Tag: Islington

278: girls’ night out

On Tuesday Things 1 and 2 got the train into London and we had a grown-up girls’ night out. It’s the first time we’ve done this, and we had a most excellent evening in Islington.

They chose Nando’s for dinner and afterwards we walked up to New River Head where I smushed history into their brains whether they wanted any or not. I showed them the historic graffiti in Myddelton Passage, and Clerkenwell Green, and nice houses in old streets, and then we went to the ballet.

Sadlers Wells had sent an email out with free tickets for Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, A Mod Ballet and two colleagues had given it rave reviews after seeing it the previous week. I’ve never been to a ballet before, and neither have the girls, so we weren’t sure what to expect. We were in the stalls, so we had a good view (give or take a few tall people) and the girls were absolutely rapt from the first moment. To be fair, so was I. It was magical.

The set was minimal and whizzed on and off the stage in a surprisingly elegant fashion. The costumes by Paul Smith were sharp and the music – by Townshend’s wife Rachel Fuller – echoed The Who’s originals. The set was enhanced by gorgeous, atmospheric projections – condensation on diner windows, the sea at Brighton, dramatic city scenes. It’s a long time since I’ve seen the film but the story of Jimmy came through strongly. We did the evening properly, with a programme and ice creams in the interval, and I think the girls enjoyed the whole experience.

Thing 2 turned to me at the interval and said, ‘Mum, this is SO GOOD!’ and Thing 1 told me she LOVED it. High praise indeed. The length of the voice messages T2 was leaving for her friends afterwards was a dead giveaway, too, and I think they’d like to go again. I know I do! It was SO GOOD and I LOVED not just the ballet but a night out with my beautiful girls.

It’s been a very educational week all round, really. I’ve had two days in schools testing the new STEM x local history session. Chris, Toni and SJ have done four days – with Chris in Victorian kit as ‘Charles’ and Toni and SJ in hard hat and hi vis as ‘Emma’, our modern day engineer. We’ve been in classrooms and playgrounds, worked with 240 kids and and generally had an excellent time. It’s been so much fun watching the sessions develop – adding in new interactive sections and tweaking others. It’s definitely better in a large area like a playground or hall, especially when the 30 small people are being used to demonstrate the workings of a pump with three umbrellas and a lot of masking tape. I interviewed some of the kids at the end of one session and the message was that they loved the activeness and all the props, wanted the rest of the school to join in, and requested that we brought a person from the future in as well so they could compare that too. I promised I’d see what I could do…

The format we’re using – someone appearing from the past to compare and contrast similar projects with a modern engineer – is one that Chris and I have used successfully in the past at Museum of London Docklands when our modern engineer encountered Isambard Kingdom Brunel. On that occasion we compared the Thames Tunnel and the Thames Tideway project, and used the children to model the Greathead Shield and how to dig into sand safely. One of our more challenging hosts spoke to me afterwards and said ‘well, I get that Brunel was an actor, but how did you get a real engineer to come and do this?’. I took that as a win, and one teacher said that it was the best session they’d ever been to.

This time round we’re including illustrations – and bringing them to life with the pump activity – such as ‘Monster Soup’, No Fishing and No Swimming signs (communication without language), and a portrait of Hugh Myddelton and his excellent beard. There’s also umbrellas, ping pong balls, lengths of piping, beads, buckets, pinwheels and high vis jackets. There’s the story of the king falling into the frozen New River, Charles Dickens complaining that he pays for a large cistern but never has enough water for a bath, and – Chris, we missed one! The complaints from the people in Pall Mall when they found live eels in their pipes! We’re testing with some older children next week – I wonder whether they’ll ask such good questions?

Other things making me happy this week

  • A crochet project I can’t show you yet as it’s a surprise
  • A much-needed evening swim with Sue – the water was 26.4 and balmy, the ducks were flipping up and down feeding in the weeds and the little shoals of fish were zooming about in the shallows
  • Ice lollies.
  • Cally Fest last Sunday – it rained and it shined, we saw almost 300 people and a lot of cute dogs. This weekend its Whitecross Street Party, and we have a great activity planned. I’ve given strict instructions to the team to slather on the Factor 50 as it’s going to be HOT.
  • An excellent conversation with the black cab driver today about the New River – he grew up on Amwell Street and now lives in Enfield and runs along the New River Path every day.
  • Whitecross Street Party!

This week we have the second of our community access panel meetings, and I’m really looking forward to next weekend… and a couple of days off after 12 straights days of work.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Blood Lines/Blood Pact/Blood Debt – Tanya Huff

Amongst Our Weapons/False Value – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The Wild Life – John Lewis-Stempel

269: a trip back in time to 1693

I love secret bits of London and this week the work gang got to see the fabulous Oak Room at New River Head. Not the bit of New River Head that we’re turning into a brand new gallery and gardens, but the bit that’s currently a very grand set of flats on Rosebery Avenue. The header image this week is ‘London from Islington Hill, by Thomas Bowles, c. 1740. New River Head, centre-left, Upper Pond in foreground’. This is from British History Online.

The New River (its compulsory to say at this point that it’s not new and it’s not a river) was finished in 1613 and brought clean water from springs in Hertfordshire to Islington, and from there it was distributed to the City and later to further afield in London via elm pipes. The New River Company was one of the earliest – if not the earliest – joint stock companies, headed by a Welsh goldsmith/engineer/all-round clever chap called Hugh Myddelton. His brother became Lord Mayor of London (the Dick Whittington sort rather than the Sadiq Khan sort) on the very day that the New River was officially opened with lots of pomp and ceremony. There are several excellent books about it, including The Mercenary River by Nick Higham which is well worth a read. Even the King was a shareholder, putting up half the money to build the river in return for half the profits – which also worked to convince the local landowners to let HM dig a river across their lands. The river followed the 100ft contour, so gravity brought it down to London, with a five inch drop over every mile. You can find some pictures of the route here.

The river originally finished at the Round Pond, where the flats are now, and the Water House was where the offices were. The Oak Room was commissioned by the company engineer in 1693, and it was a mark of how important it was that the portrait of King William III that decorates the ceiling was done by the official court painter. The ceiling is covered in plasterwork showing some very fierce dolphins looking like Chinese dragons, swans and other waterbirds, scenes from along the New River, and is incredibly detailed. The dolphins reminded me of this figure we had in the ‘A Pirate’s Life for Me’ exhibition at Museum of Childhood.

It’s called the Oak Room, though, because of the oak carvings – probably done by Grinling Gibbons or at least his workshop. There’s an unusual unicorn in the coat of arms with a most excellently pointy horn, for example, and the carvings around the fireplace include a very cute crab, crayfish, fishing nets and other watery equipment, plants and various fish. Oak is apparently very hard to carve, and the intricate work here is quite stunning. We were lucky enough to be shown around by an expert on the history of the river, who also came to our offices to give us a talk a couple of weeks ago. In its original position in the Water House the room gave a view of St Paul’s Cathedral and the City, but has been turned around in its new home where it was installed in 1920. The head of the Metropolitan Water Board used it as a dining room, apparently, and had a special chair made from the boarding of the Round Pond when it was decommissioned. Now you can see our Engine House from it, complete with scaffolding where our construction team are busy bringing it back to life.

The block of flats itself is very grand, and the entrance includes the seals of all the water companies which were folded into the MWB in 1904. The seal of the New River Company has the hand of Providence over London and the motto ‘and I caused it to rain upon one city’, which made a change from everyone else’s gods and greenery. The ground floor has a huge open space where people used to come and pay their water bills – it looks more like a ballroom – and the carved MWB seal is still over the front door. Parts of the pond revetment can still be seen too.

Our next visit is to the London Museum of Water and Steam in a couple of weeks – can you detect a theme? I’m also going to visit Myddelton House and Gardens on the route of the New River. Lots of history incoming, London fans….

Other things making me happy this week

  • Dropping the first batch of sea creatures off at the British Library, including my very psychedelic crab. Needle felting all the faces was very therapeutic.
  • A long walk last Sunday rambling along the river Roding, seeing hares again and a whole lot of ducklings
  • All the Threads about President Barbie of the new country of Mattel. Apparently Crayola are drawing up the trade agreements. See also: Puppet Regime

Today is long walk day with only a week to go till the Goring Gap half marathon….must remember to hydrate and fuel properly to face my nemesis!

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Harbour Street/The Moth Catcher/The Seagull – Ann Cleeves

Interesting Times – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

The Good, The Bad and The Furry – Tom Cox (Audible)

Demon’s Bluff – Kim Harrison

263: restocking the stationery stash in a very sustainable way

This has been one of those hectic weeks, thanks to one of my moonlighting gigs with We Are FTW – this time at the edie25 show at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Edie is all about corporate sustainability, so there were lots of interesting people to talk to about retrofitting listed buildings, for example. I won’t run out of nice notebooks for a while, either (as if that was ever going to happen!). I love doing these events for my friend Isla – it’s a great way to remember that there’s people doing things that don’t revolve around my current obsession with accessible bathroom fittings. Who knew?

I seem to be spending a lot of time at the BDC, as it’s where the Stitch Festival was last weekend and where I’m attending another event next week. It’s a lovely building which I think used to be the Agricultural Hall, and it had a great illustration of the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ rhyme which features our New River windmill. Their ops team were so helpful and friendly, which is not always the case! It was lovely to see the same agency event staff from previous conferences and to catch up with Anna, over from the Czech Republic for the event.

Detail from linocut Oranges and Lemons, by Tobias Till, 2014

I was most impressed by the catering, however, where the Good Eating Company pulled a 100% vegan menu out of the bag for more than 1200 people over two days – including a mushroom bourguignon that was unbelievably tasty, some oat and raisin cookies that were almost as good as mine, and vegan doughnuts. Apparently this was the first time they’d done a 100% vegan catering job: no repetition of main courses over the two days, either. The avocado and chocolate mousse was a bit gritty and the panna cotta didn’t quite work but everything else was amazing. The speed at which everything disappeared was testament to how good it was. They also have their own small farm, work with the Garden Army to support wellbeing and leftover food was distributed to the local homeless people through a charity based at the BDC.

We stayed in a very quirky (!) little hotel in Prebend Street called Angel Townhouse, which possibly caters mainly to the naughty weekend market as there’s mini hot tubs in each room, no dining facilities and good sized showers. I assume it’s a converted pub, with rooms over two floors above a wine bar and very thin walls. The bed was comfortable and my shower on the first morning was excellent, but sometime over the day the boiler packed up and no one on the first floor had any hot water by the evening – RUINING my plans for a hot tub and a good book after a busy day – or the following morning. I might be happy to hop into icy lakes in subzero temperatures but I don’t want to do it in my bathroom!

We ate at Pizza Express on the first night and Thai Square the second – excellent pad thai and lovely lemony satay chicken.

Conversation over dinner on night two – as all conversations have over the last couple of weeks – veered towards Adolescence, the brilliant, thought-provoking but absolutely terrifying series on Netflix. 66.3 million views in less than two weeks, the first streaming show to top the UK’s weekly viewing charts: the hype is deserved. National-treasure-in-progress Stephen Graham is angry and bewildered as the dad, Owen Cooper as his furious, radicalised son is remarkable (especially in the scenes with the psychiatrist) – as is the entire cast, actually. The cinematography ratchets up the tension right from the beginning. Each episode was shot in a single take and I can quite understand why Ashley Walters was going home in tears each evening.

My Beloved and I watched it over two evenings and I’ll be watching it again with Thing 3 whether he likes it or not, quite honestly. I can’t add anything to the reams and reams of print that the series has already generated but if you have teenagers – of any variety – watch it with them. If it doesn’t win every award going next season then something is very wrong. It will make you angry and uncomfortable and sad in equal measure but what it’s saying is vital. You could also listen to this episode of The Trawl (thanks to Tan for introducing me to this gem of a podcast). But watch it.

Things making me happy this week

  • Loop earplugs, as even on a quiet street London is noisy!
  • A good day at the Stitch Festival with Heather – I didn’t buy anything!
  • Mother’s Day Moomin biscuits – thank you TT2! And Moomin sweets – thank you Miriam!
  • The local library ordering service
  • Setting up my fundraising page for the half marathon I wrote about last week – it’s here if you’d like to start me off towards my target. On a slightly related note, the hotel in our village, also mentioned last week as I worked with some of the asylum-seeking families at the local school, caught fire on Friday night. Everyone was evacuated and no one was hurt, fortunately, but the event caused the usual spewing of racism and hate on social media including accusations of arson and one person whose only concern was whether the road was open yet (while the blaze was still, well…blazing. Oh, the humanity.) If I’d lost everything and fled to safety with my children once I don’t think I’d be in a rush to do it again. This event did not make me happy, but did highlight the need to choose love over hate every. Single. Time.
  • An unexpected journey – only to Harlow with Miriam and E to see Edith and do a bit of shopping but I did get to go to Lidl which is always exciting. I did not buy a chainsaw. The box was damaged.
  • A potential crochet commission – more on this later!
  • Asda delivering 94% of the things I ordered, and sending sensible substitutes for the others. Wonders may never cease.
  • An email from Thing 3’s head of year informing me that he was pupil of the week, which is nice.
  • Proving once again that you can’t take me anywhere without running into someone I have a connection with – this time the Uber driver bringing us back to Essex.
  • Making friends with a tiny Jack Russell/poodle cross called Figgy – four months old and a wiggly, wriggly puppy with a tail that wagged her rather than the other way round.

Same time next week then…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

White Nights/Telling Tales/Blue Lightning/Hidden Depths – Ann Cleeves

Raising Steam – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

254: if we build it, they will come

In my usual sublime-to-ridiculous way, this week we are hopping from radical inclusion to…. frogs. Yes, frogs. I like frogs.

Also newts, dragonflies, toads and bats (the flying sort, not me).

This handsome chap lives in our garden, and takes no sh*t from anyone.

This aquatic turn of mind was sparked by a last-thing-on-Friday email from our lovely project manager Liz, who is currently thinking about the logistics of getting power onto our new site and – as a pond is featured in the plans – there was a question about how much water would be in it so we’d know how powerful the pump would need to be.

Now, I do not know a great deal about ponds (other than about acclimatising myself to them in the wild) and I know even less about how to calculate the volume of a pond from a flat plan. ‘It looks quite big’, I hazarded. I suspect this was not very helpful.

I don’t know much about frogs either, so I enlisted the assistance of my Beloved who knows about things that happen outside in the garden. He dug a wildlife pond in ours a couple of years ago, which does not as yet have a frog but I live in hope and whenever he finds Tiny* when he’s gardening he puts him in the pond.

Tiny

*Tiny is my newt…sorry

In my head the pond on the new site is not a sterile, shallow water feature which will inevitably be filled with paddling small people without so much as a pondskater to be seen, but a proper wildlife pond where we can have pond-dipping, spot dragonflies and bees and butterflies, and attract all sorts of exciting wildlife including bats who definitely live in Islington and who could be encouraged to come and live on our site if we had a source of quality bugs for them. The pond in my head is raised so people can sit around the edges and people who use wheelchairs can do the pond-dipping activities too. One end of it is a bog garden and the other end is deeper, making a home for things that like deeper water for the laying of frogspawn. (It will have a chickenwire frame over it, so we can lift it for activities and maintenance but cats and would-be paddlers can’t fall in).

Small toad in the strawberry bed

There will be plants like irises and things that oxygenate the water, grasses around it and insect-attracting plants to make this little corner a wildlife haven. My Beloved and I spent the next hour delving into wildlife ponds (starting here) and discovered that you only need a pump if there’s fish – who are apex predators in the pond, and eat all the other things – or if you’re having a fountain. Wildlife ponds don’t need them, but they do like oxygenating plants which also provide cover for tiny wildlife. If we did have a pump it would need a filter to prevent the tadpoles and froglets being sucked up and mangled.

Islington has the lowest amount of green space per person of all the London boroughs, and increasingly where green space is being planted it isn’t publicly accessible. When teachers were consulted waaayyy back in 2023 they wanted to be able to come to the site to explore biodiversity and bringing water back onto the site will be key to attracting wildlife. The site’s history is inextricably linked with the history of water in London, too, so a pond makes sense. Hopefully the pond-in-my-head will become reality, complete with frogs…

Things making me happy this week

  • Coffee with Brian and Anhar from London Museum on Tuesday morning.
  • A catch-up with Cath on Wednesday evening in the local pub, where my existence was met with ‘what are YOU doing in here?’ from my daughter
  • An exciting meeting with Apple at their Battersea offices, which they described as ‘joyful’ and said my creative activity was ‘supercool’ and that they were going to try it with their kids. I’m not sure they’d seen paper and pencils for a while…
  • …and the trip back to the office was on the Uberboat to Bankside, with a walk back via St Paul’s and St Bartholomew the Great
  • I made a start on a new spiderweb scarf using the gorgeous yarn I bought last week at the Wool Show, made a pair of dragonscale mittens for my colleague’s birthday as she feels the cold, and started a hexi cardi with yarn from the stash.
  • Sunday at the Waltham Abbey Wool Show with Heather, where we squished a lot of yarn and I was quite well-behaved. When I got back I got all my skeins out of the stash and turned them into balls so I have no excuse not to use them – thank heavens for the winder and swift gadgets!
  • Open Day at Waltham Forest College with Thing 2, where she hopes to go in September
  • Impressing Thing 2 with my excellent French accent when she made me try on a beret. Well, who doesn’t do ‘Allo ‘Allo impressions under those circumstances? I am, apparently, ridiculous.

That seems to have been quite a good week, I think! Let’s see how this one shapes up…

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

Explosive Eighteen/Notorious Nineteen/Takedown Twenty/Top-secret Twenty-One/Tricky Twenty-Two – Janet Evanovich

Men At Arms – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

American Demon – Kim Harrison

215: next stop, Islington

This week I’ve spent a lot of time on buses on my way to and from visits to interesting people. I like London buses. They are reliable, cheap and almost never involve changing at Bank station. They’re also above ground so hopping on buses around the borough is helping me consolidate my mental map of Islington – this week I connected the dots between Highbury and Islington Green, for example. I now know that the number 4 bus will get me back to Barbican from Finsbury Park, and that it’s no slower than taking various trains.

I like to sit on the top deck when I can, as you’re above the shop fronts and can see the bones of the buildings above them. Islington, bordering the City, has elegant squares (especially in the bit around New River Head where we’re building our new Centre) and brick villas and terraces – home to the Charles and Carrie Pooters of Victorian London. There are modernist council estates like Berthold Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate and Bevin Court. Interesting buildings include a gorgeous Art Deco cinema (now a community hub) in Upper Street. Exmouth Market has traditional tiled pub fronts, and the old Metropolitan Water Board HQ (also New River Head) oozes Edwardian grandeur at the front and 1930s sweeping glass brick glamour at the old Laboratory building. There’s Islington Green, a tiny square where the statue of Bob the street cat holds court. There are also ridiculously posh corners like Highgate Village, and of course the gothic glories of Highgate Cemetery.

The Pooters, residents of Islington – Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith

There are railways and stations and canals, including the very long Islington Tunnel, and for some reason a lot of theatres in pubs, and medieval wells where people would go to take the waters. The more time I spend on buses and visiting new places, the more I like it. I’ve even stopped getting lost on my way back to the office.

Other things making me happy this week

  • A visit to Artbox in Islington, an arts organisation working with adults with learning needs
  • Coffee with Amanda
  • Finishing Silent Witness – all 27 series!
  • Mike Bubbins’ sitcom Mammoth (BBC) and Deadboy Detectives (Netflix)
  • A walk in the early morning woods on Monday
  • Book recommendations from a colleague – finding a fellow fantasy fan is always good. Also, I read the start of a book over someone’s elbow on a busy tube and it looked really good so I had to buy it. Not even sorry.

What I’ve been reading

A Court of Mist and Fury/A Court of Wings and Ruin/A Court of Frost and Starlight/A Court of Silver Flames – Sarah J. Maas

Notes from a Small Island/A Walk in the Woods – Bill Bryson (Audible)

Mrs England  – Stacy Halls

176: a week of two halves

A somewhat misleading title but does lead nicely into one of my work visits this week, which saw me heading to north London for a visit to the Emirates Stadium. It’s not often a single meeting puts me within a hop and skip of the 10,000 daily steps target but this one did, with a whistle-stop tour taking in the changing rooms, the press conference room, the post-match interview bit (which looks a lot more glam on the telly, I can tell you – in reality it’s a corner under a concrete stairwell), the stands and various corporate spaces, as well as the pitch and the Hub.

Not shown: any football players changing

The Hub was what I was there to see, really: having spent 17 out of my 21 years in museums knocking about Tower Hamlets, I’m now being let loose on Islington as we’re embedding ourselves in the borough while we develop the new Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration at the old New River Head site. Islington isn’t somewhere I know very well, other than sneaky visits to drool over yarn I can’t afford at Loop and hanging out at the Crafts Council occasionally. Islington, in my head, is a literary thing: Douglas Adams and Nick Hornby, Charles and Carrie Pooter in middle-class Victorian Holloway. As it turns out, it is quite literary, but also full of actual people as well. Who knew! So I am on a bit of a mission to talk to a lot of them in the hope that we can work together.

As well as the Hub, I found myself at the Museum of the Order of St John this week, where I was enveloped in an enormous hug by lovely Maggie, an ex-colleague from Museum of Childhood. Coming as a nice surprise to someone instead of a terrible shock is a good thing! If you haven’t been to this little gem of a museum, it’s worth a visit: full of interesting medieval things and housed in a fascinating building, and they have a lovely family programme. Time it right and on the same day you could do The Charterhouse and wander through to St Bartholomew the Great, tucked away behind slabs of modern brick and concrete, and the Postman’s Park.

Between St Bartholomew the Great and Smithfield

Other things tucked away behind modern slabs in the area include Bleeding Heart Yard, where Amanda and I finally managed to go for our belated 50th birthday dinner – we’ve rearranged it twice when work got in the way, but it was worth the wait. We ate at the Bistro, sitting outside on their shaded terrace which was quiet on an early Tuesday evening. We chose the set menu: I had gravadlax of salmon, followed by wild Brixham seabass fillet and crème brulée, while Amanda had roasted beetroot, Chicken Paillard and chocolate delice. We shared fine green beans and pommes frites…and a side of fresh, warm madeleines which were wonderful. The friendly waiter didn’t even bat an eyelid when we asked for a side with our desserts, bless him. The Aperol Spritzes were perfect, too, and we laid off the wine as migraines are no fun at all, and that’s currently the result of even a small glass at the moment. Why prosecco doesn’t have the same effect is anyone’s guess, but I won’t complain.

Other things making me happy this week:

  • A conversation with illustrator/author and fellow South Walian Isabel Benavides who launches her first picture book in August and who is coming to do a family workshop for me at Finsbury Library
  • A 90-page conservation plan for the site which was full of fascinating information.
  • An early morning walk with Thing 3
  • Far too much crochet and my new Banks jumpsuit covered in otters. I sewed it on my Aunty Jo’s old Singer Samba sewing machine, freshly serviced and a dream to use.
Not jumping
Rear view
Covered button with otter
Shy cactus
Chrismouse
Catcus

Things making me sad this week:

The death of Sinead O’Connor, who I loved as a teenager. The Lion and the Cobra is a hugely powerful album. Hopefully, whatever the cause of death turns out to be, she’s found some peace now.

Same time next week!

Kirsty x

Cover image: “The Laurels”, “a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement” – Drawing of “The Laurels”, the fictional home of the Pooter family. First published in The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. London, J.W. Arrowsmith 1892.

What I’ve been reading:

Heir of Uncertain Magic – Charlie N. Holmbury. Also started The Will and the Wilds but it was bloody awful so I stopped. Life is too short to read books you’re not enjoying.

Museum of Magic – Beth Revis

Odds and Gods – Tom Holt

Broken Homes/Foxglove Summer/The Furthest Station/The Hanging Tree – Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)

The White Hare – Jane Johnson