Passports to Pimlico

Two Saturdays in Pimlico. Last weekend, we did the second of the London's Lost Rivers walk, from the Shepherd’s Well in  Hampstead to the River Thames at Pimlico along the route of the Tyburn.

Say Tyburn and you think gallows, but they were on the location of Marble Arch, half a mile away. We cross Oxford (née Tyburn) Street near Bond Street, going south. I've lived in Old London Town for almost 20 years now, but there are still some places I didn't know existed, a lane in Mayfair where Terence Donovan used to live, now commemorated with a plaque and a sculpture, the Phileas Fogg club 'round the back of Bond Street tube, another commemorative statue: Freud, not outside his house/museum, as well as herons in Regent's Park, a frieze of St Christopher (fording the Tyburn?) in St Christopher's Place and of course, the drains from which you can hear the rushing river. As with the last walk, we pass through many mews, I wonder if the original stables were situated near the river(s) in order to water the horses.

Today we went to the Tate to see Richard Deacon. The problem with sculpture is that it's far more tactile than painting, or, um, video installation, and I wanted to stroke, play with, crawl through the various exhibits, particularly After, which reminded me of the giant, hollow insects and amphibians that used to exist in the Victoria Centre, Nottingham, for children to play in and on. Some of the pieces seemed constrained within the confines of the gallery, I could especially see the wooden artworks in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, gently weathering.



We also wandered through the Phyllida Barlow installation, claustrophobic in its massiveness, like an adventure playground in a  borough with no money, or the last apocalyptic day of a refuse strike.

I preferred the Ruin Lust exhibition, which featured art depicting ruins from classical days to nowadays. I suppose just as comedy = tragedy + time, then ruins + time = beauty. People travel from all over the world to see the Acropolis, the Coliseum, Fountains Abbey, but a Victorian music hall falling into disrepair is deplorable, and a dilapidated council block ugly. I thought of two beautiful modern ruins, the bombed out church in Hamburg, a permanent ruin as a monument to peace, and the similar and lovely St Dunstan In the East in the City. Also, the crumbling crofters' cottages in the extreme north of the Scottish highlands, which seem to become part of the landscape, a piece of history to remind us what once was.

I loved the photos of la batterie in Normandy - great sci-fi hulks glaring over the English channel. I've long wanted to see their English cousins, the AT-AT-like sea-forts of Kent:



There was also a short movie by Tacita Dean, filmed inside a Kodak factory, which was called The Russian Ending, so named because early Danish films regularly made two endings, one happy for the American market, one sad for the Russians. Not sure which route Lars Von Trier is taking.

Outside, were quotations from writers, artists, flaneurs about dissolution and disintegration, and books by ruin-fanciers, two of which I added to my to-read list.