Notes on London (March 7-9, 2025)
Think!
March 7 (Friday). London. 9.00 am: I arrived at Aberystwyth railway station ridiculously early by some people’s standards, but comfortably so by my own. (I’ve never been late for a train, bus, ship, plane, or appointment in my life.) The illuminated signboard and the audio announcement were in flat contradiction, one with the other. My journey to Birmingham was neither going to be delayed by the late-running, incoming train from Shrewsbury, nor was it terminating there, prematurely. (We live in an age of mixed messages.) As the exterior landscape scrolled horizontally passed the carriage window, I resumed another journey, travelling from left to right and from top to bottom through the pages of a travelogue.
12.47 am: Departed Birmingham New Street. It strikes me that we invest a great deal of trust in the red ‘Door Locked’ sign inside the toilets on inter-city Pendolino trains. On one occasion, the door promptly unlocked itself just before I got down to business, as it were. On the otherwise old, and barely fit for service, trains that serve my local line, the toilet door is hinged and has a mechanical lock that I can control, see, feel, and hear in action, as well as unlock by myself only.
2.06 pm: Arrived at London Euston on time. After buying an Underground travel card and allying to my mainline rail card (no mean feat), I headed — via Tottenham Court Road and St Paul’s — to Tate Modern. I fortified myself at the cafe before an assault on the general collection. Today, I couldn’t face being ushered through special exhibitions, room by room, information board by information board, caption by caption. My desire, rather, was to renew a conversation with old ‘friends’, whom I’d first met during my undergraduate years and have never grown tired of.
However (and I should’ve anticipated this), the halcyon days of rooms devoted to movements and periods has long gone. There used to a two exceptional displays, one devoted to Minimalism and the other to Conceptualism. The works on the walls and floor explicated one another, and enabled the viewer to appreciate the similarities and breadth of the endeavour representative of, and shared between, both movements. Good old-fashioned art-historical curation. These days, themes and topics are the preferred rationale art for introducing Modernism, Postmodernism, and whatever’s going on now (which is insufficiently coherent to be an ‘ism’, in my opinion). Artworks are presented and juxtaposed as illustrations of, for example, ‘Art in Society’, ‘In the Studio’, and ‘Materials and Objects’. It’s like being taken on a journey through someone’s A-Level project. Does this approach really make the collection more accessible to the general populous? I remain unconvinced.
A replica of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous ready-made, Fountain (1917) (which is the antecedent of both Conceptualism and Minimalism) was dwarfed by a bespoke perspective box set upon a plinth, and held the space, imperiously, at the centre of a room. It has the aura of a holy relic. Fountain is as close as you’ll get to a ‘sacred’-secular artwork of the modern period. Duchamp would’ve chuckled.
4.45 pm: I’d no heart to explore further. This wouldn’t be a day of miracles, fresh visions, and enlightenment. As one gentleman in the toilets remarked, as he (appropriately) used an urinal: ‘They’ve turned the whole gallery into an installation, just to please the public’. A more concise summary of Tate Modern’s malaise I could not have wished to hear.
5.00 am: I walked to Waterloo mainline station and took at train to Wimbledon, where I’d be staying with my younger son and daughter-in-law.
March 8 (Saturday). 4.00 am: A Wimbledon morning.
I awoke in readiness for a train and tube ride across London to Heathrow Terminal 2 with my younger son, where another family member’s plane was landing at 5.55 am. Time is almost meaningless when you travel a great distance (unless you have to get up very early, that is).
8.20 am: Back at home, and while the family caught up with lost sleep, I explored the Wimbledon Village and Quarter. 10.00 am felt like midday. I’d been operational for six hours already. Cafe customers spilled onto the pavements, where they enjoyed the long-anticipated Spring sunshine and warmth. Bleak winter seemed, today, like another country.
11.00 am: I took at early lunch at the Public Library (or Free Public Library, as it was called originally), in its small cafe. The building was well patronised and very busy. Parents brought their children, uncoerced, to choose their next week’s bedtime stories and private reading; teenagers researched homework projects; fathers (and I) dozed in comfy green armchairs, while their offspring attended educational clubs nearby; a fay young man slouched and read a biography of Richard Nixon; the drone of the ‘chants and meditation’ group in the corner drifted upon the air; and serious-minded young volunteers re-shelved books. (This was one of my mother’s tasks when employed as an Assistant Librarian in Abertillery.) Libraries are social hubs, for everyone, and vital to the community. There’s a special pleasure in running a forefinger across the spines of books on the shelf, alighting upon one at random, while noting what titles lie to its left and right, and above and below. It’s an adventure in free association and discovering surprising and tangential connections. Google ‘search’ doesn’t cut it in the same way.
5.30 pm: Eventide.
March 19 (Sunday). 8.00 am: A Wimbledon morning.
I awoke to the sound of a plane travelling to Heathrow Airport. 11.00 am: En route to Euston station. The naive provincial that I am, I’d anticipated a quiet journey. Instead, mainline and tube trains were choc-o-bloc with football fans journeying to attend the north London fixtures, and buggy-pushing families off to visit the museums. These days, my only regret in departing from London is leaving behind my family. It’s not the city that I once enjoyed as a PhD student, back in the late 1980s.
4.30 pm: I finished Julie Brominicks’ The Edge of Cymru: A Journey. By the end of the book, I felt weary, achy, feet-swollen, cold, sodden, mud-bespattered, bramble pricked, bracken scarred, and in need of a hot bath and a soft bed. A thoroughly exhausting (‘in a good way’) hike through a Welsh landscape that she adeptly connects with its people, history, language, politics, and ecology. A Baedeker-like travel guide it’s not; Julie’s account is, rather, personal, expansive, often poetic in its description, and critical (where injustice and failure needed to be addressed). She has a gift for abstracting, or drawing out, the essence a place, phenomenon, and an encounter from the otherwise overwhelming welter of detail that enfolds it. (A background in fine art and its history has served her well.) Julie’s genre is not so much travel writing as travel journalism: akin to the type of descriptive, analytical, and interpretive essay made by war correspondents in the field, wherein information, events, and experiences are mediated through their sometimes weary humanity, autobiography, and temperament. The Edge of Cymru is not a journey; it’s her journey. And she made it on foot and public transport. (Ecology is action.)
The German film director Werner Hertzog wrote:
The world reveals itself to those who walk.
Julie embodies (‘ensouls’) the truth of that assertion. As I write, the landscape seen from my train’s window speeds by at around 125 mph. It comes and goes in an instant, and, like passing strangers, yields nothing beyond surface appearances.
5.35 pm: Home, fifteen minutes late, having suffered a train carriage with no air con on a warm and sunny day.
See also: Intersections (archive); Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Bluesky; Instagram; Archive of Visual Practice