coffee flavoured with cardamom or with ginger. I opted for the latter because once, many years ago, I had drunk coffee with ginger (and other spices) in a tiny coffee shop next to a mosque in Fort Kochi (Kerala, India), and liked it.
The lady working behind the bar first collected a ‘jebena’, which is ceramic container with a cylindrical base, a handle, and a long neck with a pouring spout. She washed it out and then placed it on a glowing charcoal to both dry it and heat it. Meanwhile, she prepared some coffee in the espresso machine, and filled a small jug with it. To this she added some ginger powder and stirred the mixture well. Carefully, she poured the ginger coffee into the heated ceramic container. Then, she loaded a small tray with the following: the ceramic container and a woven stand to support it upright; a tiny coffee cup with no handle; a bowl of sugar; and a small circular holder containing lumps of smoking incense. She explained that in Ethiopia it was believed that drinking coffee whilst being bathed in incense fumes enhanced the enjoyment of the beverage. There was enough coffee in the jug to refill the tiny cup or bowl about five times.
In Ethiopia, the coffee is usually first roasted in front of those who are about to enjoy it, ground with a pestle and mortar, and then brewed with water in the jebena being heated on charcoal. Then, it is poured into the tiny cups through a filter made with fine filaments. Although Delina has an electrically heated pan for roasting coffee beans, I imagine that roasting a fresh batch for one customer was considered too much work. I can imagine that when the place has a group of Ethiopian customers, shortcuts cannot be taken and the beans are freshly roasted for them.
As for the coffee laced with ginger, it was enjoyable. I could not taste the ginger, but I could feel it in my throat as I swallowed it. Years ago in Fort Kochi, we had been told that it was believed that ginger coffee was beneficial for the throat. Would I go to Delina again? Yes, I would. Despite the trains rumbling overhead every few minutes, the place has a delightful and visually satisfying ambience, and friendly staff. It also serves Ethiopian food, which we have yet to sample.
WHEN DRIVING HOME after leaving our vacuum cleaner for repair at a small shop in Ealing, we passed a tidy estate consisting of houses and blocks of flats, all decorated with mock half-timbering painted in black and white. Near to West Ealing Underground station, this housing colony is called Hanger Hill Garden Estate.
During the period between the two World Wars, much residential building work was undertaken in London’s suburbs. Often, estates were built with features that mimicked rusticity. The idea was that the commuters, who lived there, might imagine that they were enjoying a village atmosphere, without being far away from the inner city, where many of them worked. To create this illusion, house builders adorned their constructions with decorative features that were supposed to make them seem older and more traditional than they were. The use of mock half-timbering on external walls was a commonly used decorative trick designed to evoke suggestions of ‘ye olde England’.
At Hanger Hill Garden Estate, there is a uniformity of style, which makes the use of half-timbering eye-catching rather than suggestive of rustic traditions. Interestingly, the mock half-timbering does not extend to cover the dull, pebble-dashed rear walls of some of the blocks of flats. These surfaces are less easy to see from the roads than the mock half-timbering. Overall, the result is attractive. When I first saw this well-maintained estate with neat gardens, I thought of early 20th century garden suburbs rather than old country villages, which are often delightful because they lack uniformity in their layouts.
The opening of the branch of the Central Line, which runs from Shepherds Bush to Ealing Broadway, in 1920, and especially the opening of West Acton Station three years later, were the stimuli for the construction of residential estates in the area. In 1925, the first bit of land was acquired by Hanger Hill Garden Estate Ealing Limited. The estate was built between 1928 and about 1932. The buildings, flats and houses, were all designed by the architectural practice of Douglas Smith & Barley. The resulting layout has considerable uniformity, and is attractive without being monotonous. A good feature in the estate’s design is that the blocks of flats stand in spacious lawns.
The Residents Association’s website has a good history of the place (www.hhgera.com). It noted that in the 1930s:
“…times were clearly pleasant and peaceful ones for all the tenants on the Estate. Occupiers of some of the four-bedroomed houses employed a maid, the fourth bedroom having been designed with this in mind. Whilst all the houses and many of the flats had garages, only a small number of people on the Estate owned cars … These were the days when goods were delivered to the home. Tradesmen were not allowed to call at the front doors of the houses or flats, but had to call at back doors using the service roads. Bakers, butchers, fish salesmen and greengrocers all called weekly, some attending earlier in the day or week to take orders. In the parking bays behind the flats, vans from Harrods, Dickens & Jones and the like, were to be seen drawing up.”
However, life on the estate was not free from regulations:
“Tenancies of flats were refused to people who had young children. No animals were allowed to be kept in the flats … House tenants were allowed to hang out washing only on Mondays and Tuesdays; flat tenants were not permitted to hang out washing at all.”
Currently, so two friendly residents informed us, the estate is subject to strict conservation regulations. This is a good thing because it would be a shame to spoil the appearance of this charming and unusual enclave of residential accommodation in this part of west London.
BEFORE THE YEAR 1800, the West End was truly the western end of London. West of Mayfair and Marylebone, there was countryside: woods, fields, private parks, farms, stately homes, villages, and highwaymen. After the beginning of the 19th century, the countryside began to disappear as villages grew and coalesced and the city of London expanded relentlessly westward. What had been rural Middlesex gradually became the west London we know today. My new book, illustrated with photographs and maps, explores the past, present, and future of many places, which became absorbed into what is now west London: that is London west of Park Lane and the section of Edgware Road south of Kilburn. Some of the places described will be familiar to many people (e.g., Paddington, Kensington, Fulham, and Chelsea). Other locations will be less known by most people (e.g., Acton, Walham Green, Crane Park, Harmondsworth, and Hayes). Many people have seen the places included in my book when they have looked out of the windows of aircraft descending towards the runways at Heathrow, and many of them will have passed some of these places as they travel from Heathrow to their homes or hotels. My book invites people to begin exploring west London – a part of the metropolis less often on tourists’ itineraries than other areas. “Beyond Marylebone and Mayfair: Exploring West London” is aimed at both the keen walker (or cyclist) and the armchair traveller.
Beyond Marylebone and Mayfair: Exploring West London is available as a paperback from Amazon here:
IN NORMAL TIMES, we would be setting off for a long stay in India around this period of the year, late October, or early November. We would hire a cab to take us to Heathrow Airport, which is best accessed from our home via the A4 and then the M4. The route to the airport passes a sign for the entrance to Chiswick House, which is about three and a third miles from our home as the crow flies. On the way back from Heathrow on our return from India we pass a church tower adorned with a deep blue coloured onion-shaped dome decorated with gold stars about a mile and a half further west from the Chiswick House turning. Until today, the 11th of November 2020, neither my wife nor I have ever visited these two places.
During our current ‘lockdown’, entering Chiswick House is forbidden, but wandering around its grounds is permitted. And, what a treat they offer. The house, completed in 1729, was built in neo-Palladian style. It was designed by, and built for, Richard Boyle (1694-1753), an Anglo-Irishman who was an aristocrat (3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork) and an accomplished architect. Burlington demolished the Jacobean mansion, the former home of an Earl of Somerset, that he had inherited from his father and replaced it with what we see today (minus some newer additions). Horace Walpole wrote that Burlington’s creation:
“… the idea of which is borrowed from a well-known villa of Palladio (that of the Marquis Capra at Vicenza), is a model of taste, though not without faults, some of which are occasioned by too strict adherence to rules and symmetry…”
Yet, these faults, which were apparent to Walpole, do not disturb our enjoyment of the exterior of the building today. John Summerson, author of “Georgian London”, regarded the villa at Chiswick as being “very magnificent” and pointed out that its plan is close to that of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda near Vicenza.
Following the death of its builder and then his widow, Chiswick House was owned by the 4th and then 5th Dukes of Devonshire. In 1806, the politician Charles Fox died in the house and twenty-one years later, the Prime Minister Lord Canning also expired within its walls. The house fell into decline in the 19th century. After 1892, it was used as a lunatic asylum, and then in 1929, the 9th Duke of Devonshire sold it to Middlesex County Council, who used it as a fire station for a while. During WW2, one of two wings that had been added to the house was hit by a German V2 rocket. In 1956, the two wings that were not part of the Palladian villa were demolished and eventually the fine house designed by Boyle became maintained by English Heritage and accessible to visitors.
The gardens of Chiswick House are not overly large, but they are magnificent. The grounds are full of sculptures, picturesque kiosks, garden follies including sculpted columns and a classical temple, long avenues of trees and hedges. The centrepiece of the grounds is a long stretch of water. It has a waterfall at one end and a beautiful masonry bridge crossing it further downstream. The designers of the gardens, Burlington and the celebrated landscaper William Kent (c1685-1748), are supposed to evoke the gardens of Ancient Rome. It was Kent who designed the waterfall, having been inspired by Italian garden decorative features. The grounds, though compact, are richly varied with different vistas around every corner. The elegant bridge crossing the water body was commissioned by Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806), wife of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, and built in 1774 to the designs of James Wyatt (1746-1813), a rival of the great architect Robert Adam. Even under the grey skies that accompanied us today, the gardens at Chiswick House are very uplifting.
There is a café a few yards from the Palladian-style building. Its architecture is a complete contrast to the older building but a successful one. Built in a simple but effective contemporary style with stone colonnades between 2006 and 2010, and designed by Caruso St John Architects, this is the most elegant ‘stately home’ refreshment centre that I have seen so far. From the tables placed outside this superb example of modern architecture, one can enjoy beverages and snacks whilst admiring the fine 18th century house close by.
It did not take more than a few minutes to drive from Chiswick House to the building with the blue onion-shaped dome, The Cathedral of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God and Holy Royal Martyrs in London (‘the Dormition’, for short) in Harvard Road. We have seen the dome on countless occasions but never the simple white coloured church to which it is attached. We parked in the small carpark next to a Victorian house where the clergy lives and hoped against hope, because most churches are closed these days, that the Russian Orthodox church would be open. And it was.
The church was built in an ancient Russian style in 1999 and contrasts with other Orthodox cathedrals in London such as the Serbian, Greek, and Romanian, which are housed in churches that were originally not used by Orthodox Christians. It was by no means the first Russian Orthodox church in London. That honour goes to a Russian church dedicated to the ‘Dormition’ that was built in 1716 and attached to the Russian Embassy in London. The Russian church moved premises several times, ending up at St Stephens Church in Emperor’s Gate off Gloucester Road. This church was leased from the Scottish Presbyterian Church. When the lease expired in 1989, it was decided to build a new church in Russian style, and this is what we visited in Harvard Road.
A monument close to one of the church’s entrances reads both in Russian and in English:
“In memory of the Holy Royal Martyrs tormented and slain by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg on the 4th of July 1918.”
This is the first monument of this kind that I have seen. We entered the church through doors beneath a tower with several large bells. We were greeted by a priest whose command of English was good enough to answer our questions. This kindly man allowed us to look around and to take photographs.
The interior of the church is a complete contrast to its plain white exterior. Every surface of the walls and ceiling is decorated with frescos. A large circular lamp holder is suspended beneath the dome in whose roof there is a portrait of the Pantocrator. The panels of the iconostasis were beautifully painted in that ageless style typical of eastern Orthodox church painting. They were painted in about 2008 by craftsmen from Russia, who based their creations on the Moscow style of the 15th and 16th centuries.
My grandparents, my father’s parents, were born in Lithuania when it was still part of the Russian Empire. I wonder whether it was this fact or, more likely, because he had passed away a few days earlier that made us mention his recent demise (at the age of 101) to the priest. On hearing this, he disappeared through a door in the iconostasis and returned with a candle, which he lit and gave us to place in a holder in front of the painted icons on the sacred screen. When we had done this and stood prayerfully, he gave us a small white card and asked us to write my father’s name and dates on it, so that the congregation could pray for his soul on his death anniversaries. We were moved by the kindness of this man who had only just met us, a man whose ancestors might have regarded members of my ancestors’ religion with far less sympathy, or none at all.
We drove home having experienced two wonderful things, the beauty of Chiswick House and the unexpected kindness of a complete stranger.
yamey 