Category Archives: Places

More London

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Thursday’s ticket gave me half-price entry into the London Transport Museum, so I decided to visit it, if only for the exhibition of art deco posters. Perhaps it’s an exaggeration to say that every other adult had a pushchair, but I certainly felt out of place without a small child in tow. They were pinging about all over the place. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there, so it was familiar. I did linger at the steam locomotive used on the Metropolitan & District underground for over 40 years; it had a condenser to capture the steam but nothing to alleviate the smoke. At first I thought how awful it must have been for passengers . . . and then I thought of the drivers and stokers.

I enjoyed the exhibition of art deco posters from the underground. They implied affordable modern luxury – a visit to Kew Gardens, the zoo or the West End. There were a couple by Sybil Andrews/Cyril Power that I’d seen in Dulwich.

Then, since I was nearby, I headed towards the Courtauld Gallery. I was briefly sidetracked by a youthful band celebrating the anniversary of the founding of RAF air cadets. I looked at the”Courtauld bag” (from Mosul, 1300-30) and was rather taken with Tobias and his fish in the Botticelli painting of the Trinity. There was also a small exhibition: A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760-1860. I’ve seen a lot of Turner and Constable landscapes recently, and I can’t see that Elizabeth’s Batty’s is markedly inferior.

Cutty Sark

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The most surprising thing about the elegant Cutty Sark (1869) was that it had an iron skelton. That saved on space, which was crucial for the container ship of its day. The hull was covered in a metal alloy (Muntz) to deter barnacles and to smooth her passage through the sea. She was one of the last and fastest tea clippers of her day but was soon replaced by steamships. The crew was around 26 men and boys, all living in small quarters on the top deck – with rather larger quarters for the captain and officers. One of those visits that are more fascinating than you expect.

Euston underground tunnels

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Another Hidden London tour – this time under Euston. I can still feel the dust in my nose. We looked at a former tube tunnel that was taken out of service when the island platform between two tube lines became too narrow for safety. Then the old tunnel linking two rival underground lines (whose separate entrances were either side of the mainline station) where there was a shared underground ticket hall. This tunnel was closed in 1962 and the walls are still layered with advertising posters from then. They have decayed but – given the lack of light – they are still vibrant.

The tour was full of interesting little things – e.g. making it easy for people to change trains by having platforms adjacent for popular connections is hazardous when the trains don’t arrive and depart in tandem. It’s actually safer to manage hordes of passengers by making them walk some distance to make their connection. I learned that the Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica in 1937 prompted the British government to prepare for the possibility of air raids; there was a control room just off the tunnel, and air raid warden service was established that year.

I also discovered that the oxblood-red building at the end of Drummond Street I’d noticed before was the station for the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead railway from 1907-14. Designed by Leslie Green, it has been used as a ventilation shaft ever since, but it is soon to be demolished to make way for HS2. I shall have to take a photograph before I leave.

The Marriage of Figaro

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The third time I have seen this in Leeds, but this was a completely new production. Inadvertently I booked my seat for the first night. Perky, amusing and very well done. It’s nit-picking to suggest that setting it in the age of mobile phones jars with the droit de seigneur that drives the plot; after all, it is an opera so verisimilitude is not expected. The farcical scenes were excellently done yet left room for pathos for the Countess. It was wonderful to hear seven voices at once in the lawyer’s scene.

  • Figaro – Liam James Karai
  • Susanna – Hera Hyesang Park
  • Count Almaviva – James Newby
  • Countess Almaviva – Gabriella Reyes

I noticed that all the principal singers were new to me. Also that clapping after almost every aria has become the norm.

Leeds today

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It was too cold and dank a day to want to do anything more than mooch up to the art gallery and look at the J Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition, “Nocturnes”.

No great surprise to learn that, as an artist, he was self-taught. (He obviously didn’t spend hours in life drawing classes.) He also churned out favourite scenes, as I discovered when looking online. But, oh, the light and shadows by Roundhay Park! The exhibition included some modern works to complement Grimshaw; they rather faded into insignificance beside his, but I noticed paintings by Judith Tucker that had been on display in the Burton Gallery – chosen, presumably, because of the lighted windows in dark landscapes.

There were also two extracts by Charles Dickens and James McNeill Whistler. Given yesterday’s visit to the Thackray Museum, I was inclined to view Grimshaw’s murky, polluted River Aire through Dickens’s eyes.

But the river had an awful look, the buildings on the bans were muffled in black shrouds, and the reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil conscience in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river.

Charles Dickens

And when the evening mist cloths the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens and fairy-land is before us – then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man, and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master – her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.

James McNeill Whistler

As for the rest: I would happily have stolen the Inchbold, the Tunnard seemed to approach Ignatius Riley’s “geometry and theology” criteria (although undoubtedly falling short doctrinally), and on my way back I noticed a bus going to Roundhay Park. Grimshaw lives!

Thackray Museum of Medicine

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It was an unlovely walk along Burmantofts Road to the museum; grey skies, damp cold, traffic, uninspiring housing, the absence of “theology and geometry” (I’ve just finished reading A Confederacy of Dunces) all conspired against optimism. But, really, it was nothing compared to what I was about to see of life in 19th-century Leeds.

What is now the museum was originally built as a workhouse (1858) then later became a hospital. It’s imposing and ornate – lots of Dutch gables and Burmantofts tiles – but the thing that struck me at first was how BIG it is. It was built for 800 people; I don’t know how much misery and mental distress they experienced here, but living directly opposite the Leeds burial ground (27,000 graves with 180,000 interments) can’t have helped. Perhaps it was preferable to what had gone before or life outside – particularly when “life outside” in Leeds before the passing of 1848 Public Health Act seemed utterly revolting. (Edwin Chadwick as a benevolent social reformer or a centralising bureaucrat with a purely utilitarian approach to the health of the working population? Did it matter?)

The reason I went was to see the Lorina Bulwer scroll (1904). In her fifties she was put in the lunatic ward of the Great Yarmouth workhouse, where she embroidered this. But there was so – too! – much more to take in. I started off with Disease Street and began contemplating what it must be like to live cheek by jowl with no sewerage system or rubbish disposal and polluted air. With, perhaps, a meat market/abattoir at the end of the road. Public health measures brought disease reduction in their wake. Then the treatment of diseases and illnesses, the adoption of a more scientific approach (germ theory rather than divine punishment) but still contending with deep-rooted ignorance (poor Semmelweis). Medical advances: I had forgotten that Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy without anaesthetic, and I finally understand how an iron lung worked (although it still looks like an instrument of torture). I still have a soft spot for the unscientific, though: the doctrine of signatures, leech jars, the lovely apothecary jars, the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile).

On my way back along I stopped to photograph a pointlessly polite sign and its self-important initial caps.

Turner in Time

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A very wet and windy day, but the trains were running and that was enough for me. To the Whitworth for yet another Turner exhibition. This one was of Turner’s watercolours (low status compared to oil painting) from his teens to his old age – from precision to impression. I enjoyed watching the change in style as I wandered around the room and noticed how he embraced innovation (e.g. coloured paper for his watercolours). Some scenes were already familiar, like the fall of the Clyde in Lanarkshire.

As usual, there were other small exhibitions to dip into. One on trees in art, which was rather lovely, and one on abstract art, which wasn’t. Minimalism is OK, but the “messiness” of, say, Gillian Ayres means nothing to me, Well, my loss perhaps. Included in the exhibition room were fabric and textile designs from Edinburgh Weavers and Hull Traders – abstraction tamed and tidied into repeating patterns.