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ISSUE 0053

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BATTLE OF THE SOMME 1st JULY 1916

NEWS INTERNATIONAL OPINION COMMENT BUSINESS EDUCATION FEATURES DINING OUT ARTS & CULTURE EVENTS LITERATURE POETRY HEALTH FASHION BEAUTY MOTORING TRAVEL BRIDGE CROSSWORD CHESS

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Editor: Kate Hawthorne Art Director & Director Tim Epps Deputy Editor & Head of Business Development Dr Emma Trehane Business Development: Caroline Daggett, Niki Devereux, Antoinette Kovatchka, Architecture: Emma Flynn Art & Culture Editors: Don Grant, Marian Maitland Astronomy: Scott Beadle FRAS Ballet/Dance Andrew Ward Bridge: Andrew Robson Chess: Barry Martin Contributing Editors: Marius Brill, Peter Burden Jim Slattery, Derek Wyatt Classical Music: James Douglas Crossword: Wolfe Dining Out: David Hughes Editorial: Ella McGee Babbage, Rowland Stirling, Joe Palasz Events: Leila Kooros, Fahad Redha Fashion Lynne McGowan Feldman Reviews Max Feldman Food & Flowers: Limpet Barron Horology: Jonathan Macnabb Motoring: Don Grant, David Hughes, Fahad Redha News & Online Editor, Arts Correspondent: Max Feldman Poetry & Literary Editor: Emma Trehane MA Ph.D Political Editor & Managing Editor News: Henry Tobias Jones Sub-Editor: Leila Kooros Sporting Calendar Compiled by Fahad Redha Travel: Cynthia Pickard

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July/August 2016

News Parliament Squared by Derek Wyatt

here were you around 4am on Friday 23 June 2016? I was struggling to find my mobile. My son was calling from his trading desk in New York. “Dad what the hell is going on? “ You can guess the rest. He had just seen on his screens that the UK had voted to Leave. He said that was the end for his generation. He talked about moving permanently to America. We suggested he took joint citizenship. His subsequent mood of disbelief has not changed. My daughter was at Glasto-in-Mud; she was texting me hourly asking for the result. Her texts trailed off once she realised her generation had been given a kick in the teeth. And yet not too many 18-30 year olds bothered to either register to vote or vote at all. Perhaps, voting should have been compulsory. I am still in shock. I managed to escape on Friday afternoon to Glyndebourne for a quite sensational rendering of The Marriage of Figaro. It was a miracle we arrived, no thanks to Southern Rail, who cancelled trains by the dozen including the last train home from Lewes. Why is this situation going almost unreported? It is time the franchise was nationalised. After Glyndebourne we fled to Sardinia for ten days. No-one can quite understand, if my fellow holiday

One in three Brits suffer from ‘car amnesia’ By Joseph Palasz

Do you suffer from ‘car amnesia’? At least 29% of Brits are afflicted with car amnesia every year, forgetting where they parked. Research conducted by Direct Line Car Insurance shows on average members of the nation lose their car a whopping four times during the year, with the most common place to lose a vehicle being the supermarket (34 per cent), followed by multi storey car parks (14 per cent) and out of town shopping centre car parks (11 per cent). We spend 25 minutes a year looking for our vehicles. Hapless male drivers are the worst offenders, searching for 32 minutes a year in comparison to the mere 20 minutes

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online: www.KCWToday.co.uk makers from Holland, France, Italy and Germany are typical, what the Brits have done. The tremors have continued on a daily basis. We know not what the full Article 50 is and when it can start. We do not know the costs of Leave. We do not know whether we can meet the ever burgeoning costs of the NHS and our pensions. We are, certainly in London, still in disbelief. It is my contention that there is no current political party which represents Londoners (who scored the highest Remain percentage just one per cent more than Edinburgh). In May we voted for a Muslim mayor representing the Labour Party. Yet Labour heartlands voted Leave. Labour had a terrible referendum coming on top of a poor showing in the May local elections. It feels like a busted flush. There is no one in charge. There is no leadership. There is disagreement about the very nature of the democratic basis on which it was formed. Many of us grieve but it may be finished. It may have to be morphed into an English Labour Party. Whither the Tories? Well I wish we knew. Poor Cameron: he deserved better and he has taken with him George Osborne the cleverest politician of our time. Obituaries are too early for Boris Johnson though he has behaved shamefully. I suspect he will attempt a second coup after 2020. His hunger to be PM has not diminished but few of his friends are currently Tory MPs. He is still a work-in-progress. The bookies favour Theresa May as the next shoe-in Prime Minister. She is more a managerial politician, capable but a tad dull. Maybe that is the current nation’s mood music after Leave. spent by women. Extrapolating these figures over the course of a lifetime, bewildered Brits spend almost three days trying to find their misplaced motors. Losing your vehicle can also weigh on your wallet. As much as 11% of Brits have been forced to pay additional parking charges due to not being able to locate their car, with the average cost amounting to £22. An unlucky 6% of drivers even have their vehicles towed or clamped due to their forgetfulness. As a result, car amnesia costs the nation a total of £126 million a year.

Illustration © Jonohills

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Our second female PM

By Henry Tobias Jones We will soon have our nation’s second female Prime Minister. Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom are vying for the leadership of their party, with the leadership of our country soon to follow. Mrs May is the current favourite with 2/9, with Mrs Leadsom some way behind with 10/3. In the second Conservative Party MPs’ ballot, current Home Secretary, Theresa May received 199 votes, while Leadsom had 84. Michael Gove, who is the current Justice Secretary and who forced out the odds on favourite, Boris Johnson, was eliminated after receiving just 46 votes. It is the first time that a leadership contest for the Conservative party has been held between two women. However, despite the fact that both of the UK’s female PMs will have come from the Conservative party, the Westminster pool to choose from is limited. In the 2015 general election, of the 650 MPs elected, 191 were women, up by 44 since the last government. Of the total number of female MPs elected, just 68 were for the Conservative party, compared to Labour’s 99. With Jeremy Corbyn stuck between a giant rock and a giant rock smashing jackhammer stuffed full of dynamite, the former Shadow First Secretary of State and Shadow Business Secretary, Angela Eagle, is tentatively poised to

challenge for the Labour leadership. This could see a landmark PMQs where both sides of the house are led by female parliamentarians. Likewise, overseas, women could be taking up the reigns of leadership in many of the world’s most important countries. Hillary Clinton is determined to become the next, and first, FEMALE President of the US. Her future Presidency has, however, already been significantly dented by accusations regarding her use of a personal email account for government duties. Moreover, her rival, Donald Trump, has used her status as the “establishment candidate” to significantly undermine her standing with many Americans. Queueing behind the UK and United states is France, where Marine Le Pen, who is buoyant on the back of Brexit, will be standing in the 2017 Presidential elections. Polling currently suggests that she is neck and neck with current President François Hollande, but that former President Nicolas Sarkozy would beat her if he ran against her. If Le Pen was to succeed, however, she has already indicated overwhelmingly that she would force an EU referendum in France where over 60% of the population say they are unhappy with the EU. Finally, if Angela Merkel stands and wins again in Germany’s Federal Elections in 2017, it appears that for the first time in some while, she will have a lot of competition to top the Forbes 100 most powerful women list again. And of course, all of this will seem rather irrelevant when Daenerys Targaryen sails across the Narrow Sea to subjugate all our newly elected female leaders.

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News Fare terms for TfL and Sadiq Khan? By Henry Tobias Jones

All Change Please

By Henry Tobias Jones

uch maligned for their woeful record of delayed and cancelled services, Southern Railway have now been forced to implement an “emergency timetable”, cutting 341 trains. Blaming a severe staff shortage due to the “high level of conductor sickness”, Southern say that their services have been “severely affected”. Many services including inward and outbound trains to London Victoria have been cancelled for “part or all of their journey.” Passengers have recently been complaining that the franchise’s major delays and cancellations have led to punitive outcomes at their places of work, with some people claiming to have lost work due to repeated tardiness as a result of the poor train service. According to latest figures by the

NHS England tell major hospitals they do not “meet the standards.” By Henry Tobias Jones

NHS England have told three major hospitals in Manchester, Leicester, and London they can no longer provide complex heart care surgeries, after fears that they do not “meet the standards” required. Congenital heart disease (CHD) services, which are mainly for young children and babies, affect fewer than 4,000 babies

Office of Rail and Road, with 1 in 20 cancellations, Southern rail owners, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), had the worst record of any service provider. Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) has described the “emergency timetable” as “crisis management”, adding that the rail company was “now in terminal meltdown.” In an attempt to resolve its ongoing dispute with GTR, the union have offered to suspend their industrial action. Strikes were threatened after plans were introduced by GTR to remove conductors from trains, which the RMT believe would potentially “endanger passengers.” In a letter to Charles Horton, GTR’s Chief Executive, RMT General Secretary, Mick Cash, has said, “the RMT will suspend calling any further industrial for the next three months if you will also suspend your proposals for a similar period.” Explaining that “this will then allow us the time and space to sit down together and try and explore options that will seek to deliver the lasting improvements to service and reliability we all want.” a year. 80% of children born with these heart defects continue to live well into adulthood as a result of open heart surgeries. However, since a 2001 report analysing the high infant mortality rate at Bristol Royal Infirmary the issue of who is best qualified to treat CHD babies has caused significant disagreements within the NHS. The Hospitals affected include the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Trust, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, and the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust. An additional 5 other hospitals will also have to stop offering complex heart surgeries and services. However, already affected NHS Trusts are pledging to fight the decision. Dr Jonathan Fielden, NHS England Director of Specialised Commissioning and Deputy National Medical Director,

It is estimated that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan’s commitment to freeze Transport for London (TfL) fares for four years will cost a reported £640 million. Cuts to government funding for TfL will see a £2.8 billion gap in the company’s finances between 2015 and 2021, which TfL say will “create further financial pressures.” However, in order to fund the £640 million cost, TfL has reportedly sent a letter to all company directors and band five managers offering them voluntary redundancy as part of an effort to cut costs. The letter explains: “TfL faces unprecedented financial challenge and we do not have enough money to continue as we are”, adding “we need

said: “Patients, families and staff need to be assured of sustainable, high quality services now, and into the future.” “There has been a great deal of uncertainty over the future of congenital heart disease services over the past fifteen years. We owe it to patients, families and staff to end that uncertainty, and to provide clear direction for the safety and quality of this specialist area of medicine going forward.” Dr Fielden added “a great deal of work has gone into achieving consensus across the board on the standards that providers should meet. We are determined to take all actions necessary to ensure that those standards are met, so that patients get the high quality and safe services that they expect and deserve.” In response to the decision made by NHS England, Robert Craig, Royal Brompton & Harefield Chief Operating Officer said: “We find NHS England’s

to make our business sustainable and transport affordable for the millions who rely on us while protecting vital investment and day-to-day services.” Many foresee that this will just be the opening move in an ongoing fattrimming exercise which could cost hundreds of TfL staff their jobs. Moreover, many have already accused the Mayor of London of breaking his manifesto pledge, in which he claimed that “Londoners won’t pay a penny more for their travel in 2020 than they do today.” Now, however, many claim that up to 450,000 public transport users in London will not be affected by the freeze. The Mayor has responded by explaining that, in fact, his manifesto pledge was to “freeze TfL (Transport for London) fares for four years”, not travelcard prices which set by the Department for Transport (DfT). According to a spokesperson for the Mayor the fares freeze will “benefit 96% of commuting Londoners”, adding that expanding TfL’s network will open the reduction up to more members of the public. Despite the freeze, the daily and weekly ‘cap’ for Oyster card and contactless fares will continue to rise, as will single fares on suburban rail services not under TfL’s control. This has prompted many to claim that the changes will prioritise tourists over real London commuters. Liberal Democrat London Assembly member, Caroline Pidgeon, summarised the situation Khan has found himself in, saying: “I think you have broken your fares promise today.” stated intention extraordinary” adding “we are, however, reassured to see that the idea of removing congenital heart disease services from Royal Brompton is ‘subject to consultation with relevant Trusts and, if appropriate, the wider public’. Nevertheless, Craig unequivocally claims that the Royal Brompton “fails to see how any logical review of the facts will come to the same conclusion as this panel.” Craig finally says: “We are rightfully proud of the ground-breaking work of our congenital heart disease teams; many of our experts have achieved international recognition for their contribution to the field and are responsible for training large numbers of clinical staff, in the UK and abroad. Many thousands of patients have benefited from their innovative treatment and research and we have a duty to ensure they continue to experience ‘a lifetime of specialist care.”

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Photograph © Sam Benn

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Westminster Council Scraps CCTV Network

5,000 sign petition to save historic Foyles building By Henry Tobias Jones

petition of over 5,000 names demanding a halt to the demolition of 111-119 Charing Cross Road, Foyles’ former flagship bookshop, has been delivered to Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Greg Clark MP. Asking for a public inquiry into the proposed demolition, the petition, which was launched only three weeks ago, demands that the “demolition of 111-119 Charing Cross Road” should be stopped and reconsidered. “These handsome buildings make a positive contribution to the Soho Conservation Area,” the petition adds, “and their destruction and replacement with an oversized office building would result in substantial harm to this important part of London.’

The Victorian Society have also written to Mr Clark, adding their support to the campaign. Mike Fox, Deputy Director of SAVE said: “The response to this petition has been really great, racing to over 5,000 signatures in just three weeks. A request for a public inquiry is not something undertaken lightly, but in this case we feel it is justified. “These are attractive buildings capable of being reused, and ones which should be protected by the Conservation Area. Their demolition will further erode the character of Soho, already under threat, and the proposed replacement would cause substantial harm. We urge the Secretary of State to intervene.” The proposals would see three unlisted buildings of merit, including the former Foyles store, demolished along with several other key buildings. Foyles opened in 1929 at 113-119 Charing Cross Road and was, at the time, the largest bookshop in the world. The petition can be seen by visiting: www.savebritainsheritage.org/ campaigns/item/393/SAVE-submits5000-strong-Foyles-Petition-toSecretary-of-State

amid Concerns over Terror and Crime

Westminster Council plans to end support for its ageing CTTV network this September. The planned switch off will cover several of London’s busiest areas, including the West End. The council has justified the controversial decision not to renew the CCTV network, citing funding pressures and research which suggests its ineffectiveness in the prevention of crime. The surveillance network, consisting of 75 cameras across the central London borough, could cost an extra £1.7 million to renew and update, with an additional £1 million every year after factoring in running costs. Westminster’s cabinet member for public protection, Nickie Aitken commented: “Like many other local authorities around the country, our current view is that we are not able to continue to subsidise this non-statutory service when there are many other pressures on our budgets and where other partners are the main beneficiaries.” The decision has sparked fears of an increase in crime and the potential threat of terrorism. Some crime experts have noted the important role surveillance plays in supporting modern policing and the securing of prosecutions. However, others have pointed out that private CCTV cameras, including the extensive network run by Transport for London (TfL), will continue to operate in the area. A spokesperson from Scotland Yard sought to dissuade fears, saying: “CCTV is one of the many important tools used to tackle crime” before adding “it is important to recognise that CCTV is just one of a range of measures to enhance safety.” “Outside of the local authority CCTV network there is a vast and sophisticated private network that will still be accessible to the police,” the spokesman added, “we are confident these arrangements adequately provide tools to prevent and detect crime and we continue to work closely with partners on

a range of initiatives to make London the safest global city.” Many will be happy that the costly network has been axed. A recent report by campaign group Big Brother Watch found that Westminster Council topped the nation for expenditure on CCTV. The council has spent £7.3 million on its network in the last three years, easily beating the £5.5 million of its closest competitor, Birmingham Council. Westminster Council’s spending alone accounted for 1.5% of the total national expenditure. The report, based on a series of freedom of information requests, noted that London as a whole had seen a 71% increase in the number of cameras operating since 2012. This is against the national trend, with councils countrywide decreasing their spending on CCTV 46.4% in the same period; with several councils, as with Westminster, scrapping their support completely. JP

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on manifestly dubious intelligence; hearsay, rumour and outright lies were presented as facts in a desperate bid to win support for attacks. While the Chilcot report outlines the extent to which the intelligence was faulty, it does not explicitly state that the UK government knew this to be the case at the time; in other words, the report fails to state unequivocally that Tony Blair lied. It is inconceivable that the British intelligence services didn’t know that the information presented about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was

fundamentally flawed and thus the excuse – still peddled by Tony Blair – that they relied in good faith on bad intelligence is preposterous. While the Chilcot report intimates towards this conclusion, it does not emphatically state that the campaign to justify the invasion constituted wilful deception on a grand scale. The fact that the architects of the invasion of Iraq are likely to evade international justice highlights the extent to which the international legal order is heavily politicised, inconsistent and

inherently weak. Previously, special courts have been established to examine wars in Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Rwanda. The establishment of these courts, however, requires the consent of the UN Security Council; as the UK has a permanent seat on the Council, it would veto any proposal to establish such a court for Iraq (as indeed would the US). Additionally, while the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction over the crime of aggression – though the precise nature of this crime remains in some doubt – it will not examine cases which pre-date 2017. It is unquestionably good that this report is in the public domain, but given the length of time it took and the enormous cost of the inquiry, the return is quite modest. The invasion of Iraq was a gross violation of international law, profoundly immoral and the catalyst for ruinous international instability which persists to this day; that the perpetrators of this catastrophe continue to evade punishment is a disgrace. Tony Blair’s reputation is in tatters, but this was surely the case before the Chilcot report was published; the findings have confirmed that his legacy will forever be associated with the debacle in Iraq but the thousands of victim’s families demand, and deserve, more than just further reputational costs. The views expressed in this article are my own

explore how these movies have changed our perceptions of warfare.

allow an intensity of performance otherwise impossible on stage. An emotional dramatic and musical expression of a time long past in a form impossible any time but now, produced by an Oscar-winning and Grammynominated team. For details of booking, venue and tour dates and venues from June 2016 see the website. www.symphonytoalostgeneration.com

by landscape artist Béatrice Saurel. It constitutes a vibrant tribute to the men who died during the Battle of the Somme by using the symbolism of the poppy for the British and the cornflower for the French. Visitors are invited to become involved in the Fields of Peace themselves by adding blue and red clothes. Saint-Pierre Park, Amiens

Myths and Legacies of the Battle of the Somme 21 September 2016, 7.00pm To round off the National Army Museum’s activities commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the museum has invited four experts to discuss the myths and legacies of the battle. Each speaker will present their views for 10 minutes, and we will then open up the floor to questions from the audience.

Writers in War 28 June 2016 to 16 November 2016 This exhibition studies the history of the Great War through the eyes and voices of the men who experienced war, from near or from far, on the front lines or in the rear, from the eve of the conflict to its aftermath, or indeed when the experience of war was continued in books and literature. The exhibition touches on the stories and works of great French, German and British authors including Blaise Cendrars, Ernst Jünger, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilfried Owen, Joë Bousquet, Georg Trakl, Pierre Mac Orlan and Jacques Vaché.

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Chilcot inquiry: expect no international justice

By Dr Aidan Hehir, Reader in International Relations, University of Westminster

hile the publication of the Chilcot report led to a media frenzy and much public outrage, as the dust settles the importance of the findings is likely to diminish. The report charts in forensic detail how Tony Blair’s government chose to engage in a needless war, but the Iraq Inquiry’s remit was circumscribed from the start, thereby rendering its findings largely impotent. In particular, the fact that the Inquiry was not mandated to comment on the legality of the 2003 invasion means that the report largely confirms what we already knew; it does not, unfortunately, increase the likelihood that Tony Blair, or his wider administration, will face legal censure for their actions. It has long been established that Tony Blair’s government based its justifications for supporting the US-led invasion

Somme Commemoration

hilst the majority of commemorations for the 100 year anniversary took place on July 1st, there are many exhibitions, talks and theatrical productions taking place across England and France; for those keen to learn more about the realities of the Battle, KCWToday have collected some of the most interesting events taking place in London. Real to Reel: A Century of War Movies at IWM London 1 July to 8 January Marking 100 years since The Battle of the Somme film release, this Imperial War Museum London exhibition explores the way in which the theme of war has fascinated audiences over the last century. Rediscover the real-life stories that have inspired film makers, go behind the scenes of the making of war films and

Imperial War Museum Lambeth Rd, London SE1 6HZ 020 7416 5000 Opening Hours: 10am-6pm Wounded: Conflict, Casualties and Care at the Science Museum 29 June to January 2018 Discover the innovations in medical techniques and technologies which came about as a result of the huge number of casualties following the Battle of the Somme and other First World War events. See historic objects from the Science Museum’s collection, from medical equipment to protective items, and learn about the presentday treatment of soldiers in this free exhibition. Science Museum Exhibition Rd, London SW7 2DD Open 10am-6pm Symphony to a Lost Generation The past screams to the present. The world’s first fully holographic production, a moving depiction of the human tragedy of the First World War. 250 actors and dancers appear beside the worldrenowned Vienna Philharmonic Choir and Lithuanian State Orchestra in Adam Donen’s epic symphony. The holograms

National Army Museum (Event hosted by the Army & Navy Club) 36-39 Pall Mall, London, SW1Y 5JN

Events in France Fields of Peace: Amiens 1 July 2016 to 15 September 2016 Fields of Peace (Champs de Paix) is an artistic installation designed and created

Historial de la Grande Guerre Péronne Castle 80200 Peronne Compiled By Max Feldman

Photograph © Marc Muller

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The Battle of The Somme

Zonnebeke. William Orpen. 1918

hen it comes to the First World War, The Battle of The Somme will always loom large in our cultural subconscious. One of the bloodiest battles in a war that had more in common with a meat grinder than it did with traditional armed combat; the various myths surrounding the battle have made it difficult to fully uncover the truth behind the four and a half months of continuous combat that ended with over a million dead and countless more injured. At 7.30am on July 1st 1916, a British infantry assault began after seven days of heavy artillery bombardment of the German lines. One commander was recorded as whooping “There’s not a German left in their trenches, our guns have blown them all to hell.” Only an hour later British casualties had reached 30,000, a figure that would climb up to 57,470 by the end of that long and bloody day; the worst in the entire history of the British Army. The intended decisive victory over the German Empire had collapsed into a quagmire of death that seemed to scoff at the very idea of victory. The generals presiding over the massacre seem unlikely to ever be forgiven by history (no matter what Michael Gove might say) but by the end of the battle, the German military had lost the vast majority of its trained officers and was forced into playing defensive until the last ditch Ludendorff offensive at the end of the war. In contrast the vast majority of the British dead came from the famous ‘Pals battalions’ of friends who’d joined up together and had received minimal military training. Their deaths, though tragic, were not crippling for the British army, whereas every well trained veteran German soldier who died, drained the German armies’ capacity to fight the war effectively. Historians have argued for decades whether the damage dealt to the German army’s officer corps justified the

Gassed. John Singer Sargent

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catastrophic loss of life and it’s unlikely that a true answer can ever be reached; whether the battle was a victory or defeat depends on personal perception. Field Marshall Haig hadn’t even wanted the attack to take place on the Somme, by far preferring Flanders as a prospective combat site, but he was outvoted by the French army, who felt that an attack on the Somme would better relieve the pressure of the German incursion into Verdun. Indeed Haig’s own instincts were to wait until later in

the year than July, regardless of where the attack took place, but the French not so subtly implied that faced with any delays or change of target they would simply surrender to the German army and leave the Western Front as a lost cause. As a result the British generals were presented with something of a fait accompli and committed to the attack, unfortunately the Germans were tipped off to an upcoming assault early and were able to dig in incredibly deep before the barrage. Anything less than a direct hit wouldn’t

destroy some of these more fortified positions; a fact that the first waves of British soldiers soon found out first hand in the form of a hail of machine gun bullets. The Battle of The Somme is a low point in the history of the 20th century, unthinkable suffering that still resonates with us today as in our honouring of the fallen for the battle’s centenary. Whatever your opinion on the battle itself, we must all band together to make sure that it can never happen again. Max Feldman

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Opinion & Comment

MARIUS BRILL’S

MEMEING OF LIFE Meme: . An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another...

So don’t tell me to move on

hey will talk of June 2016 as the month the country got kicked out of Europe twice. Once by Iceland, and once by the people who shop there. They will, because the gloves have been taken off and the fear of offering offence to others, the idea of politely watching your tongue or taking a moment to empathise with the feelings of others, has been well and truly Faraged. Just as one side of the Brexit argument believed the referendum meant that they could at last talk about immigration without being accused of racism, so the other side felt the result meant they could talk about the disenfranchised and least privileged as xenophobic fuckwits without being accused of snobbery. Political yes/no, in/ out, polarities only drive us to extremes; moderates are forced to make bed fellows with the abhorrent and extreme. We know that this country is no more home to seventeen million racist idiots as it is to an oxymoronic sixteen million elitists. And yet… all of us were required to make deals with our devils. Our elected decision makers washed their hands of their responsibilities and divided the country almost exactly in two as quickly and as farcically as Laputa. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), following a freak breakfasting accident, the tiny minded Lilliputians split into two factions on whether it is better to crack a boiled egg on the pointy end or the round end. The dominant Little-endians then fell into perpetual war with the Big-endians and with their neighbouring country Blefuscu where Big-ending was de rigueur. And even within the Little-endian political elite there were

high-heelers favoured by the emperor, and low-heelers who fought for people’s rights. In a vain, third way, attempt to smooth things out, the emperor’s son walked with a limp: sporting one low and one high heel. It was satire but if it all sounds strangely prescient it is because we have utterly failed to learn from history. So don’t tell me: “Accept it and move on.” One of a number of unhelpful phrases to become the memes of this summer; the anxious cry of our very own marginally dominant Little-endians. Should we? Indeed could we? Whether we trigger Article 50, whether we leave the EU or not, the severity of the divide that has been unmasked in this country will not heal in a few days with a thin “just buck up” message. In the end it’s not that “project fear” has somehow infected the panicking minds of the Big-endians, as Boris Johnson suggests. It is probably not the money markets or the coming scarcity of good cheap cleaners. It’s the certain death of the cultural expectations of half the country and the realisation of how fragile our parliamentary democracy actually is, and how easily it fell vulnerable to extremism, that has brought on what can only be described as grief. Classically, grief ’s five stages are, denial, anger, bargaining and depression before, apparently, acceptance. Certainly those first four have been more than evident but, on a national level, no one knows how long it might take to get to stage five. If jokes are what we do to try and nullify the despair of grief, even seventy years after WWII we haven’t reached the acceptance stage. We’re still finding it funny to imagine Angela Merkel visiting Greece and, when the passport official asks, “Occupation?” she replies, “No, just visiting.” So please don’t tell me to “Stop banging on about the referendum,” as if I had a choice. Brexit has triggered

something psychologists call ‘frequency illusion’. A phenomenon that occurs when your mind has focussed on something and then you consciously start noticing its occurrence more often. For example, when you’re thinking of buying a particular model of car, you suddenly start noticing that there are far more on the road than you thought before. The bitterness of our divided country has created a mass inextricable ‘frequency illusion’, it has become a prism that almost every view following it is inevitably seen through. Days after the referendum the Archbishop of Canterbury was interviewed about the vigil in remembrance of the Somme. “What do you think was the main cause of such bloodshed?” asked the interviewer. “Massive political misjudgement,” he replied, barely able to disguise the sub-text. So don’t tell me, “There were lies on both sides.” Yes there were, but Gove, Johnson and Farage’s were just far fatter. An objective observer might conclude that our government’s greatest failure, highlighted by Brexit, is depriving generations of a solid education that might encourage empathy and equip us to spot lies and consider consequences as clearly as the private school educated, despised, liberal elite that many Littleendians were protesting about with their votes, and which accounted for much of London’s Big-endian position. So don’t tell me: “What’s done is done.” Of course, with a narrow majority, the last thing you want is another go. “Move on” is the politically motivated advice of the victors and it will do nothing but infuriate those who are grieving. So don’t tell me, “If it was the other way round you would say we were undermining democracy if we campaigned for another referendum.” And yet, another referendum, just to make sure now we’re more aware of the outcome, would, of course, be no less democratic than the first, and perhaps more so. So give up the platitudes, and the urgings to move on. Let the Bigendians grieve and hope. It is a pyrrhic victory. We allowed our politicians to ignore their fundamental duties in this representative democracy, the mother of parliaments, and we all will pay for it. What are they if they are not, after all, employed by us to research, comprehend, and take time to consider as well as debate the merits of plans for our good. And yet they gave up and left the country to split down the middle. But in the turmoil that follows, that political elite which so many were voting against, will not fold or disappear but, like Dr Who, simply take on a shiny new face. So don’t tell me, “it’s just a period of uncertainty,” because there is one thing that is certain. This country, our institution of representative government, the whole idea of a United Kingdom, will never be the same again.

DUDLEY SUTTON’S I WISH I HAD WRITTEN THAT What’s the news W. S. Graham What’s the news, my bold Retreater from the wars? Play it on your fife And rest your stump a bit. You are the fork and knife That ate the storm and strife. Play your fife and I Will bring you chitterlins. He comes under the lamp And i will make the words. Settle your tender stump Out of the night’s damp. Elizabeth, move the pot Over nearer the fire. Rob Kerr (at least a part of him) has come back, He’s back to his own airt. Bring that flannel shirt. Hurry, Elizabeth, and bring Maggie and Sheila out. Old Maggie knows him well. Tell Shaun and make him bring His father’s varnished fiddle. Rob Kerr’s come over the hill. I’ll pull the little cork. And Shaun, fiddle easy. Young Sheila, swing him gently As the night goes, the night Humming from the sea. Rob Kerr’s come home to stay.

Worksheets (Malcolm Mooney’s Land) 1968 Airt, a direction or point of the compass, esp the direction of the wind. (Collins)

July/August 2016

Opinion & Comment The long hot summer By Peter Burden

ast weekend at HayonWye in the Welsh Marches, the sun burst through the blanket of grey porridge that customarily lurks over the top of the Black Mountains and for a brief interlude the grey stone of the dozing town was washed with warm, golden light. It wasn’t long, though, before the big black duvet of clouds welling up above Hay Bluff scudded over and dumped its cargo of big sploshy raindrops over us, and Summer 2016 resumed business as usual. I’m aware of course, that it is generally the prerogative of the editor of the Daily Express to fill his erudite organ with meteorological scare stories, frequently splashing (in Old Fleet Street speak) on the front page to grab the elusive attention of his demanding readership, but I’m prompted to talk about the weather now for reasons of healthy, oldfashioned nostalgia, as well as to provide respite from the torrent of indignation appearing elsewhere about the nation of xenophobic, financial illiterates that the UK (or, more accurately, 38% of its electorate) appears to have become. By the time you read this, my view might have been more widely mooted, but it is clear that a referendum on such a significant change in our constitution should have required the vote of over 50% of the total electorate, irrespective of what proportion of that electorate voted. As it is, 62% did not vote to leave Europe. However, moving on... Forty years ago, in 1976, I was the proprietor of what was sometimes described as a ‘cult jeans shop’, Midnight Blue on the Fulham Road. It stood a few doors east of Finch’s pub (now called the King’s Arms), where Oceana Dry Cleaners is now, on a strip of road then suffering from a rash of vacant shops. This stretch hadn’t become The Beach but there were already a few memoryjerking eateries, like the Hungry Horse, the Great American Disaster (where punters would queue for an hour to eat a ‘real American’ hamburger), the iconic Parson’s and, my default diner, the less creatively if aptly named Wine & Kebab. This was a more or less authentic Greek Cypriot establishment with the most odiferous loos in Chelsea (and that was saying something then). It offered a basic range of kleftiko, chewy kebabs and an endless supply of Metaxa Retsina to kill off the taste (and the taste buds). The maitre d’, a charming, not very tall son of Cyprus called Mr Luka, had been in charge since the early 50s, and always wore a dark suit (possible even a dinner jacket) and a

small, slightly greasy black bow tie. The cramped little restaurant was ill equipped to deal with the conditions that prevailed over summer 1976, the hottest in Britain that has ever been recorded. I lived for months in fetching denim cutoffs and Stars’n’Stripes gym shoes. We had a wheeze going at the time at Midnight Blue, taking old used jeans in P/X for new ones. This early example of green thinking and constructive recycling involved washing the old garments, chopping most of the leg off, sewing a neat seam and cuff and re-offering them as shorts. They were a big hit. But despite the scanty legwear, in the sultry summer evenings of ’76 it was almost impossible to find cool places to eat; cool meteorologically, not stylistically. The Wine & Kebab had become impossible; it was sweltering in there, like the Jermyn Street Turkish baths, so hot that the loos reached new heights of stench that permeated the whole place, and the candles in bottles that lit the tables started to droop, leaning over into an inverted U and spattering wax all over the never quite white table cloths. Forty years ago, air conditioning was scarcer than it is now, while the temperature was exceeding 90°F (32°C) for weeks on end, and not a drop of rain fell. The public were exhorted to save water by sharing baths, driving unwashed cars, putting bricks in their cisterns and watering their geraniums with used washing up water. In some parts of the country, people were striking up new and unexpected friendships around the standpipes from where they had to fetch their water in buckets. Every car that had a removable top went topless, with cassette players blasting out Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, ABBA’s Dancing Queen and, less helpfully, the Wurzels’ I’m a Cider Drinker. Driving across an arid, brown Salisbury Plain, listening to England’s cricketers being routed by Viv Richards’ West Indies, I was reminded of the parched tan foothills of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco where I’d previously travelled to buy djellabhas and leather belts (cured in camels’ urine, redolent of the W&K loos) to sell in Kensington Market. It was in that summer, too, that a friend, the actor John Challis, responding to his passion for gardening, chose to open a landscaping centre in Twickenham, to be confronted at every turn by acres of rock hard, widely cracked earth in which no plants could be planted, let alone grow. After four months of wielding pickaxes at unyielding ground, he’d no option but to resume his day job on telly, morphing ultimately into Boycie of Only Fools & Horses. The heat and drought were unrelenting and by August the crisis had intensified to the extent that Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan had to appoint a Minister for Drought, Denis Howell, who in desperation after

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk trying everything else, had to draft in some Aboriginal rainmakers from the Australian outback. With determination and an unexpected sense of irony, they ultimately produced a downpour at the end of the month, on August Bank Holiday. It was solemnly announced that it would take fifty years for reservoirs and aquifers to be replenished. It continued to pour without cease in the traditional English manner, and the emptiness of the reservoirs was never referred to again. Summer ’76 was a tricky time, but just now, I really do miss it.

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Getting away with murder? By Henry Tobias Jones

In the trial of Oscar Pistorius, we find ourselves looking down the unmistakable darkness of a double barrelled shotgun. In the left barrel, is the South African criminal justice system, which even by British standards seems eccentric, and down the right, we see all the modern trappings of a society fixated with celebrities and their otherworldly lives. During the first trial of Oscar Pistorius, Judge Thokozile Masipa gave the runner a culpable homicide sentence and five years. After being told to rethink her decision when the ruling was overturned and changed to murder, the Judge decided that there were “substantial and compelling circumstances” that allowed her to deviate from the prescribed 15year minimum sentence for murder. It is estimated that he will have to serve a minimum of 2-4 years in the hospital wing of the Kgosi Mampuru II jail. While discussing the case with my brother, who I think, like most people, has become too invested in the outcome of trial, he said the words: “a life for a life.” Admittedly, he meant a life sentence, but the implication is still there. If you take a life, you should pay for it. You will not rehabilitate an act of such wild stupidity, which was most likely driven by fear or anger, by putting the disabled antagonist into one of the world’s most violent prisons. The desire to see justice is overwhelming for most people. However, I have always

seen prisons differently. 1 in 5 prisoners are believed to be dyslexic, with around 50% suffering from low literacy and education. Nearly ¼ of male prisoners admit to having suffered from depression or anxiety in prison, with over 20% claiming to have attempted suicide. ‘Years in Prison’ is not a very valuable measure of punishment in my estimation. It appears to be a place to hide the hundreds of thousands of undesirables that our righteous sense of revenge prevents us from handing over to the NHS. I’m not at all in favour of turning the other cheek, but at some stage there has to be a line between wilful evil, a mistake, and a deterministic mental condition. I am convinced that the phenomenology of disability plays a major part in this case. It is understandably very difficult for someone like me, a fit and able man, to imagine the fear a double amputee would feel if they believed there was an intruder in their home. Likewise, while living in South East London doesn’t preclude me from worrying that my home may be broken into, I can hardly claim to know what it is like to live in a South African compound/home. Nevertheless, it is curious that I now find myself listening to friends’ claiming that Oscar Pistorius is just another case of “white privilege.” When I was growing up being disabled almost always qualified you to be a protected class. For obvious reasons, a white disabled person was somewhat shielded from the accusation that they had “had everything easy”. How one can distinguish between culpable homicide and murder in a case like this is beyond me. If he made a mistake that anybody, disabled or not, could have made then the outcome of the case has to reflect the severity of the mistake. Whereas if, as the Judge said, Pistorius’ disability created “substantial and compelling circumstances” then it may be fair to say, despite the fact he took a life, he was not in control of all his most culpable faculties. After all, for years people have been arguing that in America gun control is needed to stem the tide of maniacs going on rampages. But then even if we can exclude the effects of “identity politics”, would Pistorius have received the same sentence if he wasn’t a celebrity? This is where the defence of Mr Pistorius runs headlong into a rather nasty metaphor involving a rather large bus. Shooting a gun into a door without knowing who or what is behind it is the very height of criminal recklessness. Even the most hardened 'merican NRA nut would deride someone for shooting bullets at something you cannot see. Whether or not he killed his girlfriend through stupidity is ultimately irrelevant. While we all act unpredictably when we are afraid, I still wouldn’t want someone who acted as dangerously and irrationally as him to be free to walk the streets near my home.

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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News

BY EMMA FLYNN

Designing for flooding: Amphibious houses

of architects are developing designs that can work with water, rather than against it. Rather than simply hoping a big wall will keep the water out, architects are designing building systems that embrace and respond actively to water level change. Instead of building fixed barriers, which divide landscapes and communities, that are unable to he wettest ever December in respond to unpredictable weather events, the UK at the end of last year architects are looking towards integrated, saw 16,000 properties hit by flexible systems that can adapt to change. flooding, while more than 75,000 lost People like living close to water when electricity. As Storms Desmond, Eva it is perceived as safe. How can the threat and Frank brought devastating floods of rising water levels be turned into a to large parts of the UK, meteorologists benefit? In the UK, Baca Architects are recorded almost double the rain falling trying to answer this question. Specialists than average. According to the Met in waterfront architecture, and floodoffice, climate change has fundamentally resilient design, Baca have been pursuing changed the UK weather: “an extended work and research in the emerging field period of extreme rainfall is now seven of ‘aquatecture’ for over a decade. Their times more likely than in a world without human emissions or greenhouse recent book, with the same title, is the first to outline new ways of ‘designing gases”. for water’, and illustrates methods of Around 5.2 million properties in England are at risk of flooding, and many utilising water innovatively, efficiently and safely. In their own words: “water more homes and businesses continue to plays a vital role in shaping our built be built on flood plains across the UK. While this might sound nonsensical, this environment, as it has done for centuries. is where our settlements have historically We depend on it, we use it, we live with developed; along rivers and water courses it and we must respect it.” In 2015, Baca Architects completed where fresh water and food could the UK’s first Amphibious House. Located be found, and natural transportation on the banks of the River Thames in routes exploited. Flood plains continue the Buckinghamshire town of Marlow, to be attractive to developers as they the flood-resistant Amphibious House is tend to be flat, easy to build on, and designed to float and rise with the water close to established amenities and levels during times of flooding. Clad in services. The desperate need for new zinc shingles, the unique family home, homes in response to the UK’s acute rests upon an excavated ‘wet dock’ that housing crisis is also a major factor in is separated from the house to allow the forcing potentially unsuitable land into structure to float upwards, just like the development. While there are talks of constructing hull of a ship. As floodwaters fill the bigger and better flood barriers to protect fixed ‘dock’ beneath home, the water levels push the buoyant house upwards. our housing stock, most of these new houses will be constructed in exactly the To ensure that the home doesn’t float same way as the existing houses recently away, the structure is attached to four guideposts that extend upwards and devastated by the December floods. allow for a 2.5-meter-high floodwater With scientists uniformly agreeing that clearance. wet weather is likely to become much Further along the river, in Henleymore prevalent, it is clear that the issue on-Thames, the architects have secured of flooding is not going away. We were planning permission for a second ‘floodreminded of this only last month as embracing’ house. On Henley Island, people in London waded through deep floodwaters to polling stations to vote in Baca has designed a home in which the first floor is lifted above the 1 in 100 the EU referendum. That day, over one years flood level and is accessed directly month’s worth of rain fell in less than by bridge from the mainland, allowing 24 hours, flooding homes and causing severe travel delays. With increased flood the inhabitants to reach the home during risk and rising sea levels we need to learn a flood. Fitted with high performance flood-proof doors and windows, the how to live with water, not run from it. In response to this problem, a number ground floor is designed to keep floods

the Glasgow Science Centre at Pacific Quay. The floating plans create a new canal with a U-shaped floating street. The floating buildings would include a flexible mix of two and three storey glazed office buildings, studio flats and town houses with their own private moorings. New designs are one thing, but Baca are also looking at how you upgrade existing buildings to reduce future flood damage. They are exploring a number of strategies that would be possible to implement with the government’s grants of up to £5,000 for people directly affected by floods. These measures range from water resistant finishes to raising

parks and rain collecting squares. Importantly, these interventions not only manage the issue of flooding on the site, but also defer the problem further downstream, protecting the heart of the historic city. Another large-scale project by Baca, this time in the UK, proposes the world’s first floating leisure village. Planned at the Canting Basin, close to

plug sockets above flood levels, and installing drainage values and ventilation units to clear out water quickly. There are now many examples of amphibious houses around the world including one in New Orleans by the architecture practice Morphosis, and a number of precedents in Holland. These projects show that responses to catastrophe do not need to be solely defensive but can accept change and respond to it in a positive way. Nature can be both a friend and a foe, an asset and a threat. We should look at flood management as an opportunity to create new architectural experiences and beautiful places that embrace change.

Photographs © Baca Homes

BRICKS AND BRICKBATS

out for long periods of time. This notion of the ‘flood-embracing’ house is not just limited to small-scale luxury homes, Baca Architects are working on projects with volume house builders to explore how this thinking can be implemented on a larger scale. For their entry to a competition in Paris they have developed plans to maximise the potential of a site at risk of flooding from the river Seine. Rather than proposing expensive defence systems, they welcome water onto the site, proposing a network of watercourses that weave through the high density urban development. Baca integrate water management strategies into the landscape, creating flooding

July/August 2016

News

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

Photograph © Don and Bianca Barratt

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show By Don Grant

Thousands Protest in National Strike

against Education Cuts Bianca Barratt

Thousands of teachers and education professionals marched on Westminster on Tuesday the 5th of July in a show of solidarity against education secretary Nicky Morgan and her plans to cut funding in schools. As part of a national 24 hour strike organised by the largest UK teachers’ union, NUT, crowds gathered outside Broadcasting House on Regent Street to begin the protest at 12pm, with as many as 50% of state schools being affected by the strike. In scenes similar to those seen during the junior doctors’ strike and the ‘Remain in the EU’ demonstrations recently, a hugely diverse group of people came together in dispute against the Conservative Party and their recently published White Paper. Cries of ‘no ifs, no buts, no education cuts’ could be heard in the streets of Central London as teachers, head teachers, retirees and students spoke out against the cuts that will affect teaching and learning as well as pay and conditions in schools. Rahima, a key stage two teacher from East London was there with her six year old son, Binyamin, to show her support: ‘I’ve been a teacher for 12 years now and we can’t do the things we want to dothere’s just no money’ she said.

‘At the classroom level we can really see how much impact these decisions are having on our children’. A secondary teacher, Teresa, from North London explained the impact the cuts are having on the working conditions in schools: ‘It leads to so much pressure on teachers as schools are understaffed and workloads are huge. I feel that if we don’t do something now it’s just going to get worse which could lead to me deciding to leave the profession’. It seems that many teachers share these views as The Guardian stated recently that ‘nearly half of England’s teachers plan to leave in the next five years’. In reaction to the strike Nicky Morgan argued that it was ‘unnecessary’ and was ‘damaging [to the] reputation of the profession’, claiming that the ‘Conservative government has protected the schools’ budget’ when others have been cut. However, Oliver, a NUT rep for Lewisham, explained why it was so important that schools and teaching professionals supported the strike: ‘The rights we were granted were hard won by previous generations of teachers. If the government remove them and we don’t protest, we are saying they are not worth fighting for.’ ‘We must defend education.’ As the academic year has drawn to a close, NUT bosses have now entered discussions with the education department over how to reform these issues. But with fears growing of another economic collapse in the wake of Brexit, teaching professionals may have to work even harder to defend the department’s budget from austerity cuts.

his annual jamboree is not so much a flower show as a very large, sprawling trade fair. The sponsors are Viking Cruises and they seem quite proud of the fact that they can sail into some of the most beautiful places in the world and park a monstrous, top-heavy vessel the size of several blocks of flats from the Eastern bloc in the middle of Venice. They say they offer ‘culturally enriching and destination-focused journeys for guests who want to travel in comfort and style’. Not for the people on the ground. Gardening is big business, and along with cookery, spawns more books and TV programmes than any other genre. At Hampton Court, you can buy anything you want to do with the great outdoors, including barbecues, chimineas and firepits, so that you can combine gardening and cookery, whilst standing under an awning, canopy, pergola or parasol on the decking in the English summer rain, or lounge about in garden furniture, whilst listening to a tinkling water feature or fountain and inhaling the fragrant smell of fire-lighters and drinking Pimms. There is an enormous tent called the Floral Marquee on the other side of the Long Water, the size of an aircraft hanger, which is filled with all sorts of plants, all for sale. It is no coincidence that the acronym for National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies is NAFAS, as some of the designs are so naff they defy logic. Why muck about with perfectly beautiful flowers and plants to create something that is just plain ugly? Amongst the disgraceful, and shockingly awful stands selling tat, there were some very attractive show gardens, including a sunken one designed by Cherry Carmen at Living Landscapes on behalf of Perennial, a charity dedicated to helping all people who work in horticulture when times are tough. It comprised grey-green quartzrich schist natural stone surround and rills with water cascading down the walls to more hard landscaping at the base, but with lush, wide-leafed planting in

the beds, while at the top, London plane trees are underplanted with woodland shade wildflowers. There were a number of innovative front gardens, some more practical than others, but each with the ubiquitous ‘water feature’. It is difficult to go wrong with something called The Lavender Garden, which looked and smelt the part, and the densely-planted Garden for Crohn’s Disease was symbolic of the debilitating condition, with the inclusion of a fire-pit, which was meant to allude to where it strikes and how it feels. The Americans arrived at Hampton Court with a vengeance and with show gardens from Austin, Texas, Charleston, South Carolina and Oregon, each with its own character in terms of planting and design. The overall designer was the winner of Channel 4’s national garden design competition The Great Garden Challenge Sadie May Stowell, and her American sponsors must have been proud of her achievements. Not so, one fears, for the sponsors of some of the Conceptual Gardens, now in its tenth year. Using the hardest of landscaping ever seen outside of a Richard Serra exhibition, The Peacemaker Garden is represented by a giant heartbeat scan, which can only be seen from a hot-air balloon, which ‘aims to focus attention and sympathy on communities suffering violent outbursts across the world’. The planting is of species ‘that could cause harm or are poisonous, which represent the beauty of life, which is often dangerous and fragile’. P-lease! Another crass one is the Border Control Garden, actually sponsored by UNHCR, which manages to cram in all the available clichés, including a treacherous moat, barbed wire and rubble. The most specious is Wormhole (Foramen vermis), which comprises a 14ft high pyramid partially wrapped in fake grass, which was a symbolic interpretation of the universe, with portals running through its core, denoting mystical passages through time and space. The designers, John Humphreys and Andy Hyde, stated, ‘The pyramid is encircled by a pool of black water, anthracite and a ring of hot-looking translucent glass rocks and fiery-coloured flowers. They represent a dying star becoming an all-devouring black hole. The planting hints at the final solar flares of the doomed star.’ What drugs were these guys on? On the RHS website, it states, ‘Due to unforeseen circumstances this garden was not judged.’ I think they got off lightly. Photograph © Don Grant

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July/August April/May 2011 2016

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and seeking to improve diagnosis and treatment of heart valve disease and I am happy to support their campaign.” A recent survey revealed 94% of the over 60s in the UK do not know what aortic stenosis is, and 72% of over 60s reported that they rarely, or never, have their hearts listened to by a doctor. Once patients are diagnosed, Heart Valve Voice is also calling for a clearer pathway between primary, secondary and tertiary care to ensure more effective management of the disease across the UK. Consultant Cardiologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital and Heart Valve Voice Trustee, Shelley Rahman-Haley, said: “People with heart valve disease are not recognizing symptoms when they arise, or not receiving a quick heart check up when they visit their GP.” She continues to explain “there is significant under diagnosis as well as incorrect referrals due to a lack of education and awareness” which is why “Heart Valve Voice is campaigning for stethoscope checks and echocardiogram tests for heart valve disease to be incorporated as part of routine checks in the over 60s.” Wil Woan, Chief Executive of Heart Valve Voice said: “Heart Valve Voice is grateful for the support of Victoria Borwick MP, who is highlighting the importance of increased awareness and treatment of heart valve disease within their constituency. It’s hugely important that we continue to engage parliamentarians and policymakers to promote the use of the stethoscope and to work towards ensuring there is a clear and effective treatment pathway between primary care, secondary care and expert heart teams to ensure more effective management of the disease. The more we listen, the more lives we save.”

New £100,000 Royal Brompton Hospital playroom

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News Victoria Borwick MP raises awareness for heart valve check ups By Henry Tobias Jones

ensington MP, Victoria Borwick, showed her support for the charity, Heart Valve Voice, by having a cardiac specialist check her for heart valve disease. Heart valve disease is a progressive condition usually associated with ageing, where the valves which help the organ to function become damaged through wear and cease to function efficiently. Approximately 1 million people over 65 in the UK are affected by HVD. However, as part of the awareness raising project being supported by Victoria Borwick MP, Heart Valve Voice want to tell members of the public that a quick test using a stethoscope can be done by any qualified medical professional. A doctor can listen for a characteristic heart ‘murmur’ via a stethoscope, which is usually the first indication of a problem with the heart valves. This is often followed up with an echocardiogram test to confirm the diagnosis. Victoria Borwick said that “it was fascinating to learn more about heart valve disease at parliament,” adding “this disease affects a high proportion of the UK population, yet it’s worrying that there are such low levels of awareness and concern across the country.” She also said: “I welcome the work of Heart Valve Voice in raising awareness

Van Death! Halfords to the rescue Disaster! Our trusty delivery steed conked out. Step in Halfords Autocentre. With great efficiency and good humour they nursed it back to health and MOT. Grateful thanks to them. For MOT, service and repairs contact: John Thever T: 020 8870 4697, 271 Merton Rd, London SW18 5JS www.halfordsautocentres.com

Younger patients requiring treatment for serious heart and lung conditions will soon be able to benefit from a playroom after a £100,000 refurbishment. The Rose Ward playroom revamp was funded by The Brompton Fountain charity and the Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals Charity, with additional money raised by donations. The new facility will be used by play specialists on the ward to prepare children for their experiences in hospital and to help with their recovery. New features include a modern sensory area for young patients, important because sensory play has a crucial role in children’s development. It includes a flashing lightbox, infinity tunnel, bubble tube and interactive games. Another section of the playroom is aimed specifically at older children, with a large TV, PlayStation and DVDs designed to make teenagers feel more at home. A sliding glass door leads to a special ‘hub’, allowing two children with cystic fibrosis to be in the playroom at the same time, with one in the hub and the other in the main area. Previously only one child with the condition at a time could be in the playroom, because of the risk of cross infection. The new feature allows children

KCWToday’s printers, Mortons wins print award KCWToday’s printers, Morton’s, has won a major national honour at the 2016 News Awards for its production work on Fishing News. The award was presented by comedian Alan Davies of Jonathan Creek and QI fame. Davies hosted the April 27 event in front of 500 guests across the print and publishing industries, at the Lancaster London Hotel. Formerly the Newspaper Awards, the event celebrated the best in news media print, technology and business

with cystic fibrosis to play safely while reducing their feelings of isolation. Joanne Knowles has a two year old son, William, who has received care at Royal Brompton since birth. She said: “The new playroom is absolutely amazing. It’s really bright and welcoming and feels twice the size as it did before.” Rabie Al-Aina’s four-year-old son Omar is another patient. Mr Al-Aina added: “The playroom has been refurbished really nicely and the colours and decorations are beautiful. We are due to go home soon but Omar doesn’t want to leave, he’s very happy playing here.” Maxine Ovens, play service manager at Royal Brompton, said: “What we’ve achieved is amazing and we are so thankful for the donations that made the refurbishment possible. “Having a welcoming, well-equipped playroom is so important for the children staying in the hospital. In addition to keeping children occupied and distracted from their conditions, play relieves anxiety and helps children to cope with their recovery. “The playroom is a place where the hospital’s dedicated play team can ensure that children are fully prepared for their experiences in hospital and help them to understand their illnesses and the importance of their medication in a relaxed, non-clinical environment. “This is especially vital for many patients treated at Royal Brompton who spend a lot of time in hospital due to the serious nature of their heart and lung conditions. Everyone is very excited to make the most of the playroom’s new features.”

innovation focusing on production rather than editorial. The Horncastle-based organisation saw off stiff competition to see the publication named as Niche Market Newspaper of the Year. “We’re committed to achieving the highest standards for our clients, and we’re delighted to have been recognised for our work. It’s an achievement just to be nominated at the news awards, so to win is a testament to the efforts and expertise of all involved,” Mortons Print director Steve Wickwar said: “Mortons has a long history of involvement with regional newspapers, including KCWToday, and is a leading independent in contract print work, having also won the Regional Newspaper Printer of the Year category and received further praise for its production of Cage & Aviary Birds.”

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Statue & Blue Plaque Blue Plaque: Napoleon III

STATUES Photograph © Don Grant

1808-1873

The Burghers of Calais

By Auguste Rodin Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster

fter victory in the Battle of Crécy during the Hundred Years War, England’s Edward III laid siege to Calais, while Philip VI of France ordered the city to hold out at all costs. Philip failed to lift the siege and starvation eventually forced the city to surrender. Edward offered to spare the people of the city if six of its key leaders would surrender themselves to him. He demanded that they walk out wearing nooses around their necks, and carrying the keys to the city and the citadel. One of the wealthiest of the town leaders, Eustache de Saint Pierre, volunteered first, and five other burghers, Jean d’Aire, Andrieu d’Andres, Jean de Fiennes, and Pierre and Jacques de Wissant, joined him. Saint Pierre led these brave volunteers to the city gates, emaciated and mostly dressed in rags, and although they expected to be executed, their lives were spared by the intervention of England’s queen, Philippa of Hainault. She persuaded her husband to exercise mercy by claiming that their deaths would be a bad omen for her unborn child. Edward agreed, and the townfolk of Calais were allowed their freedom. Having had their lives spared, she removed the burghers’ nooses, gave them fresh clothes and dinner, and handed them money, before having

them escorted out of the camp. As it happened, her son, Thomas of Windsor, only lived for one year. Henry Moore described the group as the best public sculpture in London, adding, ‘I began to realise that a lot of things one might be using and being influenced by are, compared with Rodin, altogether too easy. So that as time has gone on, my admiration for Rodin has grown and grown.’ Rodin was commissioned to present a sculpture by the City of Calais in 1884, and the work was finished and installed in 1889. There were initially 6 casts made, and the British Government purchased one in 1911 and positioned it in Victoria Tower Gardens in 1915, which themselves were created in the 1870s by Joseph Bazalgette, instigator of London’s sewage system. The first cast was displayed to public acclaim in 1889 in Calais, but not where Rodin wanted it and displayed on a plinth. He wanted it controversially mounted at ground level so that viewers could ‘penetrate to the heart of the subject’. The subject is a group of six men, but they are presented as neither united nor heroic, each isolated from each other and displaying a mixture of defeat and self-sacrifice, as they walk to their imminent deaths. It is a powerful work and the bronze sculpture weighs in at 2 tonnes, with the tallest figure being 2 metres tall. Originally, the six figures were placed on an enormous plinth in front of the Houses of Parliament, but in 1956, after protests about its height, all but the top section was removed, still retaining the inscription carved by Eric Gill. Because of the intertwined bodies and different stances each man adopts, it is quite difficult to ‘read’ as an entity, but as one wanders around it, more aspects and details are revealed, making it one of the most dynamic statues we have as a nation. Don Grant

Charles Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, also known as Napoleon III, Emperor, is honoured with a Blue Plaque at 1c King Street. St James’s. Westminster. SW1 6QG. It was erected by the Royal Society of Arts in 1867 and is the oldest surviving Blue Plaque, and the only one awarded during the lifetime of the recipient. Louis-Napoleon was the last Monarch of France and the nephew of Napoleon I. Louis-Napoleon’s father was the younger brother of Napoleon 1 and his mother was Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter by the first marriage of Napoleon I’s wife, Josephine de Beauharnais. As she was later infertile, she thought this son would be a suitable heir to Napoleon and the dynasty. She gave birth to him in Paris and he was brought up in exile. He was educated at the Gymnasium School in Augsburg. Bavaria. He spent time with his mother in Switzerland and his father was often absent. He was officially trained in the Swiss Army. A big influence in the young Louis-Napoleon’s life was a home tutor, Philippe Le Bas, who taught him radical politics. When he later travelled to Rome to learn Italian and look at ruins he became involved with the Carbonari, a secret, revolutionary society. Louis-Napoleon had one aim during his life, to regain the French throne. He never wavered from this aim and in 1832 he wrote literary and political articles to gain attention. Before the coup against the Government in 1848 and before a new Republic was established, LouisNapoleon resided in England, as he was considered to be a distraction during the establishing of the new Government of

France. After the uprising, he was the first to be elected by direct popular vote as President of the 2nd Republic in 1850. Two years later he was declared Emperor, a position he held for eighteen years, thus being the longest serving Head of State since the French Revolution. He had gained a landslide victory with seventy five percent of the vote. LouisNapoleon’s name evoked the glories of his Uncle and he promoted himself as, “All Things to All Men”. At first his opponents had harsh treatment, imprisonment and exile for many, but over a period of time he became more liberal. Louis-Napoleon reconstructed Paris with his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann. Banking was modernised, railways consolidated, Gare du Nord and Gare de Lyon built, French merchant shipping expanded. Modern agriculture and free trade was established. A new aqueduct, reservoir and gas pipes for street lighting were created. Colonies in Asia, the Pacific and Africa were increased. Louis-Napoleon did not neglect the Arts, he built the Paris Opera House. Serious political problems emanated from Prussia as the Chancellor, Bismarck sought German unification under Prussian leadership. Prussia had been very successful in Austria during the Austro-Prussian War. Louis-Napoleon could foresee France’s domination of Europe being eroded by Prussia. In 1870 he initiated the Franco-Prussian War without allies and military forces which were inferior. As expected, defeat came swiftly at the Battle of Sedan. Louis-Napoleon was captured and exiled. This defeat spelt disaster for France and made LouisNapoleon instrumental in creating the German Empire which replaced France as the major land power in Europe and continued until World War 1. During his time in London, Louis Napoleon was very popular, he took his place in society and met many eminent politicians. He was visited by Queen Victoria and accepted as an Emperor in European Courts. Having married, he had a son, a British Army Officer who died fighting the Zulus in 1879. Louis-Napoleon died in Chislehurst, London and was initially buried at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Chislehurst. He was later moved at his wife’s request to the Imperial Crypt, St Michael’s Abbey. Farnborough, where he rests in peace with his son. Marian Maitland

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Berwick Street Market is simply unique But not for long, it would seem. By Jim Slattery

Hello Robin. (And goodbye, Boris.) Today, June 30th 2016, (the day of ‘termination’ for arch London ‘moderniser’, Tory would-be leader and dangerous clown Boris Johnson) I went to talk to Robin Smith of Berwick Street Traders, an organisation (soon to be a

society) formed by this elfin ex-adman and brand development expert, who now runs the Berwick Street campaign to save the market from extinction. Or, more precisely, corporatisation. It was a slightly sombre affair initially. Robin, who runs a farmers market-style dairy stall, told me that today was his ‘termination day’. (His four-month contract with Westminster Council was up. But temporarily, this is ‘on hold’.) This phrase reverberated in my mind. But Robin warmed to his numerous themes, and here’s a summation of what he said to me. “Berwick Street market is about 300 years old, officially dating back to 1778. Local traders, some Huguenots included. started it when the goods in their shops spilled out onto trestles in the street.” “Like many of the London markets at the time, it featured famous, wellfrequented brothels”, very different kinds of ‘stews’ than those found there today in the various street food stalls heavily patronised by the surviving film, video, advertising and media companies in the area. “There were other, similar markets nearby, in Haymarket for example, and Broadwick Street market. Though Broadwick Street never really took off.”

How we got here. Berwick Street market has thrived in all its free and easy manifestations, populated in turn by the successive waves of migrants to London over the intervening centuries till right now. Russian Jews, Italian and French immigrants up to the 20th Century, and, since the Second World War, Middle Eastern, African and Asian stallholders manned the stalls. The surrounding shops, studios and production companies that line the street (or is it really a market?) added extra colour. But now, the majority of the stallholders hold the hereditary leases that the councillors can’t do anything about; yet. If the developers and their front men get their way, these will be changed to enable one-year terminations. That way, there’ll be a vacant, ‘free’ space for the likes of Groupe Geraud to do with as they wish. Short term four-month licences are

now given to recent stallholders, despite the fact that some have been here for up to ten years. “And they are being ‘terminated’ as we speak. This relentless process is leaving the market gradually emptier and emptier…” continues Robin.

at a stroke” and with Robin Smith in command of the petition to save the market, the likes of long-term fruit, veg and flower stallholders Beefy, Micky, Mark (‘they’ll only get me out of here with a bullet in my brain’) and Jim are determined, if they go down at all, to go down fighting. “35,000 signatures on our petition, and brilliant support from The Guardian, The Evening Standard, London Radio Live and West End News” says Robin. “Another good thing about all of this is that all the traders have come together. This place is a microcosm of today’s London. “People don’t realise that before this year, Westminster Council were supportive of our self-generated plans for a truly local market in Berwick Street. One that serves this square mile, Soho, with fresh food, fresh fruit and veg, fresh meat, locally sourced when possible, and Photographs © Abigail Hedderwick 2016

f Westminster councillors, and people like French ‘street market’ multinational Groupe Geraud and Shaftesbury PLC have their way, this beating human heart of Soho’s streets will soon become yet another example of the homogenised, cleaned-up, gentrified and ‘improved’ London street markets of Spitalfields, Covent Garden, and soon, I guess, Portobello. Brixton Market has already succumbed to the charms of Groupe Geraud (see geraud.co.uk/our-markets). And if this type of large corporation and one-time philanthropic but now mercilessly greedy London property company triumphs, every slightly scruffy London landmark of true banter, communalism and value will simply disappear. As will the cheap apparel, freshly cooked food, meat, fruit and veg and farmer’s produce they now provide to a growing band of enthusiasts and their traditional customers, the inner city residents and workers who still crowd into them. Instead, these places will become the homes of loss-leading corporate plate glass chains, coffee shops and international fast food concessions. Plus, of course, imported items, clothes, ‘antique’ and trinket stalls. And they’ll be populated largely by smartphone wielding, fast food seeking, aimless clumps of tourists, who often don’t buy that much or certainly care much about the togetherness, comedy and conversation that true London markets provide. Plus the world’s wealthy, of course.

And what awaits us. Berwick Street Market is now a slightly sad but heroic vestige of its former self, surrounded by the looming superstructure and pneumatic drill clatter of rapidly developing high rise flats. All being readied for the buy to leave merchants and moneyed foreigners who will shortly add this area to their portfolios in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Emirates. They will luxuriate, if they ever bother coming to London, in flats that were once council flats, now nearly emptied of their original inhabitants like Jeffrey Barnard, who once lived in the tower block you can see in the photographs, directly behind the stalls. The new ‘apartments’ are all well on their way to being ready for their new rich owners. Dame Shirley Porter would have been delighted. And Boris, presumably, would be too, were he not now twirling at the end of a rope on a political gibbet he didn’t realise he was actually building for himself.

Vive La Resistance, Soho style! But the Berwick Street traders are resisting execution, as only Londoners can. Unified by the threat to their livelihood, “rents are going up threefold

the possibility of being a showcase for independent producers worldwide. “With a programme to help local young people from St Barnabas find work and get a training in the market too. They were enthusiastic about all of it, until this year. Then it all went quiet. “That’s when the notices of termination started coming in. In March 2016, four months ago, we were all given notice of a ‘consultation period’ ending in June. Like now! “The councillors (one I could name is Daniel Astaire) said that they needed the market ‘to respond’. Well, we have responded. This is our response.” I strolled away from Robin, spoke to a few of the remaining stallholders, when I asked them to smile for the camera, and reflected on one of the main points that Robin made in his brief chat with me. The Conversation. “Soho is all about conversation. If we lose the market, if we lose the conversation that makes this place and city what it is, then we lose Soho. If we’re driven out by rents that only loss-leading corporations can afford, we’re sunk.” I wonder if the cream of the crop of the Tory councillors running Westminster, as well as their developer mates, are listening to this conversation now?

July/August April/May 2011 2016

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International

Macedonia: Colourful Revolution By Zaneta Skerlev

hey come from all walks of life. Young couples, pensioners, students, manual workers, the unemployed, professors, doctors. And from all ethnic communities; Macedonians; Albanians; Turks; Serbs; Vlachs; Romas… They are the ones brave enough to publicly show resistance against the government of the Republic of Macedonia, the ones who have decided that they have lived long enough in fear of speaking up. And they have started to chant, to march and, to paint. Here the protesters are not merely adopting colour as symbol, but as a physical means to leave a permanent reminder that their message won’t fade as with past colour revolutions. The firm and often dictatorial rule of the ex-Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski (who still pulls all the strings) and his government have divided this poor country in the South East of Europe. They declared everyone who didn’t agree with them “traitors” and the so called traitors suffered the consequences. Many businesses were destroyed, people’s livelihoods changed for the worse and Macedonia has experienced one of the greatest “brain drains” of its young minds in recent history as unemployment reached more than 50% for 15-24 years olds. It took a lot of courage and guts for people to come out and show that they are not afraid and that they have had enough. People have been on the streets almost every evening since April 2016, when President Gjorge Ivanov decided to pardon 56 politicians facing corruption charges, almost all of them

from the ruling party. This happened after a wiretapping scandal last year, which publicly revealed audio recordings depicting a variety of alleged crimes, from electoral fraud and corruption, to plotting the cover-up of a murder. An independent Special Prosecution office was set up to deal with these charges under a mandate from Europe and the US. Its work has been seriously blocked by the government; and the president’s amnesty, although later revoked, showed the unwillingness of the government to accept justice.

paint, it will be almost impossible to wash it off. The same goes for the so called Triumphant gate and the Parliament building. Even the Prime Minister’s office, now wrapped in a thick white layer made to look like the US White House was attacked (called the Cream Cake by the locals). It now looks like a fruit cake. The colourful revolution has even put cherries on top of it. Some analysts say colour revolutions as a non-violent resistance against corrupt and authoritarian governments are not always successful, as the rule of law rarely takes hold. But the Macedonian Colourful Revolution has so far created a strong pressure for change and it has shown that it is a force to be reckoned with; some of those imprisoned during the protests have now been freed. And most importantly, it has shown something new in Macedonia, the power of unity between the previously opposed ethnic minorities. For the first time hope and change is on the horizon.

Cruise Ships for the Homeless By Joseph Palasz

Photographs © Kate Punard

Photographs © Tomislav Georgiev

The situation is now in disarray; many international mediators are coming and going, the political parties are trying to outsmart each other, the government is still making empty promises and the country is sinking deeper into crisis. But the protestors are still out on the streets, chanting, making noise, blowing whistles and vuvuzelas and using paint as their weapon. They are chanting “No justice-No Peace” and repainting the new expensive baroque buildings and monuments, which the government controversially built without any accountability. Some of the buildings, like the Ministry of Justice, once a modern building and freshly wrapped in a neoclassical shell, has been a favourite target of the colourful revolutionaries. It looks like the facade has soaked up so much

Businessmen in the city of Auckland, New Zealand, have come up with a bizarre new solution to the growing problem of homelessness and astronomical property prices: house the homeless in cruise ships. Although the proposal may seem outlandish, businessman Garry House has argued the idea makes practical sense. House, in conjunction with several other business people, has argued that purchasing an outdated 400-bed passenger cruise liner from Italy is an economical solution to the city’s growing homeless epidemic. With an average house price of more than NZ$940,000 (£498,000), Auckland property is amongst the most expensive in the world. Research from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey 2014 found that Auckland is one of the world’s areas, along with Vancouver, Sydney, San Francisco and London, to be facing a growing disparity between median household incomes and median house prices. House estimates that the initial cost of purchasing and docking the cruise ship would be around NZ$5m. That is, the cost of around 5 average homes in Auckland. House commented: “Living on a cruise ship is not a long-term solution but things are so bad for so many families now it could help ease the pressure for two or three years while longer-term strategies are put into place.” The idea however has drawn widespread criticism. Campbell Roberts, from the Salvation Army, has argued New Zealand must ‘face up’ to its housing crisis and find long term solutions. “A cruise ship is fine for a month, but to live on it for any longer would be a strange experience for the inhabitants and it would have no sense of normality about it. I am fully supportive of a creative solution to this problem but I don’t think a cruise ship is the answer,” Roberts commented. Still, back here in England, with government figures showing homelessness rates have risen 54 per cent since 2010, and the average price of a flat in London costing £476,450, many will wonder if a ‘creative solution’ is exactly what is called for.

July/August 2016

International Rio Superbug By Joseph Palasz

esearchers have discovered a virulent strain of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the oceans surrounding Rio de Janeiro, just one month before the city is set to host the 2016 Olympics. The new findings have stoked fears over the safety of this year’s games and reaffirmed the threat posed by the evolution of drug resistant bacteria. UK Prime Minster David Cameron has warned of the potential dire consequences of ignoring the global problem of antimicrobial resistance, warning: “If we fail to act, we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario where antibiotics no longer work and we are cast back into the dark ages of medicine.” Earlier in the year a report led by the economist Lord Jim O’Neill was published which details how pharmaceutical companies across the world have

British Troops deployed in Eastern Europe By Max Feldman

Hundreds of British troops are set to be deployed to eastern Europe as part of a show of strength by NATO intended to fend off potential Russian Aggression. A 500-strong battalion is earmarked for Estonia with a further 150 troops to be stationed in Poland “on an enduring basis”. Britain will be assuming control of the NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, as of 2017 which will have 3,000 troops in the UK and Germany ready to move with as little as five days’

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk underinvested in the development of new antibiotics, preferring to focus on more profitable medical research. A toxic mixture of the overuse of antibiotics already on the market and the undersupply of new drugs, O’Neill warns, could lead to the deaths of up to 10m people a year by 2050. This September, the United Nations will hold a high-level meeting to form their response to the global antibiotics time bomb. Amid political unrest, the Brazilian games have already faced major health concerns this year over the possible spread of the Zika virus. Surely the last thing the game’s organisers will wish is to become embroiled in the larger antibiotic crisis. Yet, with nearly 70% of sewage in Rio, including medical waste, being poured into Guanabara Bay, the venue for this year’s sailing competitions, many will think the new discovery is far from surprising. As part of their Olympic bid, Rio promised to curb pollution in the Bay by 80%. However, it has become clear this target will not be met. The former chief executive of World Sailing, Peter Sowrey, was reportedly fired earlier in the year for his opposition to the polluted venue. Rio’s Mayor, Eduardo Paes, has apologised to athletes for the state of the venue, saying: “I am sorry that we did not use the games to get Guanabara Bay completely clean.” As athletes arrived to sail in the filthy waters, finding their white boats stained with brown sludge, “not completely clean” may feel like a bit of an understatement.

notice. The decision is thought to have been inspired by the continuing concerns over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s potential intentions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Russia has criticised the move as a breach of the 1997 Founding Act, but NATO have argued that the changing security climate justifies the decision. Prime Minister David Cameron hailed the decision “Actions speak louder than words and the UK is proud to be taking the lead role, deploying troops across Eastern Europe. It is yet another example of the UK leading in NATO.” Whilst Defence Secretary Michael Fallon emphasised that “just because we are leaving the European Union, that doesn’t mean that Britain will be abandoning Europe.” President Obama also reassured the 28-member alliance that Brexit will not affect the collective strength of the 28-member alliance.

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Christo’s Floating Piers By Henry Tobias Jones

The cultural event of the summer recently took place on Lake Iseo, Italy, attracting 1.2 million visitors in just 16 days. Bulgarian born American artist, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (often known simply as Christo), unveiled his newest piece, The Floating Piers, on June 18th, drawing 270,000 people in the first 5 days. The artwork involved a 3km long walkway extending out across the lake between Sulzano, Monte Isola and the island of San Paolo. The Floating Piers, which were constructed using 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes, gave visitors the chance to really walk on water. The modular floating docking system was additionally covered in over 100,000 square meters of saffron coloured fabric which covered the 3km of piers and 2.5km of pedestrian streets. “Like all of our projects, The Floating Piers were absolutely free and open to the public,” said Christo. “There were no tickets, no openings, no reservations and no owners. The Floating Piers were an extension of the street and belonged to everyone.” “Those who experienced The Floating Piers felt like they were walking on water, or perhaps the back of a whale,” said Christo. “The light and water transformed the bright yellow fabric to shades of red and gold throughout the sixteen days.” The concept behind The Floating Piers was born in 1970 when Christo and his late wife and creative partner, JeanneClaude, decided that Lake Iseo would make the most inspiring location for the project. Christo financed the entire cost of The Floating Piers, costing approximately €18 million.The artist does not accept sponsorship, meaning Christo additionally paid for planned support for local government agencies such as extra police, ambulances and fire personnel

as well as for extra garbage removal and portable toilets. The artwork was also Christo’s first large-scale project since Jeanne-Claude’s death as the result of complications of a brain aneurysm in 2009. “Cristo is like a virus,” the journalist and volunteer at Christo’s new artwork, Evgenia Atanassova, tells me, “when you start following his work you just want to keep going.” Evgenia explains the willingness of people to be involved in Christo’s work, with many trained divers offering their services to secure the floating piers to the lake bed. “I heard that they were looking for people with boat licenses to help with the project,” Evgenia says of herself, “so I got one so that I could be involved.” “It really feels like a once in a lifetime experience,” she adds, “because the fabric is different when wet, it is a work of art which is always changing.” Finally, Evgenia tells me that she can even see it from her hotel room terrace, explaining the scale of the project saying “it is extreme in all aspects.” The project closed on the 3rd July and has been dismantled, with many of the items used to create the work being recycled, as well as some currently being sold on ebay.

July/August April/May 2011 2016

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Business & Finance What do the choppy waters of Brexit mean for Investors?

By Gina Miller

forecasting, no one has a crystal ball. We have seen drops in markets but not as dire as many experts were predicting before the EU referendum vote. I was not surprised as we have not yet left the EU and have no idea what the eventual negotiated leave package will look like in two years or more. The only near certainty, in my view, is that overall volatility of markets is likely to rise and, therefore, the fundamental investment questions are: How to dampen down overall risk and invest in different assets that are likely to react by differing degrees and in different directions to unpredictable events?

ne year, one month, much less one week ago, we would never have imagined we would be experiencing the old Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’. The resultant levels of political risk premium and inevitably uncertainty has undoubtedly raised many questions about investing. To ride the waves of uncertainty in the short to mid-term, investors need to focus on the longer term, remain diligent and stay calm. A common theme of the referendum was that ‘expert’ views have frequently been wrong but as with any financial

For what we are about to receive: the Accelerated Payment Notice By John Handley and Douglas Shanks

I think I’m most shocked about being as shocked as I am that we’re leaving. In common with most tax practitioners I have a profound distrust of our own Exchequer, with good cause. I am dismayed that a legislature that regularly rebuked an executive for exceeding its bounds in years gone by is now craven. I have some sympathy with the Glaswegian woman who said she’d rather be downtrodden by her own than abused by a foreign power. Sadly, I think reality for the British tax payer, perhaps still worse, the English & Welsh taxpayer, is going to be more than a dose. The innocent-sounding Accelerated Payment Notice (APN) gives the revenue the right to demand payment while the argument rages about whether the tax is due. It is frankly outrageous but no-one is going to stand up for the rights

How can I profit from such times of uncertainty? At SCM Direct.com we believe the answer is diversification across and within asset categories. Take the Brexit Referendum; for a GBP sterling investor, many of the falls in overseas markets have been reduced partially or fully by the falls in sterling. Within the UK market, the impact on the largest UK stocks, in which our UK equity exposure is focused, has been less than smaller/ medium sized companies, due to their greater overseas exposure. Even though the headline level of the FTSE is bobbing around like a cork in of people whose affairs are sufficiently complicated for the revenue to feel the need to apply APNs. Our major concern these days are the insidious way APNs are being introduced and the number of bankruptcies that will result. Basically there is a Court of Appeal pronouncement due in December. That begs the question of what happens after Brexit? Although not actually linked, the European Court of Justice’s days are numbered. Most of the Brexit rhetoric (Brexorhetoric?) concerns re-embracing our own judiciary. So an appeal to ECJ will not be possible since presumably it will be log-jammed, making the House of Lackies the final arbiter again. The point about APNs is that they are prepared in an HMRC silo, the only right of appeal being if the numbers are wrong. You object and another HMRC bunker then looks at it. Supposedly this is independent but in practice since these are pen-pushers and not technical, the figures come from the caseworker and you guessed it, the objection is referred back to the caseworker for his comments on his original judgement of the figures! Good luck in getting any significant alteration especially as the legislation refers to best judgement so he can make up anything he wants. This is the worst case of HMRC running a totally biased system I have come across. Take an example of someone

a bath, as at the 30 June 2016, the proof of our approach is that all three of the SCM Direct Portfolios are up. In terms of benefiting from uncertain times, our investment strategy is simple; be well diversified, seek out assets attractive on old fashioned fundamental yardsticks and take advantage of market opportunities as they present themselves. The highly successful Warren Buffett, who is a master at outperforming the market during bad times, has two golden rules: 1. Don’t panic and sell. The absolute worst thing investors can do is panic and sell. History shows stock market corrections, and even crashes, are a

investing in a film, acceptable to the Government with a view to support British films. They made an investment which has tax benefits. The investment is geared and used to purchase or make films. In the past, HMRC would allow a provisional claim for losses and accept a postponement of tax. Everyone accepted that if the arrangement proved nontax effective for whatever reason, the tax would need to be paid and HMRC charged interest thereon. Penalties were generally not appropriate if a favourable opinion was obtained from Counsel. Under the APN regime you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent. Tax needs to be paid up-front and if you win the case against HMRC they pay you interest albeit at a much reduced rate compared to that which they charge if you get it wrong. If you combine this with the fact that there is no appeals process AND it is retrospective in effect going back to 2004, I believe this to be the most draconian piece of legislation ever to be enacted, and by a Tory Chancellor! We don’t have time to go into the issuing of follower notices… you’ve three guesses whether it’s going to get better or worse. Douglas Shanks was chatting to John Handley, DSC Metropolitan’s absolutely furious partner

normal part of a healthy stock market. 2. Buy cheap, sell high. Market downturns should be embraced as a time to buy cheap. In Buffett’s words, “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it’s marked down.” I appreciate it takes nerves of steel to put money into a falling market, as you may not see the gain next week, next month, or even next year, but history has shown positive returns do result in the longer term. Gina Miller. Founder SCM Direct.com & the True and Fair Campaign

Strenuous efforts are made by Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today newspaper to ensure that the content and information is correct. Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today newspaper reserves the right to report unsolicited material being sent through to the publication. Personal views expressed in this newspaper are solely those of the respective contributors and do not reflect those of the publishers or its agents. All materials sent to Kensington Chelsea & Westminster Today are at the suppliers’ risk. Reproduction in whole or in part of this publication is strictly prohibited without prior consent. The appearance of advertising in this newspaper, including inserts or supplements, does not constitute endorsement by Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today of the products or services advertised.

July/August 2016

Business & Finance

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

Extending your stay

K, the country has spoken and we’re out. But despite Brexit, the world hasn’t come to an end and life goes on. And with the residential property market taking a breath, now could be the right time to take stock and think about the property you own. It’s surprising how time flies, so if you are one of the many thousands who should be considering extending your lease, ask yourself ‘when did I buy this flat?’ and ‘how long is there left on the lease term?’ Whether you’ve owned your flat for two, 10, 20 years or more, what’s certain is that the term of your lease is reducing every day which may have the effect of decreasing the flat’s value. We have legislation which grants a tenant who has owned a long lease on a flat for more than two years the right to purchase a 90‐year lease extension. The right can add or restore value to the flat, and while, as with everything in life, there is a cost (which will vary depending on the value of your flat and the unexpired term of your existing lease) you have nothing to lose in finding out what sort of sums are involved.

The first step is to find out the length of the unexpired term of your lease. You should have a copy of your lease or your property title, but if you haven’t you can obtain one from the Land Registry’s website for a nominal cost. A quick calculation carried out online will give you a guide on the anticipated premium your landlord could charge for the lease extension. However, if you do proceed, you will need to obtain a proper valuation from a surveyor. Whilst the right is to acquire a lease extension, in reality the existing lease will be surrendered and a new lease granted for a term of the existing lease plus an additional 90 years. Any ground rent payable will be reduced to a peppercorn (i.e. a nil ground rent), and service charges still continue to be payable. In

addition to the premium, the tenant is responsible for the landlord’s reasonable costs (legal and surveyor’s fees) plus the tenant’s own adviser’s fees. In some instances, depending on the amount of the premium paid, Stamp Duty Land Tax may also be payable. There are time deadlines imposed by statute, which are helpful in keeping the momentum of the lease extension procedure (rarely a speedy process). It is essential that you comply with the deadlines; missing a deadline or an error on a notice can, in certain circumstances, prevent a tenant from making an application for a lease extension for a further period of 12 months. It is therefore important to instruct specialist solicitors. Don’t despair if you are thinking

of selling your flat soon. Your flat can be sold with the benefit of a lease extension. If you have owned your flat for more than two years, you can serve the preliminary notice on the landlord to start the lease extension process. On completion of the sale of the property, the buyer can “step into your shoes” and carry on with the lease extension process, with the buyer taking over responsibility for payment of all the costs involved. One way of looking at it is if there are two identical flats being sold in a building, one with a lease term of 170 years, the other with a term of 78 years, which one would be the easier to sell? Jayne Kemsley, Private Property Partner, Thrings

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July/August 2016

Business & Finance

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk Photographs © Diane Patrice

Stephen Howlett, Peabody CEO By Henry Tobias Jones

ondon appears to be growing ungainly tusks, as each week a new ivory tower erupts into our skyline. A constant cause of controversy and debate, construction in London is one of the capital’s most vital, and all encapsulating industries, affecting everyone who lives here. For the vast majority, homes in London are not investment opportunities, and have nothing to do with climbing up a ladder, except when they do DIY. Property is about more than just a place to hang your hat or lay your head, they are our homes. The Peabody Trust is a “charity that was set up in 1862 by the American businessman, banker and philanthropist, George Peabody” in order to “ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis and provide them with comfort and happiness.” These, the words of Peabody, have become the mantra of one of London’s oldest, largest, and most unique housing associations. The man responsible for looking after the housing association’s 28,000 homes, and the 80,000 people living in them is Stephen Howlett, CEO of Peabody. Whizzing through London traffic, in the back of a cab with Stephen Howlett is something that every Londoner should experience. Every building seems to have a story, whether it is developers trying to build above Lambeth North station, or the bomb site which is worth more as a billboard than it would be as homes, or the macabre history of the ‘Devil’s Acre’ in Westminster, Stephen Howlett seems to know everything about the buildings of London. The main reason for this is because Peabody seems to be in every part of London. “That’s one of ours,” Stephen says proudly pointing out the window of the taxi, and not for the last time. It is important that at this stage you do not get the wrong impression of Stephen and Peabody. They are not developers and Stephen is not adding to the glut of luxury homes, making a tidy profit from overseas. As Stephen explains: “We work with local authorities to provide housing, they help us, sometimes through planning, sometimes with sites, but also we work with them to house people who are in greatest need in their areas.” 73% of Peabody properties are rented out for £120 per week. “The great majority of our homes are for low income earners,” Stephen says, “We take a great deal of pride in architecture and we like to produce homes that people want to live in” says Stephen. He adds, “people who know us will recognise our buildings” and he

is right. Standing 3-6 stories tall they are ahead of their time as space efficient estates, with beautiful, maintained floral beds (some of which I am told were planted by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, though they did not survive despite the help of holy green fingers). What makes Peabody unique, is not the Act of Parliament that delivered its governing instrument, nor the fact that it has stayed true to its founder’s wishes for nearly 200 years. What makes Peabody unique is its unerring devotion to London and us its inhabitants. London has grown and changed a great deal since 1862, as have we the population. But Peabody very physically bridges that gap between the people and the place. Quite literally built into the landscape, and yet, as Stephen says: “We’ve got a legacy to protect, but we are also at the forefront of regeneration in London today.” When Peabody left his 5 trustees the Peabody Trust, he not only left them the mission to “ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis”, he also wanted them to act as a business. Peabody is, therefore, a socially conscious charity business, whose aim is to return a profit not to shareholders, but to projects which will add value to their customers. In the 1970s and 80s, as much as 80% of a development could be paid for by the government (with the rest made up by low income rents), but by the 2000s “the

amount of public money became less available” and as Stephen says, “in the forward projection there currently isn’t any public money available for rented housing.” In order to continue to provide low rent housing, therefore, Peabody has developed quite dramatically. Of the 1,000 homes they provided last year, Stephen explains, “about 380 were sold outright, and one half of the rest became low rent housing, while the other half were shared ownership.” “We have now gone into an era where we are just about self sufficient,” Stephen says, talking about the future of Peabody, adding “it means we have had to borrow money on the markets, and it means more risk for us, but we will continue to do it to protect the future of the company.” He also explains that the biggest challenges faced by Peabody are the fact that it is becoming “increasingly difficult to continue to build houses in central London because of the huge

cost of land.” With plans in motion to build 20,000 homes over the next 20 years as part of a major regeneration of Thamesmead in East London, Peabody and Stephen are setting their sights on the transformative quality of infrastructure and transport, linking formerly distant parts of Greater London to the city centre. “Thamesmead to Canary Wharf will be just 11 minutes, when the new Crossrail is completed, and Bond Street will be just 23 minutes,” Stephen says, “so transport links will entirely change the geography of London.” He even believes that “people could be working in Westminster or Chelsea and Kensington, who will live in low cost homes in Thamesmead and commute in.” When you look at the high quality homes which Peabody have become famous for producing, it is not hard to believe that in 20 years time, the Royal Borough may very well be thinking about getting a little Peabody place in Thamesmead.

‘Bremain areas’ experience post Brexit property price increase

of 80 councils, average house prices have risen 19% in Remain areas versus 15% for Leave. London which voted to stay in the EU by 28 boroughs with 2.2million votes, has shown this fascinating correlation between referendum votes and property prices very clearly. All five boroughs who voted to leave have witnessed capital’s lowest property price increases since 2011. Hackney, Lambeth and Islington, who voted to remain have experienced some of the biggest increases in property value in the capital. Cambridge, which voted to Remain by 73.9%, second only to Edinburgh (74.4%) experienced the highest property price rise of 43% or £180,687. Whereas, the average property prices have risen just £33,128 in the highest voting Brexit areas in the same period. Burnley and Hartlepool, house prices have already fallen by 8% and 5% respectively.

By Henry Tobias Jones

During the referendum, Chancellor, George Osborne, warned that a vote to leave would trigger a sharp decrease in the value of UK properties. However, the areas which had the highest proportion of Remain votes have seen average prices increase £61,785 since 2011. According to research from online estate agents HouseSimple.com, average house prices have increased by 9% in Brexit strongholds compared to 18% in Remain areas. Across the entire sample

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

sewer system could handle which as a result led to regular outbreaks of cholera. Conditions worsened until, in the summer of 1858, temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit made the already foul smell of the Thames unbearable. Charles Dickens called it a smell “of a most headand-stomach-distending nature.” The newspapers, knowing a good headline when they heard one, announced the crisis as The Great Stink. In the era of The Great Stink, large swathes of London’s original water

reaction was to attempt to deny any responsibility in fixing London’s failed sewers. However considering that the stink was pervading every inch of Parliament it was rather more difficult for politicians to ignore. Civil servants soaked the building’s curtains in lime chloride to block out the smell (which didn’t work) and even considered moving the seat of government to Oxford or St Albans. And yet the first commissioner of works, Lord John Manners, insisted that “Her Majesty’s government has nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames.” However, that same government was spending £1,500 a week dumping lime into the river in a futile attempt to cover up the smell. Finally, then Chancellor of the Exchequer Benjamin Disraeli took action, calling the river, “a Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horror,” and pased a bill charging the Metropolitan Board Of Works (MBW) with creating a new sewer system, preferably one that deposited waste outside city limits. The Times announced that Parliament had been driven to action, “by the force of sheer stench.” On top of the sheer unpleasantness of the smell London’s antiquated sewers also included 200,000 cesspits, essentially a hole dug in the ground and filled with raw sewage, some of which leaked

cement back to the manufacturer if they didn’t meet his standards. The Observer called the project “the most expensive and wonderful work of modern times.” The sewer system ended up costing more than twice as much as anticipated; the MBW spent nearly half a million pounds simply buying up riverfront property so it could build embankments along the shore, and there were unanticipated engineering problems in every corner of the city. Bazalgette’s foresight may be seen in the diameter of the sewers. When planning the network he took the densest population, gave every person the most generous allowance of sewage production and came up with the diameter of pipe needed. He then reportedly said ‘Well, we’re only going to do this once and there’s always the unforeseen’ and doubled the diameter to be used. His foresight allowed for the unforeseen increase in population density that would come with the introduction of the tower block; with the original, smaller pipe diameter the sewer would have overflowed in the 1960s, rather than coping until the present day as it has. It also had the entirely unintended side effect of effectively eliminating cholera as a serious concern for London. An outbreak hit London in 1866, but it was limited to a part of the city

methane gas, causing fires and even explosions. In 1855, scientist Michael Faraday attempted to discern the opacity of the water in the Thames, and discovered that, “the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface… the whole river was for the time a real sewer.” Luckily, the Metropolitan Board Of Works had a solution ready to go. MBW surveyor Joseph Bazalgette had been working on plans for a comprehensive sewer system for London since the beginning of the decade. Parliament’s bill ended up using a plan Bazalgette had proposed two years earlier, which added 1,100 miles of sewers to London, with smaller pipes draining into larger ones. Bazalgette personally oversaw construction, even sending batches of

Bazalgette’s system had not yet reached. Not only did this reassure Londoners the project was effective, it convinced the medical community that cholera was conveyed by contaminated water, not through the air. As a result, Peter Ackroyd considered that Bazalgette “did more good, and saved more lives, than any single Victorian official.” Whilst very few are so enamoured with Bazalgette’s system as to demand guided tours, it is one of the most successful and long lasting public works projects in British history, and one that stands out in the otherwise rather parsimonious public spending that characterised the Victorian era. It goes to show that if you really want to enact social change you have to be prepared to kick up a pretty big stink.

www.KCWToday.co.uk

Feature The Great Stink by Max Feldman

or the anniversary of the so-called Great Stink of July 1858, Max Feldman holds his nose and plunges into the fetid history of London’s sewers.

Whilst the BBC’s near constant drip feed of period drama make it easy to romanticise the Victorian era, it’s worth considering the deeply unpleasant state of London in the 1850s. London fog (city smog caused by coal-burning factories’ smoke and other pollution) was far from romantic, choking the air and causing significant respiratory problems for city residents. Whilst the more cinema-friendly aspects of Victorian life (gangs of singing urchins, magical nannies, aggressive colonialism etc) are constantly reinterpreted for the screen, they rarely focus on the fact that the Thames had become a literal sewer. Alarming amount of industrial runoff was dumped into the Thames, along with more human waste than the city’s aging

system was made of wood. Medieval water pipes were essentially hollow logs, sealed together with animal fat. These pipes were only just being replaced with iron at the time of The Great Stink (they continued to be used in the United States well into the 20th century.) The sewers themselves were made of brick, as 17thcentury London had simply bricked over the Fleet and Walbrook rivers in order to create its sewer system. This crude system worked when the city’s population was under a million, but it was three times that by 1858, and the adoption of flush toilets, alongside the great number of factories and slaughterhouses in London, all combined to put an unbearable strain on the system. Predictably, Parliament’s first

July/August 2016

Education

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

commissioned piece of music, developed with the input of school-children across the tri-borough area, performed with members of Albert’s Band and over 12,000 young singers which beat the BBC to win the prestigious Learning & Participation Prize, awarded by the Royal Philharmonic Society, a prize the Tri-Borough has never received before. Talking to her, it’s easy to see how passionate she is about the idea that the Royal Albert Hall should be immediately

accessible to as wide a selection of people as possible and continue to grow and develop beyond what people would expect from a live music venue. “The only problem” she laughs “is finding any time to sleep”; considering that the Hall averages approximately three events a day, it’s clearly a valid concern. Moving the conversation back to the Hall’s various outreach programs she enthusiastically explains their new partnership with Nordoff Robbins, a musical therapy foundation. Since the beginning of the year they have hosted over 92 one on one music therapy sessions, primarily for children affected by autism, and have recently expanded the program to include older adult groups. Another fixture that the Hall aim at older groups is the yearly Friendship Matinee which encourages members of the community who would not otherwise have the opportunity to come to the hall.Tickets for the matinee are only £5, with the event organised to encourage a feeling of community (alongside the obvious pleasures of seeing a top-end show for under the cost of a Weatherspoon’s burger). The last thing that Noble discussed with us was a new project called My Great Orchestral Adventure, a new show premiering at the Albert Hall in October, designed to introduce children of three or over to Classical music, where in addition to audience participation and interactive storytelling, Albert’s Band will run through huge swathes of the classical canon (along with a little Star Wars). Clearly in keeping with the principles of musical outreach to children that fuel so much of the Hall’s educational work, it should be a notable addition to a flourishing tradition that ranges from education to the crème de la crème of rock and the performing arts all the way to the Proms. After an hour spent talking to Lucy Noble, it’s clear there’s more to learn that I could have imagined.

this innovative level at the college. This year the students have created outstanding work, allowing them to progress onto the best fashion degree courses in the country. 100% of our university applicants received offers from a variety of prestigious institutions including Central Saint Martins, Kingston University, Middlesex University, Westminster University and London College of Fashion. The fashion design course aims to support students’ development of professional and technical skills whilst allowing them to generate a unique design vision. Their creative ideas have enabled them to produce exciting and diverse collections that display new directions in fashion. The fashion promotion and styling course enables the students to develop strong creative ideas to enter exciting disciplines such as fashion forecasting,

trend prediction, art direction, visual merchandising and fashion promotion. All students develop strong digital skills combined with traditional fashion promotion techniques to produce exceptional portfolios of work. This show celebrates the achievements of the next generation of fashion talent and you are more than welcome to view the collections and final displays..

By Max Feldman

UAL Extended Diploma

in Art and Design: Fashion and Textiles BTEC National Diploma in Art and Design: Fashion Promotion and Styling End of year show

Kensington and Chelsea College are excited to announce their new exhibition highlighting the work from their level 3 fashion students. The final projects will be on view at the Chelsea Centre on Wednesday 15th June between 6:00pm –

the promising pupil is allowed to choose any instrument they feel drawn to, with the Hall and Tri-Borough Music Hub paying for both the instrument and a free term of musical tuition. Albert’s Band spend the rest of their time on the road as part of the Songbook program. Since January the group have played to an audience of approximately 1,400 people in a variety of homes and community centres, performing popular standards (with audience participation encouraged) alongside talks on the history of the Hall. Noble herself has presided over much of the Hall’s growth into one of RBKC’s educational lynchpins. As Head of Events she’s helped guide the Hall into an events promoter in its own right. With the Seven Seeds concert, a specially 8:30pm and then in display until Friday 17th at 4.00p.m. The exhibition will be the first time the two programmes have collaborated to produce a summary of

Photographs © Royal Albert Hall

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

Royal Albert Hall Entertainment and Education he Royal Albert Hall has long been synonymous with some of the most titanic figures in both the Rock and Classical worlds. Led Zeppelin played some of their first blisteringly incendiary gigs within its hallowed walls and through the Hall’s current program of pairing live symphonic orchestras with screenings of classic films like Amadeus and Jurassic Park audiences are experiencing cinema in an entirely new way. However when KCW Today spoke to Lucy Noble, The Hall’s Director of Events explained that alongside these more well-known pursuits, the Hall has quietly been developing into one of the premier supporters of music education in the capital. Whilst these programs were originally reserved for school children, it has spread to encompass all ages, from toddlers to senior citizens. Noble explained that the hall has become a key partner for the TriBorough Music Hub (which comprises RBKC, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham) and is responsible for music planning in 150 local schools alongside other partners such as the Royal College of Music. Whilst a large portion of the Hall’s educational work takes place inside the venue itself, the in-house Education and Outreach group Albert’s Band lead workshops inside selected schools, with students either participating with instruments or voice. Any children who are identified as showing particular promise have a chance of being selected for the Hall’s “Maestros” program, where

Photographs © KCC

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July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

Outstanding school states, ‘now the focus is very much on listening to the pupils’ experience in the classroom…in particular the evidence they can show that feedback [from teachers] has led them to improve’. With teachers now able to trust their own instincts and focus on the challenge and learning opportunities they provide, in whatever form they may come, there has definitely been a lesser sense of panic when the dreaded call of an imminent inspection arrives. But with a new head of OFSTED arriving at the year’s end from an academy chain that prides itself on uniformity, where will this leave schools and their new sense of freedom? After the OFSTED Social Care Annual Report (SCAR) was published on the 28th of June, Amanda Spielman will have to direct her immediate attention towards the social care crisis that is unfolding. According to the SCAR, well over half of all councils have emerged as being ‘less than good, with only two council services being rated ‘Outstanding’. Sir Michael Wilshaw’s reaction, as reported by The Guardian, was one of disappointment as he commented that the findings were ‘unacceptable’ and ‘too many children are not receiving the services they deserve’. As of March 2015 statistics have shown that there are more than 70,000 children in social care. Considering the findings of the SCAR all eyes will now be on Spielman to ensure that standards of care are raised quickly and significantly. With this in mind, it is more important than ever that schools are allowed to provide malleable and appropriate care for their students.

with private schools. The never-ending pressure and workload, with teachers telling you to be ‘the best you, you can be’, when, what they really mean is get good grades (for the school). As a 15 year old, I found it hard to balance 3 pieces of prep a night, revision and some of a social life. Panic and stress, an emotion a 15 year old can conceive, became part of my daily schedule. I was fearful about receiving a C on a piece of paper, which I’ve recently discovered isn’t as important as I was told it was. When I started boarding, to juggle the many aspects of a young teenage life, I found myself in a bubble. My school was situated in beautiful grounds, with amazing facilities such as a miniature zoo, that no state school could imagine, with teachers ready to help me whenever I needed, with whom, in turn, I created strong relationships. I formed friendships, not with spoilt stuck up stereotypes, although there were a few, but with boarders from across the globe, scholars and local day students, with a variety of backgrounds. Of course I had all this as a day student,

www.KCWToday.co.uk

Education OFSTED Changes

Lead to More Autonomy’ for Schools By Bianca Barratt

haking hands would place the receiver down as staff were called for an emergency briefing. Books would be hurriedly marked up to date and lesson plans would be changed and changed again to fit the elusive criteria of an ‘outstanding’ teacher. Yes, once upon a time OFSTED could induce the kind of dread one might associate with the appearance of the Grim Reaper- sure to bring misery to all those within its deathly grasp. After several versions of the Common Inspection Framework (CIF) being published over the last five years, it is unsurprising that many teachers have become disenchanted with the lengthy jargon inside the eye-watering 250 page document, having seen little change in their teaching conditions and the expectations of inspectors. But since the new framework was published in September 2015 under the watchful eye of the chief inspector, Sir Michael Wilshaw, many schools have noticed a significant improvement in their dealings with the regulatory body. One of the most noticeable changes has been to the criteria by which lessons are observed. Where the sole focus used to be on the teacher, there is now a greater emphasis on the learning and assessment taking place in the classroom. Indeed, this area of inspection in the new CIF has been adjusted from ‘Quality of Teaching’ to ‘Quality of Teaching, Learning and Assessment’. After all, what is the mark of an outstanding teacher if not the progress that has been made by their students? ‘What’s great about the new framework is that they [inspectors] expect teachers to have more autonomy, instead of meeting a checklist for outstanding teaching’ said one inner city primary head. ‘Schools now have more freedom to make their own decisions about what works best for the children in terms of their learning.’ This shows a greater acknowledgement of the vast differences between schools and their demographics; what works for a selective school in the suburbs may not work for a local comprehensive in a challenging area With more control given back to learning establishments, they are able to tailor their teaching and assessment methods to the needs of their own pupils, rather than to the abstract ideal of a body based outside of schools, thus allowing them to make as much progress as possible. As the deputy head of one

Chelsea Nanny Shakespearean Summer

Independent School to Independence

By Ella McGee Babbage All parents want the best for their children. They hope they will make the best decisions for their children and although this may be true a lot of the time, young people can know what is right for them. So parents; instead of analysing reviews, picking apart open days and overthinking a google search, do listen to a current student who has experienced a top private school. Get this inside track and it will remove all that sugar coating and those perfect smiles you see on school websites. The correct way to refer to private schools is independent schools. Yet, this takes away from what they really are, businesses. Educationally socially engineered business aimed to churn out A* students, this is my main issue

n a bid to enrich the Brats’ lives with even more culture, Arabic and flute lessons not being anywhere near sufficient , American Mom has signed them up for Shakespearean Summer Camp. Her interest in Shakespeare increased dramatically after she saw Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet. For four weeks of the school holiday all three Brats are deposited daily in the party room at the Dorchester. The Eldest, whose protesting was the most vociferous to begin with, seems to have done a U turn and taken to the course with astonishing enthusiasm. ‘He’s in love with Titania,’ the Middle One assures me. ‘Which is all wrong because he’s Prospero and they’re not even in the same play, let alone the same fairy kingdom.’ She does have a point. The Eldest meets Titania in the lobby

boarding simply gave me further support and structure. As clichéd as it sounds, my friends and I did share some of the best moments there, but teenage dramas, alchohol and drugs cannot be avoided no matter how expensive a school is. My bubble of seclusion popped, I had to face what patronising adults call the ‘real world’, whatever that means. This past year at a college that provides minimum help, has slapped me straight in the face. I’ve realised that most things are really hard, when you don’t have perfect facilities or teachers nagging at you to do something. You find yourself watching Game of Thrones and saying I’ll do it tomorrow. I know I should be grateful to have gone to such an amazing school, and I am, mostly. I’ve found that I miss the tight-knit community, the help, the pressure and the heavy structure that I became so reliant upon it. Is it worth the money? Just to discover that life gives you the same amount of pressure and stress for free. Sadly, you no longer have your perfect little bubble to help you along the way.

between scenes and they spend all of lunch break testing each other on their lines. I’m impressed by the practicality of the arrangement. When taking time off from the Bard the Brats’ latest obsession is the neighbour’s new cat. The two households are embroiled in an unofficial ownership battle over the spoilt feline. It is cleverly enjoying the attention showered on it from both sides of the fence and is incredibly skilled at playing the families off against each other. ‘But he likes us better,’ reasons the Small One as I deliver the cat back to its rightful home for the third time this week. ‘And our house is nicer,’ he says loudly, as I open the door to the neighbours’ supposedly inferior house. I apologise profusely for the cat-theft as well as the insults but the damage is already done, it seems. American Mom will most certainly be struck off the Christmas card list. Which, incidentally, she won’t mind at all, as she doesn’t do Christmas cards. It’ll be one less potential recipient to have to pretend to feel guilty about. The Middle One has enjoyed the Summer Camp so much that she’s decided she wants to be an actor when she grows up. By which she means she wants to go to performance school next year. American Mom has sourced one of the cast of a recent Channel Four series and RADA graduate to take on the role of drama tutor. One of her most challenging roles to date, I’d imagine. The pair spend every spare second in the garden following what appears to be an interpretative variation on Yoga, with less spirituality and more embodying animals. I wonder if this is specific to the audition process for London performance arts schools or whether the Middle One is the unfortunate subject of an elaborate practical joke. In fairness, the two scenarios are one and the same as far I’m concerned.

July/August 2016

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July/August April/May 2011 2016

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Education GCSEs in the eyes of a student By Tanya Kovatchka

t is 5:00am in the morning and I have had 6 and a half hours sleep. I am the sort of person who needs about 10 hours sleep to function so things are looking pretty bleak already. What actually sinks my soul is the fact that in a couple of hours I will have to do my maths GCSE. I have never liked maths due to a number of factors including the fact I’m terrible at it, my teacher is quite intimidating and also because I know with absolute certainty I will never need to use trigonometry in my life. Ideally I would like to write and do something creative with my life so unsurprisingly I have been unable to connect with the joys of factorising or indeed the delightful moles calculations in chemistry. This is my main problem with GCSEs; I simply do not see their use. Of course to a future mathematician vectors are blissful, useful things and the exam, dare I say it, might even be fun, but sadly I am not that person. My only comfort is that some maths geniuses would experience similar feelings of anguish during the English Literature exam. This may not have been as bad if I had not also struggled with my favourite subject due to a completely pointless time pressure. Surely the aim of the exam is to show I have connected with the material, explored

Westminster invests in an ‘edible garden’ for school children

in depth the themes, and understood the core of the characters’ essence. I believe exams should be a culmination of your best work instead you get to offer up at best one of your better averages as you feel you might get a heart attack any minute as you listen to the clock ticking away . Time and time again I have wondered why we are being subjected to this trauma. Surely it may be worthwhile if these exams actually measured your intelligence but how does memorizing an essay show your capabilities? Fine I concede they do show how hard you work yet is this as valuable as displaying your true talents? To add to the ever growing list of negatives may I also mention the exam weight, the unnecessary competiveness, the crying, the panic attacks and in general the sheer misery of it all. These are things which you will inevitably experience yet, a large part of the mark you receive depends on luck. What if this lone examiner has just got a divorce or a has a personal dislike of alliteration? The humanities are subjective enough as it is but this mourning examiner could unfairly refuse to give you the benefit of doubt in biology. There goes your A* despite the fact you may be as intelligent as some of those lucky A* scrapers you are still sadly viewed as slightly inferior. So there we have it GCSEs mess up your mental state, force you to focus on unnecessary skills and leave you in the hands of luck. Is it shocking that I deem them as meaningless? Who knows maybe later when the raw emotions aren’t as fresh then I will be able to see the good behind them.

about the origin and the process of growing food, on top of teaching techniques for cooking and food preparation. Central London has one of the highest concentrations of Fast food outlets in the country, varying from 107 to 210 fast food establishments per 100,000 residents. By Joseph Palasz The program organisers cite research showing that children who participate in the planting and growing of food are likely to make nutritional choices Westminster City Council more throughout their life. Westminster City Council’s Cabinet has opened a new ‘edible Member for Sport and Leisure, David garden’ at Paddington Harvey, joined Ark Atwood Primary Recreation Ground to help School to launch the new garden. He said: “We want youngsters to educate children about the know about the food they eat and make choices. Research shows that benefits of healthy eating. healthier children who plant and grow vegetables are more likely to go onto a lifetime of healthy eating.” Organisations, such as Sayers Croft “This garden helps young people to and The Food Explorers, will work in understand that food doesn’t just come partnership with local schools to use the from a plastic packet in the supermarket,” new garden to engage young children in he added. “By making food education food education. classes fun and engaging we can make a A primary dive of the incentive is to really positive difference.” encourage children to eat more fruit and The garden at Paddington Recreation vegetables. Recent research has found Ground is part of a wider Forest Schools that in Westminster 21.6% of 4 to 5 year Programme. The incentive aims at olds are overweight or obese. This figure providing inner-city children, with rises to nearly 40% by the age of 10 to 11. limited access to school playing fields, a The programme will also raise awareness chance to experience nature.

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July/August 2016

Education

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Literature Serial Thrillers

date. For fledgling authors the ability to churn out material at a pace suitable for syndication was paramount as serialisation was seen as one of the key skills that a notable author should aspire to. As a piece in Scribner’s Monthly explained in 1878, “Now it is the second or third rate novelist who cannot get publication in a magazine, and is obliged to publish in a volume, and it is in the magazine that the best novelist always appears first.” This was a truism

By MaxFeldman

liffhanger endings are unlikely to go out of vogue any time before the death of the universe. For television, comic books and videogames it’s a narrative goldmine that will have consumers returning time and time to stories they rationally understand that they have no real interest in, just to find out how things turn out (Lost abused this model of storytelling for over six full years of smoke monsters and incongruous polar bears, knowing their audience would keep coming back week after week with Pavlovian aplomb). Whilst cliffhangers are far from uncommon in literature, they are certainly far rarer; considering that a reader can find out how something turns out by reading the first sentence of the next chapter, the level of delirious anticipation is simply not there. This has only been true since before the advent of commercial radio and television, for most of the 19th century the concept of the novel as a cohesive whole was the exception rather than the rule. Novels were serialised in magazines as a matter of course beginning with the runaway success of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers in 1836, with the vast majority of subsequent Victorian novels first appearing in either monthly or weekly instalments in magazines or newspapers (they would later be republished as a collected edition, but to publish a novel all at once first was unusual. The Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus even went as far as to publish a finished novel, Pharaoh in instalments between 1895-96) The mania for serialised fiction, which admittedly was boosted by a general upsurge of literacy meaning that more of the population could read than ever before, was a truly worldwide phenomenon; with periodicals such as Harper’s and The Atlantic founded in order to publish such long narratives. Newspapers often carried their own serialised stories which in many cases proved even more popular than the Victorian authors thought of as ‘the greats’, though literary historians regrettably have a harder time piecing them together as The Blitz in the Second World War destroyed the majority of Victorian newspapers which had been preserved. Soon the economic advantages of writing longer novels became apparent to writers and a trend of exceptionally long novels became de rigeur both for jobbing hacks and literary geniuses alike. Eugène Sue’s serial novel Le Juif errant

increased circulation of Le Constitutionnel from 3,600 to 25,000 and writers who were able to take advantage of this intellectual boom were able to rake in hitherto unthinkable sums for their stories. Alexandre Dumas, a prolific serializer, initially published The Count of Monte Cristo across a punishing 139 instalments and was known to write for 12 hours a day on a dizzying variety of different serials in order to squeeze as much money as he could. Not all of the greats (or indeed, even the adequates) could match this kind of pace, however, Wilkie Collins, the famed author of The Woman In White and The Moonstone; far from juggling sixteen serials at once, was rarely able to submit copy to his editors less than a week before its publication

that spread across the globe, with even Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina initially appearing in The Russian Messenger between 1875 and 1877 (followed by the Brothers Karamazov from 1879 to 1880.) but in few parts of the world did it have as much of a dynamic effect as America. Initially American periodicals primarily printed famous British serials such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, which was so popular in England that when Conan Doyle killed the detective off in The

Strand magazine, over twenty thousand magazine subscribers cancelled their subscriptions. This obsessive popularity was shared by American readers to the extent that huge crowds gathered at the docks to greet the transatlantic ships bearing new instalments, with some poor unfortunates drowning after being forced into the water by the surging crowd). But as the American public’s appetite for serials increased they began to draw from a growing base of domestic authors. The rise of the periodicals helped spark an explosion of newly discovered American literary talent. The magazines nurtured and provided an economic sustainability for writers, while the writers helped the periodicals’ circulation base grow. Serialization was so standard in American literature that authors from that era often had fully incorporated the instalment structure into their creative process and found it difficult, if not outright impossible to snap back to writing in what we would now view as a standard novelistic style. Henry James, for example, wrote by dividing into multi-part segments of similar length regardless of whether he was being paid to do so or not. This form of storytelling didn’t only affect the writers’ process, the way in which fiction was consumed developed in a way that would be deeply strange to 20th century readers. A novel would often be read by readers in instalments over a period as long as a year, with authors often tailoring and altering storylines depending on audience reaction in a symbiosis that almost has more in common with modern-day reality television than it does with our current idea of high culture. Part of this is tied up in the fact that much like Classical music, ideas of what constituted ‘high’ or ‘low’ art were far more fluid and nebulous than today, with Dickens being devoured alongside Penny Dreadful without any special distinction being drawn. It was only when radio and television began their own experiments with serializing fiction in the early days of the 20th century that magazines slowly stopped their own, feeling unable to compete. This ironically made it substantially harder for new authors to get a foot in the door and drove many into writing for television and radio. Reactions to attempts at rejuvenating serialisation have been mixed to say the least, but in less obvious forms such as graphic novels and weekly webcomics, literary serialisation has found itself an unexpected Part Two, no cliff hangers required.

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Poetry

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online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

N LIGHT OF RECENT POLITICAL EVENTS, it seems fitting to launch this month’s poetry page with Rudyard Kipling’s A Dead Statesman, a poem currently surging through Facebook account holder’s newsfeed as if in an attempt to flush away the Britain’s biggest deposit imaginable. Unfortunately, it is a well-known fact that some deposits you just can’t flush away!

A Dead Statesman By Rudyard Kipling

I could not dig; I dared not rob: Therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue And I must face the men I slew. What tale shall serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young?

Sadly, Kipling’s only son John was killed in action in 1915 during World War 1 at the battle of Loos. My Boy Jack (1915) tells a story of the anguish that so many parents must have felt waiting to hear news about the fates of their sons from the front lines. “Have you news of my boy Jack? ” Not this tide. “When d’you think that he’ll come back?” Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. “Has any one else had word of him?” Not this tide. For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing, and this tide. “Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?” None this tide, Nor any tide, Except he did not shame his kind Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide. Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide! When the battle of the Somme broke out a year later over one million were killed and wounded during 141 days of horror. It was the bloodiest battle in human history and to commemorate the events on the 100th Anniversary we include a poem by one of the World War One poets, Isaac Rosenberg, who died in Somme on 1st April 1918.

The Lock and the Key

by Scarlett Sabet Zoreh Publishing Limited 2016 £9.99 (Paperback) 71pp. ISBN 978-0-9954719-1-7 When training to be an actress as a teenager Scarlett Sabet began scribbling down notes and ideas in her Moleskine. Little did she realise that these scribblings would alter her career path and lead to the publication of Rocking Underground in 2014, her first volume of poems. Whilst acknowledging that she gained valuable experience from acting it is clear that writing is her great passion. The Lock and the Key, Sabet’s latest poetic offering is a melange of fiction, events that have happened in Sabet’s life and thoughts on some of the more disturbing events that have happened around the world recently. In Cut Up she employs the literary technique

of the same name made popular by William Burrows in the 1950s and 60s to try and understand the madness that is fuelling the media this year. In the case of the Bataclan shootings in Paris for example, she claims, “I wanted to write an epic poem to immortalise that moment in time. A literary snap shot to make sense of it myself as it all seemed so senseless. I thought I’d narrowed it down but then something else cataclysmic would happen in the news. So I got all these pieces of paper and cut out what I needed and used the cut out technique.” The results are interesting and highlight Sabet’s natural ability to tell a story and her gift for rhyming. This is not surprising considering music and performance have played an important part in Sabet’s life. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which she claimed her parents would listen too over and over, was a profound influence on her work as was Bob Dylan. These great musicians, are of course, great story tellers and wordsmiths, and this is what we find Sabet’s doing with some success throughout this volume. There is an intense energy in Sabet’s work and Ocean is a classic example of how she uses poetry to harness emotion

Break of Day in the Trenches By Isaac Rosenberg

The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid Time as ever, Only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer sardonic rat, As I pull the parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver — what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe — Just a little white with the dust.

and passion. There is an eroticism here too, identifiable by her use of water imagery. Water is quite literally Sabet in her element and the method she employs to express complex ideas of feeling. There’s a tidal force here: “As he yielded to her/it crept open/Drew back to reveal teeth that were pleased/The lips pursed in punctuations of passion, and

she submitted to/that.’ Sabet claims ‘I wrote Ocean on the morning of the 15th February 2016, I had all those thoughts and images in my head, wrote them down and nothing needed rearranging’ It’s my favourite. I hadn’t written anything like that before’. Writing poetry gives Sabet a sense of fearlessness she had not previously experienced. It is this new found sense of liberation and sense of fearlessness that has allowed her door to be unlocked and walk out into a sunrise over new horizons. Sabet is reading from The Lock and the Key at Shakespeare and Company in Paris in July and will be performing at several different events over the summer. Readers will be able to listen to a selection of poems from The Key and the Lock in July and August by visiting KCWToday podcast recordings at www.kcwtoday.co.uk

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Rossopomodoro

The only downside to all this is that there’s no possibility of fitting in a dessert, so I’ll save that for another day. Coffee and grappa round off the lunch in proper Italian style, and its back to work and a sneaky siesta if I get the chance!

By David Hughes

The part of the Fulham Rd that Rossopomodoro resides in is opposite the hospital and a short hop from Fulham Broadway, and it’s a bustling lively place on an early summer’s day. The interior is pretty standard pizza joint, and I have to admit that I did momentarily wonder if I should have just ordered a delivery. I`m very happy to report those doubts were short lived: M chose the Arancini, and I had the Insalata de Mare, which was fabulous. Squid, octopus, clams and mussels stretched across a bed of radicchio and were suffused with a just the right amount of garlic and parsley to lead your senses 1500 miles south of SW10. The Arancini had the requisite crunchy exterior and gluey filling, and parlayed a range of flavours that went perfectly with M’s large glass of red. I was beginning to believe the “mission statement” of Cucina & Pizzaria Napoletana. For those who like their pizza with a stuffed crust that’s entrusted to a wild eyed moped rider, look away right now. This little number sitting in front of me has a base that is crunchy, light, airy and densely satisfying. It’s covered in Datterini tomatoes, large discs of proper mozzarella (not the grated tennis balls of cheaper offerings) and Porcini

Hanger

By Rowland Stirling

approached Hanger, ‘steak house and liquor bar’, with a degree of apprehension. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect other than meat and alcohol, and (judging by the enthusiasm for both expressed on their website) was somewhat concerned that even the building’s masonry would be solely comprised of these two elements. The name, which I took to be a reference to the popular conflation of ‘hunger’ and ‘anger’ (or possibly the implement needed to pull up your jeans the day after eating there) is in fact, the type of steak championed and made affordable by the restaurant. But in my ignorance the name conjured faintly aggressive images of on the door testosterone checks where I would inevitably be found wanting and left outside in the rain. Or worse still what if I were allowed in? Would I be welcomed into a barely converted industrial space full of check shirted paragons of masculinity, waiting expectantly for me to rip bits of raw cow from the carcass with my teeth while mainlining bourbon? Instead, rounding the corner from Fulham Broadway onto North End Road, I found an unassuming but elegant, glass fronted restaurant, where my guest and

Rossopomodoro, 214 Fulham Rd SW10 9NB T: 020 7352 7677

mushrooms that are full of flavour. Laced with some chilli oil and a helping of fresh ground pepper, a large beer completes the picture. M’s Linguine with cooked down endive, capers, pine nuts, black olives and anchovies is a rather more grown up dish, enjoyable, and just what she was in the mood for. All well and good, but with the faintest trace of chilli oil dribbling off the last slice of the pizza I just know I made the right choice. It’s a man thing apparently. I were escorted to our table by convivial waitstaff. Hanger is the brainchild of Patrick Falla who, after years of experience in some of the industry’s biggest names including D&D and JW Marriott, decided to begin his first solo venture, focussing on food cooked expertly sans fuss. Locally sourced, seasonal ingredients and a separate bar area serving traditional cocktails. When a two storey space in Fulham became available ‘the site dictated the opportunity’. The dining area was intimate but light and open, with westfacing windows allowing what little of the English evening sun there was to twinkle on the collected glassware. We were swiftly presented with the menu and at first I was struck by how limited it was, each course providing around four options, but Hanger’s mantra is clearly quality of selection, not quantity. To start, my companion had the salt beef croquettes and I, the scallop ceviche. The presentation of the food matched the décor in its simple elegance and was in contrast to the complexity of the taste. My raw scallops, cured in citric juices and marinated with ponzu dressing, were refreshingly light and zesty and garnished with rocket and microscopically sliced radish. The half croquette my friend allowed me to taste (there were only three) melted instantly in my mouth. When ordering our main, the large Hanger steak which we were to share (and which came to a very reasonable £10 a head), the waitress told us (in no uncertain terms)

that they cook the meat ‘medium rare’. I was reminded of a trip to a restaurant called La Boucherie just outside Béziers in the South of France where a member of my party foolishly asked for their steak to be cooked ‘well done’, to which the waiter replied simply: “non”. My friend and I appreciated the more English approach; this subtle warning behind the gentle hint. They didn’t want to ruin their beautifully inhouse butchered beef by grilling it to a crisp, and, preferring my steak to err on the side of ‘still mooing’, I wasn’t going to complain. The slices of Hanger steak arrived along with a side of triple cooked chips so immense they looked as though they could be used to commit murder (tasty, tasty murder), and charred broccoli in an aged balsamic jus. The steak was cooked to perfection. Beautifully pink in the centre, lightly crispy at the edges with that distinctive smoky taste from having been grilled over charcoal. It was accompanied by the Hanger relish and a horseradish aioli. I enjoyed experimenting with both; slathering varying amounts of each onto each bite in order to create the perfect combination. For the sweet course I opted for the banoffee split and was the picture of envy when I saw the chocolate orange brownie my friend had ordered, which was so rich it bordered on obscenity. But I found much to be delighted by in my own dessert of which the peanut butter cream was the standout. We had been recommended

the MAN Cabernet Sauvignon (£25 a bottle) at the beginning of our meal which provided a full bodied, slightly peppery accompaniment and which complemented each course in an entirely different way. With barely enough time to recover from being on the verge of a victual induced coma we were ushered down an unnoticed flight of stairs to the restaurant’s atmospherically lit, basement bar area, which provided a contrasting if similarly stylish and relaxed ambience along the lines of the most laid back prohibitionera den in the world. Little circular tables and comfy booths piled high with pillows were overlooked by walls covered in framed, vintage LP covers. There were three traditional gin and whiskey based cocktails to try (with the promise of a broader menu in the future): the SW6 Bramble, the Summer Collins and the Hanger Old Fashioned (all of which came to £9.50 each). I dutifully sampled each of them thoroughly and would detail the subtleties of their individual flavours but for some reason my memory gets a little fuzzy around this time, suffice to say they were all delicious and exceedingly alcoholic. 461 North End Road, Fulham, London, SW6 1NZ Opening hours: Tuesday-Sunday 12:00-15:00 then 18:00-22:00 (closed on Monday) T: 020 7386 9739 www.hangersteak.co.uk

Photographs © David Hughes

Dining Out

July/August 2016

Dining Out

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

101

By Rod MacClancy

obody can say that Knightsbridge is currently attractive as it is blighted by roadworks, traffic jams, major redevelopments and an ever reducing local population; not a pretty place. Oysters thrive in such environments, and need the flaws on which to cultivate their pearls and thus one comes across Restaurant 101. If approached with an open mind and ignoring the kitsch of Knightsbridge, one will find this fabulous pearl and an amazing dining experience. Restaurant 101, predominantly fish and seafood, is the brainchild of Breton Master Chef Pascal Proyart. The restaurant opened 14 years ago in the Park Tower Hotel close to Lowndes Square. One suspects they may be in for a special treat as in 2015 it was placed third best restaurant in London by The Sunday Times best restaurant review, topped only by Araki and The Ledbury. On arrival the decor is perhaps a little bare but this is quickly overcome by the quality of the food. We were greeted by Lajos who, along with the rest of his team, was professional, knowledgeable and attentive. Whilst contemplating the menu my dining companion had

a glass of Moet Champagne and I the 2014 Sauvignon Blanc de Touraine. A refreshing wine infused with flavours of pears, apples and gooseberries, perfect for accompanying seafood. Fresh rye and plain bread were served with both unsalted and a Breton made seaweed butter, which is so good that one regular customer buys boxes of it to take home! A very light amuse-bouche based on a tomato gazpacho with king crab basil and bacon was excellent and very refreshing. As a starter my companion had the

grilled red king crab legs and shoulder, fresh from the Barents sea, one of Pascal’s signature dishes and deservedly so. I had the taster Terre et Mer menu, which at £75 is very good value, and started with the Yellowfin tuna tartar with sushi and tobiko caviar, crab tempura, wasabi and foam seaweed, altogether a serious pleasure. The next course was scallops, very fresh but a smidgen tough, with foie gras, wild mushrooms sea spinach and an exceptional vermouth foam. For the main course, my companion enjoyed a Dover sole which was

There’s some big boots to fill with a venue like this, it’s far too imposing for anything less than fine dining, so the thick cloths and weighty cutlery feel right at home rather than old fashioned. Having flagged down a waitress we had a bit of a wait before the wine appeared, but it gave us ample time to peruse the menu. My companion went for marinated codfish with marjoram, candied celery, tomato confit and bread chips and I the Octopus carpaccio, sweet paprika potato croquettes, Taggiasca olives and tomato confit. With the addition of a bit of seasoning, the sweet caramelised celery and chewiness of the cod flakes made for an addictive combination (yes, I pinched a couple of mouthfuls) but the octopus

carpaccio was so perfectly partnered by the sweetness of the potato croquettes and the bitter leaves that I felt no jealousy. Mario Lanza was giving it his all in the background. Kitsch perhaps, but don’t you just love that some places still do that kind of thing. Who wants hip hop in a restaurant that’s a homage to classic Italian style. A steak knife that reminds me of a kukri arrives to help me through a beautifully cooked medium rare fillet. It’s perched on a smear of potato cream and mustard, a few bacon shavings and 4 asparagus spears, so those in search of their 5 a day will want the side of roasted veg. One of M’s favourite dishes is Veal Ossobuco, which she chose with Milanese style risotto. Milanese risotto is

served off the bone at her request and beautifully tender, accompanied by a stunning oyster béarnaise. The highlight of the evening was undoubtedly Chef Pascal’s, white halibut with abalone, sunshokas, wild garlic and hazelnuts; a truly fabulous dish. The final dish of this seafood triumph served was Sea bass with olives, baby artichokes, capers, basil barigoule sauce and a mouth exploding “lemon button”. There wasn’t room for dessert, but thinking of our duty to you our readers we finished with the truly decadent Manjari chocolate pavé (oh so rich!) with pistachio ice cream. A fitting end to a fabulous meal. My companion, from the south coast, who knows her fish, confirmed it was the best and freshest fish she had tasted in London, Restaurant 101 is a pearl worth diving for in the depths of Knightsbridge. One-O-One Restaurant 101 Knightsbridge SW1X 7RN 020 7290 7101 oneoone@luxurycollection.com Opening Hours: Tuesday-Friday Lunch 12:00pm-2:30pm Saturday Lunch 12:30pm-2:30pm Tuesday-Saturday Dinner 6:30pm-10:00pm

Photographs © David Hughes

Savini at Criterion

By David Hughes You could not get more central that this, nor more cosseted from the busy scrum of tourists, affable coppers, wide-eyed visitors on a night out, or would-be pick pockets hoping for an easy mark. The odd local worker who has seen it all before just wants to get their tube home, but for the rest of us that world famous patch of tarmac outside of 224 Piccadilly is a fascinating canvas. Tonight it’s the turn of some ad hoc street dancers busting some grooves, and I’m 30 years too old to be even using that term. So let’s do something a bit more dignified for those whose dancing shoes seem now to consist of two left fittings… time to dine! Savini has a pretty spectacular interior, consisting of immense columns supporting a vast gilded ceiling. Built by architect Thomas Verity in the neo-Byzantine style, it first opened its doors in 1873, and is in the top 10 most historic and oldest restaurants in the world. It’s had a series of proprietors in recent years, and last December the Gatto’s family of Milan became the latest.

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loaded with saffron, and this had plenty of colour and flavour, so she was duly satisfied with her mains. Dessert was a shared confection of chocolate, raspberry and a coconut covered bombe washed down with a sip of M’s grappa. I’m a sucker for a hit of sweetness at the end of a meal like this. Unless this place is busy, its sheer scale can make everything seem a bit reverential, so given that you are unlikely to spend much less than £150-200 for the pair of you, I’d go the whole hog: dress up a bit, drop into Fortnum’s for a couple of cocktails before you arrive, and ask your butler if he’d mind waiting up to serve you a brandy in library for when you return. You can always give him tomorrow off…

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Fashion & Lifestyle Julia Merhej and the Cornette de Saint Cyr auction house Photograph © Patrick Chelly

By Rowland Stirling

“I

got into art completely ‘par hasard’” Julia Merhej says, reclining on the red velvet seats of The Capital Hotel’s bar. She has just arrived from Paris, but shows no sign of travel fatigue. Growing up between Monaco and Paris, taking occasional trips to London, Julia explains how her whirlwind life brought her into the art and auction worlds. Originally from Syria, her father moved to Paris where he became an avid collector of 17th, 18th and 19th century art. While she “grew up in this atmosphere,” she actually did a Masters in Political Science. Julia’s love of art began at a dinner party when Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr recruited her. “That,” Julia smiles, “is how the story started.” Cornette de Saint Cyr has grown to be one of the foremost auction houses in the world. It has great breadth when it comes to the pieces it deals with. Photography is one of Julia’s primary passions. Her enthusiasm is evident in her smile whenever she mentions a photographer whose work she loves. “Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr was actually the one who first introduced photography to auction houses in 1982. He organized an auction on photography and as a result the FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain), one of the most well-known contemporary art fairs, will organize a dedicated space to photography next year.” Julia currently collaborates with three departments: MOA (Mobiliers Objets Anciens), Haute Couture (managed by Hubert Felbacq) and photography (managed by Didier Poupard). International clientele are all looking for something different. “People from Middle East might be looking more for 17th, 18th and 19th century objects, the

Asians might look more for contemporary, whilst the Europeans might look more for modern and impressionist. But it all depends on varying trends and market tastes and our specialist knowledge makes our work so valuable”. Perhaps, what excites her most is a recent project, on which Julia collaborated with Didier Poupard, the first auction of photos issued from the archive of Paris Match magazine. “You never expect the unexpected, and the tastes of buyers are often linked to emotions, and in spite of our expertise in the field, when it comes to auctions there are no rules. I can remember a photograph of Jacques Chirac in this auction which was at 1800 euros, and that we sold 17,000 euros... really you never expect the unexpected, and great surprises can happen!” It is abundantly clear that Julia loves what she does. She explains her process of selecting pieces for auction: “you need to check la côte de l’artiste” . The more the artist is well known, the more interesting it is for us.” But of course there has to be a personal touch. Through whatever she selects for auction Julia leaves a personal print on Cornette de Saint Cyr ”.

Cornette de Saint Syr Auction House Upcoming Sale

20 September 2016. 1900 h 6 avenue Hoche 75008 Paris

Enzo Mari: Une collection

Public viewings: Fri 16 September to Mon 19 September 11.00-18.00h and Tues 20 September 11.00-13.00 h www.cornettedesaintcyr.fr She mentions renowned photographer, Yan Arthus-Bertrand whose words summarised the process of selection: ‘on choisit la photo qui reflète son âme’ (‘We choose the photo that reflects our soul’). There are, however, some downfalls to the auction business. Julia explains: “You deal with some people that wish to give you a piece to sell, and you discover that it is a fake.” It is important, therefore, that the fourth largest auction house in the world employs Paris’s best. “Luckily,” says Julia as she touches wood, “we have never gotten into these troubles at all.” Looking forward there are plans for expansion and the company trys to become more international. However, it is the visionary Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr that drives them forward into a new art era of “art digitale et numérique”, which, Julia mentions, “is going to bloom very soon, and they will be opening a cultural department dedicated to organizing dinners/events around the artists of their collection. It is important for us to be close to our auctioneers, artists, and to be in tune with the global cultural artistic background.” For now, however, the multi-faceted Cornette de Saint Cyr continues to collaborate with Julia and her projects on photography.

50 Shades done in dark glasses... Mr. ee Sartorius

Thornhill in Camo

ne of my good chums is just about as clumsy as you can get. He drops mugs like they have all been greased, he walks into panes of glass, and no antique flower vase is safe. Nevertheless, he, like many more spatially aware people I know, suffers from a disease known only as: Spectacles Abscentia. In his case, he has sat on, stood on, dropped, or otherwise crushed and broken every pair of sunglasses he has ever owned. But it is something I hear from everyone, no matter how old you are, whether you are a forgetful young flapper or a sage old septuagenarian; glasses just seem to disappear. In my friend’s case, after hearing the unmistakable sound of cracking and splintering plastic lenses, his long term partner recently bellowed: “That’s the last bloody pair, you hear me? No more expensive sunglasses!” Moreover, it’s not just him. I have grandparents who are going through reading glasses so quickly that I am beginning to suspect they are burning them in lieu of their winter fuel allowance. Everyone knows it, sunglasses are expensive. But you have to have them. Have you ever walked outside into the sun from a long day of writing, hunched over your laptop in the deep dark cellar of KCW Today? I have, and let me tell you, if I were to emerge without sunglasses my retinas would no doubt imitate the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark and melt with almost holy ferocity. So the question is, how do you buy Raybans without taking a long flight to Thailand and coming back with Raybuns? Cubitts of King’s Cross has just two “workshops” in Soho (37 Marshall Street) and Borough (9 Park Street). Your glasses are cut from a single sheet of polished italian acetate, so no two glasses will look the same. And their company ethos is: ‘Handmade spectacles & sunglasses. In classic British styles. Modestly priced. That’s it.’” Make sure your bottom is firmly planted because the “modestly priced” part is about to knock you of your chair. £125. That frankly ridiculous price includes: prescription lenses, postage, and your complimentary accessories. The price is also the same whether you are choosing from their range of sunglasses or spectacles, men’s or women’s. But the kicker is you aren’t likely to stand on, break, lose, or crush any of the spectacles you buy from Cubitts. When you unbox a handmade, beautifully

Havelock in Honey

Twyford in Dark Turtle

crafted item like these they do have a precious quality. Any given week I will have between 3-4 conversations about my glasses, not as often as I’m asked about Brexit, but frequently enough to recognise. As a man who wears spectacles as a consequence of real visual impairment, I have them on from sunrise to sunset. I therefore, unsurprisingly, think that the spectacles you wear present something about you to the world. Heavy set ‘Michael Gove specs’ may, for example, make you look like an albino Austin Powers. Or the rimless mechanical glasses might say that you are the type of person who works over a designers board, and who thinks that Steve Jobs was the bee’s knees. Likewise, a monocle will tell everyone you have ‘affectations’. This is never truer than with sunglasses, the king of glasses, and the charismatic cult leader of ‘cool’. The dark glasses on offer in Cubitts are supreme, and for me, they are a lifesaver. For just £125 I can now walk around indoors, avoiding awkward eye contact, and willfully ignoring the rule that says: only morons wear sunglasses indoors. “Yeah? Well mine are prescription!” Cubitts sunglasses are an easy purchase this summer. And now that summer is here in earnest you will be looking around frantically for your scratched, 5 year old pair that has a broken hinge after last years debauchery off the coast of Sardinia. Save yourself the hassle. Cubitts has all the options you will get in another opticians, and you will pay a fraction of the price. As per usual, Sartorius Rex has selected the best options. You’re welcome. Thornhill in Camo Havelock in Honey Twyford in Dark Turtle All £125 www.cubitts.co.uk

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July/August 2016

Fashion & Lifestyle

Shirtwaisters are back in town

hair, think Betty Draper from Madmen. Origins point to the very first shirt dresses born out of the 1939 regulated utility dress introduced by the UK Government as Ration Fashion in response to a shortage of labour and materials. The US introduced the shirtwaister in 1942 and dress retailers capitalised on the style to create their own version. As an answer to falling shirt sales one model was the brainchild of a woman called Dot Cox who worked at McMullen & Co, a men’s shirt factory in New York. Her big idea was to attach skirt fabric to a man’s shirt chopped at the waist. Their shirtwaist frocks became so popular they outstripped the sales of men’s shirts; a brand new fashion was fashioned. Shirt dresses do appear to ‘pop up’ from time to time throughout the decades as a practical, no nonsense dress with breast pockets, collar and cuffs and defined waist line. Their main appeal lies in being comfortable for a day in the office but with additional accessories such as a skinny belt, dressy enough for the evening.

By Lynne McGowan

id they ever really go away, the cool day wear alternative to raunchy exposed shoulder glamour and on clothes rails from Burberry to M&S, the beloved shirt waist dress or shirt dress. It came in as a spring style trend but plenty are still about ranging from crisp and cute to casual and loose. Some have a long, pleated skirt, others come shorter with capped sleeves and a few have no sleeves but all bear the hallmarks of original shirt waist dress design. Available in a wide spectrum of colours and patterns to choose from including vertical stripes and the old perennial favourite fabric, denim, the shirt dress is not going anywhere soon. A tailored no nonsense man’s shirt was the early inspiration for the shirtwaist dress and they were all the rage in the post Second World War era. The appeal lay in the more nursy military uniform but later with thanks to Dior’s ‘New Look’ the shirt dress skirt became more feminine and bouffant in the 1950s complementing the lacquered hatless

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

The Pantone colour prophecy:

excitement and optimism, through quiet stability prevails in this palette. Influenced by the world of art and the desire to disconnect from technology and unwind, this year’s designers have What is the next black? gravitated towards colours that are, first By Sasha Fedorenko and foremost, calming. This season, there is almost no perceivable distinction in colour choice between men’s and women’s collections; The Pantone Institute introduced Rose Quartz and Serenity as Colour of the olour is a universal, yet silent form Year 2016, with a view to transcend cultural and gender roles. From the big of communication that defines fashion industry names like Vionnet, the world. From an early age, Delpozo and Emporio Armani to the colours of our environment provide BCBG, Emilio Pucci and Richard James a heavy influence on psychological huge swathes of the industry have already decision-making in our everyday lives; embraced Serenity and Rose Quartz in from something as simple as choosing their collections. an outfit to the more subconscious, such Pantone Colour Institute has been as how different colours can subtly affect brightening up the world for over our feelings and mood. A bright yellow 20 years, constantly on the look out is culturally symbolic of optimism and to predict new trends and ultimately energy, engendering warmth and good cheer. These associations often take place deciding which hue will be the new outside of our conscious awareness, with black. Twice a year Pantone gathers a responses to colour triggered by reasons colour committee that meets in secret. as varied as memories of a close friend Pantone’s colourist experts believe that or a specific vacation destination well Pantone’s Colour of the Year has a deeper or subconsciously responding to colours sociological meaning than one might which we believe complement our think, arguing that for the most part the physical or desired appearance. The use of colour in the fashion industry exploits popularity of a colour reflects the age we live in. these emotions to significantly direct The colour that the committee prospective customers towards specific chooses each year will help dictate future brands. Whilst it might sound like a pseudo-science, the simple technique has fashion trends and is selected to precisely reflect the status quo and represent proven paradoxically successful. the cultural zeitgeist. In any given year If you look at this year’s fashion Pantone’s Colour of the Year attempts to runway shows, designers across the serve as an expression of a mood and an spectrum consistently incorporate tones of rose-pink, a persuasive yet gentle tone, attitude of people at a specific moment in time. By creating the looks that truly that conveys compassion and a sense of represent the world we live in, both composure alongside blue harmonies, constructed and organic, Pantone experts which seem to bring a feeling of respite seek to awaken a sense of reflection, even in turbulent times. The vivid pinks followed by playful escapism. and blues help provide subconscious

C An early memory of mine harks back to the large white polka dots belonging to my mother’s 1950s shirtwaist dress. It had a long A line skirt, ¾ length sleeves and a row of white buttons down the front, ripe for deft little fingers to twist off. Several shirtdresses have been purchased over the years and always distinctly remembered with affection. One of the more interesting and proudly sported was bought for a pound from a jumble sale in Brighton in the mid 70’s. It was a vintage Butlin’s shirt dress in deep cyan cotton with Butlin’s embroidered in flowing red script on the left breast and supposedly worn by one of the infamous Redcoats or maybe it actually belonged to the cleaner. In the bottom drawer of my mental filing cabinet there is a dim recollection of being chased round the garden by my mother wearing a blue and white polka dot shirtwaister complete with long wide skirt and skinny belt. I distinctly remember the big white dots.

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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This Month’s Recipe Clafoutis By Limpet Barron For the base, make a paté brisé Celia Birtwell. Richard Schmidt. Rufus Hale, Richard Schmidt.Hockney at the RA. (c) David Parry/ Royal Academy of Arts e 250g plain flour 150g diced and slightly softened butter 1 egg 1 tablespoon of cold milk Generous pinch of salt and of caster sugar On a clean work surface make a well in the flour, add all of the other contents except the milk and mix the ingredients until they form a rough paste. Add the milk gradually and knead with your palm until you have a smooth texture. Refrigerate for 1 hour before use. For the filling 450g black very ripe cherries 45g melted, but cooled butter 40g plain flour 30g caster sugar 75ml cold milk 1 egg 1 vanilla pod, split lengthways 40ml Kirsch.

On the plate Cherries Black & Redcurrants

Fish – Cornish Sea Bass, Sardines, Salmon & Turbot Meat & Game – Salt marsh Lamb, Poussin, Fillet of beef

Strawberries & Raspberries Carrots, Courgettes & Cucumbers Lettuce Radishes Beetroot

In the vase Hydrangea Peonies Sweet Peas Cornflowers Sunflowers

Roll out the pastry about 3 mm thick and carefully line your tart shell, chill for 10 mins, then bake blind at 170 c for approx 20 mins, or until golden brown. Whilst the pastry is cooking, break the egg into a bowl, and fold in the flour. Then add the melted butter, kirsch and vanilla pod seeds and work into an even mixture. Place the cherries into the cooked base, pour over the batter until it just comes up to the rim. Bake in a hot oven until the top is a light hazelnut colour, approx 25 mins. To check it is done, insert a sharp knife, which should come out cleanly. Serve warm with a dusting of icing sugar

TANGERINE DREAM

C afé Fo o d & Wi n e Fl ow ers Ev ent s The renowned Tangerine Dream café based in Chelsea Physic Garden SW3 is currently recruiting for:

• An apprentice to help with admin & bookings • Assistant chef • Full and part time waiting staff

Our season runs until the end of October, with opportunities after this for key staff. Please email David at tangerinefig@aol.com with a brief resumé and contact details.

Photographs © David Hughes

Food & Flowers

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July/August 2016

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Royal Opera House A restaging by Alexei Fadeyechev of Petipa’s adaption of Cervantes masterpiece with Ekaterina Krysanova and Andrei Yusupov. Bow Street Covent Garden WC2E 9DD 020 7304 4000 July 26-August 21 Vamos Cuba! Sadler’s Wells Set in Havana’s airport, where lovers separate, families unite: a place of romance and loss, this is “an exuberant mix of traditional and modern dance styles which includes salsa, rumba, chacha-cha and reggaeton.” Rosebery Avenue EC1R 020 7863 8000 August 3-4 The Taming of the Shrew: the Bolshoi Ballet Royal Opera House Set to Shotakovich’s music, a witty, athletic adaption by the choreographer Jean-Christophe Maillot of Shakespeare’s comedy with Olga Smirnov and Artery Belyakov. Bow Street Covent Garden WC2E 9DD 020 7304 4000

June 2016 DANCE July 6 - 10 My First Sleeping Beauty: English National Ballet 2 Peacock Theatre Choreographer Matthew Hart using Tchaikovsky’s familiar score creates a ballet for the whole family. Kingsway WC2A 2HT 0844 412 4322 July 12 -16 Paco Pena Flamenco Dance Company: Patrias Sadler’s Wells Legendary flamenco player brings a new work which explores through music and song the effects of the Spanish Civil War, emotional., physical and cultural inspired by the life and death of the poet Garcia Lorca. Roseberry Avenue EC1R. 020 7863 8000 July 13 - 16 Swan Lake: The Australian Ballet London Coliseum St Martin’s Lane WC2N 4ES 020 3137 7420

July 15 Staycation/vacation RichMix Kesha Raitatha and Archana Ballal’s present two pieces of Bharatayam 35-47 Bethnal Green Road E1 July 17 A Tribute to Margot Fonteyn JW3 Discussion, film excerpts, a masterclass and a performance in tribute. 15.30-18.00 Finchley Road NW3 6ET 020 7433 8988 July 20-23 Cinderella : the Australian Ballet London Coliseum Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky with the music of Sergei Prokofiev and costumes by Jerome Kaplan. St Martin’s Lane WC2N 4E0 020 3137 7420 July 25-28 Don Quixote: the Bolshoi Ballet

August 5-6 The Flames of Paris: the Bolshoi Ballet Royal Opera House Against the background of the French Revolution, with Boris Asafiev’s score and choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, a drama of intrigue, passion and tragedy unfolds. Bow Street Covent Garden WC2E 9DD 020 7304 4000 August 11-13 Le Corsaire Royal Opera House Reworked by Alexei Ratmansky from the classic production by Pepita, a story of kidnapping, deception, a harem and conspiracy with a spectacular shipwreck. Bow Street Covent Garden WC2E 9DD 020 7304 4000 August 17-21 Echoes of Eternity: Shanghai Ballet London Coliseum The Ballet is based on a classic Chinese poem The Song of Everlasting Regret, a tragedy of love, conflict and loss set in 8th Century China. St Martin’s Lane WC2N 4ES 0871 911 0200 EXHIBITIONS

08450 944 911 Ends November 2017 The Hive Kew Gardens A unique structure designed by artist Wolfgang Buttress made from thousands of pieces of aluminium which creates a lattice effect and is fitted with hundreds of LED lights that glow and fade against a soundtrack of hums and buzzes. these effects are all responding to the realtime activity of bees in a hidden bee hive nearby. Inspired by scientific research into the health of honeybees, it is a visual symbol of the pollinators’ role in feeding the planet. Richmond TW9 3AE 020 8332 5655 July 19-23 Aviation Paintings of the Year Exhibition Mall Gallery The work of artists and talented amateurs depicting early flight through to the present day, both civil and military in a wide range of styles and media. The Mall SW1 020 7930 6844 July 25-September 2 The Ballard of British Folklore Christie’s South Kensington 85 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3LD August 2-7 Out of Africa Mall Gallery 35 contemporary examples of Shona stone carving from Zimbabwe; some influenced by the international art scene. The four usual themes are family, joy, sorrow, and rites of passage. The Mall SW1 020 7930 6844 Ends July 29 Scholar, Courtier, Magician: the Lost Library of John Dee Royal College of Physicians An exploration of the life and legacy of John Dee (1527-1609), mathematician, magician, astronomer, imperialist, alchemist and spy through his personal library. On display are his books on alchemy, maths, and astronomy annotated and illustrated in Dee’s own hand. 11 St Andrews Place Regent’s Park NW1 4LE 020 3075 1649 Ends July 29 Being Punk Museum of London A free display of objects, clothes, posters, accessories, photographs, stones and fancies celebrating the subculture of Punk in the capital in the late 1970s. A

July/August April/May 2011 2016

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Punk teenage bedroom, their meeting places and a nightclub decorated in graffiti and band fliers are all on show. 150 London Wall EC2Y 5HN 020 7001 9844 Ends August 7 Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year Royal Observatory An exhibition of amazing photographs. National Maritime Museum Greenwich SE10 9NF 020 8312 6608 Ends August 14 Sicily: Culture and Conquest British Museum Waves of conquerors and settlers have arrived in the island over many centuries; the exhibition with over 200 objects focuses on the cultural legacy that the Greeks, the Arabs and the Normans produced.The Greeks built beautiful temples and introduced grape vines. Around 965 AD the Arabs conquered the island and introduced oranges, cotton and sugar cane. By 1061, the Normans had arrived and settled in. Great Russell Street WC1B 3DG Ends August 21 Summer Exhibition 2016 Royal Academy In ten rooms with over 1,200 works showcasing everything from watercolours to videos and photography, from new talent to established stars there is much to see and to buy. Burlington House Piccadilly W1J 0BD 020 7300 8090 Ends August 27 Unseen - London, Paris, New York, 1930s-1960s Ben Uri Gallery and Museum Art, Identity, Migration Vintage photographs by three major photographers of the 20th Century: Dorothy Bohm, Neil Libbert and Wolfgang Suschitzky revealing their artistic responses to three great world cities across three crucial decades. 108a Boundary Road NW8 0RH 020 7604 3991

Ends August 28 Bill Jacklin RA: Graphic Work 19612016 Royal Academy Etchings from the 1960s alongside newly created monotypes in the first retrospective of this artist’s graphic work. Burlington House Piccadilly W1J 0BD 020 7300 8090 August 18-September 30 Young Hungarian artist Zsofia Schweger will be opening her debut solo exhibition at the Griffin Gallery. Zsofia has been selected for the New Contemporaries 2016 (previous NCs include Anish Kapoor, Anthony Gormley, David Hockney) and is currently undertaking a residency above Griffin Gallery, having won the Griffin Art Prize earlier this year. Zsofia paints large, minimal exteriors using a muted colour palette that explores her life as a Hungarian emigrant living in the UK. She’s definitely one to watch over the next few years, and will be exhibiting at the Royal Academy Summer Show and at the ICA and at the Liverpool Biennial as part of the New Contemporaries’ exhibitions. 21 Evesham St, London W11 4AJ 020 8424 3239 Ends August 29 Dorothy Bohm Sixties London Jewish Museum Given a Leica by her father as he sent her off to safety of London in 1939 away from the Nazis, the photographer has worked all over the world capturing ordinary lives; In the 1960s London she photographed everyday life from the school children to the market traders. Raymond Burton House 129-131 Albert Street NW1 7NB 020 7284 7384

r ’s e of Almodova atures v ti c e p s o tr re A complete lec tion of key Spanish fe films, plus a se y the direc tor himself programmed b

August 6 –September 14 (closed for the bank holiday weekend) Out of the Ordinary exhibition Christie’s South Kensington 85 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3LD

020 7928 3232 bfi.org.uk/southbank

BFI SOUTHBANK London SE1 8XT Waterloo

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August 2 Christie’s Lates-Festival of Folk 6.00-8.30 pm Christie’s South Kensington 85 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3LD

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Ends August 28 Maria Nepomuceno: Cosmic Teta The Barbican Inspired by the indigenous craft traditions of Brazil, the artist’s colourful sculpture are created with beads and weaving.

Silk Street EC2Y 8DS 020 7638 8891

Ends September 4 Almodovar KWC Today Ad 2016-06 126x316_v3.indd 1

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July/August 2016

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Painters’ Paintings: from Freud to Van Dyck National Gallery An exploration of the paintings painters collected and the reasons why: for artistic inspiration, to support fellow artists, as status symbols, as an investment or from an obsession. Freud, Matisse, Degas, Van Dyck, Reynolds and others all have examples of their choice in this exhibition. Trafalgar Square WC2N 5DN 020 7747 2885 Ends September 4 Ragnar Kiartansson Barbican A solo exhibition by the Icelandic artist involving painting, sculpture, drawing, music and film. He is ‘one of the most celebrated performance artists anywhere.’ New York Times. Silk Street EC2Y 8BS 020 7638 8891 Ends September 4 The Rolling Stones Exhibition Saatchi Gallery This exhibition with over 500 artefacts; original posters, costumes, unseen video clips, personal correspondence and work from their collaborations with Andy Warhol, Tom Stoppard, Ossie Clark and Martin Scorsese. Duke Of York’s HQ, King’s Rd, London SW3 4RY 020 7811 3070 Ends September 4 Leonardo da Vinci: the Mechanics of Genius Science Museum The artist’s inventions in sketch and drawing form have been brought to life in this interactive exhibition which shows his contraptions in 3D relating to warfare, manufacturing and flight. Cromwell Road SW7 5BD 020 7942 5000 Ends September 4 Servants in London Households 16002000 The Geffrye Museum of the Home In the museum’s period rooms scenes show the lives of servants working in middle-class homes over the last 400 years. 136 Kingsland Road E2 8EA 020 7739 9893 Ends September 6 Shakespeare in Ten Acts

British Library Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the exhibition covers the impact and transformation of his plays. 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 0843 208 1144 Ends September 18 Winifred Knights (1899 - 194700 Dulwich Picture Gallery With themes of women’ s rights and independence, the show tries to establish the artist’s importance as a modernist. Gallery Road Southwark SE21 7AD 020 8693 5254 Ends October 2 Seven Halts on the Somme Leighton House Museum Seven large-scale abstract memorial painting by Hughie O’Donoghue RA marks the centenary of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. The artist writes ‘Seven Halts on the Somme represents seven places where the army stopped in 1916…These paintings are a meditation in concrete form on past events, built up in successive layers..’ 12 Holland Park Road W11 1LR 020 7183 3577 Ends October 2 David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life Royal Academy A new body of work from the artist focusing on portraits offering a snapshot of the LA art world. Burlington House Piccadilly W1J 0BD 020 7300 8090 Ends October 9 Maria Merian’s Butterflies The Queen’s Gallery In 1699 this German artist entomologist went to Suriname and produced these amazing illustrations of animals, plants and life cycle of insects. Buckingham Palace Road SW1A 1AA 030 3123 7301 royalcollection.org.uk/tickets Ends October 16 States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness Wellcome Collection This changing exhibition will examine perspectives from artists, psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists ‘to interrogate our understanding of the conscious experience: exploring somnambulism, synaesthesia and disorders of memory and consciousness.

Ends October 16 Jukebox, Jewkbox! A Century on Shellac and Vinyl Jewish Museum Emil Berliner, a German-Jewish immigrant to the USA invented the gramophone in the late 19th century. This interactive exhibition takes you on journey through the sounds of shell and vinyl. Hear personal stories from artists musicians and collectors. See the 500 record sleeves. Raymond Burton House 129-131 Albert Street NW1 7NB 020 7284 7384 Ends October 30 Georgia O’Keeffe Tate Modern A major exhibition with over 100 remarkable works from one of the founding figures of American modernism and her artistic influences. Bankside SE1 9TG 020 7887 8888 Ends October 30 Take Me to Neverland: Play to Book and Beyond Florence Nightingale Museum Discover the real story behind

A Peal By Joseph Palasz

or 400 years the chimes of church bells have formed an essential part of the English soundscape. In celebration of this, on September the 8th through to the 11th as part of this year’s Heritage Open Days festival 500 church bell towers will open up their doors to the public; promising to bring the long and complex tradition of English church bell ringing to life. Heritage Open Days is England’s biggest heritage festival. Managed by the National Trust the festival involves 40,000 volunteers and thousands of locally organised events across the nation. The festival aims to unlock the hidden heritage treasures we may ignore or overlook on a day to day basis; opening up places normally closed or shut off to the public; all for free. Loyd Grossman, patron of Heritage Open Days, has said of this year’s Challenge 500: “Heritage Open Days provides the perfect opportunity to join together to bring to life the four-hundred year old tradition of English-style bell ringing for a huge audience. We are keen to recruit

J.M.Barrie’s classic with a selection of related artefacts taken from Great Ormond Street Hospital. Gusset House 2 Lambeth Palace Road SE1 7EW 020 7620 0374 Ends November 1 Jutland 1916: WWI’s Greatest Sea Battle National Maritime Museum Park Row, Greenwich, London SE10 9NF Ends November 6 Mind Over Matter: Contemporary British Engineering V&A Honouring the unsung heroes of design: major retrospective of Ove Arup which highlights the global impact of British engineers which includes AKT II, Atelier One, Buro Happold, Expedition Engineering and Jane Wernick Associates. This display present models, drawings and digital renderings of structural, civil, environmental and master-planning schemes. Cromwell Road SW7 2RL 020 7942 2000 Ends November 6 Colour and Vision Natural History Museum

churches and cathedrals to become involved in the festival by registering an event for visitors to discover their bell towers and to take part in hands on demonstrations.” Church bells in England have a rich and little known history. Developing the unique style of “change ringing,” English bell towers have served as important social and community centres for much of their history. Practiced by aristocrats and commoners alike, in the nineteenth century church bell ringing was seen as a boisterous and competitive affair; bell ringers even gaining a reputation for iniquity and reckless behaviour. Later the practice was reformed into a discipline believed to instil moral fortitude. Church bell ringing societies now boast thousands of enthusiastic practitioners up and down the country. Heritage Open Days’ call to the ringing world to open up 500 sites will provide a unique opportunity to take a look inside these important cultural landmarks and learn more of the story behind the sounds we hear every day. To learn more or register with Heritage Open Days please visit: www.heritageopendays.org.uk. A directory of the events taking part in the festival will be available on the website mid-July.

July/August April/May 2011 2016

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FILM & PHOTOGRAPHY

A 565-million-year journey uncovering how vision first evolved and how colour became a matter of life and death. See how pigments and iridescence were used for disguise and a warning or an invitation. Understand how and what other animals see. Interactive experiences and immersive films. Cromwell Road SW7 5BD 020 7942 5000 Ends November 13 Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS Imperial War Museum The display shows how Britain’s armed forces deal with very different aspects of global security from Ebola in West Africa to being part of the coalition efforts to fight ISIS in the Middle East. Lambeth Road SE1 6HZ 020 7416 5000 Ends November 27 Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost World British Museum Wonderful objects have been obtained recently from two ancient cities hidden under the sea on the Egyptian coast over

a thousand years ago. Great Russell Street WC1B 3DG 020 7323 8299 Ends January 5 Fashion Rules: Restyled Kensington Palace Four decades of fashion in a display from the wardrobes of the Young Queen Elizabeth, in the 50s and Princess Margaret in the 70s and of course Princess Diana. 201 - 209 Kensington Church Street W8 7LX 020 3166 6000 Ends March 12 2017 Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear V&A The history of private and intimate clothing from corsets to bustles which explores underwear’s function. Would Victoria be amused to see her mother’ pantaloons on display? Cromwell Road Sw7 2RL 020 7942 2000

July 14 - 24 Bagri London Indian Film Festival Europe’s largest South Asian Film Festival returns for the seventh time in ten cinemas in London and two in Birmingham. For complete schedule visit londonindianfilmfestival.co.uk July 12 - August WWI: the View from the Ground BFI Part two of the BFI’s look at WWI on films, focusing on the experience of the people who lived through it which includes the most imposing and important picture of the war David Lloyd George’s ‘The Battle of the Somme’. Southbank Belvedere Road SE1 8XT 020 7928 3232 July 27 - November 23 German Films and T.V. productions 7.00pm Goethe-Institut In German with English subtitles. July 27 B-Movie: Lust & Sound September 28 Everyone Else/Alle Anderen October 26 70 years of DEFAMurderers among Us

November 23 the Nightmare 50 Princes Gate Exhibition Road SW7 2PH 020 7596 4000 info goethe.de/uk August 25- 29 FrightFest: The Dark Heart of Cinema This is the Uk’s premiere international fantasy and horror film festival. Guillermo del Toro describes it as ‘The Woodstock of Gore’. About 60 films will be shown. More info frightfest.co.uk/tablet/index. html Ends July 31 Spielberg BFI The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Catch Me if You Can; a chance to catch up on this great director’s work or relish seeing it again. South Bank Belvedere Road SE1 8XT 020 7928 3232 Ends September 4 Edward Barber; Images of The AntiNuclear Movement Imperial War Museum Photographs from the early 1980s cover a moment in the history in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; demonstrations by women who at one

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time formed a human chain of nine miles around Greenham Common in 1982. Lambeth Road SE1 6HZ 020 7416 5000 Ends September 11 Woodstock: Baron Wolman Proud Camden The photographer’s genius lay with his camera where he transformed music photography with a brilliant series on the Woodstock Festival. He was in at the birth of Rolling Stone magazine. The Horse Hospital Camden Town Stables Market NW1 8AH 020 7482 3867 Ends December 31 Capturing the City Bank of England Museum Using the photographs from the Bank’s own collection the exhibition which includes artworks and artefacts which explore the history of the bank from the building to its staff since Victorian times. Bartholomew lane EC2R 8AH 020 7601 5545 Ends January 8 2017 Real to Reel: A Century of War Movies Imperial War Museum Go behind the scenes of some of the most iconic war films: to mark the 100th anniversary of the original The Battle of the Somme which explores how the filmmakers translated the stories of love, fear triumph and tragedy. See the scripts and set designs from such classics as The Dam Busters, Apocalypse Now, Battle of Britain, Das Boot, Casablanca and many others. Lambeth Road SE1 6HZ 020 7416 5000 MUSIC

Bow Street WC2E 9DD 020 7304 4000 July 12-17 Kew the Music Kew Gardens Simply Red, Will Young & Billy Ocean, Bjorand guests, Jools Holland, the Corrs and the Gipsy Kings will play for the Picnic Concerts in the beautiful grounds of the garden. Richmond Surrey TW9 3AB 0844 871 8803 visit kewthemusic.org July 14 Alim Qasimov Ensemble Wigmore Hall Classical Masters of Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, Sirojiddin Juraev dutar, tanbur and sato. 36 Wigmore Street W1U 2BP 020 7935 2141

July 16 The Food of Love Cadogan Hall An evening of Shakespearean music, verse and anecdote with Nigel Hess conducting RPO, Gemma Arterton and Patrick Stewart actors and Michael Dore vocalist. Sloane Terrace SW1X 9DQ 020 7730 4500 July 17 Felicity Vincent: Cello concert Foundling Museum The cellist plays a selection of works composed for dance including J.S. Bach’s Suite no.6 in D. 3.00pm 40 Brunswick Square WC1N 1AZ 020 7841 3600 July 17 Young Artist Summer Performance Royal Opera House Annual summer showcase of interest to anybody interested in discovering up and coming talent. 12.30pm Bow Street WC2E 9DD 020 7304 4000

July 19 July 14, 16, 20, 22, 27, 30 The Music of Christopher Tin La Cenerentola: Giochino Rossini Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster Today Cadogan Hall 126w x 154h Opera Holland Park Deadline 24th June 2106 The composer and Sue Fink conduct A comic opera written by the composer the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a supposedly when he was only 25. Sung KC W To d a y Q u a r t e r P a g e in italian with English subtitles. Stable Yard Holland Park W8 6LU 0300 999 1000 July 14 Jah Wobble & the Invaders of the Heart Rich Mix A melange of jazz, afro-rock, funk, reggae, dub and world music. The Financial Times wrote ‘Half Messianic, Half Messiaen’. 35-47 Bethnal Green Road Shoreditch E1 6LA 020 7613 7498

The Royal College of Music holds Lunchtime concerts (1.05pm) and rush hour concerts (6.00pm) at St Mary Abbots, St Martin-in-the-Fields, Charlton House, Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, Regent Hall and St James’s Piccadilly. www.rcm.ac.uk/events

July 15 Doric String Quartet Wigmore Hall One of the finest British quartets, it is equally accomplished playing Haydn and Beethoven as well as the world premiere of a commission by the Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy. 36 Wigmore Street W1U 2BP 020 7935 2141

July 11, 12, 14, 15, 17 Il Trovatore Royal Opera House One of Verdi’s great romantic works, directed by David Bosch, Conducted by Gianandrea Noseda with either Lianna Haroutounian or Anna Pirozzi in the role of Leonora and Francesco Meli or Gregory Kunde as Manrico.

July 15-September 10 BBC Proms Royal Albert Hall Kensington Gore SW7 2AP The 122nd season features more than 90 concerts in eight weeks. For an idea of the programs 020 7589 8212 Visit royalalberthall.com/tickets/proms

program that “traverses the globe on a musical journey of diversity and unity” and features Baba Yetu the first piece of music written for a video game to win a Grammy. Sloane Terrace SW1X 9DQ 020 7730 4500 July 19 Mahan Esfahani Wigmore Hall The Harpsichordist plays Scarlatti, Kaija Saariaho and more 36 Wigmore Street W1U 2BP 020 7258 8200 July 20 - 23 Pet Shop Boys: Inner Sanctum Royal Opera House The group launch their new album Bow Street WC2E 9DD July 29 &30, August 2 & 3 Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret with Meow Meow 7.30pm Cadogan Hall Sloane Terrace SW1X 9DQ 020 7730 4500 cadoganhall.com July 30 - August 13 Outdoor classical music and opera, and dance to hip hop. 6.00 - 9.00pm Free

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Lewis Cubitt Square Handyside Street N1C 4UZ July 30 Konono No1 + DJ Rich Mix An extraordinary Congolese band playing on scrap metal percussion and spiky metal thumb pianos play exuberant rhythms distorted through amplifiers made from old car parts. The repertoire draws on Congolese trance music. 9.00 35-47 Bethnal Green Road E1 6LA 020 7613 7498 August 1 A Satie Cabaret: Alexandre Tharaud, Jean Delescluse Cadogan Hall French pianist and Satie champion with the actor Alistair McGowan leads a program of words and music which includes extracts from Satie’s Memoirs of an Amnesiac and his solopiano compositions Grossiennes and Gymnopedies. 1.00-2.00pm Sloane Terrace SW1X 9DQ 020 7730 4500

August 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13 The Queen of Spades Opera Holland Park An opera with by Tchaikovsky in Russian with English surtitles, concerns obsession, love, madness and death. With Peter Robinson conducting the city of London Sinfonia. Stable Yard Holland Park W8 6LU 0300 999 1000 August 11 Frequencies Rich Mix Get your music heard. connect with professional artists. develop your music in live workshops. 35-47 Bethnal Green Road Shoreditch E1 6LA August 13 & 14 Red Bull Air Race World Championship Ascot racecourse info and tickets at REDBULLAIRRACE.COM and ascot.co.uk/airrace August15-20

International Piano Trio Festival 2016 Ronnie Scott’s Trios from around the world, from jazz legends to rising stars: Michael Camilo Trio, Cyrus Chestnut, Shahlosh, Enrico Pieranunzi’s, James Pearson and many more. 47 Frith Street W1D 4HT 020 7437 5081 August 18, 19, 20 & 20 Matinee Some Enchanted Evening Cadogan Hall A celebration of the hits of Richard Rodgers with songs from Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, Carousel, The King and I, South Pacific, Pal Joey and On Your Toes. Starring Lesley Garrett, Ruthie Henshall, Michael Xavier and Gary Wilmot with the RPCO conducted by Richard Balcombe with ArtsEd Ensemble. Sloane Terrace SW1X 9DQ 020 7730 4500 August 21 Veronica Yen: Piano Concert Foundling Museum The pianist performs works by Chopin, with other pieces inspired by his works. 3.00pm 40 Brunswick Square WC1N 1AZ 020 7841 3600

August 1 - 31 Kids go Free to Top London Shows Kidsweek.co.uk Ends July 30 Boys Will be Boys Bush Theatre In this play the City is not just a Man’s world because Astrid has won her ruthless way to the top, but now a young ambitious female newcomer in a junior position is carving her way to the top table. 7 Uxbridge Road W12 8LJ 020 8743 5050 Ends August 6 Unreachable Royal Court A film director in an obsessional search for perfect light. Written and directed by Anthony Neilson. Sloane Square SW1W 8AS 020 7565 5000 Ends August 6 The Taming of the Shrew The Globe Theatre The director Caroline Byrnes has a fresh, fast and distinctly Irish approach to one of Shakespeare’s most enjoyable, but sometimes controversial plays. 21 New Globe Walk Bankside SE1 9DT 020 7401 9919

LIVE MUSIC BRUNCH Most Sundays, 11:30am Spend a lazy Sunday listening to exceptional musicians and enjoying a delicious brunch.

LATE NIGHT JAZZ Most Thursdays, 9:45pm Sensational music in the relaxed setting of the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room.

Beyond the main stage at the ROYAL ALBERT HALL

Call: 020 7589 8212 royalalberthall.com/beyond

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18-21 August Ends August 27 Impossible Noel Coward Theatre The show features the World’s greatest Illusionists: death-defying stunts, technological trickery, close-up magic and grands stage illusions. St Martin’s Lane WC2N 4AU 0844 482 5138 Ends September 11 A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Globe Theatre The director Emma Rice has fused music, dance, sex and comedy in her first production in one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. 21 New Glove Walk Bankside SE1 9DT 020 7401 9919 Ends November 17 The Gruffalo the Lyric Join Mouse in a daring adventure the deep dark wood, a musical adaption of the classic picture book by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Shaftesbury Avenue W1D 7ES

QUEEN CAROLINE’S

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GARDEN

July 15-August 27 Jesus Christ Superstar Open Air Theatre Celebrating 45 years since Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical’s opening, this production is directed by Timothy Sheader with Declan Bennett in the role of Jesus. Inner Circle Regent’s Park NW1 4NU 0844 826 4242

PARTY

July 25 - July 30 Shadowlands Richmond Theatre Set in the 1950s an unlikely romance blossoms between an Oxford don and an outspoken divorced American. Based on a true story. The Green Richmond TW9 1Q 0870 060 6651

Watch a Georgian duel Perform for Royalty Dress in Georgian costume Learn army drills and sword moves and more family fun... BOOK T ICK E TS NOW hrp.o rg.uk/kensingtonpalace

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September 2 - 17 Pride and Prejudice Open Air Theatre Jane Austen’s most popular novel adapted by Simon Reade returns after a sell-out

Entry is i ncluded in the cost of a pala ce admission ticket

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Captivating scents: fresh floral fœtid

A Scented Season at London’s Secret Garden Visit our scented outdoor exhibition this summer. Pick up the scent trail which will lead you around the scented displays in the Garden. Discover displays showcasing the plants used in aromatherapy and perfumery. If you’re feeling brave visit the Abhorrent Arbour which features some of the worlds stinkiest plants!

Events & Tours • Award-winning Café • Shop 66 Royal Hospital Road, London SW3 4HS

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July/August April/May 2011 2016

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RAYMOND GUBBAY presents

SATURDAY 24 SEPTEMBER at 7.30pm run in 2013. Directed by Deborah Bruce with Felicity Montagu as Mrs Bennet. Inner Circle Regant’s Park NW1 4NU 0844 826 4242

For children aged 3 and above, a stage adaption of the classic tale with magic and sing-along songs and chaos. Sloane Terrace SW1X 9DQ 020 7730 4500

July 17 Sense and Sensibility Hatfield House The Chapter House Theatre Company performs an adaption of Jane Austen’s novel in Elephant Dell in the park. Hatfield Herts AL9 5NQ 01522 569 222

August 20 & 21 Surprise! Peppa Pig Hackney Empire A brand new live stage show: Peppa is outside playing with her friends when her parents surprise her. 291 Mare Street E8 1EJ 020 8985 2424

The power and emotion of three distinguished choirs combine to perform Verdi’s choral masterpiece.

London Philharmonic Choir Huddersfield Choral Society Royal Choral Society Katherine Broderick soprano Susan Bickley mezzo-soprano Peter Auty tenor Graeme Broadbent bass Brian Wright conductor

ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

SUNDAY 9 OCTOBER at 3.00pm

BEETHOVEN’S NINTH

July 18 Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with Comedians Southbank Centre Shakespeare’s abridged text for a modern take on his classic comedy directed by Liam Williams. Belvedere Road SE1 8XX 0844 545 8282 August 6 - September 4 The Tiger Who Came to Tea Cadogan Hall

VERDI REQUIEM

300 VOICES IN MONUMENTAL HARMONY

An unmissable concert culminates with the monumental ‘Choral Symphony’ with its climactic ‘Ode to Joy’.

Piano Concerto No. 5 ‘Emperor’ Symphony No. 9 ‘Choral’ Gareth Hancock conductor Danny Driver piano Elizabeth Watts soprano Heather Shipp mezzo soprano Gwyn Hughes Jones tenor David Soar bass

Compiled and edited by Leila Kooros with assistance by Fahad Redha

ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA LONDON PHILHARMONIC CHOIR

SATURDAY 29 OCTOBER at 7.30pm

Tutton & Young present

CARMINA BURANA

400 VOICES IN MONUMENTAL HARMONY

LONDON LO THE DESIGN AND CRAFT FAIR

ROSSINI Thieving Magpie Overture BRUCH Violin Concerto No. 1 ORFF Carmina Burana English Concert Chorus Highgate Choral Society Royal Choral Society The Southend Boys’ Choir Andrew Greenwood conductor Daniel Hope violin Fflur Wyn soprano John Graham-Hall tenor Benedict Nelson baritone

ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA

2 0 - 2 3 O C T O B E R 2 016 ONE MARYLEBONE NW1 4AQ

ROYAL ALBERT HALL WWW.MADELONDON.ORG

Box Office 020 7838 3109 DESIGN ★ SARAH YOUNG

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16 specialist departments and a weekly general sale If you have any items that you think you would like to sell at auction, please bring them along for a Free Valuation

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never complacent, never satisfied until he had mastered a particular genre. Not knowing the majority of his sitters, as they comprise friends, employees, gallery owners, fellow painters, his dentist, children of friends, dealers and curators, it is difficult to know whether they are good likenesses or not, but one really feels that he has got under the skin of each and every one of them. A few, like Barry Humphries, Larry Gagosian and Jacob Rothschild, are recognisable faces. He starts with a charcoal sketch outline, to get scale and proportion right, or ‘fixing the pose’, as he calls it, and then starts to block in the colour. Over three days, he refines the process, overpainting and adding more detail, building up the surface until, et voila!, there is another finished picture. He has always produced portraits, right from his days at the Royal College, followed by a series of drawings and paintings of his friends like Mo McDermott, Peter Schlesinger, Christopher Isherwood, Dom Bachardy, Peter Langham, Stephen Spender, Celia Birtwell, John Kasmin and W H Auden. After a sitting in the latter’s New York appartment, Hockey said of his face, famously described as a wedding cake left out in the rain, ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ Celia, who features in one of his most popular and celebrated paintings, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, which was acquired by the Tate in 1971, reappears as one of the 82 portraits, but with a curious green tip to the end of her nose. Her granddaughter Isabella also sat for Hockney, when Celia was visiting LA, as did the youngest sitter, Rufus, 11-year old son of Matthew Hale and the soi-disant film-maker Tacita

Dean, who was making a film about Hockney smoking. The boy was the only sitter to be allowed a prop, in his case, a notebook and pencil. When Hockney had finished the portrait, Rufus was asked what he thought of it, and he noted that the great man had not included the little rubber on the end of his pencil. In 2013 Hockney suffered a minor stroke, and in the spring of that year, the tragic and accidental death of a studio assistant, Dominic Elliott, knocked him sideways, and he stopped painting and drawing for a number of months. Out of this despair came the first of the portraits, one of his amanuensis and his trusted studio manager, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, ( J-P) who adopted the pose of van Gogh’s Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate), with his head buried in his hands. From there on, the portraits become more regulated, with the sitter sitting up in the chair, and apart from the first of three he did of Bing McGilvray, 23rd, 24th, 25th August 2013, where his shoes are out of shot, they included their feet. The exception to this is the only double portrait in the exhibition, of Augustus and Perry Barringer, 16th, 17th June 2014, where the canvas is hung landscape and the boys are cut off at the knees. The pictures

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Arts & Culture Celia Birtwell. Richard Schmidt. Rufus Hale. Richard Schmidt. Hockney at the RA. (c) David Parry/ Royal Academy of Arts

David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and a Still Life Royal Academy Sackler Galleries Until 2 October 2016 Admission £11.50 www.royalacademy.org.uk

ne never knows what to expect when one enters the coolness of the Sackler Galleries at the top of Burlington House through the frosted-glass doors, although it rarely disappoints. This exhibition certainly evokes a wow factor; against rich cadmium orange walls are hung 83 acrylic paintings in identical 3-foot by 7-foot canvases with 1-inch black frames, each with a shade of cobalt blue background and a cobalt turquoise carpet, or the other way round, on a 2-foot dais, to bring the subject up to the artist’s eye-height, who works standing up at his easel. The subjects all sit in the same upholstered wooden-framed chair with arm-rests in his studio in Los Angeles and the poses they adopt, and the clothes they wear, are dictated by them. This is one body of work because of the repetitive nature of the poses, hanging and the vibrant colours, including the flesh-tones, with which he imbues everyone with a ‘Rioja flush’, and yet, each portrait could easily survive on its own, without companions, even on a white wall. David Hockney is a remarkable artist, and for one really good reason; he never stands still and is always, learning, innovating, experimenting with different mediums, mastering others, like lithography, etching, painting in acrylics, photography, with his famous ‘joiners’, eventually finding them in every art students’ canon, ink-jet prints, even fax machines, silk screens, film and drawings. He moves with the latest technological developments, utilising a Brushes app to produce iPad paintings a few years ago, but at the heart of everything he produces is draughtsmanship. He is a terrific ‘drawrer’, and what is clear from these portraits is that this is from where it all stems. There are any number of artists who find a winning formula, and keep on kicking it to death. We all know who the usual suspects are, they used to be painters like John Bratby and Bernard Buffet, then it moved on to Barry Flanagan, Allen Jones, Anthony Green, Howard Hodgkin, Patrick Caulfield and R B Kitaj, artists who got stuck in a rut, and never got out of it and into the groove. Hockney never did this; he was always striving, always pushing the boundaries, never settling down,

are hung chronologically, the last ones being the octagenarian architect Frank Gehry, 24th 25th February 2016 and Earl Simms, 29th February, 1st, 2nd March 2016, a friend of J-P’s, each taking ‘a twenty hour exposure’, as the artist puts it, although some took less time. His brother John Hockney, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th January 2016, took a little longer, and is the only painting with the chair sideways on, and Jacob Rothschild, 5th, 6th February 2014 took only two days, as he had business commitments. Seen as one body of work, the overall effect is striking, but after a while, one begins to suffer from portrait fatigue, and the initial effect begins to wear off, with less and less apparent differentiation between them. Fruit on a Bench, 6th, 7th 8th March 2014 is not of a gay from LA, but is a still life, painted because one sitter never turned up and he had already had his paints prepared, so he used what fruit he found lying around the kitchen. Don Grant

Arts & Culture Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck

National Gallery Sainsbury Wing Until 4 September 2016 Admission £12 www.nationalgallery.org.uk

fter the enormous success of the Rembrandt, Goya and Delacroix exhibitions held over the past year and a half, one can imagine the curatorial and administrative staff sitting around, scratching their collective heads and wondering what to do next. ‘I know,’ says one, a eureka lightbulb appearing above her head. ‘You remember the Corot that Lucian Freud gave us a few of years ago? Well, he also gave a Constable to the Scottish National Gallery in lieu of Inheritance Tax a couple of years ago.’ ‘Haven’t we got other paintings that were once owned by painters?’ ‘Dozens of ‘em.’ ‘Goody, I feel an exhibition coming on.’ And they amassed 45 paintings that they owned and, by adding 43 loaned from Tate, the Royal Academy, the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam, the Watts Gallery near Guildford and collections in Paris, Philadelphia, Copenhagen and New York, they called it Painters’ Paintings. An enormous amount of research must then have been undertaken to establish provenance and a paper trail of purchases, exchanges and bequests, at least enough to make sense of the title. They have selected eight painters and given them each a designated space in the gallery, and they have decided to arrange them in reverse chronological order, starting with Lucien Freud. Henri Matisse is next, followed by Edgar Degas, who has two galleries, then Frederic, Lord Leighton, George Frederic Watts, Sir Thomas Lawrence and Sir Joshua Reynolds, both former Presidents of the Royal Academy, and Sir Anthony van Dyck, England’s foremost court painter in the first half of the 17th century. Freud owned a small Cézanne brothel scene, entitled Afternoon in Naples, and although his own take on the scene is not in the exhibition, as it resides in Canberra, a photograph of it is, with similar composition and other clear influences. The curator explains the significance of painters collecting work by others ‘as tokens of friendship, status symbols, models to emulate, cherished possessions, financial investments or

sources of inspiration.’ So, van Dyke owned a Titian, Reynolds a Rembrandt, Matisse a Degas, and Degas several Ingres and a couple of Manets. By far the most avid collector was Degas, who often traded his own paintings and pastels for those he coveted the most, like Manet’s delightful Woman with a Cat. He managed to track down four of the fragments of oil on canvas of The Execution of Maximillian, which had been cut up and dispersed after his death, which the National Gallery bought in 1918. He also purchased works by Paul Gauguin and Alfred Sisley, both struggling at the time, and Delacroix, who he admired colossally, a Cézanne and an enormous number of Ingres, four of which are on display. Lord Leighton also decorated his eccentric and orientalist mansion and studio in Holland Park with a vast array of pictures, including a number of Corot landscapes and a Tintoretto. G F Watts was a friend and neighbour of his lordship, and the two artists shared a love for Italy and particularly Renaissance art, and he owned Knight of S Stefano by Girolamo Macchietti painted in 1563. Sir Thomas Lawrence was one of the leading portraitists and a hugely voracious collector, amassing a staggering 4,300 drawings and paintings, including Agostino Carracci’s enormous charcoal cartoon A Woman being Borne off by a Sea God, and judging from the expression on her face, and the intimate positioning of his hand over her pudenda, or perhaps because of it, she is not putting up too much of a struggle. He also owned Guido Reni’s Coronation of the Virgin, Raphael’s An Allegory (Vision of a Knight) and what he thought was a Rembrandt painting A Seated Man with a Stick, but which was later reattributed to a ‘follower’. Sir Joshua Reynolds was another passionate collector, and he owned paintings by Bellini, Jacopo Bassano, Rembrandt, of which he had two, Poussin, Gainsborough and Sir Anthony van Dyck. He, in turn, owned no fewer than 19 works by Titian, who was his passion, but he also acquired paintings by Raphael and Tintoretto. With examples of his own work on view it is easy to see the strong influence the great Venetian painter had on him, particularly his Portrait of Gerolomo Barbarigo, seen alongside his Self Portrait, not just in the over-the-shoulder pose and penetrating gaze, but in the rendering of the luxurious fabric. There are few paintings in the show that we have not seen at one time or another, but it is always a treat to see La Coiffure by Degas, even though it can be seen any time, for free, at the National Gallery, Gauguin’s Young Man with a Flower behind his Ear from a private Collection, Manet’s Woman with a Cat from Tate, and the charming The Flood Banks of the Seine, Bougival by Alfred Sisley, on loan from Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen. Don Grant

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online: www.KCWToday.co.uk Titian. Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo. © The National Gallery

July/August 2016

Sir Anthony van Dyck. Self portrait. Private Collection

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Georgia O’Keeffe Tate Modern Until 30 October 2016 Admission £19 tate.org.uk

ight from the outset, the Director of Tate Modern, Frances Morris, and the two lady curators, were at pains to quash any erotic interpretations or overtones that have been made of O’Keeffe’s floral paintings. Rather primly, they stated, ‘(the exhibition) focuses on the work, aiming to dispel the clichés that persist about O’Keeffe’s paintings’. Methinks, these ladies protesteth too much. In a recent biography, Professor Randall Griffin, a specialist in American art history, wrote in a chapter entitled The Question of Gender, ‘…It now seems abundantly clear that, in spite of her vehement denials, O’Keeffe meant some of her paintings (not just the flowers) to look vaginal . . . Works such as Abstraction Seaweed and Water - Maine and Flower Abstraction overtly allude to female genitalia…’ The editors of Phaidon’s recent book Body of Art, Deborah Aaronson, Diane Fortenberry and Rebecca Morrill, positively gush with a lush description of Grey lines with black, blue and yellow as evoking ‘a vulva, executed in luscious tones, drawing the viewer in through the full parted lips and fleshy layers to the pink clitoral sliver at the centre.’ Griffin went on to write, ‘O’Keeffe’s aim was to distinguish herself from her contemporary male artists by producing paintings that would seem both audaciously sexual and innately feminine. Moreover, the feminist writer Lisa L Moore has argued that O’Keeffe’s flowers should be seen as part of a lesbian tradition extending back to the eighteenth century, since some evidence suggests that O’Keeffe had several brief sexual affairs with women. According to Moore, these included Rebecca Strand,

wife of photographer Paul Strand in 1929, when the two spent five months together in Taos, New Mexico, along with Mabel Dodge Luhan, that same summer in Taos. O’Keeffe may have also had an affair with Maria Chabot, who oversaw the renovation of O’Keeffe’s Abiquiu hacienda between 1945 and 1949.’ Does any of this matter? Probably not. The flower paintings work as botanical or anatomical studies and some, like her Oriental Poppies, are stunning in their simplicity, vigour and raw vibrancy. This show celebrates her first one in New York, exactly 100 years ago, at the 291 Gallery, owned and run by Alfred Stieglitz, who, having seen her drawings, exclaimed, ‘finally a woman on paper’. Her early watercolours demonstarted a mature confidence, with vivid landscapes of Virginia and Texas. Having moved to New York, she turned to abstraction, and became interested in synaesthesia, where one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as a sound may evoke sensations of colour. She began to abstract flowers and erotic qualities were read into these works, egged on by Stieglitz, who imbued them with psychoanalytical interpretations, which she found irksome. There are a number of sensitive nude portraits taken by Stieglitz, whom she married in 1924, and she also produced a number of paintings in collaboration with his sky photographs, called Equivalents. She then turned to painting New York, saying that ‘I was told that it was an impossible idea, even the men haven’t done too well with it.’ What can she have been thinking? What about George Bellows and Edward Hopper and members of the Ashcan School? Just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 she had already stopped painting the City and had made her first prolonged trip down to New Mexico.The Stieglitz family had a summer home in Upstate New York at Lake George, where she continued with abstraction, but this time using nature as the source material. Her palette changed from the vibrant colours she used in New

Mexico, and she remarked that she felt ‘smothered in green’. The soft blues and greens of the countrside in the summer merged into the reds and purples of maple and oak trees in the fall. She began a series of large flower paintings, gradually moving into realism, possibly to shake off the sexual interpretations of her work, and she continued this until the 1950s. She returned to New Mexico and stayed with the rich socialite and art patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan, in Taos, where there was already a flourishing artistic community. Amongst the artists and writers she hosted was D H Lawrence, out of whose visit she wrote a memoir entitled Lorenzo in Taos, and the photographer Ansell Adams. His photographs are some of

John Springs: A Political Eye Panter & Hall 11-12 Pall Mall Until 15 July 2016

John Springs continues in the Great British tradition of caricature, a long lineage that started with Gilray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank at the end of the 18th century and the first two

the best things in the exhibition, with eight of his brilliant black and white images shining out like gemstones, like Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, and Thunderstorm, Ghost Ranch, Chama Valley, Northern New Mexico, and a further seven from another great American photographer, Paul Strand. Stieglitz has 56 photos on the walls, including 17 of O’Keeffe. During this period in New Mexico, flowers were scarce in the desert, so she took to painting animal bones, particularly skulls, which are some of her least successful works, and somehow are precursors to the hippy era, thirty years hence. Her landscapes, however, have enormous power, particularly Black Mesa Landscape, painted in 1930 and The Black Place IV from 1944, a painting rarely seen, and certainly not in the UK before. No British gallery has an O’Keeffe in their collections, something Ms Morris regrets about her predecessors’ lack of foresight and judgement. It could be a little late now, in light of one of her works, the iconic Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, painted in 1932 and on loan from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas, realising $44 million at auction, which was the highest price ever paid for a female artist. Tate have borrowed over 100 of her works for this show, the first exhibition of her work in the UK for 20 years, so this is a once-in-a-generation chance to see so many of this significent modernist’s works in one place, even though the admission price is a hefty £19. Don Grant decades of the 19th century, through to Phil May, Tom Browne, Bert Thomas and H M Bateman in the early 20th century, followed by Vicky, David Low, Illingworth, Trog and Max Beerbohm, and then Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe and Wally Fawkes. He is probably most influenced by an American David Levine, whose fine cross-hatching he echoes, but sometimes with the addition of watercolour or gouache. The list of publications he has worked for is impressive, including many covers for the Spectator and contributions to Time, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Tatler, The Sunday Times, the Literary Review, The New York Review of Books, The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, The Independent and Esquire. Although the title of the exhibition is A Political Eye, there are also figures from showbiz, like John Gielgud, Keith Richards, Michael Jackson and Jeremy Irons, and the world of literature, including GK Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, William Burroughs and Will Self. Most nail the subject, although a couple like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown miss the target, though not by much. All the original drawings are for sale, and prices range from £275 to £800, unframed, and there is a framed drawing of six French writers, including Sartre and Camus, for £1,000.

Image © John Springs

Black Mesa Landscape @ Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow. © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Arts & Culture

July/August 2016

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BP Portrait Award 2016

National Portrait Gallery Until 4 September 2016 Admission free www.npg.org.uk

very year the standard and diversity of portraiture goes up, and the ages of the rising stars goes down. The styles vary from near photographic to postimpressionism and from the very large, like Laura Goake’s giant closeup Petra, with his subject’s hands covering his mouth, at 1.5 by 2 metres, or Brett Amory’s deperately sad portrait of Jijinka at 2.4 high by 1.2 metres wide, to the very small, like Elenor Vladimir Baranoff ’s astonishingly detailed egg tempera on gesso board portrait of the Bishop of London in full regalia at 350mm x 250mm. How Goake manages to render outoffocus features as they recede is mystifying m aybe she used a giant photographic blowup? There are some very accomplished portraits in the show: Alex Chamberlin’s sketchy study of the pianist James Rhodes; the photographer Martin Chaffer by the unpronouncable

Sopio Chkhikvadze posing against a map of London, for no discernable reason; an almost PreRaphaelite feel to Laura in Black by Joshua LaRock in soft focus, in contrast to the sharpfocus and dramatic lighting in Stephen Earl Rogers’s Haydn as Henry in a homage to the opening shot of Goodfellas with Ray Liotta; Daniele Vezzani’s sulky and defiant teenager Francesca; Shany van den Berg’s penetrating selfie, with one comment being ‘You don’t want to mess with this woman.’; the small and seemingly unfinished portrait of I.Crow X against a Vlaminck sky by Noah Buchanan. The winners, in reverse order, were the poet Hugo Williams, who suffered kidney failure after the portrait was started, necessitating Benjamin Sullivan to suspend the sittings. One can detect the fraility of the man, with a great deal of attention given to his entwined hands. In second place was a deeply moving

painting of Bo Wang’s grandmother, dying on a hospital bed entitled Silence. The winner of the BP Young Artist Award, plus £7,000, went to Jamie Coreth for his slightly cluttered Dad Sculpting Me, a study of his father in his studio working on a portrait bust of the artist. First prize, with a cheque for £35,000 and a commission from the Gallery worth a further £5,000, went, deservedly to Clara Drummond for her Girl in a Liberty Dress, a subtle portrait of her friend and fellow artist Kirsty Buchanan. At first glance, the picture appeared rather slight and wistful, with echoes of Andrew Wyeth, but it has an enigmatic quality, which she likens to Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow, painted in 1500. Both Alex Chamberlin and Clara are members of The Chelsea Arts Club, which

this year celebrates its 125th Anniversary. Founder Club Members like John Singer Sargent, Walter Sickert and J A M Whistler would be gratified to see their legacy in such safe hands. Don Grant Left: Clara Drummond. RBelow: Martin Chaffer by Sopio Chkhikvadze. Photographs © Don Grant

Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings Courtauld Gallery Until 11 September 2016 Admission £9 www.courtauld.ac.uk

It doesn’t get weirder than this. In the mid nineteenth century, spiritualism was all the rage, a bit like the twentyfirst century’s obsession with food, fitness, celebs and diets. In Victorian England, many well known and influential people, the most prominent being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who not only wrote books on the subject, but toured the world lecturing on his belief in life after death and communicating with the dead, were believers. Enter Georgiana Houghton, a trained artist and spiritualist, who claimed to channel her painting through communing with spirits, including Renaissance artists like Titian and Correggio, saints and archangels. Well, you either buy this or you do not. Personally, I do not, and will go as far as to say that it is a large tranche of utter nonsense, or, as Ernst Gombrich put it so succinctly in The Story of Art, ‘a load of old bollocks.’ The Courtauld, normally a beacon of taste and refinement in their choice of shows in an otherwise bland world, has staged, as they themselves describe ‘this remarkable exhibition’. Largely unknown for nearly 150 years, these works are an astonishing product of Victorian culture. This is the first time they have been exhibited in the UK since they were first shown in London in 1871’. Hardly surprising. These are meant to be the first examples of abstract art, pre-empting the likes of Kandinsky, who is credited with coming up with the genre fifty years later, along with Hilma af Klint, whose work was also significant in furthering abstraction. But, are the paintings any good? Whether or not Titian had a hand in them is open to argument, but one cannot imagine the great Venetian painter being pleased with some deluded mystic taking his art in vain in such a manner. Her paintings are a series of swirls and spidery tracework in watercolour on paper, with the odd figurative element dropped in, like the face of Christ in Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ, inspired or ascribed to St Luke, or The Eye of God, with Correggio as her spiritual guide, but they are mainly meaningless scribbles and, to my eye, of no merit at all, but maybe I am missing the point? They were hailed as the work of genius back then, and a contemporary newspaper the Daily News wrote they were like ‘tangled threads of cotton wool’, going on to say, ‘they deserve to be seen as the most extraordinary and instructive example of artistic aberration,’ and one critic even compared her to late Turner. She had an exhibition of her spirit drawings in a swanky gallery in Bond Street, in 1871 and it generated a lot of interest, but they did not sell, and she was nearly bankrupted after spending four months on site every day so that she could discuss the work with visitors. She continued to paint her watercolours until she went to join Titian, Correggio, Sir Thomas Lawrence and a host of archangels in 1884. Don Grant

The Portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ © Victorian Spiritualists’ Union Melbourne, Australia

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Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design

Top left: Sir Ove Arup by Godfrey Argent, © National Portrait Gallery, London Above: Sydney Opera House under construction. © Robert Baudin for Hornibrook Ltd. Courtesy Australian Air Photos Left: Crossrail Tunnel Boring Machine Jessica breaks through into Stepney Green cavern Photographer Robby Whitfield © Crossrail Ltd

V&A Until 6 November 2016 Admission £7 vam.ac.uk

ith Volkswagen as main sponsor of this first ever Engineering Season, in light of recent revelations about the car manufacturer’s integrity, maybe the title should have been Manipulating the World. In the press release it states that ‘as a global company Volkswagon is fully committed to its social responsibilty’. Really? Ove Arup, on the other hand, has a healthy and robust reputation, that has endured throughout the twentieth century, and beyond, and has been responsible for probably more design and engineering projects than was realised. They were behind the ground-breaking Penguin Pool at London Zoo, designed by Berthold Lubetkin in 1934, with its own brand of innovative modernism. Arups was also responsible for improving inadequate air-raid shelters during the Second World War, and designing the Mulberry temporary harbours deployed during the D-Day landings in France in 1944. The story of the Sydney Opera House is told in great detail, with early sketches, technical drawings and models used for wind tunnel experiments and stress-testing the gravity-defying roof.

On display is the Ferranti Pegasus computer, which is said to have saved ten years of human calculation, which was the first time such a machine had been used for such computations. There is a large display of their structural engineering involvement in the radical Pompidou Centre designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in 1977, which was startlingly innovative, in that it had all the ‘innards’ on the outside, although many of the components were purely cosmetic and served no structural purpose. Colour-coding was part of the design, so that ventilation ducting was painted blue, plumbing and fire control piping green, electrical elements orange and yellow, circulation throughout the building red, and the larger structural components painted white. It took six years to build and cost close to 1000 million francs, but in 1997, it was showing signs of premature ageing,

having received more than 180 million visitors, or 25,000 visitors a day, and a further 576 million francs had to be spent on renovation. Arup’s collaborated with Foster + Partners on the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which just reeks of money, and the Kansai International Airport. One joint effort that is not mentioned in the exhibition, no doubt through lack of space, is the Millennium Bridge outside Tate Modern, which was closed the day of its opening due to an unforeseen wobble. Foster was very hasty in laying the blame at the door of Arup with some ill-judged words, and, to give them their due, they admitted that responsibility for the bridge was theirs, although some critics were surprised by the ungentlemanly manner in which Foster turned on his engineers. Arup’s are in charge of the enormous Crossrail project, which is the biggest

construction project in Europe and is one of the largest single infrastructure investments ever undertaken in the UK. It is the first complete new underground line in more than 30 years, which began in the summer of 2012 and ended at Farringdon with the breakthrough of the tunnelling machine Victoria. Eight 1,000 tonne tunnelling machines have bored 26 miles of new 6.2m diameter rail tunnels under London. They are also heavily involved in the much-debated HS2, and have used acoustic and environmental sound studies from the Arup Soundlab, which also looks at concert halls. This is quite a dry exhibition, in spite of the inclusion of many of Ove’s quirky doodles, doggerels and sketches, which confers him with a sense of humour, something one does not usually associate with architecture and engineering. Don Grant

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Arts & Culture loss of their loved ones; it’s difficult to separate the art from the tragedy of such a fund raising event, as “ordinary decent people” embrace democratic ratification of xenophobia and its insidious fellow traveller, homophobia. I celebrated a memorable, and with candles lighting the gothic interior of St Pancras Church reminding us it was also in memoriam, Fathers’ Day with my daughters. There with my girls on a family outing, my thoughts were with the child texting her mother from the toilets saying she was about to die. The dichotomy at the heart of these events is that the very real pain of the wounded and bereaved, and the consciousness of so many lives terminated needlessly, is brought into sharp relief on an individual basis, while the effect of such a community as LBGT gathering together is unavoidably uplifting. The music itself reflected inspired selections beautifully presented. I don’t think I’ve ever seen choral works signed for the deaf before, adding a third dimension to the evening’s diversity. The five choirs all had moments that I’ll carry with me for years. Extended coverage

CLASSICAL MUSIC BY JAMES DOUGLAS

Pink Singers

#SingForOrlando Adam Street Singers; Diversity Choir; LGMC; NHS Choir St Pancras Church, Upper Woburn Place Monday June 20th

John Otway

PBH Free Fringe, Edinburgh Festival Voodoo Rooms 19a West Register St, Edinburgh EH2 2AA Monday 8,15 & 22 August 2016 John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett (1976) Following a celebrated appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test in December 1977, John Otway together with Wild Willy Barrett became overnight successes having started recording their eponymous first album in 1971, and releasing it just about 40 years ago to the day in 1976. Despite its checkered recording history the album is a purist’s dream, cohesive from start to finish despite multi-faceted referencing, from Bluegrass, Country, Garage Rock and of course Punk all within the context of what would now be described as Psychedelic Folk. No lesser an eminence than Pete Townshend was an early fan, playing on and producing three of the tracks. Otway’s voice is a glorious self-caricature, with elements of Johnny Rotten, Syd Barrett and Kevin Ayers. Ayers seemed also to influence Otway’s good-looking, long-haired, intelligent countercultural swagger. Where they differed was on stage, Ayers the upper-class laid-back hippy with the Caribbean beach hangover, while Otway sprang from speaker tower into the

Photograph © Eric Hands

ive UK choirs coming together for one evening in support of the LGBT community and to raise funds for the families mourning the

audience and back again like a demented goat on acid. The song in question Really Free became perhaps their best known track and was Otway’s only hit until Bunsen Burner twenty-five years later. As a hard core of fans will testify the one song cannot reflect the scope and vision of that fabulous first album, never mind three others that followed in reasonably short order, each with a claim to being just as good. When Otway drops the sneer, he produces ballades of quite Jaggeresque quality, one of my own favourites to this day being Geneve. I first saw John Otway live in a packed venue in Oxford and couldn’t believe either my ears (the music) or my eyes (the gymnastics). I remember the night as if it were yesterday. I was my teenagesweetheart’s guest and we still have lunch together once a year to this day. Otway is perfectly well aware that his passionately loyal fans think he’s an overlooked genius; it’s a view I take myself. He refuses to be drawn why comparatively mediocre talents have

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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of the launch of the London Gay Men’s Chorus’ charity single for the victims of Orlando Bridge Over Troubled Waters can be found online; on the night it was a significant highlight, as indeed was the NHS Choirs’ Christmas 2015 hit single A Bridge Over You. A bi-product of the evening, and Diversity Choir’s wonderful interpretation of Something Inside So Strong, is I know a lot more about Labi Siffre. When I was twelve I bought

his single It Must Be Love (made more famous by Madness, although I hadn’t made the connection until now). The single cost about seven shillings (35 New Pence) so somewhere between £5 and £10 in today’s money depending on how you look at it. A fair chunk of a twelve year-old’s net worth. A wonderful evening and fittingly: forty-nine dead and fifty-three wounded. Buy the single; I have.

received so much more recognition, although he did confess to me “I do sometimes think they might have put a little more effort into their lyrics”. I’ll send a copy of John Otway & Wild Willy Barrett to the first person to email me with Really Free in the subject title: douglas@jamesdouglas.tv Catching up with Wandsworth based Otway ahead of the Edinburgh gigs, he confirmed what’s already been announced on his website (www. johnotway.com) that he’s working with his band on new material. They’re back in the studios in September and hope to have the album ready for Christmas. John assures me that he’ll be playing at least three tracks at the Edinburgh gigs from the first album, including Really Free, although I’m also hoping to hear what has become an equal signature tune Beware of the Flowers (‘Cos I’m Sure They’re Going to Get You Yeah). That’s in fact from their equally wonderful follow-up album Deep & Meaningless which comes free with the first, so there you go; reminds me of the terrible pun when back in the seventies Pink Floyd’s first two albums were marketed as A Nice Pair. I’m also really looking forward to hearing his new music. My parents have lived ten minutes’ walk from Voodoo Lounge most of my life. My mother still runs A Georgian Residence bed & breakfast. Anyone who greets me at the 8 August 2016 gig will get copy of the album, introduced to John Otway, and will be invited back for dinner in Moray Place. www.morayplace.com

Classically Classical Summer 2016

“Geneve, take her to yourself and watch her while she rests she talks of you as home”

in a Baroque setting

Looking ahead for what not to miss in the extended Royal Borough and City, once again St John’s Smith Square catches the eye; Richard Heason is in his pomp. I’ll be popping along to Westminster, to one of our patch’s great venues, for Anna Tilbrook’s weekend of talks and concerts exploring music by Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries (Friday 7 October 2016 to Sunday 9 October 2016). Ralph Vaughan Williams is essential because of the range of his symphonies. This is a great opportunity to improve our knowledge of a composer that tends to be underrated, perhaps restricted to extremely pretty but relatively light pieces. Following the full-blown five star scintillating revival of the masterpiece that is Salieri’s La Grotto Di Trofonio, Bampton Classical Opera will be expecting Kensington Chelsea & Westminster to turn out in numbers again at St John’s Smith Square on 13 September 2016 at 7pm to see what Jeremy Gray & Co make of Gluck’s Philemon and Baucis and Arne’s The Judgment of Paris. I’ll be the noisy swot at the pre-event talk at 6pm, an hors d’oeuvre to the mouth-watering double mains.

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Arts & Culture

he Foundling Hospital was opened in 1739 by an American sea captain in order to care for abandoned babies. After much lengthy endeavour he obtained a Charter for this much needed Charity. During the 18th century there were many abandoned children. In Europe the situation was different as numerous Catholic Institutions took care of them, but in UK needy families depended on the Poor Law for help. Christ’s Hospital was founded in 1552 but crucially did not accept illegitimate children of which there were many. William Hogarth was active in the inception of the Foundling Hospital together with George Handel. They encouraged many artists to exhibit there and frequently devoted their work to the cause. These gatherings of artists sowed the seeds for the foundation of Royal Academies. Their work can be seen today with furniture and ceramics in the reconstructed and refurbished rooms in 18th century style at the Museum. Handel’s Messiah was frequently performed at the Hospital for charity and a full score copy of this famous work was donated to the museum. The Museum is also home to the splendid Gerald Coke Handel collection and his will is housed there too. The Foundling Hospital was the first Children’s Charity and the first Art Gallery. The museum celebrates the power of the individual and of art to change lives. The exhibits are made up of an esoteric collection of precious objects, particularly the evocative tokens left by mothers for identification, if they returned for their children, which they handed over at the Hospital. Exhibits include uniforms, textbooks and testimonies from past pupils.

Photograph © Cornelia Parker

The Foundling Museum. 4 Brunswick Square. London.WC1. N1. AZ Until 4th September. 2016.

The original hospital buildings were demolished when the children were moved to a purpose built hospital in Hertfordshire. This was eventually closed and sold when foster care and adoption were considered to be better options for homeless children. The Foundling Hospital changed its name to the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and this Charity is now known as ‘Coram’. The current Exhibition, Found, takes its name from the historic term. ‘Foundling’, which was applied to children and usually to babies abandoned by their parents, ‘found’, and The Exhibition is unusual and inspired by the tokens which she found poignant and evocative. Other artists have used tokens in their work. Cornelia has exhibited their work intermingled with existing objects throughout the Museum. She feels they interact with each other. This wide ranging group show recalls Hogarth’s Exhibitions at the Hospital so long ago which attracted both exhibitors and contributors to the Charity. Among the various exhibits, John Smith shows his film Dad’s Stick with an actual stick found in his father’s shed which was used to stir paint. The paint remains. Alison Wilding shows a petrified frog in the arrested motion of leaping. It is rather enigmatic, actually. Graeme Miller exhibits a set of 52 playing cards randomly found on the streets. The band The Composers uses

cared for by others. However, they were not actually ‘found’ because their mothers had to personally bring them to the Hospital and be interviewed. The harrowing scenes in the human stories seem countless. Every two years the Foundling Museum appoints three new Fellows, an artist, a musician and a writer. Yinka Shonibare, Richard Wentworth and Grayson Perry were all Fellows. Cornelia Parker is the 2014 Hogarth Fellow and the Exhibition, Found, curated by her, marks the end of her Fellowship. Cornelia Parker has reflected the spirit of the Museum’s Heritage in her exhibition and used ‘found’ as the theme. She has brought together the work of sixty artists including twenty two Royal Academicians, among the latter, Phyllida Barlow and Anthony Gormley.

‘found’ phrases and objects in their music. Cornelia has no qualms that the exhibition is large and feels everyone has a ‘found’ object in their possession. She believes crowdsourcing is a great idea and recently worked on a 13 metre long embroidery piece, a wikipedia entry of the Magna Carta and invited two hundred and fifty people to embroider different parts. Congratulations to Cornelia Parker and the Foundling Museum for running this original Exhibition. It is, indeed, a cacophony of ideas. Marian Maitland The Foundling Museum T: 020 7841 3600 e-mail: foundlingmuseum.org.uk. Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am-5pm Sundays: 11am-5pm. .Anthony Gormley. Baby. Photograph © Stephen White

Found:

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Masterpiece London 2016

Royal Hospital Chelsea

o sooner has the turf been re-laid after the RHS Garden Show, then along comes a bigger tent with carpeting, proper lighting, air-conditioning and swanky outpost restaurants like The Ivy, Le Caprice, Scotts and the Mount Street Deli, which were doing brisk business in customers who cannot get into the ‘real’ ones back in Mayfair. Masterpiece is a great place for people-watching: the jeunesse-dorée, perma-tanned Eurotrash, chancers, arrivistes, parvenus, bounders, cads, elegant ladies tottering about on 4-inch heals, swarthy Italian dealers in sharp Armani suits and rough diamond Russians jewellers. Amongst the shiny trinkets, crystal, silverware and general bling, are some real gems. Valencia, Dos Ninos en una Playa by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida on Gladwell & Patterson’s stand was a rare treat to see this Spaniard’s work, but you would have needed $5.5 million to take it home and hang it over the fireplace. Another exceptional painter, the Italian Giovanni Boldini, was an artist whose styles and diverse range of subjects is staggering, from portraiture to landscape, conversation pieces to buccolic studies, nudes to dancing. The one for sale, for a cool million euros on the elegant Bottegantica stand, was a stunning portrait of a South American society beauty. Tullio Crali, an Italian Futurist artist had a dramatic painting entitled Nose Diving on the City, a view seen from behind the pilot inside the cockpit, but Agnews were very coy about what the buyer ultimately paid for it. The Fine Art Society were up-front with their prices: £135K for a charming Walter Sickert oil of Tipperary; £150K for Gilbert Brockhurst’s Woman in Black; £120K for Shingle Street by William Nicholson. There were five shapely and languid naked ladies in Tamara de Lempicka’s alluring group portrait, Le Rythme, one playing the double bass, on the Kunstberatung stand, but the gallery from Zurich were less than forthcoming about the price. Crane Kalman had a vibrantly colourful set of pictures, including Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, Frank Auerbach and Mary Newcomb, but a Lowry spoiled the party with his own brand of gloom. The Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation is a notfor-profit organisation, founded in 2009 in Madrid, working alongside its sister company, Factum Arte, a multidisciplinary workshop dedicated to digital mediation in contemporary art and the production of facsimiles. Iconoclastic destruction, mass tourism, war, natural disasters, imperfect

Above: Tullio Crali, Nose Diving on the City, Agnews. Left: Robert Young Antiques’ stand Photos: Don Grant.

restoration and commercial exploitation all pose serious threat to the preservation of many great works of art and culture, particularly in the Middle East. There were some extraordinary examples of ancient Egyptian art, with a fragment of a pharoah from circa 1900 BC and another monumental fragment, comprising a foot and a leg from a standing male statue from Rome in the 2nd century AD on the Axel Vervoordt stand. One wonders where all these

artifacts from the ancient world come from. Katie Jones had some interesting Japanese pieces, including a series of most tactile spun stainless steel Air Balls by Kyoko Kumai for a few hundred pounds each.The recently deceased Zaha Hadid had examples of her works other than her architectural projects in a Commemorative Salon, including a Liquid Glacial Chair made of clear acrylic and an asymmetrical smoked acrylic coffee table. Blain Southern had only

one work on their stand, the edgy and angular Howling Wolf by Lyn Chadwick, which would sit uncomfortably almost anywhere. Once again, the most stylish, charming and witty stand was Robert Young Antiques, who had a gloriously eccentric collection of Folk Art objects, including a Butcher’s Shop for £25,000 and a very unscary French marble lion for £12,500, both of which prompted a contagion of red dots. Don Grant

July/August April/May 2011 2016

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Bo Burnham: Make Happy

Running Time: 60 minutes

Image © Robert Burnham

o Burnham is a millennials’ millennial. Having got his start when he was only 15 as a viral YouTube sensation famed for singing hilariously puerile (or just plain puerile depending on the song) comedy numbers, Burnham was able to mostly skip the early honing your craft/abject humiliation phase which any fledgling comedian is usually obligated to suffer. Perhaps as a result there’s always been a feeling that Burnham feels somewhat uncomfortable with his success, not so much doubts about his talents, but a fear that his career is built on dishonest foundations. Over the course of his (admittedly short) career this uneasiness has slowly infiltrated almost every aspect of his stage show, stripping back the veneer of a precocious teen star and revealing something stranger and compelling. Confessional comedy is nothing particularly new, from Woody Allen to Simon Amstel, comedians through the decades have mined deep personal pain for laughs and catharsis (hey it’s cheaper than therapy) but starting from 2013’s what and coming into full bloom on Make Happy Burnham has married it to an almost aggressive deconstruction of the basic underpinnings of the very idea of a comedy show. Whilst that admittedly sounds more than a little cod-philosophical, it’s hard to know what else to call it, from being heralded by a mechanical voice informing the audience that “the world is not funny” to describing himself as being a “grotesquely overpaid member of the

service industry”, the show seems to have a bone to pick with comedy itself. This would make for a drily academic snoozefest if not for the fact that Make Happy is very funny indeed. From the bombastic seizure inducing light show of the opener where Bo gives his own spin on the call-and-response cliché, as Burnham exhorts the audience to say “Hell yeah!” if they’re a virgin, and “No comment” if they’re a bit too afraid to share their thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict. From there, he gives us a song called Straight White Man, a painful lament of the issues facing that most persecuted of minorities (“we used to have all the money and land, and we still do but it’s not as fun now” is surely the We Shall Overcome of the 20th century) before launching into a madcap kaleidoscope of songs and riffs that constantly draw attention to their own structure as a joke. If at one point you’re thinking about how this bit about Pringles has been going on for a bit too long, the next lyric will undoubtedly be a comment on that very issue. Whilst being a talented improviser (pity the poor hecklers) the show is deliberately never allowed to breathe, instead revelling in its artificiality. As a result of the deliberately tight structure, Make Happy has something more of a ‘storyline’ than is typical for most comedy shows, culminating in a legitimately quite shattering final fifteen minutes where Burnham reaches the end of his emotional tether, in a song that starts as an auto-tuned parody of Kanye West and ends as something altogether unique. Few comedians are experimenting so radically with what a comedy show can be; Burnham’s ironic distant approach may be alienating for some, but there’s so much freshness and originality in Make Happy that I would be inclined to recommend it regardless. As a portrait of an artist as a young man, it succeeds completely, if the rumours of this being his last performance for the foreseeable future (which would be a disappointing, if not exactly surprising given the tone of the show) then he’s gone out on a notable artistic high. Make Happy is available on Netflix

Image © William Morrow and Company

Arts & Culture

The Fireman Author: Joe Hill Price: 13.99

As a culture we are obsessed with the Apocalypse; whether by nuclear holocaust, global warming, epidemic or even zombie outbreak, each generation is obsessed by the idea that they are going to be humanity’s last hurrah. As a result, bookshelves are not short on Apocalyptic fiction and there is a tendency for such works to blend together into a greyish mass of filthy survivors striding earnestly down a broken road (or indeed The Road), a set piece which seems inextricably tied to the subgenre. The Fireman doesn’t remake the wheel but Joe Hill, an author known for taking the road less travelled (his most famous novel features a man who wakes up with mind-controlling devil-horns sprouting out of his skull) does his damndest to set that wheel on fire. The Fireman’s apocalypse basically takes the joke about the exploding drummer from Spinal Tap, sucks all the humour out of it and expands it to the entire human race. Dragonscale (as it is nicknamed) is a disease with 100% communicability which, after an indefinite time period, causes those who are infected to painfully erupt into flames. In the hands of a lesser author this would just seem silly, but Hill is able to ring genuine horror and pathos from his pathogen. The descriptions of the panicked victims of Dragonscale going up in smoke are brutal but never gratuitous and build the impression of a world not on the edge but already falling off it. Due to the sheer amount of sudden combustions seemingly huge swathes of America have been reduced to raging fires and the desperate remnants are haloed in ash. Our window into this world is Harper Grayson, an unflappably cheerful

school nurse with a Mary Poppins fixation whose first encounter with Dragonscale comes when she witnesses a drifter melt into the tarmac of the school’s playground and who soon comes to sport the tiger-like stripes of the infected. It’s at this point that the novel goes off script, without spoiling the novel he manages to work in a tone of hope (and not one inspired by a miraculous cure) that is almost unheard of in the genre. As the story defies expectations, and pivots between something like a smouldering mash-up between The Beach and Lord of the Flies, Hill manages the rare art of keeping the reader guessing until the final dying of the light. By his fourth novel Joe Hill has long since reached the point where comparisons to his father Stephen King are unnecessary (if not outright reductive), however considering that Hill has described The Fireman as “The Stand doused in gasoline” (The Stand being one of King’s most famous novels also about an apocalyptic pandemic) such comparisons are unavoidable. The Fireman works on a far smaller scale than The Stand, with Hill paring down the focus to just Harper and the small community she begins to inhabit with only occasional glimpses of the world outside coming through scattered radio transmissions and hearsay from satellite characters of questionable reliability (such as Harper’s husband Jakob who deals with the Dragonscale epidemic via an obsession with a municipal plow. A development which would be silly if it wasn’t so terrifying.) The Stand’s highs probably top The Fireman but Hill’s novel is a far more cohesive read than his father’s. In addition, despite being a potentially punishing 700 pages it flies by (which is more than can be said for The Stand) in fact one of the few points to be said against the novel is that sometimes Harper just isn’t quite as interesting as the flaming wreckage of the world around her (and certainly not as coldly fascinating as Jakob and his plow). Regardless The Fireman is a worthy continuation of Joe Hill’s flaming hot streak.

July/August 2016

Arts & Culture Swans: The Glowing Man hilst most planned musical finales tend to fizzle rather than sizzle (stand up The Final Cut and don’t take a bow! Ever!) Swans have had a career defined by a brutal refusal to play by anybody’s rules, even their own. (perhaps especially not their own) The Glowing Man, the final album by the current line-up of the 2010-era Swans, is yet another curveball that announces the band’s dissolution not with a bang but with a triumphant drone. From 1982 to 1997, and then again

Swans as being like “trudging up a sand hill wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget taunting you”. A description not a million miles from the experience of listening to their early work (the climax of this phase of the band probably an EP named Raping A Slave. There are those who are nostalgic for this phase of that band, but their numbers are rather limited). On The Glowing Man, Swans prefer to work with whispers rather than roars. On their last two records (The Seer and To Be Kind) they merged motorik groove and brutalising riffs with an almost religious intensity that fused together into an altogether new form of orchestral rock; The Glowing Man by contrast is more slight, almost on the verge of fading away. Gira and co. spend much of the album suspended in a kind of ambient trance, scarcely growing louder even as their parts grow denser and hint at more emotional volatility.

from 2010 until now, Swans’ leader Michael Gira has charted a fiercely uncompromising path. Something of a mercurial (if not actively terrifying) band leader he has re-invented Swans several times, often on what feels like little more than whim, with new iterations bearing little resemblance to previous ones. Along the way, Swans have drawn from no-wave, art-rock, industrial, sludge, drone, folk, and more while flagrantly disregarding genre boundaries. This being said they have never even vaguely threatened the charts, even fans of their recent run of classic albums would probably run screaming from anything from their early period. Gira first created Swans by raining stinging hammer blows of noise and brutality onto unsuspecting audiences, he once described the experience of being in

The sum is deceptively sedate but far from an easy listen. On tracks like Cloud Of Unknowing (the title taken from an anonymous work of 14th century Christian mysticism, because why wouldn’t it be?) Swans create a feeling of drowsy menace that’s thick enough to drown in. When Gira announced this Swans incarnation would end, he referred to “LOVE” ( all in caps, he’s that sort of guy) as his reason for working one last time with his long-time band on The Glowing Man. Of course, Gira was not talking about the over-sweetened form we often get in pop music. The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

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The Neon Demon

Director: Nicholas Winding Refn Running Time: 117 minutes When watching a Nicholas Winding Refn film it’s rarely easy to tell what is an artistic choice and what is deliberate audience-baiting provocation. For every Drive: Refn’s dreamy synth damaged noir deconstruction that unambiguously wowed audiences in 2012, there is an Only God Forgives: an (appropriately) unforgiving nearly wordless revenge ‘thriller’ that was far more interested in Ryan Gosling being brutally beaten under lurid neon lighting and castration metaphors than anything so bourgeois as entertaining an audience. Full disclosure: Despite the lack of mainstream appeal, I was actually a big fan of Only God Forgives’s lushly nightmarish atmosphere, admittedly whilst acknowledging that it’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. As a result of Refn’s seemingly almost pathological need to shun protracted mainstream acceptance, it’s never easy to predict on checking out the director’s new work whether you’re about to walk into a Drive or Only God Forgives. In The Neon Demon’s case it is unashamedly cut from Only God Forgives cloth; a cloth which may seem like a rich blood-red velvet to some, or the Emperor’s New Clothes to others. This proviso given, The Neon Demon is a definitely a case of style over substance, but in a rather more literal fashion than that statement is usually proffered. The meat of the story is an almost provocatively familiar one: a rise and fall narrative of a 16 year old aspiring model Jesse (Ellie Fanning: she pretends to be 19 because “18 is too on the nose” according to a modelling agency madam) who steps off the bus into an L.A. that’s not so much hungry as bloodthirsty. The very first shot shows Jesse (who is very much the ‘pale and waifish’ type) lifelessly sprawled across a divan as she oozes blood into the cushions and onto floor, until the camera pulls back far enough to reveal a second camera snapping glamour shots of Jesse’s faux fatality. This very much sets the tone for the rest of the film; the idea that the fashion industry

is full of vampires is not a particularly fresh one, but Refn commits with such gonzo intensity that it hardly matters. The coven of beauties who swarm around Jesse are daubed in smeared “Redrum” brand lipstick and worship a bald, Nosferatu-esque fashion photographer who sniffs his models necks before photos; subtle it ain’t. Any extraneous plot has been cut away leaving only the lightest wisps of a narrative. By any metric The Neon Demon should be an eye-rollingly pretentious and boring slog, but Refn’s mastery of mood somehow manages to flip that metric on its head before practically decapitating it. The Neon Demon’s glittering nightscape version of L.A. practically hums with dreamlike menace; seemingly populated by about ten people, it’s the rat-race reimagined as solitary confinement. Refn’s camera is constantly exploring gigantic neon-lit cathedrals of fashion that stand entirely deserted; à la the Marie Celeste expanded into an entire city. Few directors have such an unearthly command of colour and darkness and as such the visual atmosphere of woozy reds and oceans of black is so immersive that it’s almost hallucinogenic. When you factor in the throbbing synths of Cliff Martinez’s Giallo-lite score the sensuality of the experience is such that the flimsiness of the story is weirdly transmuted into a strength rather than weakness; with such an audiovisual onslaught that it would distract from anything without a nightmare’s simplicity. There is a sly sense of humour to the proceedings which is maintained even when Demon reaches its volcanic climax, a sense that Refn isn’t taking things quite as seriously as first impressions might suggest. The casting of Keanu Reeves as a shady motel manager manages to hilariously kill the mood whenever he’s on screen, to such a degree that it seems thoroughly purposeful (and thoroughly entertaining). Refn’s work will never be short of detractors and The Neon Demon seems likely to have more rather than less, but there are plenty of pleasures to be found for those receptive to its wavelength. It might be more than a little ridiculous and overblown but if style’s this evocative then perhaps substance is overrated.

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Arts & Culture

BALLET BY ANDREW WARD

Swan Lake in the round

English National Ballet

here is a sense of anticipation and expectation when 5,000 people enter an arena to be entertained and none better than the Royal Albert Hall, whether it is The Last Night of the Proms or one of Raymond Gubbay’s latest spectacles! Derek Deane’s in the round production of Swan Lake for ENB at the Royal Albert Hall has much to excite the senses and does not disappoint on virtually every front. Unlike the usual production with a proscenium arch and an orchestra pit between the audience and the stage, Deane has to please everyone from every angle of the circular stage ensuring that each and every one of the audience feels that they have paid for centre seats in the stalls or circle! The drama starts with the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s melodic score being played with gusto by ENB the Philharmonic and superbly led by Gavin Sutherland in the middle and somewhat elevated position above the stage! The music is as famous as the ballet and it works a treat being above the action. Where Deane scores, to keep all sides of the story covered, is to have much of the divertissement danced with multiple casts all at once. The most successful example was the Act 1 Pas de Trois becoming a Pas de Douze with ENB’s top Principals and Soloists performing a kaleidoscope of steps facing out to the audience from the centre point of the huge performance space with exuberance. The iconic Cygnets dance in Act 2 was doubled up to eight, cleverly choreographed by Deane, with the synchronised little swans very much with their heads above the water showing ENB has length and depth on all fronts. Deane’s production in the round does not rely on stage sets like the normal theatre productions. However, he is the master of creating a spectacle for the big stage. The lake side scene of Act 2 starts with a blanket of dry ice, cleverly lit with deep blue and purple lighting, that entices the audience into the spell bound drama that unfolds as 60 swans enter the stage clad in white feathered tutus and headdresses. Both Deane and ENB have to be applauded here as the 60 swans are the stars of this production. A delight to see the juxtaposition of delicacy and strength combined with artistry to create

the romantic atmosphere the audiences come to see by the coach load! Deane’s choreography is at its best here with the swans weaving patterns followed by inch perfect straight lines with not a port de bras or incline of a head out of place. The opening night lead cast was Alina

Cojocaru in the double act of the Swan Queen Odette/Odile and Osiel Gouneo as her Prince Siegfried. Cojocaru performed the role majestically for the most part and Gouneo danced the solos with panther like virtuosity. However, they lacked the romantic connection

with each other in the white acts that is so important in every love story ballet. Moreover, understandably, every artist drops their brushes once in a while but Cojocaru and Gouneo seemed at times under rehearsed. Gouneo fluffed his lines early in the evening forgetting the mime scene choreography and Cojocaru did likewise falling off pointe several times in the bravura section of the evening at the beginning of her Act 3 solo. Other performances to note: James Streeter spread his wings and performed Von Rothbart with menacing gusto and artistry; Crystal Costa and Fernando Bufalá performed the Neopolitan with panache and a zippy flair which got the audience on the edge of their seats in Act 3; both the national dances from Spain and Hungary in Act 3 were performed with musicality, assurance and attention to detail that is so important in these divertisement; the Big Swans were danced in Act 2 and 4 with technical command and artistry most notably by Principal dancer Begoña Cao. This production has an important place in ENB’s repertoire not least because it is a real crowd pleaser and for many will be their first experience of ballet.

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July/August 2016

Theatre

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1984 Review By Rowland Stirling July 1-October 29 Playhouse Theatre Tickets from: £19.84

1984

was a fierce polemic against Stalinism, envisioning a world perpetually at war with unseen, ever changing enemies, the population constantly watched and disappearances frequent. Winston Smith, a low level bureaucrat, embittered with the totalitarian regime under which he lives attempts to join the resistance with his lover Julia, before being swiftly and brutally reprimanded by the omnipresent government. Writer/directors Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan have created something rare in their dramatisation of Orwell’s classic dystopian novel: an original and refreshing take on a work of fiction so engrained in the collective subconscious that references to the once chilling ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Room 101’, have become lost in the garish quagmire of the culture industry. However the primary success of this joint production between the Almeida, Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse, and which highlights the story’s continuing relevance, was simply bringing it to the stage, an act tantamount to political CPR. What separates theatre from film or the written word is its inherent ephemerality which allows a

production the unique opportunity to mirror the political landscape of any given moment; although Stalinism is thankfully no longer a threat on our collective radar, state sanctioned torture and the monitoring of our personal lives are concepts that ring a far too familiar bell. Disorientation and uncertainty over what constitutes reality is principle performance technique; the audience is made implicit in the state’s voyeurism through screens that display hiddencamera recordings of Winston and Julia in what they think to be their unaudited haven; seizure inducing light shows and walls of grating noise (that one doesn’t hear so much as feel) culminate in the infamous torture scene that would be unwatchable if it were possible to look anywhere else. It isn’t. A repeated scene in which characters are ‘disappeared’ with each performance, the actors responding as though nothing has changed, provides an element of surreal comedy while allowing a glimpse into the cognitive dissonance necessary to survive in such a society. Andrew Gower is convincing as a Winston Smith who expects to die from the moment he opens his diary, and Catrin Stewart is nothing short of feral as Julia, the hint of a childlike lisp making her aggressive lasciviousness all the more disturbing. The standout performance is Angus Wright as inner party member O’Brien, whose monotone takes on a horrifying banality in room 101 when uttering the one-word commands: ‘fingernails’ and ‘teeth’. But however good the performances are, the play’s design and direction is its real triumph, carrying the disturbing atmosphere and energy of the book

through every level of its existence. Even the running time, at 101 minutes, possesses the genes of Orwell’s novel. The play’s beginning sees the lights come up on what looks to be a public library or record room in which we meet an anxious Winston Smith. He is about to write in a diary, something that a voice-over informs us is punishable by

death. By way of a momentary blackout, the formerly empty room is suddenly and uncannily filled with people who surround the startled protagonist, discussing the diary he hasn’t yet written, but in the manner of a reading group ruminating on a text of great significance. This discussion is returned to at the play’s conclusion and questions the reliability of its author and therefore the events that have preceded. The co-existence of two timelines, one scrutinising the other, takes its inspiration from the novel’s often glossed over appendix The Principles of Newspeak. Written many years after the events of the novel it retrospectively describes the development of the language employed by ‘The Party’ to eradicate thoughtcrime by censoring the vocabulary that makes it possible. By overlapping these dual temporalities, Icke and Macmillan create a dramatic representation of doublethink: The party enforced concept of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and simultaneously accepting both of them. Something that lets party members believe anything from 2 + 2 equaling both 4 and 5, to their country being at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia on one day, then vice versa the next. The genius of bookending the play with a distanced discussion about its content is the implication that change is possible, but that complacency will lead to the restriction of liberty. The final question is asked: What if Big Brother is still watching?

The Burning Gadulka Drayton Arms June 17th 2016

For those of you who aren’t sure what a Gadulka is (a group that includes Microsoft Word according to the little red zigzag currently on my screen), it is an instrument, vaguely resembling a violin in shape. But, as the protagonist of this hour long one man show is very quick to point out; when played, it has far more in common with a cat being murdered. The instrument hails from Bulgaria and is traditional in folk ensembles. I can’t imagine its flammability improving the sound particularly but, by all accounts, it couldn’t possibly make it worse. The protagonist delivers what begins as a simple monologue on the plight of a Gadulka player (guitar players can use their instrument to pick up girls at parties, Gadulka players…cannot) but soon develops into a lament for a way of life that has almost entirely faded away, leaving the narrator as a dinosaur in a world that has moved on. The narrator (an at times almost unnervingly manic Miroslav Kokenov) spasms between humour and pathos with an almost metronomic intensity and there is certainly an affecting message at the piece’s heart, but it can’t be helped that at one hour the show is simply too long. There are plenty of funny (and one or two genuinely painful) moments in the show, and it feels as if it could have been easily cut down to a svelte 40 minutes which would provide more of an impact. Still, it sure beats listening to the Gadulka for an hour. The Burning Gadulka will be performed as part of the Clapham Fringe Festival on the 23rd and 24th October www.claphamfringe.com/about.html Rowland Stirling

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Travel Porto

dark warren of streets that purportedly held either our hotel or, rather more worryingly, a potential brothel (Phillipe’s English leaving something to be desired). Thankfully it turned out to be the former rather than the latter and we were soon ensconced in a room which had found the sweet spot between a Pontins and an interrogation chamber in a Fascist dystopia, but was perfectly sufficient for our fairly basic needs. A quick moonlit stroll through the criss-cross of cobbled streets showed a city where bars seemingly uniformly

By Max Feldman

oth Port (the drink) and Portugal itself are named after Porto, which seems peculiarly uncreative (as if London was named ‘Filthyriver’ and England ‘Filthyriverland’) but that’s one of the few bad things that can be said about a purely charming city. Some friends and I had flown out to Porto purely to attend the Portuguese itineration of the Primavera Sound Festival (a festival which should probably bear the legend ‘For Hipsters, By Hipsters’) but by the time we left we had all unexpectedly become even more captivated by Porto’s quasi-medieval beauty than we were by the ‘cooler than thou’ charms of the riches on offer at one of Europe’s most consistently fantastic music festivals. It seemed that horrifically, we had all somehow matured into sensitive and appreciative young men. An unthinkable thought. This grim discovery was ahead of us when we first touched down in Porto, ‘unexpectedly mature’ would have been the last way our fellow travellers would have described us; a few too many mid-air screwdrivers having temporarily transformed us into an unfortunate mishmash of Bukowski and the Tasmanian Devil. Sobered by the cold of the night (and by the equivalent frostiness of the glares of our fellow disembarkees) we piled into a cab and got our first taste of Porto hospitality from our driver Phillipe: “You will love the Latin girls, the ones who you buy.. er…how do you say the…” “Prostitutes?” “Yes! Prostitutes! I introduce you to some very good prostitutes”. Whilst it’s always nice to have cab drivers recommend you the local sights, Phillipe had something of a one track mind when it came to entertainment; to the point that when he finally moved on and started recommending the city’s octopus we

weren’t completely sure he wasn’t talking about some legendary, eight armed lady of the evening who worked out of restaurants. This wasn’t exactly painting Porto in the best of lights and our concern was heightened when after learning that we were English he launched into what he clearly felt was our native song: a football chant primarily made up of the line “Let’s go f***ing mental! Dada! Dada!” which was proffered with terrifying enthusiasm (the third verse reached such a level of spirit that we came very close to crashing into a tram, a development which probably would have led to a very different article). After what seemed to be approximately 14 verses, Phillipe finally turfed us out in a

stayed open till past 3am but didn’t come with the attendant binge drinking, glass breaking, blood on the streets fun that Britain finds itself getting up to in the early hours of our respective city centres. Holed up in a cavernous crypt of a bar we were informed in no uncertain terms that “the beer in Porto is great”; to begin we sampled something called a Super Bock (a beer whose name makes certain promises which go unfulfilled, unless off-brand Estrella is one’s definition of ‘super’), before swiftly making our minds up to try something else. Unfortunately the very idea of a non-Super Bock beverage engendered in our barman what could kindly be described as confusion and less kindly as the kind of atmosphere that precipitates lynch mobs. It seemed

the statement that the beer in Porto being fantastic meant singular rather than plural. Super Bock had a predominance that was something closer to a cult than a product, not only was it omnipresent in every bar and restaurant (to the extent where you wouldn’t be surprised to find it on sale in churches and nurseries) but they had also bought up nearly every advertising hoarding in the entire city. Quite why this was necessary was rather unclear, considering the lack of alternate options (besides suicide or, God forbid, abstinence) for anything else. Despite finding ourselves between the proverbial ‘Bock and a hard place’, we were able to get by on the fact that everything was almost obscenely cheap (it was possible to get four Super Bock for €3.60, which almost made up for the fact that we then had to drink the damn things). In the sunshine Porto revealed itself as a charming church studded town, full of small museums, cheap restaurants and expansive and wildly overgrown public parks. Primavera Sound Festival was held in one of the larger of these city parks approximately 20 minutes from the city centre, which made for a very pastoral atmosphere for an almost ridiculously eclectic lineup that included everything from bruising Math Rock to Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds in full. Much like the rest of Porto it was remarkably relaxed and was probably the most sober festival I’d ever had the pleasure of attending, with nothing stronger than (fairly sparing servings of ) wine and Super Bock being on the menu. In an attempt to manage the potential heat, the Festival ran from 5.00pm to 4.00am each day which left us plenty of time to explore the city’s secrets. The city centres around the Douro river which, as per Phillipe’s garbled recommendations, did indeed have some fantastic seafood restaurants all along the river bank, with bustling street markets and (most excitingly for a specific kind of tourist) some of the oldest Port breweries in the world, which serve up vintage port of all stripes in tastefully outfitted private rooms for the incredibly low price of approximately €3 a glass (with a free side helping of chocolates). The white port in particular was so delectable (and of such a high alcohol content) that it would have made up for an ocean of Super Bock. We hovered around the centre of the city, dipping in and out of churches and exhibitions on a whim and eating a truly sinful amount of seafood when we weren’t soaking up the festival. Much like Porto itself, Primavera Sound is a very cheap festival (a full three day ticket will only set you back approximately €80), and for fans of more outré music (headliners this year were PJ Harvey, Sigur Ros and Animal Collective) it’s a seriously good excuse to make your way down for an extremely nice city break with some serious musical bite. Just be sure to pack your own beer. Primavera Sound: Porto takes place yearly in mid-June.

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July/August 2016

Travel

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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We welcome you to witness and participate in the spectacle that is INDIA. The vibrant colours, culture, the people and their smiles makes an everlasting impression on each and every traveller that has come to it shores. It is one of the most chaotic, enchanting, spiritual and life affirming countries in the world. We understand and realise that travelling to India for many is a once in a lifetime event and we strive to make it a memorable and most importantly an exuberant one.

Snails and snobs (Why I love) Paris in the summertime By Lynne McGowan

ho could fail not be in love with Paris. All those grand buildings lining the Seine, sculpted masonry over doorways with hulking brass knockers and street corners bristling with pavement cafes. As the grand dame of European cities, Paris ‘out baroques’ them all with its shameless ornamental architecture and beaux artistry everywhere you look. Madames with scowling scarlet lips and nails to match trip along the pavements clutching tiny dogs and drivers impatiently hoot horns as tourists dawdle along with faces turned up to face arching gargoyles. Mostly unjust but native Parisians have long had a reputation for being snobbish and irascible. From markets to museums what is there not to love. We came away with an armful of crusty bread and Beaufort cheese from a local Latin Quarter market and visited both the Musée a la Chasse (Hunting Museum) and Musée National Picasso-Paris. Located in the Marais district, the first describes itself as a singular museum and it most certainly is. Housed in two finely restored 18th century mansions is a curious collection of artefacts and art celebrating the kindred alliance between animals and man. Paintings and taxidermy prevail

but the display and diverse range of splendid flintlock muskets and rifles was absorbing. By hiking up into the modernised mansard roof, the quirkiness of the building enhances the experience. As for the second, Picasso himself would not be disappointed with this recently renovated museum for his multifarious works. Many of the artworks were donated in lieu of inheritance tax on his estate in 1973 and display Picasso’s playful nature with his adroit sense of humour. For me, one of the best reasons to go to Paris is to refresh the under wear drawer so it’s just as well we only visit once every five years but what a sight welcomes the visitor walking into Galeries Lafayette on boulevard Haussmann and that is just the lingerie department, prepare to be overwhelmed. And as for the dining, it was impressive throughout but without a vegetable in sight. The first night called for a fruits de mer feast with enormous platters stacked and packed with ice. On the last night we were taken to dinner by friends to one of their favourite local eateries, very old school and very french. After the snails and sole meuniere rinsed in butter and parsley we headed off alongside the Seine. We strolled past and looked down at youthful rendezvous on the embankment and looked up at the magnificent La Tour d’Argent restaurant with a pedigree dating back to 1780. The evening was perfectly rounded off with Berthillon chocolat amer sorbets and an odd but amicable chat with an artist and his black cat Maya who leapt up and perched on his shoulder as he cycled off into the night. Lynne McGowan

Fully escorted tour with local English speaking guide. Scheduled flights from London Heathrow. Five star accommodation throughout. Meals and entertainment included. Gala Dinner with local musicians and artists. All excursions included. All overseas transfers included.

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All prices are correct on the date of print. Prices are ‘from’, per person, based on two people sharing a room (unless stated) and are subject to availability. Hotel ratings are based on local standards and may change at any time without prior notice. Inclusive transfers are on shared basis. All offers are subject to availability and can be withdrawn without notice. Flights are based on UK departures from London Heathrow and vary depending on departure date, in economy class and are subject to change. Excursions are as stated, subject to availability and may change at any time without prior notice. Deposit only at time of booking.

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

www.KCWToday.co.uk

Get out of London this Summer

Opening Times: Open/closing times vary depending on show Admissions: Free - £11.50 (prices vary) Minack Theatre, Porthcurno, Penzance, Cornwall, TR19 6JU

National Railway Museum

By Ella McGee Babbage

Largest UK rail museum presenting immaculate trains; 300 years of history and interactive activities for everyone, including talks and train rides. T: 0844 815 3139 www.nrm.org.uk Opening Times: Week days 9am-5pm Admissions: Free National Railway Museum, Leeman Rd, York, YO26 4XJ

ummer has arrived; it’s time to turn off Netflix, stop complaining about work and get out of the city.

Bournemouth Aquarium Oceanarium

This seaside aquarium has a wide range of undersea wildlife, including sea turtles, penguins and otters. T: 0120 231 1993 www.oceanarium.co.uk Admissions: Adult £9.50, Child £6.50 Opening Times: 10am-6pm Pier Approach, West Beach, Bournemouth BH2 5AA

Team Sport Go Karting

Go karting indoors allows the family to enjoy a competitive day of excitement and thrills. T: 0370 801 3689 www.team-sport.co.uk Admissions: Adult £25 (prices vary) Opening Times: 7 days a week (call for bookings) Canada House, Gatwick Goodsyard, Gatwick Road, Crawley, RH10 9RE

Spring Barn Farm

A traditional farm invites the public to its working sheep farm; indoor and outdoor play areas, restaurant and even a campsite. Don’t be afraid to meet the animals. T:0127 348 8450 www.springbarnfarm.com Opening Times: 10am - 5pm Admissions: £8 pp Spring Barn Farm, Kingston Road, Lewes BN7 3ND

Hampton Court Palace

Visit the home of Henry VIII, one of England’s most famous Kings, step back in time to explore the grand Palace halls. T: 020 3166 6000 www.hrp.org.uk Opening Times: 10am-6pm Admissions: Adult £21 Child £10.50 Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, Surrey KT8 9AV

The Eden Project

Explore the largest indoor rainforest in the world, a large variety of activities can be found such as zip wires, gigs and storytelling. T: 0172 681 1911 www.edenproject.com Opening Times: 9:30am-6pm Admissions: Adult £25 Child £14 Eden Project, Bodelva, St Austell, Cornwall, PL24 2S6

Cheddar Gorge Caves

Jump into the dark, searching through the deep cave passages, walk along clifftops and enjoy open bus tours through the dazzling gorge. T: 0193 474 2343 www.cheddargorge.co.uk Opening Times:10am-5pm Admissions: Adult £19.95 Child £13.95 Cheddar Gorge & Caves, Cheddar, Somerset, BS27 3QF

Horse Riding New Forest

Explore alluring heathlands and forest, see wildlife including the popular wild

Go Ape

Treetop adventure courses and zip lines through forests, Go Ape lets people release their wild side. Perhaps even take a leisurely Segway trip through the forest. T: 0333 331 7693 www.goape.co.uk Opening Times: Opening/closing times vary depending on location Admissions: Adult £33 Child £25 (prices vary) Various Locations across the UK.

Dicken’s World

An educational adventure that take you back to the 1800s; travel back in time and experience a different world, when the famous author lived. T: 0844 858 6656 www.dickensworld.co.uk Opening Times: Sat & Sun 10am5:30pm Admissions: £7.50 pp Dickens’ World, Leviathan Way, Chatham, Maritime, Kent, ME4 4LL

Minack Theatre

A beautiful outdoor theatre not only offers a range of plays, but amazing views out to sea. Famous comedies, tragedies and musicals have featured on this stage. T:0173 681 0818 www.minack.com

Colchester Zoo

An adventure for everyone, you not only get to admire creatures big and small, but you can interact with them too at feeding times and more. T: 0120 633 1292 www.colchester-zoo.com Opening Times: 9:30am - 5pm Admissions: Adult £22.49 Child £15.49 Colchester Zoo, Maldon Road, Stanway, Colchester, CO3 0SL

Canterbury Historic River Tours

An enjoyable insight into Canterbury’s historic past giving a unique vantage point to some of Canterbury’s most stunning and important architecture. T: 0779 053 4744 www.canterburyrivertours.co.uk Opening Times: 10am-5pm Admissions: Adult £9 Child £5

New Forest ponies, whilst on horseback. T: 0142 540 3489 www.burleymanorridingstables.com Opening Times: 8am-5pm Admissions: Prices vary (call to enquire) Burley Manor Hotel, Ringwood Road, Burley, Hampshire, BH24 4BS

Norwich Puppet Theatre

In addition entertaining shows for all ages, you are able to attend puppet making workshops and enjoy other activities. Not just for kids! T: 0160 361 5564 www.puppettheatre.co.uk Opening Times/Admissions: Dates, times & prices vary depending on shows or workshops chosen St James, White Friars, Norwich, Norfolk, NR3 1TN TN34 3DW

Although London is great, there is more to our country then its famous capital. England has an array of different activities you can venture to explore with family, friends or you could go solo. Whether you are looking to be ‘at one with nature’ horse riding in the New Forest or let loose GoKarting in Crawley, you’re bound to make some great memories this summer. If you think our notoriously rainy weather gives you an excuse to snuggle up inside, think again. Many day outings can be done inside, safe from the weather; you could visit aquariums or explore Hampton Court Palace, where royalty once roamed. Learn something new in one of Britain’s thousand museums, there is something for everyone. They’re not all dull! Don’t regret this summer, make it one to remember: and go have an adventure.

Canterbury Historic River Tours, The Kings Bridge, Canterbury, CT1 2AT

Travel

020 7738 2348

July/August 2016

Travel

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

Forge Mill Needle Museum

The Museum tells the fascinating and sometimes gruesome story of needle making in Victorian times. Models and recreated scenes and an audio trail provide a vivid illustration of how needles were once made. T: 0152 762 509 www.forgemill.org.uk Opening Times: Weekdays 11am 4:30pm, Weekend 11am - 4pm Admission: Adult £4.90, Child £1.65 Needle Mille Lane, Riverside, Redditch, BN8 8HY

Merseyside Maritime Museum

Titanic, life at sea, Battle of the Atlantic are all things to learn about life at sea. T:0151478 449 www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime Opening Times: 10am-5pm Admission: Free Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 4AQ

George Marshall Medical Museum Exhibits a collection of medical objects illustrating the gruesome development of medical science. T: 0190 576 0738 www.medicalmuseum.org.uk Opening Times: Weekdays 9am-5pm Admissions: Free Charles Hastings Centre, Worcestershire Royal Hospital, Worcester, WR5 1DD

Jerwood Gallery

An exhibition programme showcasing the best of modern British art, includes a sweet seaside café. T: 0142 472 8377 www.jerwoodgallery.org Opening Times: Tuesday-Sunday 11am-5pm Admissions: Free Rock-a-Nore Road, Hasting Old Town, TN34 3DW

Pallant House Gallery

Modern British and International art with various exhibitions and special courses open to all abilities. T: 0124 377 4557 www.pallant.org.uk Opening Times: Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm Admissions: Free 9 North Pallant, Chichester, PO19 1TJ

Panacea Museum

This museum tells the story of the Panacea society; a fascinating religious community that formed in the early twentieth century. T: 0123 435 3178 www.panaceatrust.org Opening Times: Thursday, Friday & Saturday 10am-4pm. Admission: Free

World Museum

Displays archaeology, ethnology and the natural & physical sciences. A very popular museum, which also includes an aquarium, bug house and planetarium.

Sandringham House Museum & Gardens

Woodland walks, lakes and streams are planted to provide year-round colour and beauty. T: 0148 554 5400 www.sandinghamestate.co.uk Opening Times: 11am-5pm Admission: Adult £13.50, Child £6.50 Sandringham, Norfolk, PE35 6EN

Lady Lever Art Gallery

A beautiful building containing one of the UK’s finest collections of fine and decorative art. T: 0151 478 4136 www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever Opening Times: 10am-5pm Admissions: Free Portsunlight, Lower Road, Wirral, CH62 5EQ

World of Glass, St Helen’s

Learn about glass and how it’s made, watch a live glass-blowing exhibition, and figure your way through a mirror maze. T: 0174 422 766 www.worldofglass.com Opening Times: 10am-5pm (except Sundays) Admissions: Adult £8, Child £6 Chalon Way East, St Helens, Merseyside, WA10 1BX

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Open air gallery, shows sculpture/artwork including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, through beautiful scenery of a British park. T: 0192 483 2631 www.ysp.co.uk Opening Times: 10am-6pm West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF4 4LG

The Fry Art Gallery

Houses paintings, prints, illustrations, wallpapers and decorative designs by artists of the 20th century and present day. T: 0179 951 3779 www.fryartgallery.org Opening Times: timings vary depending on the day (enquire for details) Admissions: Free Castle Street, Saffron Walden Essex, CB10 1BD

T: 0151 478 4393 www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml Opening Times: 10am - 5pm Admissions: Free William Brown Street, Liverpool, L3 8EN

The Rough Guide

to Accessible Britain In the introduction to this guide, former BBC programme maker, Emma Bowler, begins by quite literally putting her best foot forward: “The Rough Guide to Accessible Britain isn’t just about taking in the ambience of a place.” For far too long, attractions and experiences up and down the country have effectively closed their doors to people of limited mobility. But as Mrs. Bowler, who uses a mobility scooter herself, says: “our team of disabled reviewers have checked and updated all the attraction reviews, which means that wherever you go you’ll know what to expect” so that everyone can “concentrate on having a great time rather than worrying about access.” Although there are fantastic experiences and visitor attractions

all over the country which people can visit, in London there are particular gems which you might not have thought would be accessible for disabled guests. The London Fields Lido, which was restored and opened in 2007, is the capital’s only Olympic-sized, heated outdoor swimming pool. While there is no blue badge parking, all the staff regularly attend disability awareness training and are more than happy to lend a hand. Another highlight is the Cutty Sark, which after a £50 million renovation, is “a shining example of how informed, clever design can render something old, and seemingly inaccessible, open to all.” With lifts offering access to all of the decks, it is fantastic for wheelchair access. This guide is a lovely and essential book for disabled people who want to enjoy a good old day out in Blighty, but who don’t want to plan for hours just to be told they “might struggle to get about.” To download the ebook version of the guide or to read it online, please visit: accessibleguide.co.uk

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

www.KCWToday.co.uk

Travel

Upturn down West By Cynthia Pickard

Dalmatian Pelican with a wingspan of over eleven feet was seen in the Lands End area in May, the first sighting of the bird for hundreds of years. Change is in the air down in Cornwall. New attractions are opening up, it’s a good time to make a visit to the west of Cornwall, to Penzance as well as the many other delightful harbours, villages and sites of historic mining set in this dramatic coastline’s rocky landscape. Penzance’s wonderful 1935 Art Deco Lido built right on the seaside and protected by a sea wall, Jubilee Pool has been restored and has just reopened after suffering damage in the devastating storms of 2014. In adjacent Newlyn a new independent cinema has opened, the first one for fifty years since the old Gaiety closed down. The Newlyn Filmhouse, this state of the art two-screen cinema showing a selection of world films, has been created by entrepreneur Suzie Sinclair in an old smokery and fish cellar and is enhanced by an upstairs space revealing a friendly bar/café with an enticing menu. It’s a great place to meet up with friends and has become a focal point for many local artists for whom Newlyn is home. Another attraction, recently added to the Cornish gardens scene, is the Tremenheere Sculpture Garden opened in 2007 but continually being enlarged and improved by another local innovator, Doctor Neil Armstrong, who has masterminded the exotic sub-tropical planting of the varied landscape of streams, ponds, tree ferns, succulents and woodlands of this 20 acre site. Greeted as one enters by one of the many inventive pieces that harmonise with the gardens, The Temple that Blows in the Wind is an experimental work by Penny Saunders that moves by means of a pendulum mechanism. Walking through the woods and terraces the works by other highly esteemed contemporary artists such as James Turrell and David Nash can be experienced until one reaches the highest

point where there are magnificent views to the coast and St Michael’s Mount. While I think that a genuine Cornish pasty is a lovely thing and one that should definitely be sampled once, some striking venues for a proper pub lunch can be found in West Cornwall. Both The Pandora Inn on Restronguet Creek, Falmouth or The Ferryboat Inn on the Helford River are idyllic places to eat good gastro food while watching boating life on the water. But for a fine dining experience to write home about, wander along the narrow streets of Penzance through Penlee Park past some lovely old architecture to chef-owner Bruce

is beautifully presented and delicious, the traditional fish soup with a touch of tarragon contained the surprise of a hidden piece of red mullet. Lobster ceviche with heritage tomatoes and tequila, hake with wild garlic asparagus and mussels, cod with saffron potatoes, all the dishes are presented with inventive accomplishment. Watch out Masterchef ! On the menu are some fine tasting and beautiful looking desserts too, look out for the orgasmic passion fruit sorbet. However as well as those gorgeous puddings, you have to love fish, neither carnivores nor vegetarians are catered for! Some interesting upmarket bed and breakfast accommodation has been developed in Penzance too. Each bedroom at The Artist Residence has been decorated by a different artist. While Chapel House, an elegant Georgian 1790s building that used to house the Penzance Arts Club, is now beautifully restored offering six double bedrooms. So if you are visiting West Cornwall this summer, there’s a lot going on and some great new cultural and culinary experiences to be had.

Rennie’s newly opened restaurant The Shore, it’s a must visit for fish lovers. Bruce, who has worked his way through various Michelin starred restaurants including Gary Rhodes and Rick Stein’s establishments, is uncompromising in his commitment to only serving fresh, locally caught fish and home grown vegetables. Every dish on the compact menu

www.newlynfilmhouse.com 01736 332222 Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Gulval, Penzance. T: 01736 448089 www.tremenheere.co.uk The Shore Restaurant, 13-14 Alverton Street Penzance, TR18 2QP T: 01736 362444 www.theshorerestaurant.uk Artist Residence, 20 Chapel Street Penzance, TR18 4AW www.artistresidencecornwall.co.uk Chapel House, Chapel Street, Penzance, TR18 4AQ hello@chapelhousepz.co.uk

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Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Londonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading private Hospital Proud to treat the Military and Veteran Community since 1899 We are proud of a Hospital wide commitment to exemplary standards of nursing care. We offer a wide range of medical and surgical specialities, as well as physiotherapy, hydrotherapy and imaging facilities, including MRI and CT. We offer subsidies and meanstested grants for all serving and ex-service personnel and their spouses. To find out more about subsidies and grants for military personnel and veterans, please contact the Fundraising Department Email: veteranshealth@kingedwardvii.co.uk | www.kingedwardvii.co.uk/veterans Registered Charity No: 208944

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23/06/2016 11:16

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Health & Beauty Anxious? Depressed? Stressed? Worried? We’re here to help Take Time to Talk

is a free and confidential NHS service for people aged 18 and over who are registered with a GP in Kensington & Chelsea, Queens Park and Paddington. We provide a range of psychological therapies and support to help you feel better if you’re anxious, depressed, stressed or worried.

What We Offer

We offer a variety of therapies including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Counselling. CBT is practical, evidence based therapy that supports you to develop strategies, tools and techniques to tackle distressing feelings, thoughts and behaviours. Counselling is a ‘talking therapy’; a chance to talk and think about your difficulties with a trained professional. Counselling can help you with experiences such as bereavement, relationship problems, abuse as a child or adult, depression or low mood, or changes in life such as divorce, getting older or retirement.

How To Refer

If you would like to refer into our service to receive support you can sign up by filling in and submitting the form on our website, www.take-time-to-talk.com This is the most direct way of referring in. If you would prefer to speak to your GP about your needs first, you can – it is completely up to you.

Home

There’s no place like it Being able to live at home can be one of the most important comforts in an older person’s life, and because family and friends can’t always be there, Home Instead Senior Care are here to help. From an hour a day, to full time care, our service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to provide:

What Happens Next?

Once we have received your form we will give you a call to talk about your needs. From this first contact we can discuss the options available for treatment based on your difficulties, needs and goals.

For more information or to self-refer, please visit our website: www.take-time-to-talk.com You can also contact us by telephone on 020 8962 4748.

What if my GP is in Westminster?

If you are registered with a GP in the borough of Westminster, you can contact Westminster Talking Therapies on 030 3333 0000.

Home Instead has received the Queen's Award for innovation in recognition of our unique quality home care service where the social wellbeing of our clients is central to our model of companionship-led care.

Kensington & Chelsea: 020 7736 8777 Westminster: 020 3701 2862 www.homeinstead.co.uk Each Home Instead Senior Care® franchise office is independently owned and operated.

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Terms & Conditions: All reservations at the Spa in Dolphin Square are booked subject to availability and are pre-paid on a non-exchangeable & non-refundable term. These offers are not in conjunction with any other offers.

July/August 2016

Health & Beauty

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

online: www.KCWToday.co.uk

King Edward VII Hospital’s Tim Brawn Healthcare for Veterans By Henry Tobias Jones

or those commemorating the Battle of the Somme, the most bloody battle in British military history, the King Edward VII Hospital holds a particular significance. Founded in 1899 in the Chelsea residence of two sisters, Agnes and Fanny Keyser, the hospital has maintained the Keyser’s mission to help and heal soldiers returning from war for over 100 years. The then Prince of Wales, and later King Edward VII offered his patronage to the hospital after a conversation with his friends in which he decided “something had to be done about the poor wounded soldiers returning from the second Boer War.” Today, the hospital’s new Head of Fundraising, Tim Brawn, is the man responsible for protecting and ensuring King Edward’s wishes. “The hospital was created as a response to a problem,” Mr Brawn tells me, pointing to the fact that modernising war was creating far more frequent and devastating injuries. “The hospital really moved with the times,” he explains, “when the First World War came along the hospital was required more than ever.” During the Battle of the Somme 19,000 British soldiers died on the first day alone. The hospital treated many victims of the battle including most notably “Harold Macmillan, the one day future Prime Minister, who was nursed at the hospital after sustaining severe injuries” at the Somme. During World War Two, the Hospital was even bombed and moved to its current home on Beaumont Street as a result of private funding. In the hospital’s reception a Union flag is displayed, the same flag that flew outside the tent of Viscount Montgomery on Lüneburg Heath on the day that Germany surrendered, marking the illustrious role the hospital played in the bloodiest period of human history. The Hospital is now London’s leading private hospital, based in Marylebone. However, despite being just around the corner from the riches of Harley Street, the King Edward VII is rare as both a private hospital and a not-for-profit charity. As Mr Brawn says: “In a sense charity runs through everything we do.” Rather than making a profit to return a dividend to shareholders, “any extra money we raise and make is reinvested into the hospital in terms of equipment and grants to service people.” These grants represent the noble

legacy of a British institution giving back to the men and women who have fought, protected, and often suffered for our country. And the King Edward VII hospital’s commitment to military personnel is only growing stronger. “We are creating a ‘Centre of Excellence’ in the hospital,” Mr Brawn says, “and the centre for us is Veteran’s Healthcare.” While in America ‘vets’ are much more commonplace, the average Briton might not immediately think of themselves as a veteran, but for Mr Brawn and the hospital: “a veteran is anyone who has served in the Armed Forces for more than one day.” He tells me about the numerous times ex-service people who

may now be police officers, doctors, or business people, have been surprised when he refers to them as veterans. But in the King Edward VII Hospital, the term veteran is not just a classification. As part of the ‘Centre for Excellence’, all veterans, their spouses, ex-spouses, and widows are entitled to a 20% discount on their treatment, and they can apply for a means-tested grant which can entitle them to as much as 100% off medical care in the hospital. As London’s leading private hospital, the King Edward VII offers an exceptional level of service to its patients, with 4 nurses to every patient and some of the top surgeons and practitioners in

the world. As Mr Brawn tells me, the veteran’s grants are often “misunderstood by people who don’t feel entitled to ask for help from us.” People who might have “gone on to live successful lives in other professions is great,” Mr Brawn tells me, “but the fact that they have served is good enough for us, and we want to help them.” “The prime example is, for example, the widow of a Korean war veteran who needs a shoulder replacement, or a Gulf War veteran who needs a hip replacement, or even an Iraq War triple amputee who needs pain management treatment.” The King Edward VII offers a whole range of speciality treatments from Orthopaedics, to plastic surgery, women’s health, and Neurology. “We are dealing with the many issues that veterans and their families deal with” Mr Brawn tells says “and all of the complex issues which can arise which nonmilitary hospitals might not be so aware of.” “People may find that their treatment on the NHS is taking too long, or they might just equally want to avail themselves of fantastic treatment for free in London’s leading private hospital” he tells me, adding “it’s almost too good to be true.” Another way in which the hospital is launching itself even further into its mission to help military personnel is the creation of a Veteran’s Health Research Centre, on behalf of COBSEO (The Confederation of Service Charities) which will see the hospital “become an international repository for veteran’s health, pooling research in the UK from countries all over the world like Israel, Australia, and the US.” With the help of generous donations, which the hospital and its patients still need, the King Edward VII will become a vital international resource for ensuring that veterans health research is driven onwards and upwards, as it so urgently needs to be. “Everything we are doing is just our way of thanking the people who served the nation,” Mr Brawn says to me, before telling me the story of his own father, who “died 16 years ago but who escaped from a Prisoner of War (POW) camp by walking through the Alps in the middle of winter, becoming one of just 200 people to survive of the 700 who went in.” “And despite all this he never spoke badly of the war” Mr Brawn adds, “he went on to work his way up to being the branch manager of the Royal Exchange in London, and did he see himself as a veteran? No, but he was a veteran. He was my superhero.” “If I had been working at the King Edward VII when he needed surgeries” Mr Brawn says, “I could have got him into the hospital for some great treatment.” He concludes, rather sweetly, “when you meet veterans and you see what they’ve done you think ‘wow, what a great cause’ and the fact that we can give these people free operations is simply amazing.”

020 7738 2348

July/August April/May 2011 2016

Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today

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Health & Beauty A fresher look without surgery

The Consultant Surgeon led team at Cosmetech has perfected the art of the non-surgical facelift. Here Consultant Surgeon Mr Ashok Songra talks about the perceptions of beauty and why he refuses to go beyond what looks natural.

The Cosmetech team have a reputation for creating some of the most naturallooking cosmetic work in the business. With a loyal following of people at their Holywood and Chelsea Private Clinics who discreetly maintain their youthful looks. Their signature work is ‘the natural look’ ; the treatment results are so good that people know you look good but they don’t know why! Their dislike of expressionless, overplumped faces has shaped the signature style. “The techniques we use are more advanced and focus on preventing the signs of ageing by maintaining the skin and supporting the underlying structures of the face,” says Mr Songra. “We can now delay the ageing process and preserve a face as it is for the next 10 years. “With so much awareness of cosmetic treatments, clients now come to us with a better understanding of cosmetic treatments than ever before. They don’t always want to go under the knife for many reasons; health, fear or simply social pressure. With such a variety of non-invasive treatments available today, we’re now able to achieve an excellent natural-looking face-lift without surgery and have developed a combined therapy face-lift. Symmetry and proportion are key to a natural attractive look, because as we age we lose natural volume in the face. Hyaluronic acid dermal fillers from a substance that occurs naturally in the body gently replaces what the skin has lost, lifting deep folds and halting the effects of ageing. For the best results,

Helping you take care of yourself World class clinical care in the heart of Kensington Bupa Cromwell Hospital offers an exceptional healthcare resource for Londoners. Whether using private health insurance or ‘self-funding’, our world-renowned services are available to everyone, and just a five minute walk from Kensington High Street, Earl’s Court or Gloucester Road. private GPs with walk-in appointments the latest diagnostic technology, with no waiting times and quick test results London’s leading consultants, with appointments available at short notice health screening packages to suit every budget Women’s Health Centre with female-only specialists Call us on 020 7460 2000 or email info@cromwellhospital.com to discuss your healthcare needs.

bupacromwellhospital.com

treat the face as a whole, lifting mid-face areas, then lifting the lower face and jaw line for a fresher and plumper look.” The Cosmetech, Chelsea Private Clinic is a Consultant Surgeon-led clinic which specialises in non-surgical antiageing solutions, health and wellbeing. Their experience within the NHS and private sector includes managing facial trauma, facial deformity, cosmetic dermatology and scar revisions. Mr Songra Consultant Surgeon in head, neck and facial surgery, is on the UK’s anti-wrinkle validator panel, which assesses safety and the ability of practitioners in administering antiwrinkle injections for cosmetic purposes. Q. What can anti-wrinkle injections do? A. They can maintain the brow position and prevent the ingraining of lines. Advanced anti- wrinkle injections also help prevent lower jowls developing. Combined with dermal fillers they can prevent the need for surgery in later life. Q. How do they work? A. Anti-wrinkle injections are a purified protein that’s injected in tiny quantities into face muscles to soften lines and wrinkles. You’ll see improvement three days to two weeks after treatment. It usually wears off in 3-4 months. Q. Are anti-wrinkle injections safe? A. Yes. They’re licenced for ages two and over. We have over 30 years of clinical data proving their safety. Q. What is a hyaluronic acid dermal

Receive 10% off with this voucher. off your first non- surgical treatment with Mr Ashok Songra. This voucher expires on the 1st September 2015 please call 020 7565 0333 for bookings. * terms and conditions apply filler? A. The acid occurs naturally in the body and helps to hydrate and add volume to skin. Q. What do dermal fillers do? A.They replace facial volume, smooth lines and restore skin elasticity and tone. Services available at the clinic include: Anti- wrinkle injection / Dermal Fillers, PDO Thread Lifts, Colonic Hydrotherapy, Manual Lymphatic Drainage Massage, Acupuncture, Cryolipolysis, Hair Styling and Colouring technician, Skin Rejuvenation, Nutritional Consultations, Osteopathy, Cosmetic Skin Tag and Mole Removal.

Chelsea Private Clinic The Courtyard, 250 Kings Rd London SW3 5UE T: 020 7565 0333 www.chelseaprivateclinic.co.uk frontdesk@chelseaprivateclinic.com

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July/August 2016

Health & Beauty Facts on Facial Fillers By Jayne Beaumont

nce the domain of film stars and celebrities, the past decade and more has opened the world of ‘dermal fillers’ to those of us who are not regularly photographed by the paparazzi but nevertheless, want to enhance or regain our best profile. A ‘dermal filler’ creates volume in areas of the face where it has been lost through age or diet and restores a more youthful look. There are numerous techniques and products available so it takes patience and research to find which one to use and where to go for the best results. Most available products are safe and minimally invasive. The current most commonly used filler is Hyaluronic Acid (HA) that occurs naturally in the body. It is the main ingredient in products such as Juvederm, Restylane, Teosyal, Belotero and Emervel. HA has been used for over 15 years in millions of procedures worldwide. Its versatility allows it to be used for volumising almost every area of the face. Occasional side effects of HA are bruising and swelling but they quickly disappear. Another advantage of using HA is the ease in reversing the result if necessary. One of the concerns of dermal fillers is their longevity and the truth is, this depends on which part of the face they are used. Generally, lip volumising lasts for 6 months whereas the filling of lines around the lips as well as mid-face lines can last up to a year. Better news is that dermal filler around the eyes can remain for close to 2 years. The second most popular filler used

in the UK is Sculptra. It is a more natural procedure as it stimulates the production of the skin’s collagen. However, it takes between 3-6 months to see results and lasts about 18 months. Sculptra is more effective for larger areas of the face such as the temple hollows and the cheeks. It also provides a subtle lifting of the face. The side effects are similar to Hyaluronic Acid. Radiesse is another dermal filler that is not used much nowadays as it doesn’t break down evenly. A relatively new product is Ellanse that is similar to Radiesse but with better absorption. However, its claims have yet to be proved over a period of time. Dermal Fillers in the UK are not so strongly regulated as in the USA where they are rigorously tested. So before trying a new product, check first to see if it has FDA approval. The choice of a practitioner or doctor is paramount for a successful result. A good one will know how the face changes as it ages so he/she can provide a more natural look. An explanation of complications and how they would be managed should always be provided. Do select a doctor that has performed at least 50 procedures a year. Even better, choose a clinic with a proven reputation as there is an art to enhancing a face that reflects a subtlety and refinement that simply causes friends to quizzically comment, ‘you are looking very well’. The cost of dermal fillers varies but the minimum would be £250 for one area of the face. And a good clinic should be registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Adviser : Dr. Asif Hussein MBBS DHMSA DipDerm FASLMS GDipLaw PgDip Legal Practice Cosmetic Dermatology & Laser Surgery Medical Director sk:n London, Victoria Honorary Lecturer Queen Mary University, London

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Motoring From the Back Seat Part 34 By Don Grant

etting my license was paramount, not just to mobility, but to mobility with the opposite sex. By the time I was old enough to put L-plates onto the family Morris 1100, I had a fairly good idea of what steering, gears and clutch control were all about, and dad had arranged for a neighbour, Bill Mason, to sit beside me while I drove him around the Suburb, and beyond. Dad used to reward him by getting him passes for the big races at Silverstone and Brands Hatch. He was a police driving instructor at Hendon, and one of the first journeys we made, beyond the Suburb, was to the training school out on the RAF Aerodrome, where he took me onto the skid-pan in a very bashed-up Wolseley, with no bumpers or hub-caps. We had a pursuit game unsurprisingly called ‘cops and robbers’ with another equally battered Wolseley, and the most impressive thing was the unhurried smoothness of the drivers’ actions, hanging the rear end out with just the right amount of opposite lock and accelerator. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to drive myself that day, but I learnt a colossal amount just by observing. I had applied for my test as soon as I got my provisional licence, and it came up shortly before Christmas at Hendon Central, only a couple of months after I turned seventeen. I drove Bill there, and there were flurries of snow being blown about, and we talked gloomily about a possible postponement. It was getting dark when I set off with the examiner, and then it started to snow. I could sense my passenger tensing up as I negotiated the slippery side streets of northwest London, and he was patently getting nervous about the emergency stop. I knew it was coming, as he had shifted in his seat to surreptitiously glance behind to ensure no one was following, and, by the time he smacked his clip-board on the dashboard, I simultaneously hit the brake pedal. The car went into a slide at forty-five degrees to the kerb, which I corrected, and the car came to a stop in the middle of the road, pointing in the right direction. I immediately selected second gear and set off again, just to get out of the way. ‘Please pull into the side,’ he said, in his clipped, nasal voice, adding, ‘when I asked you to come to a stop, I meant come to a complete stop, and wait until I had asked you to proceed again’. I apologised and asked whether he wanted me to do it again. ‘No, no no!’ he said quickly, with more than a whiff of panic in his voice. ‘That won’t be

necessary. Please move off and proceed back to the centre.’ It was snowing quite heavily by the time we got there, and he made me wait ages while he leafed through his notes. He said that he had only put a cross in one of the boxes, and that was because I had failed to complete the emergency stop as laid down by the rules. ‘However, under the circumstances’, he continued, looking at the opaque windscreen thick with snow, ‘I think we can allow you a pass. ‘ As if I wasn’t going to. We probably both unclenched our buttocks at the same time. I recall a beautifully-drawn cartoon by Russell Brockbank, depicting a pretty young girl sitting in a D-type Jaguar with L-plates outside an MOT driving test centre in the snow at night. Through the window one can see a group of worried-looking examiners drawing straws. I had been riding motorbikes for the past year, well, slightly over a year, if one includes a few sorties on my first bike, a 500cc Ariel Red Hunter, taking it for ‘test runs’ around Hampstead Heath.

If that wasn’t enough, a friend of mine from school, told me of another, even older, Ariel 500 he had found dumped behind some lock-ups behind his parents’ house in Grove End Road in St John’s Wood. After school, we went there on the bus, and tried to get it started. We walked round to Les Leston’s garage in Blenheim Terrace, where he kept his Lotus Elite DAD10, and borrowed a plug spanner and some petrol. We exhausted ourselves trying to kick and tease the big single-cylinder engine into life. It fired a couple of times, so we then pushed it down a slight hill leading to Maida Vale. It coughed, farted, backfired, and then spluttered into a throaty roar. I managed to keep it going, amid billowing clouds of exhaust fumes, but discovered that the lights were not working, apart from the brake light. I decided to set off for home in the dark, while it was still running, keeping to all the back streets I knew. Once again, I had no tax, no insurance, no license, no crash helmet, no lights and no

common sense. I was pleased to discover the horn worked, and by keeping my foot on the brake, I had a back light, of sorts. I zigzagged up through Hampstead and then I went down the paths across the Heath in true scrambles style, a route I knew from cycling to and from school nearly every day. Having access to a car was a different kind of freedom, though. The exhilaration of actually driving on one’s own at last. Suddenly, I was able to take girls out, without going on the bus or tube, and drive them home.Years later, I drew a cartoon of a couple in a car, a sort of play on the frog/prince theme, with girl saying, ‘if I kiss you, will you turn into a lay-by?’ Dad was generous to a fault when it came to letting my brother and I have access to wheels, and would let us take out cars he had on road test, including some quite fast and powerful machines, like a Jaguar E-type, Mini-Cooper ’S’ and Triumph GT6. From the age of 14 or so, he let me park whatever car he had on test in the garage at the end of the drive, which taught me clutch control. Gregor then bought a pre-war Austin Ruby, which smelt of damp leather, wet labrador and oil, and we would all tinker with it in the back yard for hours, along with my motorbikes, one of which had been cannibalised to produce one reliable machine, or as reliable as one could get from an English bike in those years. Eba, our mum, was quite late in learning to drive, and dad tried teaching her the rudiments, but wisely gave up before the marriage unravelled in the time-honoured way and got Bill from across the road to sit beside her. He went out and bought her a Rover 16 from one of his dodgy mates round the back of Warren Street. This was a product of the late 1940s known as ‘The Doctor’s Coupé’, which, as one journalist wrote in a road-test, ‘was a car for strong men in tweed plus-fours who preferred things built to last’. It had running boards, interior trimmed with walnut and leather and ‘doors that closed with the convincing clunk of a railway carriage, and furnishings that looked like those in a doctor’s waiting room.’ Dad thought that if she could drive this car, she could drive anything, and he was right. After she passed her test, and threw away the L-plates, just as I was shortly to do, she was soon tooling about in her own opentopped MGB, a Sunbeam Alpine and a 4.7-litre Sunbeam Tiger, with a whole range of Minis in between.

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July/August April/May 2011 2016

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Aston Martin gives you wings By Fahad Redha

Motoring

By Fahad Redha

Holding a major motorsport in the heart of London is no small feat but Formula E managed to pull it off. Being a race of all electric cars helps, though it is hard to ignore the absence of the sounds and smells typically in a race. Once again, the series concluded in Battersea Park with the tight street circuit that makes overtaking a real challenge. The weather this year gave the drivers a chance to put the cars, and tyres, to the test. Sebastien Buemi was crowned champion, clinching the title after setting the fastest lap. The race itself was far from controversy with Buemi and rival Lucas di Grassi colliding on the opening lap. Buemi had a slow start from pole and was rear ended by di Grassi. This took off Buemi’s rear wing and caused

significant damage to the front of di Grassi’s car. Both drivers had to limp back to the pits and jump into their second cars. With two points for the fastest lap and both drivers tied on points, the race boiled down to that. Di Grassi gave everything he could but fell short, leaving Buemi to succeed Nelson Piquet Jr as champion. “The most important thing is that we won both championships,” said Buemi. “I’m actually sad you know, to win it in that way, but also to see what Lucas did because I was very respectful of his driving, he’s been amazing. Like he’s said many times, his car is very bad and he is a very good driver, and if he was in my car he’d be at least half a second quicker!” Formula E offers hope for enthusiasts. It’s a commonly held view that as safety and especially environmental regulations become more stringent, there will be no place left for a car lover. Yet here we have an exciting motorsport that also manages to be green at the same time. Not to mention the flurry of new all-electric sports and supercars being developed, both from mainstream brands and startups. McLaren, for example, hopes for its entire range to have some hybrid tech by 2025. And what better place to develop and prove this technology than on the race track. Look out for the next Formula E season set to begin on the 9th of October in Hong Kong.

nnounced and eagerly anticipated since over a year ago, Aston Martin and Red Bull Racing have finally taken the wraps of their co-developed hypercar, the AM-RB 001. The limited production monster is powered by a naturally aspirated V12 and was the brainchild of Adrian Newey, Red Bull Racing’s Chief Technical Officer and the world’s most successful F1TM designer, Marek Reichman, Aston Martin EVP and Chief Creative Officer and David King, VP and Chief Special Operations Officer. Taking the power to the wheels is a “clean-sheet design” gearbox conceived by Newey and developed by Red Bull Advacned Technology, while advanced suspension design helps the car handle the extreme aerodynamic load at high speed. A lightweight carbon fibre structure helps the car achieve a claimed 1:1 power to weight ratio, while radical aerodynamics give it “unprecedented levels of downforce in a road-legal car.” The car will be built as a “bespoke machine from the tyres up” in a purpose built factory created originally for the One-77, Aston Martin’s first limited production model. “I’ve always been adamant that the AM-RB 001 should be a true road car that’s also capable of extreme performance on track, and this means it really has to be a car of two characters. That’s the secret we’re trying to put into this car - the technology that allows it to be docile and comfortable, but with immense outright capabilities,” said Newey. The task of engineering the car will be shared between Aston Martin’s Q division as well as Red Bull Advanced Technology while production will take place at Aston Martin’s Gaydon factory. Production will be limited to between 99 and 150 road cars and 25 track-only versions. The first cars will be delivered to their owners in 2018 with a price tag expected to be six figures.

You’re virtually a racing driver By Fahad Redha

Since 1997, the Gran Turismo series of games have inspired a generation of young enthusiasts. “The real driving simulator,” as developers Polyphony dubs it, is the closest many will get to racing, albeit without the danger of the real thing. The GT Academy, which Polyphony co-created with Nissan, has been a stepping stone to being a real racer. In it, players compete in the game with winners earning a place in Nissan’s Driver Development Programme and an entry into an international race or series with the company. Since its inception, 20 people have earned a place on the track.

But the next iteration of the series is set to take this to a whole other level. Gran Turismo Sport, set to be released in November 2016, aims to create many more racers via a partnership with the FIA. In it, gamers earn the “The FIA Gran Turismo digital license.” “The FIA Gran Turismo digital license is something we have discussed with 200 automobile clubs all over the world and the FIA over the last three years,” says Gran Turismo producer Kazunori Yamauchi. “Things have been moving forward step-by-step, and at the World Motor Sport Council a few months ago there was a vote to allow this project and this announcement. Once you’re eligible for the license, that information will be shared with the relevant automobile club, and from thereon it’s up to them to decide how they will handle this.” Time will tell how successful this will be but if the GT Academy is anything to go by, it will be one to watch.

May April/May 2016 2011

Sport Rio 2016: “Bring them on” By Derek Wyatt

our years ago the nation basked in the stunning success of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Record crowds attended, our multi racial volunteers were simply outstanding and they were rightly awarded the Best Games ever. London became the first city in the world to host them for a third time. Before the opening ceremony there were concerns at different times about cost overruns, security (remember the G4 debacle?), the lack of an anchor tenant (unlike the Manchester Commonwealth Games Stadium in 2002 which was always ear-marked for Manchester City) and the jaw dropping cost of the tickets. But come the opening ceremony and all this was forgotten. For four weeks the talk was how creative we were as a nation, how brilliant our athletes were and how the crowds supported everyone especially those participating in the Paralympics. It made us all immensely proud of ourselves. Pity we did not bottle this mood given how Londoners now feel about Brexit! So spare a thought for the Rio Games organisers as they ready themselves for the Olympics and Paralympics beginning 5th August. They too have had their problems. Stadia are still being finished (Athens was the same in 2004). The Zika mosquito virus has bedeviled the nation and caused some athletes, mainly golfers like Rory McIlroy, to withdraw. (As if golf should be in the Games in the first place!) But above all else there is the spectre of Russian track and field competitors not being allowed to compete. This is because some of their athletes have been found guilty of drug abuse. It has been clear for some time that there has been, as there was between 1952 and 1988 in the old Soviet Union, s tate sponsored programmes to improve the performance of athletes by using banned substances. Russia hosted the Winter Olympics 2014 and hosts the FIFA World Cup 2018 and it is probably the case that the increase in illegal drug abuse is connected to these two events. Russia has spent at least $30b showcasing these sports and has wanted to demonstrate, given Ukraine and the financial boycotts imposed by the West, t hat she is back as a leading member of the world community. As for Rio they do not know this but as soon as their Games open all the criticism and all the infighting will be forgotten. For as London proved, the Olympics and Paralympics (might they be one soon?), are the greatest show on earth. Bring them on.

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online: www.KCWToday.co.uk London Home Football July 28 Chelsea v Liverpool 04:35 July 30 Chelsea v Real Madrid 20:05 July 30 Fulham v Crystal Palace 15:00 August 4 Chelsea v AC Milan 02:30 August 5 Fulham v Newcastle 19:45 August 13 Arsenal v Liverpool 15:00 August 13 Chelsea v West Ham 15:00 August 20 Fulham v Cardiff City 15:00 August 27 Chelsea v Burnley 15:00 September 10 Arsenal v Southampton 15:00 September 10 Fulham v Birmingham 15:00

Motorsport

July 24 6 Hours of Nürburgring July 24 Hungarian Grand Prix July 28 WRC Finland July 31 German Grand Prix August 18 WRC Germany August 28 Belgian Grand Prix September 3 6 Hours of Mexico September 4 Italian Grand Prix September 8 WRC China

Red Bull Air Race July 16-17 Budapest August 13-14 Ascot September 3-4 Lausitzring October 1-2 Indianapolis October 15-16 Las Vegas

Lord’s Cricket

July 14-18 England v Pakistan July 19 MCC v Nepal July 21, August 2, 4-7

Middlesex v Surrey July 24 Middlesex v Kent Spitfires July 28, 31 Middlesex v Essex Eagles August 13-16 Middlesex V Durham August 27 England v Pakistan September 4 Davidstow National Village Cup Final September 6 MCC Schools v Esca

Athletics

July 22-23: Müller Anniversary Games, including IPC Grand Prix Final, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Basketball

September 3 Eurobasket 2017 Qualifying Series Great Britain v. FYR Macedonia, Copper Box Arena, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park September 7 Eurobasket 2017 Qualifying Series Great Britain v. Luxembourg, Copper Box Arena, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Hockey

July 30-31 HockeyFest On Tour Surbiton Hockey Club, West London

Volleyball

July 23-24 SideOut London Grand Prix #3 SideOut Beach, Leyton August 6-7 25th Cambridge Volleyball Tournament Cambridge Rugby Union Football Club August 20 Barn Elms and London Volleyball Club Mixed Beach Volleyball Tournament Shoreditch Park Court September 3-4 SideOut London Grand Prix #4 SideOut Beach, Leyton

Horse Racing

An Evening at the Races with Jess Glynne July 20 An evening at the races with Busted July 21 Elmbridge Community Raceday July 27 An Evening at the Races August 4 An evening at the Races with Bryan Adams August 19 Afternoon Raceday August 20 Superhero Family Day September 9 Afternoon Raceday

Sporting Calendar

Ascot July 22-23 King George VI Weekend July 28-30 Luna Cinema August 6 Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup & Concert September 2-3 Festival of Food & Wine Racing Weekend Kempton Park July 6 Irish Night August 1 Afternoon Flat August 3,10,16,17,22,24, September 2 AWT September 3 Ladies Day

Newmarket July 15 Kaiser Chiefs Newmarket Nights July 16 Summer Saturday Great British Summer Day July 22 Busted Newmarket Nights July 23 Summer Saturday July 29 Tears for Fears July 30 Summer Saturday August 5 Mark Ronson DJ Set Newmarket Nights

August 6 Summer Saturday Royal British Legion Day August 9 Jess Glyne Newmarket Nights August 13 All Was Quiet in The Deep Dark Wood August 26 Family Fun Day Super Hero Day August 27 Summer Saturday Live Little Mix Sandown July 1 Ladies’ Day Windsor July 13

Marathons in the UK

July 17 Dundee Marathon July 17 Fairlands Valley Challenge Multi-Terrain Marathon Stevenage, Hertfordshire July 31 Fort William Marathon Highland August 7 Gloucester City Marathon August 7 Indian Queens Half Marathon Cornwall August 14 Isle of Man Marathon Ramsey August 14 Salisbury 5-4-3-2-1 Trail Marathon Salisbury, Wiltshire Photograph © Peter Besenyei

August 20 Coll Half Marathon Isle of Coll, Argyll and Bute August 21 Isle of Wight Half Marathon Sandown August 28 Guernsey Waterfront Marathon September 4 Dunstable Marathon Bedfordshire September 4 Wolverhampton Marathon September 10 Great Langdale Marathon Ambleside, Cumbria marathonrunnersdiary.com Compiled by Fahad Redha

July/August April/May 2011 2016

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Crossword & Bridge This is the forty eighth Wolfe Cryptic Crossword

Across

ane Hoare by email was last months winner, congratulations. I hope you enjoyed last month’s edition. Please let me have any comments or suggestions you may have. Remember, even if you haven’t totally finished the whole crossword still send in your grids either by post to Wolfe, at Kensington,Chelsea and Westminster Today, 80-100 Gwynne Road London SW11 3UW, or scan it in and send by email to wolfe@kcwtoday. co.uk. as the first correct or substantially correct answer picked at random will win a prize of a bottle of Champagne kindly donated by: Lea and Sandeman. www.leaandsandeman.co.uk/Fine-Wine. 106 Kensington Church St, London W8 4BH. T: 020 7221 1982. Contact Sandor. 1 8

W O

L 11

A N

T T

A R

H 13

G R

R O N

V 26

W E

N 30

L Y

I O

T Y

M E

G H

H 31

A M E

E F

R O

A A

I E

U L

O L

E 18

W H

E S 21

D O W N

S 22

L 32

M A

X T

A M

1 A measure that could be said to remain. (6) 4 Posted young serving girl around the french. (6) 8 Well behaved cricket extra? Au revoir. (7) 9 Young man, babys bed and time to ostracize (7) 11 Made a bold leper completely unacceptable. (10) 12 Kiss between head and shoulders. (4) 13 Push down on the fourth estate. (5) 14 Intended to teach act one hundred did before. (8) 16 Definitely a meat fruit and veg eater. (8) 18 Keep waving your tail but dont drink on it. (5) 20 Holding Catalan king as long and limp. (4) 21 Bet on road not a highway. (4,6) 23 Long Boa around Italian city (7) 24 Hat oven cooked one materially dispossessed. (4-3) 25 Smuggler found on the hall floor. (6) 26 Make fit and if fine in good condition. (6)

1 The possessive case of which western stockings. (5) 2 Drunk glued in to treat oneself. (7) 3 Hope tyres circulate said on magic revelation. (3,6) 5 Non PC native Australian of french home. (5) 6 Lilac on ice holding pithy comment. (7)

South Deals. None Vul.

K Q 10 6 53 Q 10 7 2 KJ8

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣

N S

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣

West

North

East

7 What homes was reportedly good at. (9) 10 Conforms to the rule but hopefully not when blind. (9) 13 Pink fabric favoured by Louis XV. (9) 15 Not up front in part of the theatre, actually it is! (9) 17 A rhino mixed with a short knight

Pass

4 ♥1

All pass

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South 3♥

J94 10 2 KJ95 A 10 9 3

7 KQJ9864 863 72

CLASSIFIED ADS

When partner has opened at the three level, showing less than opening points and a good seven card suit, you should discount your queens and jacks (“quacks”) outside his suit when deciding whether to “put up or shut up”. The reason for this is that quacks tend to come into their own on the third and fourth rounds of suits, at which point partner, the pre-emptor, is likely to be void (remember he has just six cards in the three outside suits), and able to trump. Fast losers are the problem and that means missing aces and kings. Experience has shown that an opening hand discounting side-suit quacks is necessary in order to raise a Three-of-a-Major opener to game (bidding to make).

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣

with Andrew Robson

A8532 A7 A4 Q654

Down

Monthly Bridge Tip for Intermediates

♠ ♥ ♦ ♣

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(1) An opening hand even discounting ♣Q

West led ♠K and declarer could count nine easy tricks - seven trump tricks,♠A and ♦A. Can you see the route to a tenth trick? Declarer can almost certainly garner his tenth trick from trumping his third diamond in dummy. Accordingly he must delay drawing trumps. He wins ♠A and immediately plays ♦A and ♦4 (key plays). East wins ♦K and finds the best return of ♥2. Declarer plays ♥9 winning the trick, and now leads ♦8, trumping it with ♥A (this is his crucial extra trick). He trumps ♠3, draws the two outstanding trumps, and loses two club tricks at the end. 4♥ bid and made. ANDREW’S TIP: Discount queens and jacks outside trumps when responding to a preempt. Raise a Three-of-a-Major preempt to Four (to make) with an opening hand discounting such “quacks”.

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holds printing fluid. (7) 19 Piece of clothing for a man about a limb. (7) 21 The common head of a good French church. (5) 22 Cut between drugs to go and splice in secret. (5)

July/August 2016

Chess CHESS

By Barry Martin

1931-2016

first met Viktor Korchnoi Grandmaster (GM) in 2009, when he participated in the 7th. Staunton Memorial Chess Tournament that I co-organised with Raymond Keene GM, held at Simpson’s-in-theStrand, London. Stories of his irascible temperament were well known, but coming from a living legend of such magnitude, irritations of any sort are just minor hiccups in the bigger plan. However, as the third round of the tournament started to get under way (I was the tournament director for that day), I heard a commotion coming from the centre of the playing area around Viktor’s board. I swiftly went over and found that Viktor was refusing to start his game as white, and other players who had just started were now looking over to see why Viktor was (predictably in their eyes) causing a disruption! Viktor had a deep bark of a voice and his English was slightly scrambled when he became excited. As it was I eventually began to understand what it was he was growling about and why he wouldn’t start his game. Without wishing to cause an international incident, (after all the 7th. Staunton Tournament was the strongest tournament to be held in London since 1986, and over half the players were grandmasters from Holland and Europe, with the other half grandmasters from the United Kingdom), I calmed Viktor down. I managed to get him to come with me outside the playing area to discuss what the problem was and also

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online: www.KCWToday.co.uk managed to quieten him down enough that I could understand what he was saying: “No pay, no play!”. Viktor always travelled with his second wife Petra, (first was Bella), and it seemed that she understood that Viktor was to be paid up front for this tournament and had requested cash. It took me some time to assuage his worries, promising him that I would resolve the problem, (which I did). He returned to his board and not only did play resume but we became friends for the rest of the tournament, sharing humorous asides and reminiscences. I was at that time preparing a portfolio of Grandmaster Portraits, and was pleased to have captured Viktor’s portrait (see below) laughing, as we joked about life’s ironies! Nigel Davies who played Viktor in the tournament and drew, said of him, “Viktor Korchnoi was one of my chess heroes. Meeting him over the board was one of my most memorable chess experiences. Viktor was very nice to me in the post-mortem session telling me how I did better than Leonid Stein with whom he played a similar game in 1962”. Korchnoi was the world’s oldest active chess grandmaster up until the end, and even then still in the world’s top rated 100 players. He suffered a stroke in 2012, but was back playing chess soon after. Viktor Lvovich Korchnoi’s combative nature had deep roots! Born 23-3-1931, his father; a Christian, taught literature, and his mother of Jewish origin was a pianist. His father died fighting the Nazis, and Viktor endured and survived the 872 horrific days of the Siege of Leningrad, during the Second World War. Suffering from malnutrition he saw relatives die, including his grand-mother, who brought him up during this period of human atrocity, after his parents had separated following his birth. He was then cared for by his step-mother, since his father had remarried. Viktor’s tenacity and will to survive during these early dark days, was in all probability reflected in his strong will to succeed in chess, where his pugnacious, battling, scrapping style was to become world famous. Nigel Short GM said, ‘ All of that geometry and classical elegance, he didn’t give a toss about it. It was all about the fight!’ Viktor himself confessed that playing someone he disliked raised his game! He achieved his International Master title in 1954, and Grandmaster title in 1956. He won the Soviet Chess Championship 4 times between 1959 and 1970, and played 90 international tournaments between 1954 and 1990, winning or sharing first prize 40 times, and only on 7 occasions finishing below the top 3 places! The match that captured the world’s press, the public’s attention, and their imagination was the World Championship in 1978 against Anatoly Karpov, who at that time was the epitome of Soviet hegemony. This match is remembered by many as the most acrimonious world match, with

so much more than chess surrounding its outcome. Karpov refused to shake hands with Korchnoi at the opening of the tournament, obeying strict orders direct from the Kremlin, as Korchnoi was now considered persona non grata, having defected from Russia to the west in 1976. He was the first Grandmaster to do so, and Switzerland became his new home. The ‘great escape’ became hugely symbolic worldwide, and was a severe blow to the Kremlin’s political autocracy and Russia’s mental and intellectual superiority expressed through chess over the rest of the world, particularly the West, during the ideological and Cold War entrenchment following the Second World War. The 1978 match had in one stroke shattered the centuries old image of chess as the civilised encounter, the Royal Game, between two minds with all the genteel etiquette and rules of behaviour finely and historically honed, a social event for gentlemen with good manners. This notion was rudely dumped without ceremony and transformed in an instant into the cold light of a world where power and success was to be achieved using whatever means one could muster. And if in this pivotal world defining moment it necessitated parapsychologists with mind bending abilities, undercover agents with missions to destabilise and disorientate, the wearing of reflective sunglasses to deflect damaging rays, coded messages placed daily in yoghurt pots eaten at the board, mystic groups including members of the ‘ levitating for success’ Ananda Marga sect who had just been released on bail for the attempted murder of an Indian diplomat, furniture that had secret mechanisms installed inside, and many more accusations levelled by each player against their opponent’s delegations, then so be it. This was the dawning of a new world, no-holds barred reality that personified global politics, and its cut throat obscenities in the search for world domination. Karpov led 5-2 in the match, with the first to reach 6 wins as the winner, draws not counting. The match seemed a foregone conclusion, when Korchnoi fought back and won the next three games to level the contest on game 31. He then lost game 32 and the World Championship. Instances of chess conflict between players, other than over the board, are many; with some hilarious, and some deadly serious. Viktor was involved in one of the former kind during his 1974 world qualifying championship game against Petrosian, where each took to kicking the other under the table they were playing on. The players were duly warned and planks installed between

them under the table to prevent further kicking. It is alleged that bangs could still be heard despite these preventative measures! Viktor was 85 years of age when he passed away in the Swiss city of Wohlen. FIDE issued a statement, transmitted through TASS news agency,’ Korchnoi led a vivid life and did a lot to popularise chess. This is a great loss for the whole chess world’. The following game was between Robert James Fischer, white, and Viktor Korchnoi, black, Candidates Tournament, Curacao, 1962, see diagram. Viktor had won against virtually all the chess giants in the post-war era including Botvinnik, Tal, Smyslov, Fischer, Petrosian, Spassky, Karpov, Kasparov, Carlsen and others. He also had a plus score against many of them. The following problem is one of them with black, Korchnoi, to play and win. Answer upside down below: White has captured black’s rook on move 27.Bxf8... and threatens black’s queen on h6. Black can take back with his queen, king or rook on e8.However,to take with his queen leaves his kingside vulnerable, particularly with his king exposed on g8, minus the g7 pawn. If black takes with his e8 rook it invites white’s knight to invade on the e7 square, checking black’s king. Black’s next move required careful, forward thinking. What was it? Answer, 27.Bxf8, Rxf8. 28.Ne7+,Kh8. 29.Nxf5,Qe6, a freeing-up move that looks fairly unprepossessing given the position. 30.Rg1, an obvious move to control the open g-file, 30...a4, Sir Francis Drake plays bowls whilst the mighty Spanish Armada manœuvres to attack! 31.Rg4, starting to double up on the open g-file, but perhaps not fully understanding the importance of 30...a4! 31...Qb3! trying to force the exchange of Queens with the a pawn transferring to the 3rd. rank with the re-take on b3.32. Qf1, refusing to comply,32...a3. 33.Rg3, probably thinking black’s bishop would take, but shockingly black played 33...... Qxg3! 0-1.

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