Notes on London (January 23-26, 2026)
January 24 (Friday). Aberystwyth – London.
9.30 am: I boarded the train at Aberystwyth for London via Birmingham. Was the man sitting behind me talking on his phone or to himself? A mother breast-fed her infant, unabashed. I remember a time when women were pressurised to ‘do that sort of thing’ in the toilet on public transport. Low, grey clouds cast everything beneath into a colourless half-light. Mist erased the distant hills between Cemmaes and Caersws. As I travelled from Ceredigion into Powys, on a straight line drawn between the former districts of Montgomeryshire in the north and Radnorshire in the south, the landscape flattened considerably.
Recent flooding had created a temporary lake in the field outside Newtown, which lies close to the River Severn and the border between Wales and England. The approach into Shrewsbury criss-crossed arcing railway lines, in-filled with wild grass and fireweed. This is only what I saw; not all that can be known.
14 minutes later than advertised, my train entered Euston station. From the mid-1980s to the early-2000s, I would’ve had a spring in my step as I walked from the platform up to the concourse. These days, I already feel jaded on arrival, in anticipation of the onslaught. The city is over-crowded; pedestrians don’t look where they’re going because their attention is tied to their phones; drivers are rude and reckless; and everything is so much more expensive, now.
Either side of the original entrance to the station (prior to its redevelopment in 1961) still stand two doric-style gates. Carved on plaques flanking their facades are the names of all those cities and notable towns in Great Britain that were once directly connected to the station. On the left-hand side of the left gate is: ‘Aberystwith’ (spelled with an ‘i’ rather than a ‘y’). Ah! Those halcynon days of straightforward travel and variant spelling. In the 1980s, you could take an Intercity train from Euston to Aberystwyth without ever getting off.
3.30 pm: I indulged a hot chocolate and gluten-free banana and hazelnut cake at a local watering-hole with reliable WiFi, and caught- up on the day I’d left behind at home. 5.00 pm: By Underground and Overground, I travelled to where my elder son and daughter-in-law lived, for dinner, an overnight stay, and to catch-up on our lives.
January 24 (Saturday). 8.15 am: A Hackney morning.
9.00 am: Out into the sunshine and on towards Pimlico by Underground to see Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals, at Tate Britain.
In my lifetime, I’ve attended several exhibitions exploring their work of in the context of other contemporary romantic landscape painters. On this outing, the Tate’s approach to the essay was straightforward: compare and contrast. It demonstrated well just how close the two artists were, stylistically, at the beginning of their careers, and how far apart by the conclusion. John Constable remained determinately earthbound and empirical. J W M Turner, for his part, steadily moved towards transcendence: the gross-materiality of this world vapourised by the sun’s searing light.
There was on show one watercolour by Turner entitled The Sun Rising Over Water (c. 1825-30) that (in my opinion) did the lie to a popular opinion about his austere late oil paintings. Namely, that they were unfinished. Formally, the watercolour describes a disc situated at the centre of the composition … and little else beside. Like the paintings he made two decades later, many of which were never exhibited, the work (to borrow Dan Flavin’s description of Minimalism in the 1960s) appeared to be ‘pressing down towards no art’. My sense is that Turner’s late works are the inevitable end-stop to a trajectory of reductivism begun in watercolours, like this one.
January 25 (Sunday). 9.00 am: A Hackney morning.
9.45 am: My first visit to the V&A East Storehouse.
It was like walking into the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). I couldn’t help myself: ‘Where have you shelved the Ark of the Covenant?’, I asked a young assistant, cheekily. ‘The what? I’ve only been here a week. New job, you see. Try the QR code’. ‘The cultural reference was clearly lost on them.
From floor to ceiling artworks and objects of material culture of every description and size were stacked: Jesus in a box, Keith Moon‘s drum kit, David Bowie’s Stylophone 350s (like the one I played in the mid-1970s,) a large section of brutalist architecture from the Robin Hood Gardens estate, an ornate carved ceiling from a palace in Torrijos (1490), Frank Lloyd-Wright’s office for Edgar J Kaufmann (1937), a display of door handles and locks from a 20th-century hardware store, a late nineteenth-century English wardrobe in the Egyptian style, and electric guitars donated by heavy-metal axe wielders from the 1970s and 80s. A visitor can make an appointment to scrutinise certain objects in the collection at close quarters.
This was a storehouse (an Aladdin’s cave; a Noah’s Ark) for homeless disparate things, rather than a museum. As such, they are uncurated. No one has imposed a narrative upon the collection. It’s up to each visitor to make connections for themselves. The absence of an authoritative voice was refreshing in an age when galleries and museums are apt to ‘nanny’ our experience from one object and one room to another. (‘Think about it like this … ‘.) I could easily spend the rest of my life aimlessly wandering across the mezzanine floors, drawing lines between centuries, countries, and objects that, ordinarily, wouldn’t be seen together in the same place at the time.
January 26 (Monday). London – Aberystwyth. A Central London morning.
My hotel room has the creakiest floorboards EVER. A hearty apology to whoever was sleeping in the room below.
9.30 am: A visit to St Pancras Church on Euston Road. I’d never before seen the interior (save for its Crypt Gallery, which has a rolling program of exhibitions). No great shakes.
After taking breakfast at a local patisserie, I headed by foot and Tube train for Chinatown. London Transport has revived its Poems on the Underground provision. The decision is welcome, and the experience uplifting: a little oasis of reflection amid the hustle and bustle, as it were. I first came across it in the mid-1980s, when I was conducting research for my PhD at the old British Library, and indulging cultural binges.
Gerrard street and Lisle Street were preparing for Chinese New Year. I ate roast-duck rice at a local restaurant as a pre-celebration. 2.40 pm: I was on the Edinburgh-bound, train heading towards Birmingham, on the first leg of my return journey to Aberystwyth (with a ‘y’ and one change).
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; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice