The London Traveler

I rather like those histories of everyday things – ‘Latitude’, the story of spice, the history of salt. Exhibitions of locks and keys from the middle ages, or the furniture exhibitions at the Geffrye Museum, fascinate me.
So an exhibition of desks is a must! As a writer I spend most of each day at one, and it isn’t beautiful.
When I daydream, I imagine myself sitting at a fine Louis XIV desk with curvy gilt legs, or a lovely Restoration bureau…
“8 Desks” is a bit more modern but equally stylish. Jean Prouvé and Jean Royère’s almost minimalist, strikingly modern desks …read more

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You have a couple more days left to register your interest in RCA Secret 2008.
This intriguing art sale features postcards which have been painted or decorated by numerous artists, some well known (Grayson Perry, Tracy Emin,  Paula Rego and Anish Kapoor feature this year) and some less so. Musicians and fashion designers have also created some of the cards. There are 2,700 works available this year.Britart, photography, printing, there’s a huge selection of different styles and media.
You pay £40 and you take your choice. But you don’t actually know who painted which card, so it’s a bit of a lucky …read more

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I still remember the first time I saw a really great tapestry. It was the central panel of the Lady and the Unicorn series in the Musee de Cluny, in Paris, and I must have stood in front of it for half an hour, looking at the tiny flowers in the borders, each petal and leaf neatly delineated – an amazing profusion of detail.
But generally, my generation saw tapestry as something like needlepoint – something for little old ladies, something hanging in draughty old castles or at the back of ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’. Tapestry was something from a world …read more

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Half way along Whitehall stands the Banqueting House – the last remnant of Whitehall Palace.
The palace of Whitehall had grown up during the Middle Ages as a straggling, rather random collection of buildings. Into this Gothic and Tudor muddle, Inigo Jones placed a monument of classical reason – it must have come as a shock,  a building more Italian than English, clashing with everything around it.
Of course  later on, classical style became pretty common in London – Nash’s terraces, Lutyens’s neo-imperial, every other bank and insurance company using pediments and colonnades. But this was pretty much the first classical building …read more

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Well this is a bit different from Sotheby’s. I’ve been window shopping at Sotheby’s – I actually furnished much of my Stoke Newington house from the Criterion Auction Rooms!
The Islington branch is in that little bit of Essex Road that hasn’t been complete ly gentrified yet. You find lovely antiques, but you can also find a solid wood Victorian kitchen table like the one in my grandad’s kitchen for ten or fifteen quid  – if you’re lucky.
Auctions are on Mondays. That gives you Friday and the weekend to look at the lots. A viewing here is always fun – it’s …read more

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We’ve all seen the comic cuts where someone sneezes or scratches his nose and ends up buying a Van Gogh he can’t pay for as the auctioneer bangs his gavel…
Don’t worry.  It’s not going to happen to you. Not at Sotheby’s, anyway – you have to  register, and use a numbered paddle to bid. So you can watch the action in the auction room without wondering if you’re going to end up with a few million quid’s worth of Post-Impressionist and no money to pay for it.
So you can settle down, and watch what’s going on. You’ll see bidders raising …read more

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Every summer sees a new pavilion built at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. This summer sees a work by Frank Gehry, architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.
The pavilion is made half of wood, half of timber. Though it rests on four giant steel supports, it’s the wood and glass you notice – the organic weight of the one, the transparency of the other.
Gehry apparently based the design on military catapults drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, and there’s something quite spiky about the way the wooden struts bristle down the back of the pavilion.
But there’s also something rather interestingly random …read more

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Believe it or not, London has one of the world’s best collections of Italian Futurist art. Like all the best museums and galleries, the Estorick Collection started as one man’s obsession – American writer Eric Estorick discovered Futurism during his honeymoon in Switzerland, and soon became a major collector.
The Futurists were a bunch of artists who were excited by the potential of modern machinery and technology. (To their discredit, some of them were also excited by the apparently modernist appeal of Fascism.)
Some of the earliest Futurist art is brash, energetic and powerful.   But my favourite works in the …read more

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One of the London Festival of Architecture’s most interesting exhibitions is a show at Southwark gallery, charting the unvisited reaches of the Thames Estuary.
As you head out of London along the Thames, the glitzy office blocks and shiny residential developments disappear. Instead, there are sheds, warehouses, the strange concrete shapes of water towers, chimneys, power stations and cargo terminals. And mile upon mile of gloomy marshland.
It’s a landscape that looks its best with grey skies – moody and unloved. A landscape where history has come and gone, leaving only stumps of old forts in its wake.
This …read more

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Following my report on ‘Last Stop’, Ralf Obergfell’s exhibition of photographs on the last eighteen months of the Routemaster’s service for London Transport, I had the chance to interview the photographer about his work.
LT: When did you first encounter the Routemaster bus? How far back does your fascination with it go?
RO: I first saw the Routemaster on TV at my parents’ house in Staufen, on the edge of the Black Forest. I was 12 or 13 years old.
LT: How did the project for Last Stop get started?
RO: I’m a founding member of photodebut, which was set up in 2002 as …read more

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