Eagle eyes view the English capital

Red House, by Marc Gooderham

You could be forgiven for thinking that developers in London today have fetishised both height and a desire to build the oddest shapes possible, which then demand to be nicknamed.

Not everything created from such a base is bad. ‘The Gherkin’ remains an elegant addition to the City, while the Tate Modern extension is appropriate. But some are simply dire, with particularly dishonourable mentions for One Blackfriars – ‘The Vase’ – and 20 Fenchurch Street – ‘The Walkie-Talkie’. And let’s not mention the thrusting inelegance of ‘The Shard’.

Sadly, chunks of a more human-scale London are being torn away in the name of … well, in the name of corporate profits. Character replaced by a forest of largely characterless glass and steel.

In such times then, it is a particular pleasure to see an exhibition such as London Eye 2 at The Millinery Works in Islington.

Works by 15n artists are on display, all available to buy. The creative talents behind the works span generations and include Sir Peter Blake, the British pop artist still best known for his iconic Beatles Sgt Pepper album cover.

Camden Town Tube, by James McKinnon

Here there are a number of limited edition prints in his distinctive collage style and love of pop culture, including Piccadilly Circus, the Convention of Comic Book Characters, and River Thames, Regatta, with its nod toward a steampunk sensibility.

Several of the artists turn their gaze reflectively on a London that is fast disappearing; in some cases, derelict or covered in graffiti.

This is a large part of Marc Gooderham’s practice. Here, he has five works on display. Acrylic painting Waiting for You and Fill Your Heart (pastel on black paper) both convey a sense of the slightly shabby, while The Rio Cinema, Dalston and The Vogue Cinema (both pastels on black paper) convey dusk and night time scenes devoid of humanity, with a deep sense of loneliness.

Yet in The Red House (pastel on black paper), he also gives us a bright blue sky and a burst of glorious colour. Mounted and framed in black, this is a work that adds light to the room.

If the exhibition as a whole gives us a sense of London on a human scale, Marc is not the only artist whose work conveys a sense of loneliness. We can see it too in the deserted station of Camden Town Tube and the deserted street of Back Lane Hampstead, both by James MacKinnon.

Eric Rimmington’s Above Ground conveys the same sort of mood – and even his Lunchtime, with sunbathers sitting in isolation, has something of the same atmosphere.

Butler's Wharf, Shad Thames

Terry Scales’s Butler’s Wharf, Shad Thames features the striking bridges between wharf buildings near Tower Bridge – again, the absence of people lends a haunting quality.

Giles Winter’s works – four of which show residential streets at dusk, with corners of lit rooms visible, but nobody present, take us in the same direction.

Just one – The Noctambulist – has a solitary, hat-and-coated figure walking away from the viewer, almost out of the canvas, giving us something incredibly Hopperesque. His other work here, Bus Shelter, is an incredible take on rain in the city, brilliantly executed.

Peta Bridle’s etchings continue the decaying, lonely idea, So too, do Eleanor Crow’s human-devoid paintings, though the likes of Near London Fields, Early Afternoon (Deriocte Street, just south of London Fields) to Mornington Terrace, May Evening, 2018.

For me, two artists stand alone in presenting a different view: Nessie Ramm’s The Parakeets of Richmond Park celebrates the spread of ring-necked parakeets across the city, framing them in an antique Victorian frame, against a subdued background of all those towers. It’s clever and charming.

But personally, I admit taking a special delight in Melissa Scott-Miller’s work.

Islington Front Steps is so bright but spot on, and the same can be said of the fabulous Islington Back Gardens in a Heatwave (left). Both are glorious oils that will add light to any room in which they hang.

Back in the early 1970s, I lived in west London, in a fairly typical London town house.

As such, these works by Scott-Miller have a real resonance. They might not portray something I actually saw, but looking at them, I genuinely see something that I recognise.

All in all, this is a superb exhibition. Whether you can buy or not, I seriously recommend it.

Find out more at via @MillineryWorks.

Discover London – before it's too late

Leadenhall Market

Some years ago, just as I was getting interested in photography, I took to going on Sunday morning photo safaris around London.

Some were to the more salubrious areas, some to where visitors mass and others still to streets and alleys that will not be likely to find themselves on the tourist trail.

Quite a few of these came as a result of an informal online photographic project: each week, the person organising it would set a place as a subject and those who wanted to participate would go, snap away and then share their efforts.

It was interesting to see how different people saw and approached the same subject, and it also provided an opportunity to discover parts of the city one might not otherwise ever come across.

I hadn’t thought about this for some time, but was reminded of it this morning by seeing #DiscoverLondon trending on Twitter.

‘Yes,’ I thought: ‘discover London before it’s too late.’

Falkirk Street, Hackney

There’s not been a time since I moved to London in 1988 that there hasn’t been construction work going on somewhere. But in recent years, in almost every direction, the skyline has become a forest of cranes as development and redevelopment have surged ahead.

Now I want to be clear that I have no aversion to modern architecture per se – I’ve enjoyed quite a few rambles with the camera amid the steel and glass, but what’s happening now is not the stuff of good or interesting new building.

Crypt window, Christ Church Spitalfields

This blog has previously touched on the boom in high-rise towers that are soaring above us. Some of them are interesting buildings. Some – and I am thinking particularly about the ‘Walkie Talkie’ – are simply hideous.

But even that is not the point. The gentrification of London – and it’s happening elsewhere too – is getting dangerously out of hand.

There’s a human cost to this: it’s a form of social ‘cleansing’ that has been discussed far and wide. The cost of housing long since became ridiculous – it’s now a question of

St George's Garden

needing to find over £400k for a home in the capital.

In September last year, it was reported that the average cost of a home in London was £515k. It’s £272k in the rest of Britain, which is hardly cheap.

Wages have not risen to the extent that most people can get a mortgage for three times their annual income that will buy them such a home. How mortgage lenders are, therefore, getting around this, I do not know, but it can hardly be sensible and sustainable.

Off Middlesex Street

There’s another aspect to the gentrification, though: it’s producing a city where character is disappearing as fast as the developers move in.

Denmark Street – our Tin Pan Alley – is earmarked for replacement with the anodyne. Norton Folgate, in the City, is under serious threat too. Soho is having its soul stripped out.

Many other areas are going the same way.

In Brixton just this last weekend, there was a demonstration against what’s happening there, with communities feeling that they’re being forced out by redevelopment and rising prices.

Change Alley

The situation is, however, complicated by

certain factors.

Broadway Market, just around the corner from me, has undergone a revolution in the last 12 years or so.

Moving into the area two decades ago, it was three quarters derelict, usually with hardly a soul around and not enough shops to buy the ingredients for a meaningful meal.

As illustrated previously, in a lengthy interview with one of the very few traders who had survived those desolate years, the growth of supermarkets had been a factor in that decay.

Pearly king at Covent Garden

A piece of local graffiti was memorable because it was accurate: “Broadway Market,” it declared: “not so much a sinking ship as a submarine.”

As the street started to revive, some locals complained. Yet apart from some dastardly dealings by local developer Roger Wratten by name rat by nature, it’s not been a case of losing much.

The street is always busy now – which also means it’s a bigger employer – is a darned sight more pleasant (even with the hipsters and more wheelie toys than Hamleys on a Saturday), and has enough of a range of independent shops that you can actually do most of your shopping there.

No, they’re not the same sort of shops, but since the majority of those who had abandoned the street for Tesco all those years ago had shown no sign of coming back, the shops are catering to a different, more middle-class market because that’s how they’ll survive as businesses.

Princelet Street

Those who complained that there shouldn’t have been any market on Saturdays, on the grounds of gentrification, never had any alternative plans to revitalise the street.

Similarly, you see something similar when dozens of people suddenly turn up to protest against a local pub shutting, having not bothered to give it any custom for years, if ever.

In other words, the issue is neither entirely straightforward nor bad per se.

But the problems don’t stop with regeneration. As has been seen across London, rising rents then further push the small independents out, to be replaced by franchises and chains.

Coronet Street

Think Leadenhall Market – a glorious building, tragically sanitised as hiked rents drove out the

likes of a fabulous fishmonger, a poulterer and a butcher.

Think Borough Market – revived to foodie heaven, but now becoming ever more a vastly over-priced stop on the tourist trail.

London is in danger of becoming simply a sort of theme park for those passing through.

So do #DiscoverLondon: look up above street level when you’re on foot: even Oxford Street is interesting when you gaze above the shop fronts. Look at the street art too – some of it can be fascinating and adds to some otherwise dour areas.

Postman's Park

Find out about some of the places where the photographs here were taken. Maybe even go and have a look at some of places they were taken in.

We have a fascinating city. So take a little time to discover beyond the bland and the corporate and the soulless.

And take any opportunity to look a little deeper, if you discover that an area is being scheduled for redevelopment.

Let’s all attempt to ensure that London – and all our cities and towns – are not rendered devoid

of any character by those who have no interest in them other than as money machines.

Look before it's all gone

And don’t forget that local businesses will only survive if we use them. Don’t go crying outside that pub or that butcher or that library when its shutters go up for the last time if you’ve never crossed the threshold in the past decade.

All photographs copyright.

• You can follow @londonerwalking, @SpitalfieldsT and @createstreets on Twitter to find out more about the city, its history, regeneration and development.

London through three pairs of eyes

Marc Gooderham with The Ghost of Southwark Street

As the tail end of hurricane Gonzalo lashed Britain, I found myself near London’s Petticoat Lane and with time to burn, having turned up rather too early for the opening of a new exhibition.

Shelter from the intermittent downpours and whipping wind was available around a corner in The Bell – and if ever you wanted a simple illustration of how this part of the city has changed – and is changing – then here it was.

Just a decade ago, you’d have ventured inside with a certain caution.

Now, although the décor remains authentic, the crowd is rather more booted and suited than once it would have been, there are comfy sofas to relax in and, while the young lass at the bar is pierced and tattooed, she’s also perfectly happy to discuss the two rosés that the pub serves – one from either side of the Catalan Pyrenees.

Christ Church, Spitalfields

It was an entirely appropriate taster for the main course ahead.

A London Eye: Three Artists Look, gives a trio of painters the opportunity to show their different interpretations of the city in one place.

Although this isn’t a solo show, it’s dominated by the work of Marc Gooderham – 22 works as opposed to 12 and 10 from the other artists here.

Writing briefly about Gooderham’s work previously, I’ve touched on how he finds beauty in the run-down and the derelict, complete with street art – often faithfully captured in his hyper-real acrylic works.

While there are paintings here, there are also works in graphite and chalk, giving a great idea of the artist’s range.

Christ Church, Spitalfields, a beautiful chalk on black paper, has a delicate, spectral quality about it.

It’s the antithesis of The Ghost of Southwark Street, a large acrylic on canvas that catches the eye as soon as you enter the gallery.

Blue Skies

Here, in a way, is the epitome of what interests Gooderham, as he explained. It’s not just the derelict – or even the past – but the constantly changing landscape; the process of transformation.

He captures a part of the past that is still with us – even as some of it is about to be razed to the ground or changed into something considered more apt for the new bustle that is London.

Indeed, even documenting the street art and graffiti captures part of that transformation – many of Gooderham’s subjects are in a part of town where street art has developed into having commercial pull for visitors.

The Bell – indeed, the entire area around Spitalfields – is all part of the transformation (for good or bad) that is taking place almost on a day-to-day basis.

Wilton's Music Hall

Many of these subjects are places I’m familiar with: Christ Church, Wilton’s Music Hall, the Rio Cinema in Dalston and the Regent’s Canal in Hackney are pretty much my patch, so they have a particular personal resonance.

The works show such places as rather worn, yet still glorious for all that, and with an atmosphere to match.

It’s all achieved with a satisfying variety of techniques, from the hyper-real acrylics to a rather looser style (The Blue House), the softness of graphite and chalk, and the near-abstraction of Blue Skies.

It is also, of course, a call to look at and explore our built environment – and most particularly where you least expect: to look and find the unexpected glories that the urban world has to offer.

Try it some day. You can even do it on the nightmare that is Oxford Street: cast your eyes above street level and there is a different and fascinating architectural world to be discovered.

London Face

Miranda Benzies’s work offers a very different perspective – her London Faces series is an intriguing and surreal world where iconic aspects of the city are reimagined into human faces – a London Eye car becomes an eye, for instance, as in the eponymous London Face.

In London Lady, a red phone box becomes a mouth – which did remind me of the anecdote about Max Bygraves telling Julie Andrews how to speak Cockerney for My Fair Lady: “just open your mouth like a letter box and it all comes out!”

There are also landscapes here that convey London – and particularly the Thames – in a different and sometimes rather darker way.

The execution is excellent – Benezies’s works are all in oil, with a very fine finish

Nicholas Borden paints en plein air – which is a challenge in itself in the bustle of London – and explores the city in bold, bright and deceptively simple canvases.

The selection here includes oil on canvas and on wood, plus drawings.

This may be a small exhibition, but it’s a fascinating presentation of London – and not least, of the less well-known side of the capital.

A London Eye: Three Artists Look is at the Leyden Gallery, 9 Leyden Street, E1, until 15 November.

leydengallery.com

Books for the beach: the great annual dilemma

Loki with, err, her gospel

And so it begins: the great annual kerfuffle about What Books am I Taking on Holiday.

It brings with it the annual question of: ‘why don’t you get a Kindle?’ Well, I have a tablet, and I read news and features on it, but don’t particularly like reading anything longer.

I love the feel, the heft, the smell, the sense of a real book.

And however good the backlighting is on a device, glass does not take well to being buffeted by sand (oddly enough) and other elements, while computer technology does not, generally speaking, make good bedfellows with water.

I don’t an electronic device into the bath – so why would I risk dropping one into the sea or similar?

Books it is – and this ritual is one that, even in its apparent indecisiveness, I enjoy.

Of course, it adds weight to the baggage, but I’m not travelling by air.

The Other Half is being seriously serious this time around, with an intention of taking Piketty for the beach – only a doubting Thomas would not concede that Capital in the Twenty-First Century has already caused enough of a stir to render the first name of its author as superfluous.

And Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life, a massive new biography by Stephen Parker, is also sitting ready to find a corner in the case.

My own reading list is somewhat different – although the Brecht will be available if the mood takes me.

First up is The Colours of Catalonia: In the Footsteps of Twentieth-Century Artists by Virginie Raguenaud, which I bought in Collioure in the first place – and will now take back to provide artistic background for this trip.

It does, of course, include a section on Collioure and Matisse and the Fauves. And Raguenaud talks of Ceret and Elne, of Picasso and Survage.

Museums Without Walls, by Jonathan Meades, is also penciled in for provision of pithy pointers to looking at and reading the built environment around us.

And then I have Five Quarters of the Orange, Holy Fools and Coastliners – three novels, all set in France, by Joanne Harris, together with The Gospel of Loki, her reworking of Norse myth from earlier this year.

Harris is one of those writers I haven’t read as much of as I have meant to – but that’s largely out of fear. For ages, I dreaded any of her other titles being a let-down after the glories of Chocolat, which is a rare beast, in that it’s a book I’ve read rather more than once.

Back in 2005, I reviewed Gentlemen and Players for a magazine – and thoroughly enjoyed that too – but subsequent re-reads of Chocolat and a first reading of its sequel, The Lollipop Shoes, were as far as I dipped my foot into Harris’s oeuvre until dipping into Blackberry Wine a week or so ago.

I’d always intended to get a copy of The Gospel of Loki, but this has not been a big reading year, so hadn’t got around to it until The Other Half suggested it for the holiday list.

One Amazon reviewer suggested that Loki won’t appeal to anyone who liked Chocolat, but that seems a remarkably limiting idea with no logic.

I love Chocolat – and I love the Norse myths. I can’t be unique – well, not on that score, at least.

As Terry Pratchett’s dust jacket biog points out, he is “sometimes accused of literature”.

Harris is, first and foremost, a wonderful storyteller, with a great ability to weave modern fairytales – on occasion, very darkly – and to employ magic realism, but she’s also a writer of the sort of subtlety that the same can be said of her: indeed, she makes me think of Angela Carter.

Take Chocolat: it’s a wonderful story, but it’s also ‘about’ so much: about life, living, pleasure and guilt, and it leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

My mother didn’t like it, but then it was only some time after I’d given her a copy that it dawned on me that Harris’s approach to both the sensual pleasures of life and to religion might not entirely have appealed to her.

C’est la vie, as those damnable Frenchies might say.

Blackberry Wine is a great read, and as I turned the final page and brushed away a tear – yes, you really do care that much about the characters Harris creates – thus was born the feeling that Proust can wait.