I’ve walked up Paddington Street from Marylebone High Street before, but managed to miss Paddington Street Gardens, which were once an additional burial ground for Old St Marylebone Parish Church in the 1730s. A useful information post at the gates mentions the nearby workhouse built in 1750 (enlarged 1775). This is just the kind of thing I am looking into for my novel, so was delighted to stumble across the very site quite by accident.

The area closed as a burial ground in 1814 ( a new one had opened at nearby St John’s Wood), although is still consecrated ground. There are  – quite startlingly – probably 80,000 graves  on the site of the gardens although most of the gravestones have now been removed and an archive of the records is kept by Westminster City Council. The Gardens contain many trees, including that staple tree, the London Plane.

From Edgware Road, I trundled along Harrow Road for a while. This is a great artery running along and under the Westway from Paddington. I’ve found out that this is the way to get to Kensal Green Cemetary (1833). This isn’t meant to sound morbid, but it’s a place I want to visit at some point. The history and statuary are quite something.

I got the bus back into central London from there. Near Knightsbridge I looked out of the window at a smartly-dressed young woman walking up to the traffic lights with her shopping. She had some kind of injury to her legs and walked with difficulty. She must have to do that every day. She walked with an awkward dignity and waited patiently for the lights to change. From the bus window there is often something to make you feel humble.

Lots of splendid stuff as usual (the Weston Rooms are my favourite; packed with smaller pictures of all kinds). Familiar favourites were there too (Bill Jacklin and Ken Howard), along with loads of new people to look up. In one of the main rooms, David Mach RA exhibited a piece called Silver Streak: a fabulous gorilla made of wire coat hangers. Stunning and clever.

Afterwards I wandered through Shepherd Market, a smart little enclave of restaurants in Mayfair. The area was still waking up at 12.30. These shabby old buildings (below) are nearby. An amazing contrast.

Later, I walked from Maida Vale to Paddington. Not in a very ordered or direct way, but along streets of mansion blocks overlooking Paddington Recreation Ground and others with semi-detached houses and smart cars outside. There was almost no one about. I’ve said this before, but sometimes London’s silence is astounding. It was like a silent suburban street from another time.

Back in Paddington, I ambled around some streets getting background for my novel. It’s not enough to look at maps on the internet or wade through archives (useful those these are). It’s important to walk it and to feel it. My brother said recently that I was having a big love affair with London. He’s right.

So says the pamphlet for this is free exhibition at the British Library and – even sweeter – I had the afternoon off work to have lunch with a pal and to see it.

There are plenty of early maps of the world with beautifully-inscribed  names and others which were displayed to convey their owners’ power. There were re-imagined maps of London as well as UK county and parish maps and a lovely Victorian schoolroom map of Europe with the names of countries and places carefully picked out in clear font. Some of those names and places shifted in early 20th Century Europe and then shifted right back again as the century closed. There were great propaganda maps, too.

The BL has a splendid philatelic collection too, displayed in pull-out glass cases. I could do with some of those at home to put things in.

On the way home I see  a woman on the bench outside Tesco’s clutching a can of Special Brew and carefully writing inside a birthday card.  In the next street to mine, the kids from the flats rush out into the road (no checking for traffic – they rush fearlessly out). Chasing and chasing one another, bikes flung down in the road as they rush along the pavements with sticks. I’m listening to The Smiths’ How Soon is Now.

I wrote about his diary in my Research in Westminster post (7 Feb 2010)

I wondered what he was like as a young man and whether he’d always had such patience or if it had arrived with age.

This man is all our fathers.

Other things last seen in the UK in 1974: lots of strikes and financial austerity. So, the current political crowd are in good company. We don’t really do coalition-type things here, so at the moment there is that curious British awkwardness going on. Whatever, the election has really gripped people’s imaginations and the café this lunchtime was full of people loudly proclaiming what they thought should happen.

And the latest is that the curiously shiny-faced Tory leader David Cameron is apparently reaching out to the Lib Dems, leaving Gordon Brown out in the cold.

The Queen has gone back to Windsor and appears to be waiting for the boys to sort themselves out.

Gordon Brown was pictured looking mightily peeved on the BBC and is probably plotting to change the locks at Number 10 at this very moment.

Obviously, the crowded polling stations I mentioned yesterday weren’t good news for everyone, particularly if they didn’t manage to vote. We don’t usually do that here either. The results for local London borough elections are due, too. Let’s hope they are a bit more straightforward. Watch this space.

I love voting. I vote in the General Election (of course), the local elections (also today) and the European elections. There’s something special about General Election day: people trotting off to cast their vote in all manner of places (civic halls, local schools, portakabins, caravans, castles and others on the BBC here), all designated for the same purpose.

Yes, that’s all very rosy and no doubt we could end up with more of the same (although there’s still all to play for and I don’t remember an election being this close). But there is a shared sense of getting out there, polling card in hand, nodding politely at others in the queue, then being alone to make your decision.

There’s also something splendidly low-tech about voting: paper polling-cards, lists of names, rickety wooden booths, pencils on string. This morning on the way to work, I passed cheery women outside Friends’ House (the Quaker meeting house) in Euston, which had been open as a polling station for two hours.

I’m going to have a bath now. The polls close at 22.00. I’m trying to stay up as late into the night as possible to see the results (I’ll probably be snoozing peacefully on the sofa by 01.20…). Here’s hoping not.

Well now, here’s another, with the news tonight that Malcom McLaren has died in Switzerland. Mark Borkowski on Channel Four News tonight called him a “Showman, a PT Barnum” and I don’t think he’s overstated it there.

Ever one with an eye for showmanship, publicity and opportunity, he is famous for his colourful management of the Sex Pistols at a time of massive flux in seventies Britain. Entrepreneurship was always at large: he had previously (in 1975)  run the boutique called SEX in the King’s Road, Chelsea. After the Sex Pistols, he experimented with hip-hop and opera.

I was listening to him only a few days ago, narrating Parnes’ People for the BBC Radio 2 documentary about another inappropriate favourite of mine, Larry Parnes (1960s impresario and manager of Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Eddie Cochran and Georgie Fame among others). The choice of narrator was highly appropriate: McLaren was arch, lending a knowing air to the programme.

Tonight I’m reading that Malcom McLaren will be flown back here and buried in Highgate Cemetery. If that’s true it’s a very fitting resting place.

We get Maundy Thursday off work so I headed to Barbican Library to catch up on some reading and writing. This book was on the ‘Returned Today’ shelves (I always like to look at these shelves – you never know what you’ll find).

Echoes of the East End contains chapters from ‘ordinary’ people describing their lives in the East End of London in the early years of the twentieth century.  We meet girls who grew up on ‘The Island’ (area of housing demolished in 1970) in Clapton E5 and others who lived in Hoxton N1. This is an East End still receiving heavy immigration and a mix of communities finding their feet with ‘native’ Londoners (some of these a generation or two from elsewhere; some of them with deep roots to the area in which they lived).

Some of it is is grim in its description of grinding poverty, inevitable hunger and seemingly endless threats of violence. It seems clichéd to say that these tales are tempered with heart-warming tales of community and neighbourliness, but they are. And there are scholarships won to the local grammar school and birthday celebrations and street parties held on the occasion of King George V and Queen Mary’s Jubilee (1935).

There are also fabulous pictures and descriptions of work and church outings. Much as in the pictures at the Tate Exhibition (in my earlier post Disappearing London:1) these pictures tell us so much of the social history of the time and I sit and pore over the faces and clothes of those lined up for the picture.