Category: Art Exhibition

World’s Greatest City?

I went with friends to Tate Britian to see the Hurvin Anderson exhibition. The show has now closed, but it was a fine exhibition by an Anglo-Caribbean artist who was brought up in Birmingham. The pictures had a slightly evasive feel. You got the sense that the artist was not entirely comfortable as a Jamaican or as a Brit. Some of his works are very fine paintings indeed but they keep the viewer at arms-length. One of my friends, born in the UK but from an Indian family, made the point that’s how it often feels as an ex-pat. There is a persistent low level of disconnect or unease.

My family and I lived and worked in Bangkok for eight years. When our daughter reached the age of twelve, we decided to move back to London. We’d met many so-called Third Culture kids, who called their parent’s home their home even if they hardly knew it at all. It made then all somewhat rootless. We didn’t want that for our daughter.

After visiting the exhibition, we went to the cafe at the gallery and continued our conversations which soon became hijacked by the topic of London, the city where we all live. Throughout many of these posts I’ve made my love for the place very clear, so I don’t need to rehearse those arguments again.

Finishing our coffee we all walked back over Vauxhall Bridge to our homes. Later that afternoon one of them sent me the FT article which you can see above. It starts:

An evening walk through Islington with an Australian friend. He looks around at the Georgian facades, at the Lime-biking locals, and grows ruminative. “They say it’s the best city in the world …I wait for the counter-argument. … but they don’t say it enough.

So, I think we know where he stands but what I found interesting were his suggestions for the two main contenders. Perhaps because it’s the FT, a paper with more than a passing interest in money, the clue is in the name, he suggested Singapore and Dubai.

I’ve worked in both cities and the idea that either could ever become the greatest city in the world seems fanciful. Dubai is endless roads through a desert with each skyrise madder and more ugly than the last. Of course, their tourist trade has been decapitated on account of President Trump’s special military operation in Iran and the subsequent drone attacks on US allies in the region. As to Singapore, in many ways it’s a beautiful place, but small and has more banking culture than indigenous culture. To anyone who has lived out east it’s ‘Asia Lite’ not the full fat version as experienced in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur.

It’s hard to argue with the FT writer when he says this: A city has to be rich for centuries, not decades, to accrue the sheer quantity of stuff that makes it the best, or at least most complete. Live in one, and the notion of western decline can feel abstract and remote.

I remember when first moving to Bangkok and going to their National Gallery, without wishing to be unkind the was no picture of world class importance. Don’t get me wrong I loved living in Thailand, which is stuffed full of intriguing local culture, but the world’s greatest city? Not by a mile.

I always used to say that New York was my other favourite city, but like many I wouldn’t choose to visit there now on account of the present administration. How do you make an enemy of Canada for goodness sake? So, for now it’s London, but hang on what about Paris? I leave it to you to decide.

Art in the Arches

Covid has given retail a right royal kicking. With people stuck at home, many have swapped their shopping habits from the high street to the internet. Where Amazon and the rest have benefited, shops from Debenhams to our local gift shop Max & Melia are shuttering. Take a walk through the City of London and you’ll see a retail graveyard. Even Piccadilly, in the heart of the West End, has space to rent.

Unfortunately, the same is true in our neighbourhood. Vauxhall styles itself as The Vibrant Place though some of its vibrancy has washed away as shops and restaurants close. The same is true of empty railway arches at Vauxhall Cross. To be fair two places I always liked, Counter Vauxhall Bar and Brasserie and the motorbike shop Metropolis, closed before the pandemic took hold.

*Picture by Roxanne Dewar (Bucket and I thought this was the best)*

Vauxhall One, the local business improvement district, does huge amounts to keep Vauxhall clean and green and they commissioned a series of murals to paper over the empty spaces.

*Not art, just me and Bucket having a snoop*

The artists have done a great job, but in many ways I’m ambivalent about the whole project. The pictures brighten up the place but I’d far rather there were thriving businesses in their place.

For art we can go to the Damien Hirst Gallery on Newport Street or Tate Britain just over the river.

But don’t let me put you off, take a stroll to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, and look at what the artists have achieved. Some of the paintings are exquisite.

Here are the artists along with their Instagram links

Mr Penfold (Tim Gresham)

Luke Smile, a typographic artist

Susheel Basra, graphic designer

Illustrator Roxane Dewar

Italian artist and illustrator Gianinna Delpino

Botanical print designer Leila Vibert Stokes

Collage designer and animator Flavia Felipe

Graphic designer Craig Yamey

Muralist, illustrator and self-professed doodler Luke Embden

Artist and graphic designer NERONE

Thomas Kirk Shannon, VAULT Creative Arts

The featured image at the top is by Gianinna Delpino

The year of living dismally

We’ve never lived a year like it. Just over twelve months ago the Prime Minister told us to go home and that’s pretty much what we did albeit with a slight hiatus over the summer. We’ve mostly been home, cooped up and closeted.

Life has been directly informed by whether you like your home and the people in it. We were told we were ‘all in it together’, but that ‘it’ varied wildly from those with a large house and garden surrounded by a loving family to those closeted in abusive relationships or living alone twenty stories up in a tiny apartment with no access to a garden. It’s been a series of very different journeys which have determined how tolerable or otherwise our lockdown has been.

Pernicious disease

Then of course you may have caught Covid, a most pernicious and almost incomprehensible illness. Some caught it, displayed no symptoms and are still unaware they ever had it. More than a hundred and twenty thousand got sick and never recovered. For others still hanging on after being ill for weeks or months it continues to be a long brutal battle.

And what about babies and very young children, usually the most vulnerable to disease? It seems to have had little or no impact on their young lives. How can that be? Slightly older kids may not have been physically affected by the disease, but many have been hurt badly by the psychological fall out.

Our house

Days seem to pursue a relentless course of not very much. In this house we all work or are trying to navigate ‘A’ levels. We moan when the broadband is as bad as dial-up and our super important call disintegrates into digital dust.

In the evening we watch Netflix or a BBC iPlayer boxed set. We’re currently on the wonderful French farce ‘Call my agent!’ and then settle down for the 10 o’clock BBC News, unless the news is too dreadful to watch. I’m now fully acquainted with all Sophie Raworth’s broadcast outfits and frankly Soph it’s time to go online and select a couple of new ‘fits as I gather, they are now called. (Thanks to daughter for that). I really need to get out more, but then again so do you.

If you’re a keen reader of A little London Life, you’ll know that over the summer we moved to Essex for three months while our kitchen was given a complete makeover. Builders seemed to have worked right through the pandemic.

And there in the Essex house that we rented from friends was a small upright piano. I was determined to do something during lockdown that would mark some kind of growth and started hammering out gibberish on the piano. Well, that hasn’t stopped as a lovely friend from my days at ABC News gave me a digital upright which now gets beaten into submission on a nightly basis. I’m still an astonishingly bad player but having played guitar for almost 50 years I do understand music’s basic wiring. I know what’s going on under the hood, which I’m now struggling to translate on to the keyboard. It’s a battle but I’m in it for the long haul. Sorry neighbours.

Suddenly, nothing happened

So how has it been for you? Still struggling to coming to terms with it all? Doing OK? Coming up for air?

It’s odd to try to recall what happened when almost nothing happened. The major events that typically bookmark our personal orbit round the sun were in short supply from March of last year. No holidays, no going out, no meeting with friends, no journeys, no business meetings. Social interaction reduced to a Zoom call. Work seems like a series of tasks rather than a collaborative experience.

What do I miss most? Is it gigs, theatre, art galleries, cinema, having pleasant things in my diary to look forward to? Yes, all of that but not really that either. What I really miss is just being in the presence of my fellow humans. Hugging, kissing hanging out, drinking, chatting. Life with a forward trajectory built into it. How do we know we’ve achieved anything if we keep busy but are often busy doing nothing?

Vaccination action station

It’s certainly not over yet, but the various vaccines are a beacon of hope. I remember talking with someone at the start of it all saying I thought the chance of getting a vaccine quickly was slight at best and there was a good chance there would be no vaccine at all. Science has come to our rescue, we have vaccines, there is a way out. Let’s have no mealy-mouthed anxiety. Roll up your sleeve.

As the little bumper on the BBC says: The future isn’t cancelled. See you on the other side.

Photo London: Visual treat

I took a stroll to the Photo London Exhibition at Somerset House with Gyuri Szabo. He’s an old friend of mine, and an amazing photographer, who decoded many of the photographs for me and made sense of some I didn’t understand.

I usually let the words do the talking on this blog, with pictures something of an afterthought, but with Gyuri taking shots as we went around and the organisers kindly allowing me to use a few of the exhibition pictures, I thought I’d turn the tables and give you a visual treat.