Small London wanderings

Very much restricted wanderings this time as I only had part of a day to explore my home town.

I arrived at my Air B and B at midnight - five hours after I said I would, due to a four-hour delayed flight and another hour standing around at Stansted airport with about two hundred other people all also wondering where their baggage had got to.
Luckily, the very lovely host was totally understanding, made me tea, asked what I was doing in London and showed me - after making me a hot-water bottle - to my lodgings - a beautiful garden shed. Actually, not a shed - more a recycled wood cabin with found 30s windows and tea-chest interior cladding.

                                                  

I don't think I have slept better for months.
I lay there thinking how odd it was to be in a small wooden house in a Clapton garden within this vast throbbing city, and how really quiet it was and then I was out for eight hours - unheard of!

After my agent meeting the following day, I returned to the shed, had a rest, read one of Mark Haddon's short stories (excellent) and then walked a very, very long way and got lost (no GPS, thank you!) but it was an interesting getting lost, mainly around the Hackney Marshes area and ending up at a pub called The Approach near Victoria Park where a lot of my novel is set.
I met up with friend, Sophie, and we discussed life generally before yawning into our drinks and deciding that our respective sleeping places were calling.

                    

The interior of a wonderful café called 'The Tram Stop' somewhere between Clapton and Hackney



The Hackney Empire. Somehow, I've never seen this/these buildings before! One of a few architectural symbiosis of old and new that, to my mind, works.

                       

The Mighty St Leonard's Church, (from a bus) home of my Character, Hoxton.

                 

                               Beauty salon on Kingsland Road.

                                                       

One of a billion or so overlooked door and window lintel decorations in London



I'm not sure why I photographed these two edifices but I just liked their air of silent resignation to the next bit of decay and graffiti; respectively sitting under about 150/60 years of drizzle watching human-progress - or not.



Global-warming evidence near the Hackney Marshes. A very happy olive tree.

                               

Top of bus-shelter debris. I saw quite a few surprising things on the bus from Hackney to Covent Garden - a credit card, shoes, a sandwich, books, glasses . . . Thrown up there from the street, or from the bus, passing biplane . . .
This bungee-rope must have been there for a decade or so judging by the moss that surrounded it. I once started a short-story about a man who lived on a bus-shelter roof. I might continue it.

                                              

                                           A tiny building which must be mostly a fireplace

                            

                                    A wistful bulldog

                            

Interesting bit of modern architecture encompassing London yellow brick, steel and glass.



A magnificent drinking fountain in Victoria Park - I loved the way the trickle has been designed to enter the little oval pool with a groove so the water returns to the base. And the pebbles! Wow.



A slice of rails, woodwork, ironwork, cables, brick and tenacious buddleias growing from wall-cracks



And back to the airport. I'm sure the duty free bit has expanded again to feature further meters of people thrusting bits of perfume-saturated white card at you; and even more chocolate/tea/booze and useless plastic crap than you can shake an advertising exec at.

There's always a spotlight area for a certain product halfway through the D-Free bit - last time I think it was Toblerone, and before that M and Ms? The current Giorgio Armani installation was rendered somewhat ludicrous by the 'no climbing' sign on the pretend boat-gangway.

I bought a small tin of Earl Grey as a congrats present for my son passing his driving test, avoided everything else, ate a very nice black-bean thing in Leon and settled down with a pot of tea to write my meeting notes out - just another member of the huge human colony perched on seats and taking Instagram pictures of their meals. We are a strange lot.

More London wanderings

I only had a day to explore this time so planned meticulously what I would do, to then not do it as like any respectable 'flaneur' or 'flaneuse'? (not flannel, thank you spell check), I got distracted by the lure of previously-unknown alleys, buildings and signs, one of the most memorable being 'The Horse Hospital' somewhere in WC1.



Starting point: outside St Athan's Hotel in Bloomsbury



                         



Bloomsbury at 5. 30 am
                                           

So, I wandered around the borders of Camden and Holborn with exploratitive (not a word?) zest and part nostalgia, as ever, seeking the perfect Formica, fuggy café of my London years - sadly mostly gone, certainly from the hyper-center; Nero's, Starbucks, et all, now sitting smugly on nearly all streets.
The art gallery part of my plan now becoming less likely, time-wise, I headed towards Clapton Pond and Lea Bridge Rd to do a bit of shadowing of my main characters' footsteps in my current tome.
Smithi and Jarvis walk (in 2073) from Sureditch (Shoreditch) to the Hackney Marshes, to a pub called the Princess of Wales, and then back again, avoiding certain dangers but encountering others unforeseen. I wanted to see how long the walk would actually take (not allowing for the total fog-out and swamp of which I have placed in the book).

 



as decreed by Jesus?

   

re-postisioned gravestones in the beautiful St Georges garden/ancient burial ground, WC1

          

          A habitation of extreme pointiness in Lloyds Square.


Time restricted after meanderings in WC1, I took a bus to Clapton pond and was amazed to find . . . a pond! For some reason I had imagined this to be not so, the water just a memory, now filled in, the ghost of it trapped under a chain-coffee shop.



Clapton pond



the pub and below, part of the filter beds area






group of sulking pigeons - man pictured had just walked over, stood near them and told them over and over 'don't you move'.

I walked up Lea Bridge Road and found the pub lurking betwixt the river, the bridge and large grassy zones bordered by vast plane trees. The pub was shut so I couldn't investigate the inside and imagine where 'Jarvis' was going to play the violin standing on a piano with antlers strapped to his homburg, so I traced their journey back to Shoreditch, following the river before turning westwards.
The joy of discovering completely unknown (to me) areas of London. I had never imagined there to be a tract of such wild land enclosed within the city - the filter beds of the river Lea. I could have been standing in the Fens, such was the quietness, just waving bog grasses and birds flitting.
I continued to 'The Marshes', enormous, flat expanses of cropped grass as green as, well, grass . . . But the space! interrupted only by the white, skeletal poles of football goal posts and the occasional dog-walker.



Time-restricted now I ceased wandering, tuned right over a bridge and strode onwards to Chatsworth Road where I had a tea break in the intriguingly-named, and atmospheric, 'Cooper and wolf' café where a friendly person drew me a map of how to get to St Leonard's church, my return point.

    

A pink house                                              a blue house

I followed the criss-cross of roads and eventually arrived on Kingsland Road, got my hair cut (much needed) in a barbers, ate an iced bun and found the church where I was happy to enter its cool interior and spend a little time thinking about my characters' existences within the building.
A train to catch, I walked on, retrieved my case from the hotel and caught the tube to Waterloo pleased with the day and already thinking ahead to the next opportunity to discover/re-discover more of my home city.



The biggest fig tree in London town? Somewhere near Farringdon Road