Notes on London and Birmingham (March 28-31, 2025)
Either: ‘What will you become?’
Or: ‘What will become of you?’
March 28 (Friday). London. 9.30 am: An upbeat sort of day: sunny, optimistic, and anticipatory (even with the prospect of a replacement bus journey between Machynlleth and Shrewsbury). I was travelling to London to spend a weekend with my sons, whose wives had returned to their families to celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday. A Harvey Boyz only get-together, therefore. A travel-hop, then, from Aberystwyth to Machynlleth to Shrewsbury to Birmingham to London. But all transports were on time. Which was some consolation.
For the first few hours in London, I’m always moderately unnerved by the intensity of the crowds, the change of pace, anonymity, and (what can seem to a rural bumpkin like me), a disregard for other people’s existence. From Euston I headed to Pimlico. There’s an underpass from the station that I’ve walked through ever since my first visit to Tate Britain (or the Tate Gallery, as it was then called) as a sixth-form student at secondary school [high school]. My approach to the gallery is always along the Manton entrance side, where can be seen the pockmarks made by shrapnel from an enemy bomb dropped during The Blitz.
As on my last visit to London a few weeks ago (see: Summa: diary (March 7-9, 2025)), the intent was to get reacquaint myself with artworks that I’d seen, and had been influential, early on in my career. My first visit to the Tate was in 1976, on a school trip. I was in the second year of my A-level course in Art. A year before, the gallery had acquired Francis Bacon’s Three Figures and Portrait (1975). (Someone has corrected the painting’s caption board by inserting the ‘t’ missing from the word ‘contrasting’, in red pen.) I remember being bold-over my John Martin’s The Great Day of his Wrath (1851-3) and ridiculing a Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon (1958). (But what did I know, back then. It haunted me for the rest of my life.) Back then, the painting along with others of the Seagram Murals were displayed at the Tate Gallery close to the J W M Turner Bequest, in accordance with Rothko’s wishes. (However, their permanent home is Tate Modern.)
After a restorative hot chocolate in the cafe, the Modern and Contemporary British Art collection assumed priority. I am (and look) much older now, but the paintings appear as fresh and immediate as they were when I was a 17-year old, spotty schoolboy. I moved from Peter Lanyon’s St Just (1953) (for which the Tate no longer appears to have the reproduction rights), to Richard Hamilton’s replica of Marcel Duchamp’s, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even (1915-23/1985), to Derek Boshier’s Identi-Kit Man (1962) and, finally, to Ben Nicholson’s masterpiece (in my opinion) June 1937 (Painting) (1937). In the 70s ad 80s, and prior to the development of the Internet, the only way a visitor could take artworks home was in an illustrated catalogue, or as postcards and slide transparencies. Taking personal photographs was strictly prohibited.
5.15 pm: From Pimlico to Highbury and Islington to Hackney, to stay and with my elder son for the night. We shopped together at an upmarket supermarket in Stratford, close by, to purchase requisites for a Chinese dinner. (He’s a very good cook.) We caught up on news and our respective lives, and talked jazz, jazz, jazz, ending the evening watching a documentary on the great saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter.
March 29 (Saturday). Partial eclipse of the sun. 7.00 am: A Hackney/Hockney morning.
7.45 am: Writing. 10.00 am: After breakfast, my elder son and I headed to Stratford tube station and, from there, into central London. We visited the new Gibson guitar shop, where other fathers were inducting their sons into the ‘dream’. (There’s an interesting marketing study of generational patterns of purchase to be undertaken.) I have one Gibson guitar, and don’t need another. Acquired immunity, as it were.
11.30 am: We headed for Ruskin’s Cafe on Museum Street. I’d not been back since the weekend before the first pandemic lockdown, in March 2020. Today, we sat outside in the glorious Spring sunshine, reminiscing about then and since. 12.00 pm: On towards Goodge Street to meet my younger son. We ate at a small Chinese/Malaysian cafe that does a highly commendable beef rendang curry puff.
For the first part of the afternoon we indulged our enthusiasms shamelessly, beginning in a rather old-world, artisan film-processing shop, then proceeding to L Cornelisson & Son art suppliers. I was keen to review their range of brushes. They’re the only art tool I won’t buy online without first feeling the weight and balance of the shaft and ferule, and the consistency of the hair. I was like a child in a toyshop-cum-sweetshop.
Close by, was the Camera Museum on Museum Street. I’d been there once before, and wanted my sons to enjoy the café and my younger son to talk with the resident camera repairer about large-format Polaroid film and cameras. While drinking our coffee, a young man on the table behind offered his own large-format camera to my younger son, and allowed him to take the last shot in the cassette. A generous gesture from a complete stranger with a passion for instant photography.
The museum in the cafe’s basement comprises hundreds of dust-covered cameras, from the Kodak Brownie to late-twentieth models. The presentation didn’t come up to the standards of the British Museum (at the top of the street); rather, this was an unaffected and unsophisticated (but no less enjoyable) overspill of one collector’s (largely) curiosity about, and love affair with, cameras and their culture.
From 3.00 pm and for the next three hours, we lurched from one café and vinyl record shop to another, before taking dinner at a more than decent burger restaurant. My elder son and his wife are compiling a spreadsheet of the best outlets in central London. Thus, we were engaged in on-going research.
7.30 pm: My younger son departed, while my elder son and I walked to Frith Street to attend a concert by the John Scofield Trio at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club. (This was in fulfilment of a late Christmas present from him to me.) I’d first heard Scofield’s guitar playing on Miles Davis’s album Star People (1983). He has remained a star ever since. The group played with urgency and, at times, tremendous ferocity. Jazz is life – intense and fractured; is love – longed for and lost. My son and I left the venue, dazed, amazed, and eager to cast our impressions into words.
March 30 (Sunday). Mothering Sunday. Birmingham. A Hackney morning.
6.00 am, pretending to be 7.00 am. (I’d completely forgotten that the clocks were going forward by an hour.) 9.15 am: My elder son and I walked to the station, hugged ‘goodbye’, and returned alone to our separate lives. From Stratford to Tottenham Court Road to Euston, where I caught the train to Birmingham.
On arrival, some respite for prayer at St Philip’s Cathedral.
I was in the city to meet an old colleague of mine, Professor Martin O’Kane. We’d not seen each other in I don’t know how long. But as soon as we began talking, he and I were back in the groove. The context of our reunion was the famous Tea Room at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery — a splendid backdrop for both relaxation and serious conversation.
Martin and I had worked together on a series of interdisciplinary conferences and publications in the 1990s and early 2000s that amalgamated art historical and biblical studies perspectives on biblical art in some of the UK’s major collections. Like two ageing rock stars, we made plans to reform for a ‘gig’ in honour of the late Professor J Cheryl Exum.
2.30 pm: We toured the Rembrandt: masterpieces in black and white exhibition together, Martin providing an Old Testament and I an art historical sidelights on the biblical scenes. The majority of the prints were on loan from the Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam. I recall seeing some of them there on my visit to the city in 2023. One etching that was new to me is ‘A Scholar in his Study (“Faust”) who, other scholars now believe, isn’t Faust.
It’s a oddity in Rembrandt’s oeuvre. The old scholar looks up from his desk at a floating luminous orb ‘bearing Christian references, including the anagram of a prayer’. In the background, a human skull with blackened eye sockets looks ominously out of the darkness. Behind and above is an fearful semi-transparent shape, portrayed as though rearing up from the shelf like some supernatural monstrosity in an M R James ghost story.
5.30 pm: I took dinner at a local Lebanese restaurant before sundown and the arrival of the faithful hoards, breaking fast on Eid.
March 31 (Monday). A Birmingham morning.
8.30 am: Back at the city centre, I headed westward then northward toward the Jewellery Quarter. My first port of call was St Paul’s Square. I’d first come here on the occasion of a surprise family weekend in celebration of my early-retirement, in 2022. A rich, happy, and beautiful time. (See: Summa: diary (July 22-31, 2022).) On the square, there’s a cafe that offers some of the best sourdough bread I’ve ever eaten. I took breakfast before moving on the diamond and gold dealers at the heart of the Quarter.
The area accommodates not only ethnically but also religiously mixed communities. There’s a former synagogue and a Sikh temple close to where I’m drinking a watermelon tea and eating a delicious baklava cheese cake at a Turkish coffee house, presently. (The young woman who served me had made the cheesecake, and is also undertaking a Masters in International Politics and Relations at the university.) The Sikh place of worship temple was once a Protestant Nonconformist chapel. And should anyone baulk at the idea of another religion inhabiting what was originally a Christian building, then, I remind them that the architectural forms of the former chapel were all derived from Graeco-Roman pagan temples.
11.30 am: Having picked a up a pre-ordered Malaysian takeaway from a nearby outlet, I headed for Grand Central (good grief!) to begin my journey back to Aberystwyth by train and bus. 4.20 pm: Touch down.
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