We arrived yesterday morning in London and powered through the day with lots of walking, one nap, and a respectable early bedtime. Today we increased our step count exploring Knightsbridge (think Harrod’s Food Hall) and spending time in both Hyde Park and Green Park. The rose garden was mostly over except for one or two last blooms.
RECENT READING
The Latter Days by Judith Freeman
Continuing my reading of memoirs by writers and reporters, I read this one by novelist Judith Freeman. She was brought up in the Mormon faith, but strained against its strictures and rules from an early age. Certainly by her teen years, she was rebelling internally, being given talks by one of the church elders, and subjected to little chats with her mother who admonished her to behave more like her older sister, Marcia.
Somewhat surprisingly, Freeman married a local boy at seventeen, got pregnant very soon thereafter and surrendered any thought of college for herself. Later she and her husband moved from Utah to Minnesota and grew even farther away from the church.
Freeman’s memoir is straightforward and plain as she recounts a childhood starved of warmth and thin on material goods. I found some of the early chapters slow, but appreciated more her later discussion of the turquoise notebook she found from her high school years and how she was eventually able to quench her thirst for learning and channel her desire to become a writer. She has written several novels based on her Mormonism.
We spent the better part of the day in the London Bridge area of the city and learned about Science Gallery London from Daniel Glaser (pictured above.) It is part of the Global Science Gallery Network begun in Dublin in 2008 to engage 15-25 year olds with science. More specifically to engage them “where art and science collide” through a variety of media—film, theater, immersive and online experiences, art of all types, and the like. London is the second location for Science Gallery and it will officially open in 2016. In the meantime, it is in pre-season mode, as it were, before its new home is created. Set in the shadow of the Shard and just steps from the London Bridge Tube and rail stations, Science Gallery is at a busy crossroads and the ideal spot for attracting an audience. It is affiliated with King’s College and all of the future Science Gallery locations (goal is to have a global presence of eight of them by 2020) will be based at universities. But part of their mission is to engage with the entire community and to be a bridge between academe and the city. Future sites include New York, Bangalore, and Melbourne. Why not San Francisco, I say?
King’s College Guy’s Campus
According to Dan, their enthusiastic and well-qualified director, the plan is to have 3-4 seasons each year around a common theme. This fall (September and October 2014) is a time of experimentation and a prototype of what is to come. The SG folks worked with youth in the community as well as with staff and researchers at King’s College to find out what topics and concepts interested them and then have commissioned professional artists and producers to create works. This is a facilitated approach to content development, but one that gets at what the young people want to know about, not what the adults or program staff think they should. Dan and his staff did six months of engagement work ahead of any programming. One novel aspect is that the media team is comprised entirely of youth and led by two sisters, aged 17 and 19, who have 16,000 You Tube subscribers.
Theme for the fall is FREQUENCIES: Tune into Lifeand it relates to the sounds of life, to the rhythms and cycles of our body. Involvement in FREQUENCIES includes: a juggler interacting with children, a cellist at the cancer center, a DJ with a market trader, looking at the physiology of sleep, and the participation of a hospital porter and a lung pollution expert. The emphasis in program development is on rapid prototyping with nine collaborators having just one week in which to create a new sound, and a sound that would be open source!
Science Gallery will have no permanent collections and will focus to some extent, but not exclusively, on issues of health and medicine, given its location on the Guy’s campus. This campus is home to the medical school and Guy’s Hospital. There will be several pre-seasons prior to the official opening of Science Gallery in 2016. Future themes are likely to be: “Spare Parts” (transplantation), “Teeth,” and in 2016, “Addictive.” For this last theme, they will do engagement work with addicts, pushers, specialists, and others in order to generate ideas for the works themselves.
Beginning in 2015, the building they are now in will be renovated to include a theater, a wide open gallery-like space, production facilities, and a cafe. Project cost is 12 million pounds which is a combination of funds from the university, from individual donors, and the Guy’s Hospital charity. Ongoing operating costs will come from the university budget.
Current home of Science Gallery to be renovated in 2015
Students involved in the project were recruited through the Youth Media Agency and are paid for their time. For those familiar with the California Academy of Sciences, Science Gallery has elements of NightLife, Brilliant!Science, Careers in Science, and Teen Advocates for Science Communication (TASC) with its flash mobs. One significant difference is that all events are free; some revenue will be realized from the cafe and a shop. The current staff is quite small, around a dozen individuals, plus three working on commission for this season, and the students. Attendance goal for the first year is 350,000.
We had the privilege of attending one of the FREQUENCIES events, a performance by Bishi, a Bengali British musician and singer based in London, which featured images from a lab recording of her sleep patterns juxtaposed with haunting music and singing. It was different and certainly combined science with art. It will be informative to watch how Science Gallery London evolves, how they define success and what outcomes they achieve. And it would be fun to return in 2016 when they are up and fully operational in their new space.
It’s been about 5 years since I was last in London and now we are back. My observations on this return: cell phones are in use everywhere on the street, even more so than New York. Many, many restaurants now have outside seating, cafe style. On some days that means lap blankets are provided in addition to exterior heaters.
The Tube is cleaner, faster, and even better. We have not yet had to wait more than a minute or two for a train, and there are ready announcements if there is even the slightest delay (“we are stopped for a red signal and should be moving again in a moment.”) Many stations have been upgraded and made attractive. Happily, our Oyster cards of yore still work and we’ve been topping them up frequently! Mass transit here is expensive which, I guess, is providing the fuel for the upgrades.
British food has gone trendy; the farm to table movement is in evidence on numerous menus–think California and San Francisco, but with a British twist! We had a small lunch at a hot newish restaurant called The Shed (rustic inside and out like a garden shed) and sampled carrot hummus and lamb chips (as in shaped like fries and fried) with a harissa dipping sauce. The hummus was tasty and the lamb chips delectable. Among the more usual offerings on their menu, we nibbled a couple of delicious cheeses. Overall, though, I’m still struck by how much meat is on the menus, probably no more than before, but my response to living midst California’s bounteous produce.
The new double decker buses are very classy looking and still red, thank you. Lots of construction going on—both new buildings and road works.
Hatchard’s on Piccadilly
Hatchard’s, that bastion of books, was doing a lively business the other day and remains one of my favorite hangouts for all things literary. It is now owned by Waterstone’s, but retains its genteel character and other than Waterstone’s Kindle covers for sale, you almost wouldn’t know.
There are branches of Waterstone’s all around the city and a number of other independent bookstores and mini-chains. Other favorites of mine include the original Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street and Heywood Hill in Mayfair. The latter is a cluttered cozy set of two small rooms of both old and new books with a thriving mail order and gift collection business. On the surface at least, London’s bookselling industry appears to be thriving.
As for what else is new, we stopped in at the gala reception for the opening of the new Sherlock Holmes exhibit. Quite the bash!
Museum of London exhibit
And I absolutely love the blue rooster in Trafalgar Square! It’s unmissable, whimsical and adds an element of informality to this public space. The title of it is Hahn/Cock and the sculptor is Katharina Fritsch.
RECENT READING
