Categories: London

Columbia Road Flower Market

Columbia Road Flower Market

Columbia Road e5
Sunday morning only.
www.columbiaroad.inf

My favourite place is ephemeral. It comes into being on Sunday mornings, at the moment the trucks wake me up delivering their goods. It begins to disintegrate after 2:30 p.m., when what produce remains is trundled back into vans by people shouting in Cockney accents, or is bought cheaply, surreptitiously, and illegally by locals like me. I speak of that oldest and most famous flower market-Columbia Road. Every Sunday morning, my studio (thirty seconds' walk from the florabundal epicentre) is garlanded with kangaroo paw, lilies, parrot tulips, tuberose-proof that nature still exists somewhere, even during a London winter. The market provides many subsidiary attractions. For example, when the English buy bedding plants, they cheer up, and sometimes smile at complete strangers. Once, on a Sunday morning, I was practising my piano with the French doors open. A flower-buying crowd gathered on the street below and started clapping. The delight of Sunday mornings compensates for East End Sunday afternoons.

Robyn Davidson has had homes in Sydney, London, and the Indian Himalayas. Her books include Tracks, winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and Desert Places, shortlisted for the same prize.

A. Gold

A. Gold
42 Brushfield Street e1
020 7247 2487

My current favourite weekend activity is bicycling to A. Gold, a small specialist grocer and wine merchant alongside Spitalfields Market, close to the City and Liverpool Street station. My route takes me through Brick Lane and the small side streets of this part of eighteenth-century London, now smartened up as if it were a piece of New England.

Charles Saumarez Smith is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Jack the Ripper Walk - sounds corny but, believe me, it isn"t.

Jack the Ripper Walking Tour
020 7624 3978; www.jacktheripperwalk.com

I know this sounds as corny as the waxworks at Madame Tussauds, but trust me, it ain’t. It’s my favourite walk offered by the Original London Walks, the group that organizes hourly tours with subjects ranging from Charles Dickens’s London to Princess Diana’s London, from the Old Jewish Quarter Tour to the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. Show up at the tube stop, meet your guide, pay your £8, and you’re off. In two hours, see and learn more about London than most Londoners will ever know in a lifetime. Jack the Ripper Haunts meets Sunday nights at 7:30 p.m. at the Tower Hill tube and is often led by Donald Rumbelow (the world’s leading “Ripper-ologist”). He escorts his group through the East End of London, describing in gory detail the wheres and hows of each murder, finishing at the Ten Bells, the pub where the prostitute-victims drank their final gins. Despite initial protestations from visiting friends, they invariably return to my flat in a Victorian frenzy saying, “That was the best thing we’ve done in London.”

Glen Roven, four-time Emmy winner, has performed with orchestras around the world.

Highgate Ponds - fresh water swimming with a view of the city

Highgate Ponds

Hampstead Heath, near East Heath nw3
020 7332 3773; www.cityoflondon.gov.uk
Open from May to mid-September.
For directions go to www.journeyplanner.org.

A personal favourite with visitors in the summer are the ponds at Highgate. It surprises out-of-towners who have suffered a hot day of London tubes and stress that you can swim in fresh water in the open air—with a view over the City. There are three ponds: men’s and women’s and mixed (the water flows through the women’s first!), and in late summer the temperature is delightful. The atmosphere is very relaxed; it is not at all “naturist.” Indeed, the mix is indicative of London’s cultural diversity: Orthodox Jews with their ringlets pinned up; old, young, fit, and unfit. The women’s pond, I’m told, is rather more sociable.

I recommend the stiff walk back up the hill to theFlask Tavern (77 West Highgate Hill n6, 020 8348 7346), a Georgian pub at Highgate Village; if it is getting cold by then, they have braziers outside.

Ian Kelly
Ian Kelly is an actor and writer. His publications include Shakespeare Cinema.

Sir John Soane's Museum - an extraordinary, if little visited, residence

Sir John Soane’s Museum
1792–1824, Sir John Soane
13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields wc2
020 7405 2107; www.soane.org

Sir John Soane’s Museum is still probably the least known museum in London. Even though its three contiguous townhouses are crammed with fine art and artifacts—Turners, William Hogarth’s most famous work, A Rake’s Progress, bronze sculptures, antique cork architectural models, and Regency décor—the museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, bequeathed to the nation by the architect John Soane upon his death in 1837, attracts only a hundred thousand visitors a year.

This may change: The museum has launched a program called “Opening Up the Soane,” making a series of “lost” interiors, including his bedroom and bath, accessible to the public for the first time since the architect’s death. The director, Tim Knox, former head of the National Trust, has written a new book on the museum, and it includes splendid photographs by Derry Moore; there is a new study centre where scholars can examine the ten thousand Robert Adam drawings in the collection; and a conservation lab is currently under construction.

Soane was a bricklayer’s son who apprenticed with architects. He became such an accomplished draftsman that he won the Prix de Rome, a three-year scholarship to study in the Italian capital. He eventually became the architect of the Bank of England, and wealthy enough to collect everything from contemporary paintings to an Egyptian sarcophagus. (He was a shopaholic on the level of Andy Warhol.) He continually re-arranged the rooms in his house, adding yellow-glass skylights, and creating mysterious spaces that still delight visitors. For decades he taught architecture students from the Royal Academy in his atelier, which partly explains the wealth of architectural models and plaster casts.

Considered a classicist, Soane was actually a “protomodernist,” interested in stripping down Beaux Art idioms. To this day, he remains popular with architects of every stripe: neoclassicists, modernists, post-modernists, and even the avant-garde (Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid). Many artists (including Anish Kapoor) say they find inspiration in the idiosyncratic museum and visit it often. Now, with the “opening up,” it’s time for the general public to appreciate the special appeal of Sir John Soane’s enduring vision.

Wendy Moonan covers architecture, fine arts, and the decorative arts for Veranda and Elle Decor, as well as for several websites, including 1stdibs.com and VandM.com. She wrote a weekly antiques column for The New York Times for fourteen years.

Follow the Stroll to Bob Crachit's house

A Film Buff's Stroll

For thirty years I worked at Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus, and lived first on the west side of Hampstead Heath, then on the east side, and would often walk the three miles home via Camden Town. The first journey is the one Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson took from Oxford Street to Hampstead in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton to burgle the home of the "king of all blackmailers," who lived at a Gothic mansion on the corner of East Heath Road and Well Road. They subsequently fled from the house, zigzagging across the Heath to emerge presumably on the Highgate Road and catch a cab back to Baker Street.

The second journey is the one walked by the intrepid Richard Hannay in John Buchan's classic conspiracy thriller The Three Hostages, just after World War I, following the first clue that leads him from Oxford Circus via Camden Town to Gospel Oak at the Heath's southeast corner. His walk takes him past the apartment block at 122 Portland Place from which Hannay would later escape, disguised as a milkman, in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

The most sublime Hitchcock image from the 1930s is of the unattended horse-drawn milk-float in Park Crescent. You can get to Camden Town by the Nash Terraces of Regent's Park's Outer Circle or Albany Street, from the top of which, at the White House, the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale ran his espionage ring in the 1960s. Camden Town is where the nine-year-old Charles Dickens lived in Bayham Street, as well as being the home of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol and the inner-city area transformed by the coming of the railways in Dombey and Son. At Parkway, Camden Town, is Palmer's Pet Store, above which the Communist leader Bennett lived in Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield. (The black-and white shop front remains intact but inside is now a fashionable café, Yumchaa.)

Going North by the Holmes or the Hannay route takes you through George Orwell territory-in the mid-1930 she lived in Warwick Mansions, Pond Street, 77 Parliament Hill, and 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, and worked at a bookshop called Booklover's Corner (immortalised in Keep the Aspidistra Flying) in South End Green, as recorded by a plaque on the corner. At Gospel Oak you'll reach Gordon House Road, along which a psychopathic hitman drives on his way to a killing on the opening page of Ruth Rendell's The Lake of Darkness. Cross over to the Heath and climb to the top of Parliament Hill, where D. H. Lawrence and Frieda watched zeppelins bombing London in World War I, as described in Kangaroo.

Philip French
Philip French is The Observer's film critic, author of Westerns, and co-editor of The Faber Book of Movie Verse. He was named Critic of the Year in the 2009 National Press Awards.

Moro

Moro
34-36 Exmouth Market EC1
020 7833 8336; www.moro.co.uk

Samuel Clark married Samantha Clarke, and the two chefs took a leisurely ramble through Spain and Morocco. They had ravenous appetites, as lovers do, and they ate everything in sight. When they returned to London they couldn't stop craving those flavours, and they began thinking about food in a whole new way. The result was Moro ("Moor"), the restaurant they opened in 1997. The instant you open the door, you are transported into an intensely fragrant, ornate Arab-Spanish world. The authentic, powerful food is based on recipes and cooking methods that have travelled through the centuries. Because the Clarks feel that cooking over live wood or real hardwood charcoal is integral to their shared vision, you'll find a big, wood-burning oven taking pride of place in the kitchen. And although their food is uncomplicated, it is far from crude. A whole sea bass, seasoned with lemon and fennel and roasted in that oven, is drizzled with pan juices and served with a chunky relish made of roughly chopped pistachios and garlic, given added mystery and allure by orange-flower water, lemon, and mint-flavours that have been entwined since antiquity. Gleaming ruby-red seeds from pomegranates, long cultivated in Arabia, transform a rustic parsley-grain tabbouleh into a sumptuous side. The Clarks have a family now, and a second home in Spain, but they still eat everything in sight.

Jane Lear

Jane Lear, a food and travel writer based in New York City, is the former senior articles editor at Gourmet magazine. A contributor to The Gourmet Cookbook: More than 1000 Recipes and Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen, she also co-wrote (with chef Floyd Cardoz) One Spice, Two Spice: American Food, Indian Flavors.

Moro is also steeped in Mediterranean culture, in particular, that of Andalucia, where the cuisines of southern Europe and North Africa create a delicious synthesis; last time I ate there I started with quail in flatbread with pistachio sauce, followed it with wood roasted peri-peri chicken with coriander rice and rocket salad, and concluded with fresh raspberries on a bed of Jerez cream. As you eat you can watch the chefs at work in the open kitchen at the far end of the restaurant.

Clive Sinclair

Clive Sinclair, born in London, is the author of novels including Blood Libels and Cosmetic Effects. He is a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the PEN MacMillan Silver Pen.

A Connoisseur's Afternoon

A Connoisseur’s Afternoon

Jeroboams
50-52 Elizabeth Street SW1
020 7730 8108; www.jeroboams.co.uk

H. R. Stokes
58 Elizabeth Street SW1
020 7730 7073; www.henrystokes.co.uk

Tomtom Cigars
63 Elizabeth Street SW1
020 7730 1790; www.tomtom.co.uk

Fulham News
200 Fulham Road SW10
020 7351 3435

Battersea Park
On the South Bank, across from Chelsea SW11
The Peace Pagoda is by the river in the centre of the park.
www.batterseapark.org

There are very few “secrets” in such a busy, gossipy city as London, but there are some simple, unexploited pleasures. One of mine would be this.

Take a car or a cab to Elizabeth Street in Belgravia, where you will find a lot of what you need to nourish body and soul. At Jeroboams, pick up some good bread and cheese and a bottle of better-than-average white burgundy; a 1996 Meursault would do fine. While the cab is waiting, nip into Henry Stokes’s bookshop at No. 58, a small, village-like affair, but with a well-chosen stock of current titles. Buy something. In the same street, Tomtom Cigars will sell you a Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2. Now divert the cab to Fulham Road, where you will find the world’s best newsagent, Fulham News. Buy an armful of your favourite papers and magazines, then have yourself dropped at the Chelsea Bridge entrance to Battersea Park. I love Battersea Park because of its oddness: it was built on spoil from the excavation of the Royal Docks, and asparagus was cultivated here.

Anyway, select a bench overlooking the river, somewhere near the Peace Pagoda. On a weekday you will have the place entirely to yourself so, if you have remembered your running stuff, hide the food, papers, and books and take a turn around the park’s perimeter. This is about a mile and a half, so not too demanding, but enough to justify the indulgence of the food, drink, smoke, and reading you are now going to enjoy.

The view from your bench is beautiful and evocative:  this is Whistler’s and Wilde’s Thames. It is wonderful in warm sunshine, even lovelier in autumnal mist. From the bench, as you munch your bread and cheese and slurp the wine, you can enjoy one of the best urban views in Britain: Wren’s dignified Royal Hospital and then the gorgeous red brick houses of Chelsea Embankment, these last Britain’s most singular contribution to the history of world architecture. If you have brought two bottles, you can sit and wait and watch the sun go down over the eccentric Albert Bridge and the lumpy old Lots Road Power Station. For less than the price of a pretentious meal in a mediocre restaurant, you have had some of the very best London has to offer.

Stephen Bayley
Stephen Bayley was responsible for the Design Museum and created the Boilerhouse Project at the V & A. His books include Woman as Design, and he is a columnist on The Times. He currently runs a small design business in Soho.

The Roof Gardens

The Roof Gardens
1938, Ralph Hancock
99 Kensington High Street w8
020 7937 7994 or 020 7368 3993; www.roofgardens.virgin.com

If you're tiring of the summer crowds in Kensington, turn down shaded Derry Street and look for a large, imposing doorway marked 99 Kensington High Street. It appears to lead to the offices of some well-heeled company, but go inside, sign in at reception, take a lift up to the roof, and then step out into one of London's strangest secret gardens. Floating an improbable thirty metres above the traffic of Kensington High Street, and sprawling out over one and a half acres, the Roof Gardens boast fully grown oak and fruit trees, a stream stocked with fish, and four resident flamingos, named Bill, Ben, Splosh, and Pecks. There are fine views over the crowded cityscape of Kensington and Chelsea. Opened in 1938 atop what was then the Derry and Toms department store (part of the Barkers group), the gardens were created at the behest of Barkers' vice president, and designed by Ralph Hancock (architect of the Gardens of the Nations at Rockefeller Center, New York). Today the Roof Gardens are owned by the Virgin Hotels group and open for public viewing on select days only: phone in advance of your visit to check access, and then wander through a 1930s departmentstore president's dream of a gracious shopping experience.

Helen Gordon
Helen Gordon is a journalist, editor, and the author of Landfall. She was formerly an associate editor at Granta magazine. She lives in East London.

The Topolski Century

The Topolski Century
1975-1989, Feliks Topolski
Hungerford Arches
www.topolskicentury.org.uk

The Topolski Century, housed unpromisingly in a railway arch on London's South Bank, is the city's only permanent exhibition devoted to a single artwork. Vibrant and violent, this expressionist collage chronicling the glories and horrors of the twentieth century displays all the decadence and cruelty of a canvas by Dix. Part maze, part stageset, pure art, it gains added drama from the trains rolling towards Charing Cross Station overhead. Every visitor to the National Theatre or Royal Festival Hall should allow time to experience Feliks Topolski's unique vision.

Michael Arditti
Michael Arditti is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and critic. His novels include Easter, A Sea Change, and The Enemy of the Good.