It’s a surreal experience: getting into the centre of London ‘too early’. Walking down Oxford Street at half past nine on a Sunday morning is like some future film about survivors of some mystery virus that wipes out all but the uninformed.
On a sunny morning, only busses, Japanese tourists taking pictures of a closed Top Shop (Fashion spies? I doubt it) and myself were the only ones about.
Now I’m sitting in Museum Street WC1 having a tuna melt (3.95) in The Pancake Cafe. Next door is ‘Seoul Mate’, a Korean and Oriental Food shop and next to this is the gallery ‘Abbot and Holder’, where I saw this Gwyneth Johnstone picture imprisoned behind security grills.
Painting by Gwyneth Johnstone
Some of my earliest memories involve Dad taking me to Islington on the train from Maidstone (where we briefly lived in the late sixties / early seventies) when he was summoned by Gwyneth to help her with some drawing or painting problem. They had met at the Portal Gallery where they were both represented at the time and Gwyneth, ever over-critical and unsure about her painting and drawing abilities, would ask my Dad up to her crumbling Bloomsbury-Group-Fringes house in Barnsbury for ‘some help’ with a thorny perspective / compositional / tree painting problem. ‘Oh Albert’, she would say in her unmistakably well-bred bohemian tones, ‘would you’, with great emphasis on the ‘would’ in that slightly over-polite way the upper classes feign extreme gratefullness when asking someone from the lower orders to do something for them. She paid of course, otherwise we wouldn’t have made the trip past the one building in London I could recognise as a four year old: Battersea Power Station. Lurking somewhere in the upstairs room was her mother, a debutante from the early 20th century who’s affair with Augustus John had produced Gwyneth.
Museum Street has changed since I was here last. I like the little collection of independent cafes, pubs and eateries, representing an oasis of independent shopkeeping in an otherwise chain-dominated franchise desert. Now it has bollards between Gilbert Place and Little Russell Street and a section of herringbone raised pavement with a cycle lane running through it. This is now inhabited by the tables and chairs of the cafe I am at and its opposite neighbour, ‘Ruskin’s Cafe’ and in the late August sun, a few other early tourists have gathered happily chatting. If it wasn’t for the weakness of the cappucinos, one could dream about being on the continent and not the wet and windy island outpost that made me.