rhythmaning (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rhythmaning) wrote2008-09-07 03:33 pm
rhythmaning) wrote2008-09-07 03:33 pm
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A Wednesday in London: Temple, Cathedrals and a Ghost
A bit of a dilemma: a morning to spend before catching the 3pm train back north. After breakfast, I dumped my bag at King’s Cross and wandered around the building, trying to get myself stopped again looking for photographs. I know King’s Cross well – it has been my main link with London for the last fourteen years, and for four years before that (I used to get the milk train down over night; they would run old rolling stock, and one could find a compartment, pull down the blinds, and stretch out across the bench to sleep. It was cheaper than the misnamed “sleeper”, and more comfortable than the open-plan trains where one would be crammed in and there was always a loud Scotsman with a quickly emptying pallet of Special Brew sitting opposite me), but when I searched, there were few images which grabbed me. (This contrasts greatly with St Pancas next door, which I thought was superbly photogenic when we visited in February; I must go back to St Pancras to start a journey: Nice would be nice…)
I did however see this.
I decided to go to Sp Paul’s Cathedral, hoping to take some photographs – building on my new found obsession with ecclesiastical architecture (I must also visit St Gile’s on the Mile: I can’t recall ever having been inside) – and being me, and with plenty of time, I decided to walk. It turned out to be a very random walk, following where things caught my eye.
I am very glad it did. I headed south from King’s Cross into the hinterland – not quite Bloomsbury, not Clerkenwell – perhaps Tavistock is the name estate agents would use. It is an interesting area – old Georgian squares, Victorian social housing, modern (sixties?) blocks.
I saw this as I crossed a small square, Regent Square.
I cut down an alley and found myself in St Georges’ Park. I read the notice at the entrance: the park was formed from the graveyards of two churches, both called St George’s; the grave stones are still there. It was sunny and quiet, and it felt rather special. The Whole of the Moon, which winded me; I was going to sit amongst the graves but thought better of it, and walked past Coram’s Fields (smiling at the black sheep), on past Great Ormond St children’s hospital, and down into Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
London is incredibly green: there are lots of green spaces. I walked across the square and out through Bell Yard, sticking my head around some of the barristers’ chambers and their very specialist suppliers – I particularly liked the window of the wig makers – and out into Fleet St.
Crossing the road, I realised I was at the gates of the Temple. I don’t think I had been into the area of the Temple for perhaps forty years; my mother used to have a friend that lived there, and when I was a child we would go down to watch the Lord Mayor’s Parade drive along the Embankment before going back into a flat within the Temple for a party. The Temple rather than St Paul’s turned out to be the first church I visited. The church like the courts was in recess; the building was closed, so I had to content myself with the arches and carvings outside.
Realising that it is actually a video camera he is looking through doesn’t stop it being intimidating. A different kind of shooting, perhaps.
I was hoping to see the current installation in the Tate, Martin Creed’s Work No. 850, featuring runners coursing through the hall. I saw no sign of anyone running, so I asked about it at the very friendly information desk. Unfortunately, I was at the wrong Tate: that was happening at Tate Britain, down the river. There was a river boat which goes every twenty minutes upstream between the buildings, and that sounded quite fun, too, so I decided to look around Tate Modern for a while before catching the boat to Millbank.
When I was last at the Tate Modern, Shibboleth had been on display in the large open space of the turbine hall. This was a huge crack running the length of the hall, carefully constructed: the art was really the absence of the floor – the crack itself. That exhibit was long over, so I was surprised that the ghost of Shibboleth was clearly visible: they appear simply to have filled the crack in (that must have used a lot of Polyfilla). The artwork which was an absence is still there, but even more absent: the space has been filled, leaving the outline of the crack clearly visible. This didn’t seem quite right to me – though I can’t work out why.
Indeed, it was a day of absence, really: the Rothko paintings which usually form the centrepiece of a visit to the Tate for me weren’t there either, since they have been removed in preparation for a major retrospective of Rothko which opens in a couple of weeks and runs through until February next year.
I did go to Street and Studio, an “urban history of photography”, which was too large and sprawling to be too meaningful: frankly, it was all over the place and lacked any real depth or focus.
Unfortunately, I then managed to miss the boat, literally – it went a few minutes early (bastard!) – but I wasn’t too bothered. The Creed “exhibit” is on until November, so I may still catch it (I hope to be down next for the London Jazz Festival in November), together with the Rothko.
Instead, I wandered east under Southwark Bridge, along Clink Street and into Southwark Cathedral. Here, for a small fee for a licence, one can take photographs – though I chose not to: despite being the oldest extant church in London (…or something like that …), the interior didn’t grab me. I did have a good look around, though. It was quite busy, and there were some fascinating tombs. A vicar of some sort – a woman – came on the tannoy and invited everyone to stop and pray; so I did: I sat and thought, winded for the third time. It was a rather lovely place.
Outside, they have excavated some of the foundations of the church, which go right back to Roman London: there is a part of a Roman road beneath the church. All rather chastening.
I wandered back to the river, and sat watching a cormorant fish in the Thames. They always fascinate me. A guy sitting on a bench nearby started talking to me; I wasn’t really in a talking mood. He asked if he was disturbing me – I said no, which wasn’t wholly true: I’d rather have been left alone watching the water.
I grabbed lunch in nearby Borough Market, and sat eating my sandwich in the small cathedral garden. It was now busy with people eating lunch: mostly office workers, but a few tourists (like me!) and a handful of drunks sprawled on the grass.
And then it was back up the Northern Line to King’s Cross, and back up the northern line to Edinburgh: a lovely, nostalgic and sentimental journey home.
I did however see this.
I decided to go to Sp Paul’s Cathedral, hoping to take some photographs – building on my new found obsession with ecclesiastical architecture (I must also visit St Gile’s on the Mile: I can’t recall ever having been inside) – and being me, and with plenty of time, I decided to walk. It turned out to be a very random walk, following where things caught my eye.
I am very glad it did. I headed south from King’s Cross into the hinterland – not quite Bloomsbury, not Clerkenwell – perhaps Tavistock is the name estate agents would use. It is an interesting area – old Georgian squares, Victorian social housing, modern (sixties?) blocks.
I saw this as I crossed a small square, Regent Square.
I cut down an alley and found myself in St Georges’ Park. I read the notice at the entrance: the park was formed from the graveyards of two churches, both called St George’s; the grave stones are still there. It was sunny and quiet, and it felt rather special. The Whole of the Moon, which winded me; I was going to sit amongst the graves but thought better of it, and walked past Coram’s Fields (smiling at the black sheep), on past Great Ormond St children’s hospital, and down into Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
London is incredibly green: there are lots of green spaces. I walked across the square and out through Bell Yard, sticking my head around some of the barristers’ chambers and their very specialist suppliers – I particularly liked the window of the wig makers – and out into Fleet St.
Crossing the road, I realised I was at the gates of the Temple. I don’t think I had been into the area of the Temple for perhaps forty years; my mother used to have a friend that lived there, and when I was a child we would go down to watch the Lord Mayor’s Parade drive along the Embankment before going back into a flat within the Temple for a party. The Temple rather than St Paul’s turned out to be the first church I visited. The church like the courts was in recess; the building was closed, so I had to content myself with the arches and carvings outside.
Nearby was a modern sculpture, a large – four foot hight or so – pair of hands, carved in a black stone and highly polished, reminiscent of Rodin’s Cathedral. It didn’t photograph well.
I walked down to the Embankment through the gardens and back up to Fleet Street, and on to St Paul’s, where I was to be disappointed: no photographs were allowed inside. I didn’t feel like paying in order not to be allowed to do what I had gone there to do. I don’t understand why, say, York Minster allows photography and St Paul’s doesn’t – the signs say that it is because it is a place of worship and they request visitors to respect that, but York Minster is also a place of worship; the cynic in me can’t help thinking it is because they want visitors to buy books or postcards.
But being inside the cathedral I found strangely affecting. Once more I felt winded. I noticed a chapel to one side which invited visitors to sit and pray or (strangely, I thought, but then I know bugger all about ecclesiastical niceties and dogma) even give confession. I thought about sitting quietly in the chapel, alone with my thoughts again, but decided instead to stand amongst the tall pillars outside, hidden by the trunk-like flutes of stone.
Tate Modern was next on my random itinerary. The outside of the old power station is still decorated by murals advertising an earlier exhibition – a man staring intently down the sights of a gun. I know it was a “only” a painting, but I still found it a frightening image.
Realising that it is actually a video camera he is looking through doesn’t stop it being intimidating. A different kind of shooting, perhaps.
I was hoping to see the current installation in the Tate, Martin Creed’s Work No. 850, featuring runners coursing through the hall. I saw no sign of anyone running, so I asked about it at the very friendly information desk. Unfortunately, I was at the wrong Tate: that was happening at Tate Britain, down the river. There was a river boat which goes every twenty minutes upstream between the buildings, and that sounded quite fun, too, so I decided to look around Tate Modern for a while before catching the boat to Millbank.
When I was last at the Tate Modern, Shibboleth had been on display in the large open space of the turbine hall. This was a huge crack running the length of the hall, carefully constructed: the art was really the absence of the floor – the crack itself. That exhibit was long over, so I was surprised that the ghost of Shibboleth was clearly visible: they appear simply to have filled the crack in (that must have used a lot of Polyfilla). The artwork which was an absence is still there, but even more absent: the space has been filled, leaving the outline of the crack clearly visible. This didn’t seem quite right to me – though I can’t work out why.
Indeed, it was a day of absence, really: the Rothko paintings which usually form the centrepiece of a visit to the Tate for me weren’t there either, since they have been removed in preparation for a major retrospective of Rothko which opens in a couple of weeks and runs through until February next year.
I did go to Street and Studio, an “urban history of photography”, which was too large and sprawling to be too meaningful: frankly, it was all over the place and lacked any real depth or focus.
Unfortunately, I then managed to miss the boat, literally – it went a few minutes early (bastard!) – but I wasn’t too bothered. The Creed “exhibit” is on until November, so I may still catch it (I hope to be down next for the London Jazz Festival in November), together with the Rothko.
Instead, I wandered east under Southwark Bridge, along Clink Street and into Southwark Cathedral. Here, for a small fee for a licence, one can take photographs – though I chose not to: despite being the oldest extant church in London (…or something like that …), the interior didn’t grab me. I did have a good look around, though. It was quite busy, and there were some fascinating tombs. A vicar of some sort – a woman – came on the tannoy and invited everyone to stop and pray; so I did: I sat and thought, winded for the third time. It was a rather lovely place.
Outside, they have excavated some of the foundations of the church, which go right back to Roman London: there is a part of a Roman road beneath the church. All rather chastening.
I wandered back to the river, and sat watching a cormorant fish in the Thames. They always fascinate me. A guy sitting on a bench nearby started talking to me; I wasn’t really in a talking mood. He asked if he was disturbing me – I said no, which wasn’t wholly true: I’d rather have been left alone watching the water.
I grabbed lunch in nearby Borough Market, and sat eating my sandwich in the small cathedral garden. It was now busy with people eating lunch: mostly office workers, but a few tourists (like me!) and a handful of drunks sprawled on the grass.
And then it was back up the Northern Line to King’s Cross, and back up the northern line to Edinburgh: a lovely, nostalgic and sentimental journey home.