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On Sunday my brother and I walked across Hampstead Heath to have lunch with an old family friend, and we walked past the house in which we grew up.
Around the corner is a blue plaque which I hadn’t noticed before, denoting that John Constable had lived there. I knew he had lived in Hampstead – there are a lot of sketches and paintings – but I had believed he lived on the top of the hill, near Fenton House. Clearly not.
Some years ago, when I returned to London after my first period in Edinburgh, I was exploring a bit of the V&A that I didn’t know – a picture collection – when I saw this picture by Constable.
I hadn’t seen the picture before, but I recognised it instantly: it was the scene across the road when I was growing up. Three tall elms on a little pocket of Hampstead Heath, cut off from the bulk of the heath by a busy main road. It hadn’t changed much since Constable’s time, though the elms had grown old. My brother and I played cricket beneath their boughs.
The trees were damaged and fell – or were felled – after the “hurricane” of 1987: now, without their shade, the area is covered by low scrub.
What is still there is the tall beech tree opposite our old house. This was the first thing I photographed when I got my first SLR in 1974. (I think I still have the negative, somewhere, in a box full of old negatives...) The new owners, whom we chatted to, were worried that bits of this tree would fall off and hurt someone. (Or, as my brother pointed out as being more likely, their Range Rover.) They want to get the council to lop some of its branches off. I think it is a beautiful tree, and I hope they don't succeed.
(I could be wrong, of course: maybe the elms Constable painted weren't the same ones I played beneath. But I am pretty certain.)
Around the corner is a blue plaque which I hadn’t noticed before, denoting that John Constable had lived there. I knew he had lived in Hampstead – there are a lot of sketches and paintings – but I had believed he lived on the top of the hill, near Fenton House. Clearly not.
Some years ago, when I returned to London after my first period in Edinburgh, I was exploring a bit of the V&A that I didn’t know – a picture collection – when I saw this picture by Constable.
I hadn’t seen the picture before, but I recognised it instantly: it was the scene across the road when I was growing up. Three tall elms on a little pocket of Hampstead Heath, cut off from the bulk of the heath by a busy main road. It hadn’t changed much since Constable’s time, though the elms had grown old. My brother and I played cricket beneath their boughs.
The trees were damaged and fell – or were felled – after the “hurricane” of 1987: now, without their shade, the area is covered by low scrub.
What is still there is the tall beech tree opposite our old house. This was the first thing I photographed when I got my first SLR in 1974. (I think I still have the negative, somewhere, in a box full of old negatives...) The new owners, whom we chatted to, were worried that bits of this tree would fall off and hurt someone. (Or, as my brother pointed out as being more likely, their Range Rover.) They want to get the council to lop some of its branches off. I think it is a beautiful tree, and I hope they don't succeed.
(I could be wrong, of course: maybe the elms Constable painted weren't the same ones I played beneath. But I am pretty certain.)