Lucie Winterson's Exhibition

Lucie Winterton is an artist who bases her work on natural materials like sand and water which she directs to flow over photographs of rivers and landscapes. She says: 'Over these I work pigments, earth and acrylic wash - tipping and tilting the surface of the canvas and using big brushes and mops to move the paint around. I watch and partially control the bloomings of colour, sedimentations of sand and the tide lines that dry at the edges of pools'.

 

She has a fine exhibition at 60 Threadneedle St in the City. Click the heading for more photos.

Click here for some more of her paintings

Favourite Blogs - The Master Draper Blog

The current Master of the Drapers' Livery Company, Maj-Gen Adrian Lyons, describes his blog thus:

'I think Master Draper Blog is the first time that any master of a London Livery Company has ever tried to describe his/her year leading one of these fascinating organisations.

The Drapers' Company is one of the older livery companies and because of the importamce of the finished wool cloth trade to London, and the wider English economy, five hundred years ago we are ranked as the third company in seniority.

Today there are over a hundred livery companies in London focussed on an extrordinarily wide range of trade related and charitable activities.

Our website www.thedrapers.co.uk gives a good overview of what we do across a wide range of charitable activities.

I hope my blog will describe a year where ancient ceremonial, promoting a wide range of charitable activity and maintaining a great organisation to continue its proud traditions into the future will blend together to create an interesting insight into one of London's great institutions'.


I am proud that the Master of 'my' Livery Company has taken up this very modern challenge. Already his posts are revealing details of the Company's work that the Liverymen themselves have little current knowledge about and are very glad to learn. He should also help to dispel some of the unwonted mystique surrounding these purely charitable institutions as well as encourage deserving beneficiaries to find willing sources of funding in these straitened times. But it's going to be a hard act for his successors to follow!

Click the heading to read the blog itself

Rainbow

Seen from the garden

Favourite Blogs - Spitalfields Life

Dennis Server's House at 18 Folgate St

Spitalfields Life is a captivating blog by an unnamed 'gentle author' who introduces himself evocatively thus:

'In the midst of life I woke and found myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand posts about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

I do not think there will be any shortage of material, though it may be difficult to choose what to write of because the possibilities are infinite. Truly all of human life is here in Spitalfields.

It is my custom to walk everywhere in London and I discover things on my walks, so you will also find stories here from the many places that are within walking distance of Spitalfields.

The days go by quickly and I am always eager to discover more stories. It is through meeting more people and learning more about this place that my understanding will grow and this project will evolve. I am open to all approaches.

Every Sunday, I get up early and walk to Columbia Road Market, buy some plants and write a weekly report to create an account of the seasons at the flower market. Knowing that I must not disappoint you enables me to get out of bed and fills my garden with plants too.

Like Good Deeds and Everyman in the old play, let us travel together. I promise to keep writing to you every day and it will be an eventful journey we shall have together.'

The 'gentle author' - who I believe to be a man, although that simple fact is never made clear - has made good on his promise; a new post arrives each morning - beautifully drawn stories of people, shops, streets and buildings, filled with sympathetic insights into the lives of those he describes. I doubt whether any part of London has been so closely observed. For me, it's a mixture of Gilbert White and the prose of the unnamed writer who used many years ago to pen a weekly column for The Field. And although it began only in August 2009, it's already a masterpiece.

On Spitalfields, this piece by Raphael Samuel in July 1988, will explain its significance and history

Spitalfields is the oldest industrial suburb in London. It was already densely peopled and “almost entirely built over,” in 1701 when Lambeth was still a marsh, Fulham a market garden and Tottenham Court Rd a green. It owes its origins to those refugee traditions which, in defiance of the Elizabethan building regulations, and to escape the restrictions of the City Guilds, settled in Bishopsgate Without and the Liberty of Norton Folgate.

Spitalfields is a junction between, on the one hand, a settled, indigenous population, and on the other, wave upon wave of newcomer. Even when it was known as ‘The Weavers’ Parish,’ it was still hospitable to many others – poor artisans, street sellers, labourers among them. In the late nineteenth century Spitalfields was one of the great receiving points for Jewish immigration and the northern end of the parish provided a smilar point of entry for country labourers. There was a whole colony of them at Great Eastern Buildings in the eighteen eighties, working as draymen at the brewery, and another at the Bishopsgate Goods Station. This ‘mixed’ character of the neighbourhood is very much in evidence today.

Spitalfields Market – threatened with imminent destruction by a coalition of property developers, City Fathers, and conservationists – is almost as old as Spitalfields. It was already in existence when the area was still an artillery range. In John Stow’s ‘Survey of London’ (1601) it appears a trading point “for fruit, fowl and root.” A market sign was incorporated in the coat of arms for the Liberty of Norton Folgate in Restoration times, and the market’s Royal Charter dates from 1682. The market, in short, preceded the arrival of the Hugeunots and has some claim to being Spitalfields’ original core. The market continued as a collection of ramshackle sheds and stalls until it was transformed, in the 1870s, by Robert Horner, who bought the lease of the land from the Goldsmid family in 1875. Horner was a crow scarer from Essex who, according to market myth, walked to London, became a porter in the market and eventually got a share in a firm. Ambitiously, he set about both securing monopoly rights for the existing traders, and replacing the impromptu buildings with a purpose built market hall – the “Horner” buildings which today is the oldest part of the market complex.

The older, eastern portion of the market is the direct product of Robert Horner’s vision of his own situation. It is built in the manner of the English Arts & Crafts movement. On its own terms, the old market is a pleasing piece and a worthy addition to the diversity of Spitalfields. Its rusticated archways on the Commercial St facade and the repeated peaks of the roof with their smallish sash windows lend a clearly Victorian flavour to Commercial St, which was largely a Victorian venture anyway. Inside the market it is a vintagely Victorian hall of glass and iron of unassuming beauty, even more so when at work, then its true worth as a genuinely functioning piece of Victorian space is revealed. Like St. Pancras in a different way, it has an element of the museum and an aesthetic that overlays the original construction upon utilitarian principles. Most of all the old market appears as a peculiarly English space. An effect that is heightened by the lavish use of ‘Wimbledon’ green. It is that deep traditional green that characterises English municipal space and that, in this case helps to marry the market to the discordant additions of the late 1920’s and to give distinction to the territorial boundaries of the market that have been historically more fluid.

The old market is a celebration of trade, a great piece of Victorian working space, not only of great historical value itself, but contributing to the visual manifestation of the historical development of the whole of Spitalfields. It is a worthy layer in an area that grew by a sort of architectural sedimentation. Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the Huguenot fronts of Artillery Passage, the Georgian elegance of Elder St and the smaller houses of Wilkes St and Princelet St, the mid-Victorian utility of the Peabody Buildings, the rustic character of the old market, the twentieth century neo-classicism of the Fruit Exchange and several examples of a more unspeakable modernity are some among many accretions which contribute to make Spitalfields what it is. The most perfect example of a palimpsest in which diversity rather than Georgiana or Victoriana represent the true nature of the area.

The character of a district is determined not by its buildings, but by the ensemble of different uses to which they are put, and, above all, by the character of the users. It should be obvious to all but the self-deceived, that to stick an international banking centre in the heart of an old artisan and market quarter, a huge complex with some six thousand executives and subalterns, is, to put it gently, a rupture from tradition. The whole industrial economy of Spitalfields rests on cheap work rooms: rentals in the new office complex are some eight times greater than they are in the purlieus of Brick Lane, and with the dizzy rise in property values which will follow the new development, accommodation of all kinds, whether for working space or home, will be beyond local people.  The market scheme will mean a social revolution, the inversion of what Spitalfields has stood for during four centuries of metropolitan development.

The fate of Spitalfields market illustrates in stark form some of the paradoxes of contemporary metropolitan development: on the one hand, the preservation of ‘historic’ houses; on the other, the wholesale destruction of London’s hereditary occupations and trades and the dispersal of its settled communities. The viewer is thus confronted with two versions of ‘enterprise’ culture: the one that of family business and small scale firms, the other that of international high finance with computer screens linking the City of London to the money markets of the world.

Raphael Samuel  22nd July 1988 

Favourite Places

The Test at Fulling Mill, Whitchurch. This stretch of the river and the Mill was once owned by my step-grandfather. Click here for his granddaughter's reminiscences

Favourite Places

Dartmoor

Farewell Lexus

The Lexus at the top of Beech Hill, with Stocks behind

My brave Lexus Coupe has been declared a CTL and is no more (except that the number plate - H2PNO - has been transferred to Kei's Prius). Having been virtually trouble-free all its life, it was found to need a number of repairs that would have cost far more than its value.

It's been a marvellous car (as you can read here from an earlier post) but it will no longer sit outside waiting to take me on long drives into the countryside where the whistle and crack of the turbos were all one needed in place of music. Farewell and thank you.

Favourite Cartoons

As you already know, one of my favourite cartoonists is Pont, whose inspired drawings of 'The British Character' remain as accurate today as in the 1930s.

Favourite Poetry - Constantine Cavafy

Morning Sea

Let me stop here. Let me, too, look at nature awhile.
The brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky,
the shore yellow; all lovely,
all bathed in light

Let me stand here. And let me pretend I see all this
(I actually did see it for a minute when I first stopped)
and not my usual day-dreams here too,
my memories, those sensual images.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Favorite Poems: A 9th Century Chinese Poem on Old Age

'We are growing old together, you and I;
Let us ask ourselves, what is age like?
The idle head, still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors.

One dares not look in the mirror's polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper one's love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer one's dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk
Is great as ever, when you and I meet.'


A 9th Century Chinese poem on old age, 
sent to Isaiah Berlin by Stephen Spender