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London Gardens, Green Lifestyle & Carnival de Cuba – 2005

London Gardens, Green Lifestyle & Carnival de Cuba: I had an interesting time twenty years ago on the weekend of 4-5th June 2005 in London. After a visit to some fantastic private gardens on the Saturday, on Sunday I went to a Green Lifestyle festival in Greenwich then photographed a Cuban carnival procession at Coin Street.

Here I’ll edit slightly the text I wrote back in 2005 and integrate it with some of the pictures I made, with links to the rest of those I put at the time on My London Diary. And end with a brief comment.

London Gardens – North London, Notting Hill and Chelsea

London Arts Café, now sadly long defunct, was an organisation which promoted urban art and examined its contribution to urban life. Its annual programme often included some interesting visits, sometimes taking us to places we never knew existed. On Saturday June 4th 2005 we were privileged to be able to visit three very different private gardens, each it it’s own way extraordinary. They are all among those featured in the 2000 book by George Carter, The New London Garden, (ISBN 1-840000-347-2) where you can find more details about them and view some splendid photographs by Marianne Majerus.

*Judy Wiseman’s sculpture garden in Gospel Oak*

We met George in the Notting Hill garden and he talked to us about his work and the importance of the garden in urban space, and we were also fortunate to meet the garden owners who also told us about their own gardens.

A grotto in Notting Hill

In North London, we visited a garden filled with sculptures of various types by designer and sculptor Judy Wiseman, making the most of the various locations. Most were casts of bodies or parts of bodies. This garden, I think alone among the three we visited, is open to the public to visit on one day most years as a part of the charity Open Gardens scheme.

In Notting Hill, the garden was more practical in some ways, with a large expanse of lawn, but in one corner was a dark area of trees and bushes with a fantastic grotto.

Most fabulous of all was the rooftop garden in Chelsea, stretched along the rooftops at the back of four houses, all former studios of well-known artists. One of the highlights for me was a scale model of a glasshouse built by Decimus Burton, used to create a miniature world with plants and figures.

After spending some time admiring this garden, we were also shown the art gallery in one of the houses, with an incredible collection of pictures, including works by Picasso, Braque, Courbet, Moholy-Nagy and many other famous names, including some fine work from the 1950s. There were also some fine rooms in the house, including a modern kitchen and some fine period pieces.

more pictures

London Green Lifestyle Show – Greenwich Park

*Solar Panels and The Queen’s House, Greenwich, London, June 5, 2005*

The group that had organised Kingston Green Fair had been asked to organise the London Green Lifestyle show in Greenwich Park, held on World Environment Day, June 5, 2005 as a part of London’s contribution to a more sustainable lifestyle. Unfortunately the events were spread over far too wide an area of the park to really be successful.

As always, there was rather a lot of missing the obvious in the approach to a better environment. So there was little about the need to drastically cut down air travel, and relatively little about cutting down car use. Casual visitors could certainly have gone away with the idea that if we all recycled our rubbish and perhaps switched to a green power supplier, everything was set for a rosy future.

I first spoke in public about the need for effective action to save the world in 1970. I had sold the last car I owned in 1966, using a bicycle wherever practicable since then, very occasionally using taxis and hiring a car for a few holidays. We’ve lived a relatively low-impact lifestyle, perhaps except for my addiction to cameras and computers! I changed jobs so I could cycle to work (and now work mainly online to avoid travel.) Others I’ve known have done more, moving to become largely self-sufficient.

At the moment the government is playing lip-service to the need for urgent action on the environment, but falling short of taking or even discussing any effective actions, to do things like actually cutting the use of fossil fuels, or reducing the number of car and air miles we travel. [Little has really changed in challenging the centrality of the car in our culture since – and electric cars are little better for the climate.] I’m increasingly gloomy about the future, though the world will probably stay in reasonable shape for the rest of my lifetime.

We need to think far more seriously about quality of life, rather than concentrating on things that are easy to measure like gross national product. much of it is truly gross, and there are better ways to organise our lives around the things that really matter.

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Carnival de Cuba – Coin St Festival, Bernie Spain Gardens

Carnival de Cuba was taking place the same day at Coin Street (perhaps the one successful development in london since the war.) I got there in time for the procession, and clearly everyone was having a great deal of fun.

There was really far more to photograph and though I spent less time there than at Greenwich there are several times as many pictures from the carnival on My London Diary.

Afterword

The visits to the gardens in these pictures was for me a rather unsettling window on the private realms of the over-privileged in our society who inhabit a very different world to the rest of us. Though there are far worse ways many of them chose to spend their phenomenal and largely unearned wealth it would be good to see the tremendous creative talent shown here put into work that could be appreciated by a much greater public in public spaces.

But perhaps like the private collections of Sir John Soane we can now see in Lincoln’s Inn Fields or those stolen from the Tradescant family by Elias Ashmole at least some of these may eventually become publicly accessble assets.

Later I photographed more private gardens of the wealthy in a collaborative project with the short-lived Queen’s Terrace Café, shown there in 2011 as ‘The Secret Gardens of St John’s Wood’ and with the book with Mireille Galinou of the same name still available from Blurb, where you can view the preview which contains many of the pictures.

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January 1987 continued

Regents Canal, Gloucester Ave, Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987 87-1c-22_2400 — Regents Canal, Gloucester Ave, Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987

think I had a good month taking pictures in January 1987. I always liked the winter months for photographing places, although the weather wasn’t always kind. But London is a city of many trees, and though they enhance it greatly they also obscure many views. And I do like the way you can see the structure of the trees after they have shed their leaves for the winter, though perhaps they are at their best in spring as they begin to sprout again.

Most of the month I was in Camden, and walked a little beside the Regent’s Canal as it goes through Primrose Hill. There were just a few boats moving – the canals were less busy back then. I’ve always had an interest in the canals in London – and this year was to have exhibited a set of panoramas to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Regent’s Canal, officially opened in August 1820. You can read more about that show which had to be abandoned in an earlier post here, and the set of pictures I took in preparation for it are – including the one from Camden below – are on Flickr.

Regents Canal 2020: Camden High St13-20190308-d0708 — Regent’s Canal, Camden, 2019 – from ‘Regents Canal 200’

Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987 87-1c-51_2400 — Primrose Hill, Camden, 1987

One of my favourite portraits is Bill Brandt’s 1963 photograph of a rather morose Francis Bacon looking out of the left of the frame at twilight in front of a lamp post on Primrose Hill. Of course my picture is nothing like his, an empty path and rather more naturalistic, but I think it captures something of the atmosphere of the place which attracted Brandt and made him choose it as a suitable stage for his picture.

Sir John Soane, memorial, Old St Pancras Burial Ground, Pancras Rd, Camden, 1987 87-1d-15_2400 — Sir John Soane memorial, Old St Pancras Burial Ground, Pancras Rd, Camden

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was a leading British architect working in a neo-Classical style. Although prolific, many of his buildings have been demolished or, like the Bank of England, greatly remodelled, though his three London churches, St Peter’s Walworth, Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone and St John, Bethnal Green remain, as does the Dulwich picture gallery and work at various stately homes.

His family tomb in the Old St Pancras churchyard, designed the year after his wife’s death in 1815 is perhaps the most clear example of his work, and is said to be the inspiration behind Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box, made in 1924 shortly after Scott had been made a trustee of the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – possibly London’s best and certainly one of its quirkiest museums.

Fence, Grafton Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987 87-1h-14_2400 — Fence, Grafton Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987

I made several exposures of this short alley in Gospel Oak, beside a tall fence partly covered by dead creeping plants. and with a rectangular block behind. Fortunately fairly early on a Sunday morning in January there were few passers-by to doubt my sanity and I didn’t have to wait long for the passageway to be empty.

The barriers, the fence and the building each define planes with rectangular blocks at different angles – with both creeper and clear space roughly defining rectangles at an angle, and through that space the rectangle of the building seemed to me to match that of the barrier on the footpath.

Gilden Crescent, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1g-46_2400 — Gilden Crescent, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

You could furnish a home from the street in front of this shop selling (and buying) “All types of Old & Modern Furniture” and of course many did. We still use the chairs we carried home from a shop like this, and a few other pieces of furniture, though we had our own photographs of ancestors for the wall rather than buy those on display.

But other things too attracted me about this display as well as the neat rows of chairs, the mattresses and the gas cookers. There was the antique lamp post in the middle of the display at right, and, above the door, presumably from an earlier use, the advertisement in lieu of a shop name ‘WEIGHTS Cigarettes… For More Pleasure.”

Hockey, St Leonard's Square, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1i-46_2400 — Hockey, St Leonard’s Square, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

Two house bricks stand as a goal for these boys playing roller hockey on quad skates in a cul-de-sac in Kentish Town. I think it was a sport I had not met before – and those hockey sticks were made in the USSR.

Hockey Players, Holmes Rd, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1j-41_2400 — Hockey Players, Holmes Rd, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

A short walk away I came across another group of hockey players, standing with large sports bags and hockey sticks next to a mural showing roller hockey players on the wall of a skate shop. Their bags and sticks say ‘CANADIEN’ . I can’t remember now what they told me, and whether or not they were Canadian.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Beginning 1987

Forge Place, Malden Crescent, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987 87-1a-46_2400 — Forge Place, Malden Crescent, Kentish Town, Camden, 1987

I’ve just begun to add black and white pictures from 1987 to a new album in Flickr, and am rediscovering quite a few pictures I had forgotten, including most of those in this post, all from the January pages of my filing sheets.

Eros, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster, 1987 87-1a-55_2400 — Eros, Piccadilly Circus, Westminster, 1986-7

Probably that means they were taken in January 1987, though a film I loaded into the camera in December might not be finished until the following month, and I suspect that the picture of Piccadilly Circus with boarding around Eros was probably made before Christmas. Some statues get regularly boarded up.

Window with cross, Mansfield Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987 87-1b-35_2400 — Mansfield Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987

I’d been waiting to start this album for a few months, as I’d got fed up with using my film scanner (too slow and now with an unreliable Firewire interface), my flat bed scanner (not quite sharp enough) and a bellows and macro lens on a Nikon D810 where I couldn’t quite get even lighting across the frame. The Nikon film holder that comes with the bellows works with mounted slides which crop the frame, but try as I might I couldn’t get even lighting across the full 35mm frame.

Dove, Southampton Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987 87-1b-46_2400 — Dove, Southampton Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987

While it was fast and easy to photograph negatives, every one needed to be worked on in Lightroom and Photoshop to try and correct the lighting fall off, and I couldn’t find a way to do so automatically. I experimented with different light sources and made some slight improvements, but couldn’t solve the issue.

Stairs, Malden Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987 87-1b-52_2400 — Stairs, Malden Rd, Gospel Oak, Camden, 1987

I decided to buy Nikon’s more recent kit for digitising images, the ES-2, and ordered one in early March, but dealers were out of stock and I only received it a couple of weeks ago. Fortunately, although not perfect, it is a great improvement in several ways. The ES-2 connects to the front of the 60mm macro lens with a short tube, and one advantage is that unlike the bellows it retains auto-focus. With the bellows I had to focus in live-view at the start of each session and then firmly lock it it place, remembering to exit live-view as this crops the image.

Generations, Geoffrey Harris, sculpture, Maitland Park Villas, Kentish Town, Camden 87-1b-62_2400 — Generations, Geoffrey Harris, sculpture, Maitland Park Villas, Kentish Town, Camden 1987

But the main advantage is that the ES-2 is almost capable of giving even coverage across the whole 35mm frame and has a proper negative holder which takes a strip of up to 6 negatives, with click-stops to move from one to the next. It isn’t perfect and seems ridiculously overpriced but it is a great improvement, making the digitising of negatives easier and faster. For the moment I’m concentrating on black and white, but I think it should also make working with colour negatives much easier, and the workflow I’m using to batch process the files (more about that in a later post) should also work with them. Most images just need minor tweaks and fortunately most of my negatives from 1987 are quite clean.

Most of these pictures speak for themselves, though perhaps I should admit that the ‘cross’ is the shadow of a parking sign. You can see these and more in my album 1987 London Photos.

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.