London Lives

For it was written that There Must Be Hares at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. It’s the law. These are by the late Barry Flanagan RA and are wonderful.

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.

In the library, I found a fabulous quote about London by Henry James:

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

From the window of the bus at Paddington, I saw a woman in a long dark fur coat, perhaps aged about sixty. She hurried along with a slightly care-worn look. She had no luggage, so I presume she lived locally. She seemed adrift and slightly out of time; a person one sees increasingly rarely almost as if they are disappearing from London. People like this fascinate me and have long been one of the things informing my writing: Who are they? What were they? What are they?

A couple of years ago I saw an exhibition at the Tate in Pimlico called How We Are: Photographing Britain. It affected me enormously, much more than I could have anticipated. The photographs therein not only form an important document of changing social history, but there, staring out at us, are faces and types of people that are disappearing and that we may never know again. I remember one series of photographs about a factory works outing from the 1950s, with lots of women lined up in front of the coach. There were fearsome matriarchs among them who had a look about them that was absolutely of the era and of their time. Not only are they almost certainly no longer alive, but these women as a particular type no longer exist.

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

The day dawned in an unpromising fashion then the weather became unexpectedly lovely as it went on. At about 10am, I spotted a fox asleep on the wall of next-door’s garden. He was well camouflaged and snoozing peacefully. I’ve spotted him in the undergrowth at the end of the row of gardens and also sleeping in our own garden. The slinky tabby cat from next door-but-one sometimes sits on the same wall, peering intently into the undergrowth. Now I know what he’s looking for.

I went to Chiswick today. It’s a fairly long ride out west, but the weather was lovely: a beautiful autumn day with a gorgeous sky and shimmery sparkles glinting from anything shiny at street level. The bus noodled gradually, heading out along Marylebone Road. I could write oodles on this blog about Marylebone, but that will come.  There was a wedding taking place at the old Marylebone Town Hall. Always lovely to see happy people and beautiful coloured clothes spilling out onto the pavements as you slide by on the bus. There’s a sense of sharing that snippet as you pass by.

Sweeping across Edgware Road, the bus went on to Paddington and Notting Hill.  There is a road just past Notting Hill Gate called ‘Palace Gardens Terrace’ which I think is a wonderful road name. Palace Gardens Terrace. Lovely.

On Chiswick High Road,  the park at Turnham Green was bright and green and clipped, the church at its centre looking solid and wonderful. Cyclists swooned past, giving off gentle smells of fabric conditioner. I was looking for a shop called Dada, which sells books, CDs and DVDs. Last time I was here, I picked up a CD of Nat King Cole (like having velvet gently fed into your ears) and DVDs about Joe Strummer and the Old Grey Whistle Test. This time I picked up a Julie London CD and a DVD of Leonard Rossiter which I’m planning to give to my father for his birthday. He’ll love it. I think I’ll get him a Hairy Bikers cookbook as well.

When I was a child and living in the Midlands, my parents used to bring us to London to visit various relatives and friends. We came to Chiswick on those visits, to see a friend and former neighbour of my parents. She had a fabulous three-storey house and her husband had a bedroom on the middle floor (they were a couple that had separated but never divorced). Their children had other bedrooms on the various floors. One of the things that intrigued me about this house as a child was that the bathroom was on a ‘middle’ floor. You climbed two flights of stairs to get from the ground to the first floor and this bathroom was reached on a level between the first and second flights. Big chequerboard tiles and you had to stand on tiptoes to reach the long handle to the pull-flush, with the cistern high up near the ceiling.

I remember us visiting in October 1981 and we had an ‘early’ Christmas dinner, because we wouldn’t see them at Christmas. The IRA had left a bomb in a Wimpy bar in Oxford Street and it killed the bomb disposal expert. It was all over the news. I remember it on the TV just before it was switched off as we ate our dinner.

Some years later (1993, I reckon, the year after I’d moved to London), my mother and I travelled to see her friend and we spent a lovely afternoon in her garden, eating food and chatting over old things. Her husband had passed on, and she has since. At some point, I will walk back along that street in Chiswick and look up at the house where my parents’ friend lived and at the neighbouring house where my parents lived as younger people.

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.