129: Quoth the raven ‘nevermore’

OK, it wasn’t a raven but a crow, and it didn’t actually say anything, but ANYWAY. Yesterday my friend Amanda and I ticked off number five on the Magnificent Seven cemeteries list with a visit to Abney Park in Stoke Newington as she was house sitting in Shoreditch again.

We hopped on a bus from Shoreditch High Street which took us through Hackney and Clapton, and then missed the entrance as it was hidden behind hoardings. We didn’t notice till we’d walked as far as Stamford Hill, when it dawned on us that the 400 yards that Google had said had been going on for a while!

Once we’d made it through the building site to the cemetery it was lovely – cool under the trees and with lots of friendly hounds and their people. Like several of the other cemeteries we have visited much of it is now left wild as a nature reserve, and indeed this was the first such reserve in Hackney – it was planted as an arboretum so there is a huge variety of trees on site, as well as a ‘rosarium’. There’s apparently some interesting mushrooms (not that sort of interesting) and assorted fungi about. I was quite taken by this fallen tree where the mushrooms were fruiting into the hollow trunk.

There are fewer celebrity burials in Abney Park than in Highgate and Brompton etc, but we did find a memorial to Isaac Watts, the hymn writer – apparently there was a spot he particularly liked to hang out in. There was also a very imposing statue of him further in – he’s buried in Bunhill Fields along with John Bunyan (all those nonconformist types!) but Hackney was his stamping ground. Our favourite grave belonged to Sophia Caroline Whittle, ‘Relict of the late ‘Censorious”. We couldn’t find out any more about ‘Censorious’ but I’d love to know!

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission have been working hard cleaning and clearing their sites in Abney Park so there are shining white stones among the Victorian greys. Many of these seemed to date from late 1918, sadly – just a day after the end of the war in one case. There are lots of little tracks off the main paths, allowing you to explore. Like the others we have visited many of the older graves are overgrown and inaccessible, but that allows for the wildlife to thrive. We saw squirrels and heard a lot of parakeets – but no signs of the owls who nest in the trees, who were presumably tucked up for the day.

This one looks as if she’s been waiting a while

It’s funny to think that there are trends in funerary décor as with everything else – in one area there will be a row of Grecian urns, and in another a set of identical angels topping the plinths. Perhaps the local memorial stonemasons have sales? There seem to be a lot of Blitz victims, which is to be expected in East London. We saw the non-denominational chapel, which was only used for burial services and not for worship and which is sadly closed after falling into disrepair. Quinn London, who are also the ones doing the base build at my own dear museum, are responsible for the restoration of both the entrance and the chapel so a trip back might be worthwhile when the works are completed.

One thing that does worry me is the number of people who ‘fell asleep’ and ended up in the cemetery – if someone could double check that I haven’t just dropped off before they plant me that would be great.

After a quick refuelling stop in ‘Stokey’ (as I believe the ‘hipper’ natives refer to it) we headed south again – the first bus that came along was the 106, which took us through Hackney and down to Cambridge Heath station where we got off and walked down Hackney Road to Columbia Road. I lived on Hackney Road for several years, and back then it was punctuated by strip clubs and derelict shops. It’s now restored and rebuilt in many places, with bars, coffee shops and the odd boutique (OK, and strip clubs). I was glad to see the City Cafe II still in situ – excellent bubble and squeak on a Sunday morning!

We walked through Columbia Road, stopping at the British Cheese Shop where I definitely didn’t have a Monty Python moment, and rejoined Hackney Road at the Old Street end, where we decided to detour via Hoxton Street Market and Hoxton Square – I love the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies shop (supporting a literacy charity). The market is hanging on as a community space – the City looms over it and the gentrification of Shoreditch is slowly sneaking up, but until then you can still buy second hand china, clothes, fruit and veg and hear people greeting friends and ‘aunties’. There’s a wonderful old building that was an early asylum, which took serious Google-fu to find out about, and there’s still lots of evidence of Hoxton’s artisan past.

The door of Hoxton Street Monster Supplies

After a quick stop for a cuppa and a biscuit or two we wandered over to the Barbican to buy some supplies (OK, tequila. But we got salad too.), walking via Bunhill Fields so we got two cemeteries in in one day. John Bunyan is tucked up in there, flown over by the ubiquitous parakeets and scampered on by squirrels.

Post-dinner, we were people watching from the roof and observed five Hackney enforcement officers arrive to deal with one graffiti artist – not because of his artwork (which we liked when we went to see it afterwards) but because he was obstructing a parking space with his kit. The area has become famous for the street art – from Stik and others to your basic taggers – and some of the pieces are amazing. Still, heaven forbid you take up a parking space! We went for a late night round-the-block (9.30 is late, surely?) and judging by the drop in people on the streets of Shoreditch we may be witnessing the beginning of the recession – also, people seem to be buying their nitrous oxide in bulk now rather than in the little canisters, looking the aerosol sized cans about the place when we walked the dog this morning!

I’m pretty sure it’s nap time now, though – all that walking took it out of me!

Other things making me happy this week:

Thing 3 starting secondary school
Finishing my talk for the GEM conference this week (phew!)
Hanging out with my godson and his girlfriend as well as Amanda
Not having Covid any more
Several dog walks

See you next week! This week I am off to the Crafts Council for an in person thing, to Derby Silk Mill for the GEM conference – exciting!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

If It Bleeds/The Outsider/Finders Keepers – Stephen King

114: We’ve come to White City by mistake!

Or, Cemeteries and Cocktails part IV: Brompton Cemetery in the no-man’s-land of west-ish London.

Let’s get this clear right from the start, shall we? West-ish London has never been my stamping ground, other than having to go to work in South Kensington rather often at the moment, and as it turns out it’s equally unfamiliar to my partner in these adventures. Between us we are pretty good with east and north, but west and south are unknowns. Keep this in mind as we progress!

We met at St Pancras, which was heaving with Sunderland supporters who were on their way to Wembley for the Division One play off or something. There were lots of them, and even at 10am the station pubs were awash with red and white stripes as they all got into the spirit of things (except the poor man who’d brought his wife and son and who was being dragged off to Leicester Square. He was not being allowed to get into the spirit of things, judging by the look on his face.). Wycombe were the other team in the play-off and presumably they just had to get on the outer reaches of the tube – we didn’t see any, anyway! They lost, possibly as their fans weren’t in the spirit of things.

A and I successfully negotiated the Piccadilly line to Earl’s Court and to the cemetery, which was about 10 minutes walk past nice houses. We tried the North Lodge cafe first, with an almond milk hot chocolate for me and a flat white for her, and we shared an almond croissant. Cute dogs galore, and very clean toilets. I could have lived without the person in front of me in the queue ordering his ‘iced americano, yah, with just a dash of oat milk, yah’ and adding daft things to his drink every 30 seconds. So, I suspect, could the baristas.

The cemetery looked green and lovely, so we set off in search of Emmeline Pankhurst’s grave and whoever else was laying about in there. Unlike the previous three, Brompton is clearly used much more as a leisure space by the locals – lots of cyclists, runners and dog walkers were in evidence. It didn’t feel as friendly as the others, either, possibly because people weren’t all there to see the graves and so there were less hellos from fellow wanderers.

The cemetery leaflet very helpfully lists their ‘Top 25’ must-sees and there is a downloadable PDF with another 75, so every so often you find a small metal number in the path telling you where someone is. Other notables in Brompton include John Snow (the cholera one, not the newsreader or the Game of Thrones one. Duh!), Sir Henry Cole (without whom I would not have my current job or something), and James Bohee who was apparently the best banjoist in the world. We didn’t find all of them but we did meet a lot of extremely tame crows and squirrels, who were happy to share one of my emergency biscuits.

After 180 odd years there are a lot of graves in the cemetery – it’s still a working cemetery so there are recent burials as well as the older ones. These are very well tended, some with beautiful miniature gardens and one which is permanently decorated for Christmas. You’re no longer allowed to build giant mausoleums any more, sadly, or have the huge family plots. I have always quite fancied a mausoleum, to be honest, but since that doesn’t seem to be an option I’ll go completely the other way and have a woodland plot instead. One mausoleum we rather liked was that of Hannah Courtoy, who sounds like a woman I’d like to have met: she had three children with an older man and although they never married she – somewhat controversially – inherited his fortune which paid for her Egyptian-style tomb. It looked like a TARDIS, so we half expected a Doctor or 14 to appear.

We wandered past the catacombs (the plan is to go back in July for a tour) and the Brigade of Guards monument, and worshipped briefly at the paws of a supremely disinterested cat who was drowsing in a coat-lined hollow in the sunshine. Many of the older sections have been allowed to grow wild so are covered in grasses and spring flowers attracting bees and all sorts of wildlife.

What’s White City got to do with all this, I hear you ask?

Once we’d had a good explore and put the world to rights, we congratulated ourselves on not having been accosted by weirdos or chased by strange men in skips, and decided it was time to go and find some lunch – Nandos or a good burger, we thought. We left the cemetery and headed back to Earls Court – and somehow we missed. We took the next road down from the one we’d come in from, thinking that we’d find our way back, and next thing we know we have seen a lot of seedy hotels, some very expensive houses, and we’ve found ourselves at a huge Tesco on the A4 where a strange man was juggling clubs in the middle of the road.

With the aid of Google Maps we oriented ourselves, found a bus that was supposed to go to South Kensington and with a sigh of relief we sat down and anticipated a good lunch. It was with dawning horror that we slowly realised the bus was going to White City instead, despite what the bus timetable had said. There was our weirdo, too, in the shape of a little old lady who rang the bell for every stop but did not get off! Instead, she harangued the poor driver until he let her off somewhere between stops as she claimed he had not opened the doors where she wanted (he had) and she did not want to walk back.

It was with another sigh of relief that we spotted Westfield – not where we’d wanted to be but we were pretty sure we’d find some lunch there. We did, in the shape of GBK, and a well-earned burger and fries. We passed on the joy of going shopping, and headed home instead. Next up: a return to Brompton and then Nunhead. What excitement will a foray south of the river provide?

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Not Dark Yet/The Price of Love – Peter Robinson

99: ghouls just want to have fun

Yesterday my best friend and I marked off the third on the list of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries of London with a trip to Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. I’m rather ashamed that, despite living or working in the borough for 22 of the 25 years I’ve been in London, this is the first time I’ve visited what turned out to be a really pretty and peaceful spot smack in the middle of Mile End. We discovered a mutual love of graveyards back in Preston when we were at university together, so this is a thirty year old tradition. For once we weren’t exploring in pouring rain, which is usually the case on our expeditions!

Here it’s more about the nature than about the big names buried in the site, and there are no enormous monuments or mausoleums like those on our previous adventures at Highgate and Kensal Green. We were also not chased by strange men jumping out of a skip, or confronted by a pickled baby. We did have a very good mocha from a tiny coffee TukTuk called the Blue Daisy though. Many of the headstones are tiny, well below knee height, and all the stones are higgledy-piggledy and crammed together as a lot of the park was cleared by the GLC in 1967 after it was closed in 1966.

There are local ‘names’ buried there – the wild animal importer Charles Jamrach, for example, whose story I told for years in my London immigration sessions at Museum of London Docklands. Clara Grant, the social reformer and ‘Bundle Lady of Bow’ is there, also remembered in the name of a local primary school. She believed that children could not learn effectively if they were cold, hungry and unhappy – it’s a sad fact that more than a century after she started the ‘farthing bundle’ scheme there are still huge numbers of children in poverty in Tower Hamlets. There’s the grave of Alfred Linnel, who was trampled by a police horse in Trafalgar Square when he attended a protest against the Bloody Sunday violence the week before. You can also see the Blitz Memorial, built of the bricks of damaged houses from Poplar and commemorating those who died in the Blitz. There are public graves, such as that of 27 of the people who died in the Princess Alice disaster in 1878.

The site was declared a local nature reserve in 2000, and even in this urban area with the District Line rattling past we heard the drumming of a woodpecker and the shrieks of the now-ubiquitous parakeets. The ground was covered in snowdrops, winter aconite and crocuses and there were plenty of magpies, squirrels and this rather Goth pigeon lurking about. He was patient enough to let us take a photo before flying off.

After a good wander around the paths and desire lines we decided we’d walk through to Spitalfields for lunch – a good two mile wander along some of the side streets and then along the Mile End and Whitechapel Roads where you can still see some gorgeous houses among the Pizza-Go-Gos and fried chicken joints. Whitechapel and Spitalfields markets were buzzing, unlike Oxford Street where I’d been working on Friday. You forget what a stranglehold the Arcadia Group had on the British high street until you see the empty shop fronts of House of Fraser, Debenhams, Top Shop and so on. (Soho, where I had a meeting in the afternoon, was reassuringly busy and grubby still, complete with businessmen taking three or four attempts to go through the ‘private dancing downstairs’ door and ‘rooms by the hour’).

I really fancied noodles so we went to Xi’an Biang Biang Noodles on Commercial Street, where we both had the hand-pulled BiangBiang noodles with beef in special sauce. Gloriously splashy and messy and well-earned after our long walk. All in all a good day out, and our next one will be Brompton Cemetery in April.

This week it’s half term and I have an exciting co-creation project lined up with Spotlight and the mixed-media and materials designer Scott Ramsay Kyle, which will be full on but fun. See you on Sunday!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Locked Room – Elly Griffiths

The Best Thing You Can Steal – Simon R Green

Ninth Doctor Novels (vol 2) (Audible)

Ink and Sigil – Kevin Hearne

Running Tracks – Rob Deering

80: umbrellas and Marjorie Proops

There has been a standing joke among the learning team that every time I go out with the play kit I bring the rain. This week I have been out all week in schools and for four out of five days the rain was torrential at times, and on the one day it wasn’t I brought a plague of wasps instead. There’s definitely a pattern forming, and at this rate no one will sign up to work with me next summer! Still, we had a good week and met a whole lot of children at two primary schools in Tower Hamlets, as well as working with games designer Rex Crowle (Little Big Planet/Knights and Bikes) and a Tower Hamlets secondary school to deliver a webinar as part of the V&A’s Upstart Careers Festival. On Friday night – not surprisingly – I was unconscious on the sofa at 7.30pm.

With further rain forecast, my best friend A and I had planned one of our ‘culture and cocktails’ days out – this time to the second of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries. This week marked 30 years since we met on our first day at university in Preston: it still feels like yesterday since we arrived with our parents and our worldly possessions with no idea of where we’d be staying (Lancashire Polytechnic, as it was at the time, wasn’t that organised – a large number of students used to be bussed in from Southport’s Pontins holiday camp until accommodation was found). My first sighting of A was of her throwing a strop in the car park, and then we found ourselves in opposite rooms in the same flat. We’ve grown older (if not up), produced six kids between us, become mad cat ladies, ranted a LOT and supported each other through all sorts of good and bad things. Every so often we manage a day out – not as often as we’d like – and we do love a cemetery.

We visited Highgates East and West back in May, and so this time we went anticlockwise round to Kensal Green. This is the last resting place of people like Brunels (Isambard and Marc), Charles Babbage, Steve Took, the odd royal, a whole lot of political types and thousands of people like you and me. Some rejoiced in the most glorious names: Eudoxia Penemenos, for example, and Andalusia Grant, who we were pleased to find had lived up to her name with an interesting life. The cemetery is also a good illustration of the area’s multicultural make up: Irish, African-Caribbean, Vietnamese, Cypriot, Italian, Greek names and more, and even a stone entirely in Welsh. I was very taken with the stone of David Montgomery Pelham, ‘impresario’, whose epitaph read ‘I would not have missed it for anything’.

The tomb of Andrew Ducrow, equestrian and circus owner, caught our imagination with its sphinxes, bee skep and magnificent hat.

A tradition of our days out is that one of us will be approached by some strange person, and hanging about in graveyards only increases the chances of that. This time it was an elderly gent who’d been leaning into a skip, only to lurch towards us when we approached and start going on about umbrellas and Marjorie Proops (I have just checked and she’s buried elsewhere!) – and then he kept running after us! We thwarted him by striking out cross country, and spent some time wondering whether he was the resident ghost. Highgate has its vampire, perhaps Kensal Green has the old man who got wet and died of a chill, and is doomed to wander the paths for eternity in search of an umbrella….

The cocktails part happened at Parlour, on Regent Street (not that one). We had their weekly seasonal lunch which at £19 for three courses was very good. I had the smoked mackerel, chicory and apple salad to start followed by fillet of sea bream with peppers and almonds, while A had baked goats cheese followed by slow cooked Goosnargh duck with beetroot and blackberries. We both finished up with the artic roll, in coffee dolce and chocolate peanut butter flavour. I had the Kensal Green Tea and A had a Hot ‘Queen’s Park’ Mama and a Lady Cosmo. I think we’ll be back: so friendly and the food was great.

This morning I have been swimming: the water temperature was down to 14.6 and we expect to start the winter swimming season next weekend. I’ve dug out my woolly hat and onesie already!

That’s all, folks – see you here for week 81!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Lords and Ladies – Terry Pratchett

Gobbelino London and a Melee of Mages – Kim M. Watt

Inspector Hobbes and the Common People – Wilkie Martin

Carpe Jugulum – Terry Pratchett (Audible)