London Lives

Now that I’ve been bitten again by the writing bug, it’s good to explore other writing spaces and to research ideas. So this week I joined Westminster Libraries (one of them is a good research library too). Off to lovely Marylebone to  collect my card and explore the facilities. The upstairs has an extensive research collection and study area and I sat for a while reading up on John Dickson Carr and locked room mysteries.

Then I hopped on the bus to Paddington to look in another of the borough’s libraries. All fab again. Both are in lovely old buildings. I shall look in the Charing Cross one and the Westminster Research Library this coming week or at the weekend (although I have an LSE lecture and a friend’s play on Saturday).

This is intriguing, too: Westminster’s Archives Centre is serialising an 1846 diary written by Nathaniel Bryceson, a Victorian clerk in Pimlico. His mother was born in 1797 and Nathaniel himself died in 1911. That’s just two generations crossing a very significant period of time. Incredible. I look forward to reading the entries.

When I left the library in Paddington, the day had become suddenly spring-like.

Gloucester Terrace, London W2

Porchester Square, London W2

As we move into the Bank Holiday, it became clear today that vast swathes of London’s population seems to be (a) away from London, or (b) at the Carnival. The bus slipped steadily around near-empty streets as it moved from the Edgware Road and into Paddington. No chance to glimpse Bayswater today, as the bus was diverted before then, to tuck down other roads away from the Carnival.

It’s one of my favourite areas of London, the slightly faded glamour of Paddington seeping into the whitewashed houses of Bayswater. But even here, there is an element of transition and griminess in the streets of little hotels. From here, it’s possible to explore Ladbroke Grove, or continue on to W9 and Maida Vale.

But today it was to Fulham and then Chelsea, looking for nick-nacks and cookware. Once, when I was standing outside Peter Jones on Sloane Square, a man walked past me with four Great Danes. It was like a cacophony of legs; impossible to tell where one Dane ended and another began.