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

Art in the banksy?

Bansky rat, Hoxton; sadly now gone

Banksy was on the charge in New York last month, with the aim of creating a new art work every day – although it didn’t start well, with the first one painted over within 24 hours.

But it provoked the usual sort of outbursts from some on news websites, calling for that city’s “finest” to arrest and deport Banksy (if they could find him) and then have him scrub any of his works off walls in the UK.

Goodness: how tedious some people can be.

You might not like street art, but it’s not the same as daubing ‘I woz ere’ on the local bus shelter. And neither are we talking about people stenciling something on the outside of St Paul’s.

In some areas, it brightens up rather drab and tatty surroundings. And it has the added economic advantage of being an increasing draw for visitors who want both to look and photograph.

Not that the objectors are just daft individuals trying to out conservative each other on a website.

ROA rabbit, Hackney Road

Two years ago, Hackney council decided that it would tell the owners of a building on Hackney Road to get rid of a piece of artwork from the side.

This was a rabbit by Belgian street artist ROA, who creates almost Düreresque pieces, and it was done with permission. He’s done a rat further down what is, in essence, a not very picturesque street, so such works help to give the area a welcome lift.

I actually emailed the council telling them to sort their priorities out – I like to think that that effort was influential, because the rabbit is still there, lighting up a street that is otherwise pretty dire on the eye.

In an interesting contrast to this particularly democratic art form, I’ve noticed in the last day or so that my Facebook timeline now getting spammed by Saatchi, which wants me to “invest in art”.

It amounts to them having decided what artists to promote, telling you that there’s a chance that these artists’ work might sell for lots of cash sometime in the future and wouldn’t that be a good investment?

Peeblitz; Blair – war criminal. Now painted over

It’s possibly a fairly good career move for the artists concerned, but it’s also difficult to budge the feeling that the prime motive of Saatchi isn’t one of promoting good art or actually convincing people to enjoy art more.

This is far more about Saatchi making money.

Of course, in the past, artists were at the mercy of patrons.

The 19th can 20th centuries saw the growth in importance of galleries and agents, and also of individual collectors who wielded influence – for instance, Leo and Gertrude Stein in Paris in the early 20th century.

But if we then return to street art, we can see that people can enjoy it and share it (it’s easy enough to buy Banksy prints for instance, or to print up your own photos), without some vast outlay.

Art sometimes seems to suffer from an idea of stuffiness and, of course, cost.

It’s worth noting that many of the UK’s major galleries are generally free, except for specific and temporary exhibitions.

This applies at such national institutions as the National Gallery and the Tate Modern, both in London, but also at plenty of regional galleries too.

But appreciating street art is not incompatible with admiring Rembrandt or van Gogh – and it could be argued that, as fine art has appeared to become more abstracted and, therefore, more difficult to read, the likes of Bansky fill a vacuum of artistic expression in a modern way.

Christ; crown of thorns. Brighton beach, artist unknown

Banksy isn’t alone in using street art to make political points – and street art as a whole hardly invented political and satirical art: think Hoggarth for starters (several of his works are on display in the National Gallery), but that probably upsets some of the naysayers, since the politics generally displayed in street art are hardly conservative or pastoral in nature – see the picture of Peeblitz’s Tony Blair stencil, taken on Hackney Road in 2007 and sadly painted over fairly soon after.

Although there are moments when those who are conservative about street art in general change their tune if it suits them.

My parents, for instance, thought that the Peeblitz/Blair piece was wonderful – and there was a companion piece featuring his fellow war-monger, George W Bush.

The inventiveness and quality of some street art is excellent. And to pretend otherwise is frankly churlish.

Mind, the entire New York outing included a stall set up in Central park selling original Bansky canvases for under £40.

Now that, Saatchis, is an investment. And so too are my Barry Blends – except that I have bought them for no other reason than pleasure and to lift my life on a daily basis.

And I would suggest that Banksy has far more in common, in terms of a philosophy of art as for everyone, with the likes of Matisse, who very much believed in art being for everyone, than do the Saatchis.

And that, my friends, is art.

Utopia it ain't

It’s cold – really cold – and grey; and the pitter patter of freezing rain isn’t helping much either.

A stroll up to the top of Broadway Market brought no joy in the search for trays of cells in which to sow seeds, so I’ve resorted to ordering online.

All of which is frustrating, because it would be wonderful to get outside, right now, and plant or sow something: my growhouse, put together yesterday, is begging to be filled.

Not that the frustration is entirely caused by the weather.

Our boiler has been sickening in recent weeks and pretty much gave up the ghost last week, just as I was set for a week at home.

On Monday morning, I got a plumber to come out. He looked at it, tweaked a valve and said – in shocked tones – that it had no thermal expansion tank (a what?) and would have to have one added.

Now the boiler is 17 years old, so this came as something of a surprise. I asked whether he was familiar with the model. He told me that he was. I raised, in effect, the fact that it was 17 years old and there had only been one problem with it, some years earlier, when the value that he had tweaked had had to be replaced.

But no, he was insistent about that thermal expansion tank. And you have to trust the professionals unless you know all about such things yourself.

Birds and people, amid the scrawls.

However, he didn’t charge me for the call out and left it for me to decide what to do next.

The next morning, as I hauled myself from the pit and headed into the kitchen to make coffee, it was to find a total absence of electricity. No hot water – and now no power.

We took turns to fumble with the fuse box, but the main switch stubbornly refused to go into the ‘on’ position.

The Other Half got dressed by torchlight and went to work.

Thankfully, an electrician talked me through finding out which of the individual fuses was shorting everything else. Sure enough, it was the water heater.

With power restored, I was gratefully brewing a cup of strong, sweet tea, when the phone went.

It was the plumbing company – a different man this time – asking if I could open the car park gates to let him in.

“Hang on,” I managed. “The bloke came yesterday”, to which I was informed that this was a ‘quality-control check’.

And this, it’s worth noting, was at barely 8.15am, and it was totally unannounced.

It turned out that the company clearly had suspicions about the plumber (a young man). Which was probably a good thing, since it materialised that the boiler was one of the first to be designed with an internal thermal expansion tank.

It needed nothing adding – just one thermostat and one element replacing. And having later accepted the quote, I am now waiting for some sort of idea of when someone will be coming to spend half a day doing this work.

Being without hot water is a pain. And sitting around waiting for information is also a pain. It’s indicative too of just how reliant we are these days on being able to get power at the touch of a button.

The walk back from Broadway Market saw me take a diversion onto the canalside, where for the last year or so, boats have been moored, open as shops for a day or two each week, selling second-hand books and even hats, from the delightfully named Chapeau Bateau.

Everything was shut and shuttered today, residents doubtless hiding away from the weather.

Yet with so few people around, I find myself pulling out the phone to snap a couple of shots of local street art/graffiti, some of which does wonders to a fairly dour environment.

There were intriguing bits around the steps to the canal towpath – goodness knows that the Utopia one was trying to claim – but among the scrawls and daubs, there are often some rather fetching things to be seen, such as these birds.

The council tries to whitewash the efforts away, but there's never a 'canvas' that stays blank for long.

Just today I spotted a little ghost, dispensing crosses (kisses?) from a brown paper bag, over the ghostly remains of some previous work.

Anyway, as something to cheer the day, I decided to cook up some pasta for lunch – a bit of a treat, since I’ve been cutting back on pasta a great deal in recent months.

This is an enduring favourite sauce though, and incredibly healthy, if you want to think in those terms.

It’s also one of the first dishes that I learned to cook without reference to a book, and I never bother to measure or count out any of the ingredients.

So, for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen it before …

Take a red pepper or two – the romano types are best; much sweeter – and halve and de-seed it.

Take some big, beefy tomatoes, halve them, remove the seeds and then leave to drain on kitchen paper.

Take a red chili – or more – and halve and de-seed that.

Now, pop everything on to a baking tray, skin side up – wipe the skins if they’re damp at all – and whack it under a hot grill, about 10cm from the heat source.

It needs 10 to 15 minutes, but check after 10. You want the skins to be nicely blackened.

Let them cool a little and then remove the skins.

In the meantime, sprinkle some ground almonds on a plate and pop that under the grill. Watch carefully – you want them to start to turn golden, but not to burn.

Then everything needs to be blitzed – but only very briefly, as you want to retain texture.

This isn’t a purée. I use a hand blender. If it’s a little stiff, loosen with olive oil.

And that’s really all there is to it.

Heat gently and serve over the pasta of your choice.

It’s the perfect dish to make you feel as though you’ve been given a great big hug. Easy, quick, cheap, tasty and healthy: what more could anyone want?