London Lives

Chilly it may still be, but the skies are brightening up and there was some lovely sunshine to be had today at 12°C.

Trinity Square Gardens, EC3

Trinity Square EC3 is opposite the Tower of London and is the location of  Trinity House (designed by Samuel Wyatt, 1796) and the former Port of London Authority. Trinity Square Gardens (1797; restored 2003)  has a beautiful memorial to the 24,000 merchant seamen lost in two word wars “Who have no grave but the sea”. There is a  memorial pavilion to WWI (by Sir Edward Lutyens)  and the memorial garden to WWII (by Sir Edward Maufe).

These are the Names... Trinity Square Gardens

Huge plaques bear the names of the ships and the men, the writing raised from the surface, tactile and alive, running on and on in huge saddening lists. Every so often  there is a poppy or a small wooden cross left by a loved one next to a name. They are stuck on with blu-tac and flutter poignantly in the faltering spring breeze. Some are faded and have slipped down from the name to which they were affixed. The plaques are separated by beautiful relief sculptures on sea-faring themes and the space is simple, calm and reflective. Really beautifully done. Opposite, the Tower looms and the Thames glitters.

There is something startling about the fact that that these gardens and the plush surrounding buildings cross two of London’s boroughs. The plush buildings are in the City of London, while the park itself is in Tower Hamlets. Here are two very contrasting boroughs (and the City really does contrast with everything around it) and you slip softly from one to another.

There were fireworks starting even when I was on the way home from work. From the window of my flat, I could see displays over Canary Wharf, over to the City, across to Battersea Park and beyond. We were meant to be going to the Waltham Forest ones, but my pal is working late so we can’t. Neither of us can manage the Ally Pally ones on Saturday, either. Still, the displays are great and the ones in the parkland over the back of my house were gorgeous.

Hope all the local moggies are safely indoors…

Five years ago today, I was attending my uncle’s funeral. He was my father’s older brother and had been ill for some time. It was a poignant day for all of us, my father in particular. It was the most gorgeous autumn day, brilliant blue sunny sky, very chilly, with yellow leaves on the trees. A piper played the Last Post, recalling my uncle’s time as a Bearskin when he was a young man. I held my father’s hand tightly as his brother’s coffin was lowered. My mother was holding his other hand on the other side. I’d never attended a burial before, so was unsure how I would feel. The churchyard was familiar, though. My father has taken me round it before, pointing out the graves of my great-grandparents and various people who lived near his family when he was a child.

I don’t think I’d really comprehended how strong this loss would be for my father until we were chatting a few months before my uncle died. My father and his brothers were brought up in outer London during WWII and he simply said: “That’s my older brother; when we were kids we were bombed out of our beds together.” And they were.

After the service and the burial, we went to a local pub with numerous cousins, aunts, uncles (hundreds of people, most of them bearing my surname) and chatted, drank, laughed and pored over memories. It sounds strange to say that the day of a funeral can be beautiful, but this one was.

The first truly blustery and rainy day of Autumn. I am snuggled here on the sofa and have no plans to move. I’m catching up on things I’ve recorded this week: a documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain and now something from the Age of Glamour series about Al Bowlly.

The Marr programme is the first of six and was brilliant: this episode covered the period from the death of Victoria to the illness of Joseph Chamberlain in 1906. Along the way, he explored the horror of the Boer War, nepotism in Parliament, music hall and Votes for Women. An extraordinary era which is of great interest to me (1900s, Edwardian Britain, inter-war Britain). I look forward to the remaining series. Next week, we move inevitably to WWI.

The Age of Glamour strand on BBC4 is also fantastic and has covered people of the age (the Bright Young People), golden liners of the era and Art Deco icons (loads of brilliant stuff about the Tube, particularly at St James’s Park station). These programmes also cover interests of mine (Art Deco, design, luxury design, social history). Al Bowlly was a very popular crooner of the era. I love documentaries like this, even about people I have only vaguely heard of because of the social history that is inevitably on display. In fact, I was surprised at how many of his songs and recordings I knew from hearing them round and about on many programmes. Dennis Potter was inspired by him to write Pennies From Heaven. I haven’t watched any Dennis Potter stuff for ages; I must see if they’ve got DVDs in the library. After surviving the bombing of the Cafe de Paris previously, Al Bowlly, poor man, was killed when a Luftwaffe bomb hit his house during the Blitz in 1941.

After a brief glimpse of sunshine, it is clouding over again. It’s very, very quiet today. No noise from the other flats downstairs, barely a car to be heard on the road. Last night, I could see the BT Tower flashing lights and today I discovered it now has a screen counting down to the Olympics.

Foodwise, I have some nice salmon and dill tartlets that I made last night, as well as tomatoes and spinach, some crusty bread, halloumi and biscuits. I need not step out of the door if I don’t want to. I’m aware that this is a very lazy-sounding post, but that is what this particular London life is doing today.

The JW Waterhouse exhibition at the Royal Academy has long been on the summer agenda. We left it until the week before closing, which probably explains why it was quite tediously packed to start with.

Beautiful, beautiful stuff  though. Inevitably, the Lady of Shalott was there and was superb. The picture I really wanted to see, Echo and Narcissus (usually at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool) was there, which was especially pleasing. The colours, composition and lines were lovely to look at.

There were also some new favourites: Consulting the Oracle, Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus and Hylas and the Nymphs. Fabulous stuff and makes me want to look out my copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis again.

Then along to the Corot to Monet landscapes at the National Gallery. I haven’t looked at landscapes for ages and many of these had a very satisfying quality, with lovely use of light.

In the NG shop I picked up The National Gallery in Wartime, about the arrangements for preserving the collections in the event of sustained bombing. The social history and photographs look wonderful and I look forward to reading it.

Being off work is wonderful. There is something sumptuous about laying in the bath at 4pm, listening to Woman’s Hour on iPlayer. I’m a recent convert to the programme and usually listen to the podcasts on my way to work in the mornings.

Yesterday, they were discussing Operation Pied Piper as it is the 70th anniversary of the evacuation of children at the outbreak of World War II. My father grew up in London at this time and my grandmother refused to allow him and his brothers to be sent to the countryside. I was chatting to a researcher about this recently and he told me that this was quite a common thing at the time. Two of the women on the radio spoke of their memories of being an evacuated child. They seemed to have been relatively happy, but there was an underlying sense of lack during that time, and I don’t think that was only because of the war.

And now it’s one of the Beautiful Evenings here. Sunny, if a bit blustery, the Gherkin gleams in the distance and the sun reaches across all the rooftops around as it falls into shadow on the streets. It’s still sunny over on Highgate Hill. The quality of light here is beautiful.