2. London 5/6/22: Architecture, Spies, Israeli Food, British African Art

Greetings from London

We had a big agenda for today, and some went as planned, some fizzled, and some new things popped in. Our plan was to visit the Museum of Everything – dedicated to “outsider art,” with which I have a long-time fascinations, beginning in art school. And we thought we might go to the Gallery of Everything as well. But we hadn’t really looked into the details. As we finished breakfast at The Breakfast Club, we checked timing and location and learned that the Museum had closed and that the Gallery was installing a new show so we dropped those plans.. and decided to walk the two +/- miles to the Tate Modern. Frankly, for those of you who know me and my basic distaste for museums… I wa more interested in seeing the bubble gum art that someone had done on the Millennium Bridge…which you cross when walking to the Tate Modern. But as we walked the bridge that leads to the Tate Modern it seems as if (perhaps during Covid) the city had cleaned the area and the gum art was gone. 

Thus we went into the Tate Modern and figured we’d see the Kusama show but tickets were sold out until October! So, we walked through the Lubaina Himid show which was interesting, but also a little problematic for me. Himid’s work depicts scenes from of the African diaspora and a quasi-everyday life of contemporary Africa. She has a very “studied” primitive style, having attended art schools and institutions of higher education. There are also two sound installations—one of which is really good, using interviews (or supposed interviews) where people state their real name (African roots) and what they are called now… and what they did in Africa and what employment they have today.

Then we headed to the Blackfriar Bridge to walk again across the Thames. We took the tube to Belsize Park in Hampstead area to see the Isokon Flats which I had read about some time ago, but never visited. It’s a modernist building built in the 1930s as an experiment that was the dream of Jack Pritchard, a furniture designer in the early 20^th century. The apartments were purposefully small to accommodate working adults who Pritchard felt wouldn’t have time to cook and entertain. There was a communal kitchen and other spaces to be shared by tenants. Pritchard engaged the architect Welles Coates for the design and it has a ship like metaphor for the building’s vocabulary. The Pritchards had their own penthouse at the building. There are some interesting stories tied to the building as Agatha Christie lived there for many years and several famous architects from the Bauhaus lived there after the war. And interestingly at one point there were at least five Russian spies living on the block and in the immediate neighborhood, including one famous one living in the building. It fell into disrepair in the 60s and was eventually restored in the 80s. As we were photographing the building, an older man got out of a car and started to talk with us. Turns out he has lived in the building for about 20 years and gave us some additional information. He is a retired faculty member from Cambridge and University of London—in psychology and philosophy.. and a bit of an architecture buff.. however he didn’t pick the flat because of its fame or who had lived there (Chermayeff, Moholy-Nagy, Breuer, etc.). He picked it because he likes the neighborhood and its proximity to transit. He has another place in Cambridge. 

We then took the tube back to the hotel to relax before heading to dinner. We had tried to get reservations at about a dozen places without success. People are truly out and about and Shoreditch is a popular zone. Finally, we landed a reservation at Bubula – a modern Israeli restaurant that is super-tiny. We got reservations for 9:45. That was the best we could get. Turns out Bubula was quite good.. vegetarian, fixed menu, and very very tiny.. about 36 chairs. We feasted on the set menu of 11 different dishes—all sharing style. From pickled veggies to amazing flatbread with hummus and labneh with roasted garlic and herbs and some kind of oil to roasted fennel with pear and I have no idea what else to aubergine to a “deconstructed” potato latke that looked like a piece of cake to skewered oyster mushrooms marinated in tamari, zaatar, to a wonderful baked haloumi and some other goodies to a bunch more things that I cannot remember. Good wine and homemade date ice cream… We floated back to the hotel about a half mile away. 

Didn’t feel too guilty about dinner since we walked about 8 miles today and I’ve been getting well over the 10,000 steps each day.  OK.. that’s it for me today… We head to Brighton tomorrow with Emma, Hem and Finn. Keeping fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain.

Best –

Fern