Queen’s Terrace Café

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.

more pictures

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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Pensions, Cuts, Murdoch & Cafe Jiro: Thursday 23rd June 2011 – Trade unionists march against public sector pension cuts, a protest against Murdoch being allowed to take over BSkyB and one of my favourite artists turns a St John’s Wood gallery into his café.

20,000 March for Pensions & Against Cuts

Public Service unions had organised a march against pension cuts and itt was joined by many thousands of union members as well as many others protesting against cuts in public services made by the Tory coalition government.

There was a large crowd waiting when I arrived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields over an hour before the march was due to begin and more were arriving as it left a little early as the organisers and police worried about overcrowding in London’s largest square – around 28,000 square metres.

Before we left there had been speeches by several union leaders and the march was led to Parliament by Christine Blower NUT, Mark Serwotka PCS and Mary Bousted ATL along with MP John McDonnell.

The Hutton review had clearly shown that the government was lying when it said that public service pensions were not affordable. This report had said it expected “benefit payments to fall gradually to around 1.4 per cent of GDP in 2059-60, after peaking at 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010-11.”

There seemed to be a huge number of police on the street for a peaceful march, particularly one that was mainly composed of teachers and civil servants with only a token presence from militant students and anarchists.

Police had earlier been busy in Lincoln’s Inn Fields where they appeared to be conducting stop and searches on any young male demonstrators in black clothing.

Things did get just a little agitated when for some reason police decided to stop the march on Strand for around 20 minutes and it got very noisy on Whitehall as it passed Downing St.

I stood outside Westminster Central Hall for around an hour as more and more marchers arrived from the main march I had been on and a number of others from various parts of London. Police and march stewards there objected to Charlie Veitch and other ‘Love Police’ haranguing the crowd in his usual deadpan fashion upholding his right to freedom of expression and they moved away.

Westminster Central Hall is a large venue but far too small for the numbers at the event and there was a large overflow rally in Tothill Street at the side of the church. A group of 20 or 30 black-clad protesters there were told by police they must remove their hoods and dark glasses and there were some arguments. I heard later in the day there were a few scuffles with them and police in Whitehall and they were kettled for a few hours in Trafalgar Square.

More on My London Diary at 20,000 March for Pensions & Against Cuts.

Save UK Democracy From Murdoch – Dept Culture, Media & Sport

Outside the Department of Culture, Media and Sport was a protest organised by on-line global campaign network Avaaz and my union the NUJ against the decision by Jeremy Hunt to let Rupert Murdoch to take over BSkyB.

This was an emergency protest organised within minutes of the news breaking early that morning, and the email calling it went out when many were already on their way to work or to attend the pensions protest, so numbers were small.

Obviously some planning had taken place earlier and there was a tall stilt walker with a large but rather inappropriately avuncular head of Rupert Murdoch, surely one of the ugliest figures in world media and pursuing a clear aim of world domination, toying with two large string puppets representing David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt.

But most of the posters were clearly last minute, with laser-printed sheets being glued onto generic NUJ placards. NUJ members were “appalled – like most of the thinking population – by the thought of the UK’s largest commercial broadcaster falling into Murdoch’s hands, and the threat that this poses for in particular for news coverage, but also for a diverse and broadly based media culture. “

“They want the government to act in the public interest rather than as puppets for Murdoch’s interest and don’t want Sky News to become another Fox News.”

Save UK Democracy From Murdoch

Café Jiro 2011 – Queen’s Terrace Café, St John’s Wood

In the evening I was at The Queen’s Terrace Café, which had opened in April 2011. This was no ordinary café, but a cultural café, run by Mireille Galinou, who for some years had run a charity called the London Arts Café, which never quite managed to open a café but did organise a dozen or so exhibitions and numerous other art events in London.

London Arts Café and The Queen’s Terrace Café are no longer with us, but you can still read online about many of the the activities the London Arts Café organised during its existence from 1996-2007. For some of this time I was Treasurer of the organisation and also wrote the web site.

One of the most enjoyable art shows I went to in 2009 was Café Jiro, an installation in the Flowers Gallery in Cork St, London by a friend of mine, the Japanese artist Jiro Osuga who grow up in north London. The 2011 was a smaller and more intimate version of that show, with one of the large wall-size panels from the Flowers show, along with a number of other works specially produced for this space – including three in the smallest room.

The small gallery was packed for the opening – and for me a great opportunity to meet some old friends, and it was good to see Jiro’s work in a real café environment. You can read more about the show on a 2011 post in >Re:PHOTO.

Café Jiro 2011