London 9: Art and more…out and about

Much as I said there was history around every corner in London, not just in museums, the same is absolutely true for art. You may have noticed that the canals have a fair amount of graffiti along the walls, and the same is true in many more places. There’s a huge range from more simple tags to formal street art without even mentioning all the comissioned and sanctioned public art installations all over the place.

The one place you won’t find anything on the walls is in “the City.” They crack down on graffiti pretty hard there, it seems. But, there were a few interesting comissioned pieces there that drew our attention. In one public plaza there, was a fairly wide ranging display focusing on the history of slavery (one bit of which is shown below). More unusual, as historical references go, was this IWW-themed installation telling workers to organize. In the City. The financial district. Organizing. So weird. It’s a physical representation of an old IWW graphic. I do love the “sabots” as pointers on the clock. Sabots were wooden shoes that could be thrown in to stop the machines–the root of the word sabotage. Cool to see. But I just couldn’t get over the location nor the fact that it was paid for by the City of London Corporation.

We also ran across several of Gillie and Marc’s works. Near Spitalfields Market they have a ton of elephant statues, and at the park right by Lower Marsh Market, a pride of lions. They’re works draw attention to endangered animals and are part of various fund-raising efforts. Also, the lions are just super-cute and I loved watching everyone picnicking amongst them.

One of the odder set of formally commissioned works I saw was a huge series of mosaics representing the mythological beliefs of the poet William Blake. I got kind of into William Blake after being randomly assigned a poem of his for an analysis paper in high school. He’s a weird dude. And the mosaics based on his works were weird too. And oddly, mostly hidden in a tunnel under the train tracks near Waterloo. Here’s two, but there were more than a dozen…

Outside the City, and beyond the formally commissioned, there was a ton to see wherever we went. Some we saw on an organized “street art walking tour,” but a lot was just encountered by wandering. One particularly coated surface was the area crossing the train tracks coming out of Liverpool Station and heading over into Allen Gardens. This was not the first or last place we also got to see some artists at work…

Another great spot is another tunnel under the Waterloo Station. Not only is there great graffitti art here, but there’s also a game cafe with a great collection. Win-win.

I should probably go ahead and mention that we did see a couple of works by Banksy. Some of his stuff’s great, but this one didn’t strike me that much…

On the other hand, my absolute favorite bit of street art was one we encountered on the Millenium Bridge. This is the pedestrian bridge that connects the Tate Modern to St. Paul’s Cathedral. It opened in 2000 and was shut down within minutes as the crowds going out on it caused the entire thing to wobble. It was later fixed and is now quite stable, but some Londoners still call it the Wobbly Bridge.

The first time we crossed, we were just taken in by the view and were busy looking around. However, the next time, we noticed a couple of little colorful bits by our feet. It turns out that there’s an artist who occasionally goes out on the bridge and paints over the various gum smears that are smushed between ridges along the walkway. We actually saw him once, basically lying on the bridge (when it was cold and misty out–serious dedication!) while people scooted around him and his small pile of tools. Many of these have the dates included, and you can see the 2021 ones are more faded than those from 2022. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of unpainted gum smears our intrepid artiste has yet to use as a canvas…

Elsewhere, there was some more political art. (Remember when people thought Theresa May was bad? They just hadn’t really dealt with Johnson yet…)

Or a beautiful underpass celebrating one of London’s most fascinating neighborhoods…

This one deals with pandemic life. Also, as a side note, check out the street sign, where in this section of East London most are written in at least two scripts.

We saw this artist’s works all over London. They’re very recognizable. Always women. A mix of realistic shape and sort of a sci-fi-ish/digital-esque/something overlay.

One artist whose works are harder to spot makes these tiny little metallic figures and sticks them on top of old signposts. One is a bit like an ouroboros, another a creature with two heads, all a bit mythological feeling.

This one come from a German artist who pastes his own face up in various poses.

And this one our tour guide called a street art version of pointillism. Check out the whole view and then the close up…

Our guide also showed us a few bits of cool string art. No idea how someone has the time or energy to do this outdoors in London weather (I suppose it’s better in the summer?).

Stick’s simple figures (six lines and two dots) were cute and encountered a few times…

ALO’s unique figures were pretty easy to identify. I like how they have a sense of realism, but also look almost digital.

Overlooking a courtyard full of good street eats was this terrifying figure…

(OK…more cute than terrifying.)

And just a handful of the others we saw…

While a lot of the pieces above are just put up by artists in places they hope they’ll last, others are actually comissioned by building owners. This one has multiple artists contributing panels all around the idea of “connection.” You might recognize one…

One of my favorite street artists we encountered the most frequently was WRDSMTH. They simply paste up interesting pithy quotes. Usually with their typerwriter stencil. But I like them. They’re works and words made me smile.

Since we’re talking street art and the like, I thought I’d add just one little story here. On our last weekend in London, Jessica and I took an extra-long walk through the eastern parts of London heading down to Greenwich to visit the Royal Observatory. We had sorta planned this out weeks earlier, but waited until April because…the Observatory was closed January through March. Convenient, eh? Luckily we had one weekend we could sneak it in.

To get there, though, we took the loooong way. We started by taking the tube out to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and then walked south roughly following the Prime Meridian. We followed a loosely outlined route called “The Line” that took us largely along canal-side walkways with bits of audio-guide history and a couple of public art installation stops.

Parts of the walk overlapped with the “Jubilee Greenway” that had been developed in Elizabeth’s 50th year as Queen, so here the stones that you see all along parts of that Greenway were used to show ER (Elizabeth Regina) and a crown.

Up at the north end, we started with views of the ArecelorMittal Orbit, a weirdo structure built for the Olympics, as well as the much more elegant swimming complex across the river, and overall it was a lovely walk down to the Royal Victoria Dock. One of the more interesting spots we passed was Three Mill Island, once home to three working mills (who woulda guessed?), two of which you can see in the photo below–House Mill on the left, with the river running beneath, and Clock Mill on the right with the clock tower and funny witch-hats.

Along the way we saw several art installations. A fair number of them were works by Madge Gill, an artist who had lived in the area in the early 20th century. Her works were quite lovely, and were in all sorts of places from a tunnel to the side of a bridge to simple displays down near the docks. Her style of sketching reminds me a bit of my mom’s doodles, and a few of her more geometric pieces remind me of mine.

There were a handful of other pieces along the way, but the ones that struck us most were…

  • “Reaching Out” by Thomas Price, a 9 foot tall sculpture of a young Black woman on her phone. It was kinda nothing special, but that, in fact, is what made it kinda special.
  • Eva Rothschild’s “Living Spring” was really nothing special, but I just liked the way the form of the stripy pole interplayed with the trees along the canal. Otherwise, eh. And her description on the audio guide did nothing to make me think she was particularly brilliant. “I like stripes” isn’t really selling your artistic depth…
  • “DNA DL90” by Abigail Fallis, on the other hand, was definitely unique. A double helix made of shopping carts. Not only was it visually interesting, but I kinda fell in love with her description on the audio guide of how preparing to make this led her down a rabbit hole of learning waaaaay too much about different shopping carts. Cracked me up.

When we finally got down to the River Thames, we zipped over to Greenwich not by bus, ferry, subway, or any other logical means, but by a touristy cable car that is part of the London transit system, but sponsored by Emirates Airline. It did provide quite a view…

After lunch we headed uphill to the historic Royal Observatory. The view from the top was great, overlooking the Queen’s House (a 17th century royal residence) and the new business center of the Docklands (which is competing with the old “City” for prominence these days).

Much of the work of the observatory dealt with timekeeping–the main interest in observing the stars. The major goal was to help sailors keep track of longitude. Latitude is much more easily observed by the angle of the sun and the stars, but knowing one’s longitude on a giant unchanging ocean meant having some way to accurately track the time back home and see how much the timing of things like sunrise and sunset were changing as you kept sailing.

The location at the top of the hill was ideal back then, since it could be seen from much of the surrounding area, and most importantly along the river. Daily, at 1pm they would raise and lower the red ball on top of the building there, allowing a good portion of folks in business and government to tune their clocks.

Given the focus on timekeeping, there were a number of sundials on display. The coolest one used the tails of two dolphins to track time. Each of the wavy lines you see there marks ten minutes of time. The waves allow the shadows to mark the time accurately as the angle of the sun changes throughout the year. We found it was accurate within a minute or two. Not bad. And artistic.

Inside there were displays all about old clocks. They discussed designs the first Royal Astronomer had made for a “sidereal clock” that kept time accurate to the stars, not in relation to the Earth and the Sun so much. It’s a few minutes off per day from Earth’s time. Eventually he decided it wasn’t too useful.

There was a huge explanation of the race to make a clock that would work for sailors (for the reasons explained above), which resulted in the first successful model, Harrison’s Fourth Timekeeper.

And the displays went on to explain how standardized timekeeping spread and the various reasons people keep track of time. One of the most interesting bits discussed how in the early days of telegraph and then telephones, the operators would clear all the lines around noon so they could receive the signal to tune their clocks, a signal that was then passed on throughout the country.

There were some other fun bits, like big ol’ telescopes and a periscope that projected a live picture of what was happening down along the river into a dark room…

…but you know the main reason to go is just to stand in two hemispheres at once…or in neither?…or on the opposite side of the world from your partner? You choose.

Which reminds me…two things about the Prime Meridian we learned…

  • First of all, the various astronomers who ran the place moved it over time. Wherever their main telescope was, that was where they decided the Prime Meridian was. So there were several “meridian lines” marked on the walls there to show how it had shifted.
  • And secondly, how did the Prime Meridian become universally agreed upon? I’ve always just assumed that because Brits controlled so much of the world, they just kinda enforced it on everyone. That’s mostly accurate. But we did learn that there were competing prime meridian locations up until the late 1800s. Finally, to help standardize international navigation, the major players (hint: mostly European) agreed to go with the British maps since more people used those than any others already. France wasn’t too happy, but they decided they could live with it.

That’s all for today. I think I’ve got about one more megapost on London left in me. Until next time…

PS-Life update: Jessica and I remain isolated in Swansea. We at least got some COVID tests that work for me. Needless to say, we’re both still positive. Sad to have missed out on hiking in the Brecon Beacons, as we were supposed to do the last few days, but mostly just hoping we’re well enough to get out of here in time to see Jessica’s family who are currently in France. At least this is giving me time to catch up on my blogging…

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