Categories: London

Follow the Stroll to Bob Crachit's house

A Film Buff's Stroll

For thirty years I worked at Broadcasting House near Oxford Circus, and lived first on the west side of Hampstead Heath, then on the east side, and would often walk the three miles home via Camden Town. The first journey is the one Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson took from Oxford Street to Hampstead in The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton to burgle the home of the "king of all blackmailers," who lived at a Gothic mansion on the corner of East Heath Road and Well Road. They subsequently fled from the house, zigzagging across the Heath to emerge presumably on the Highgate Road and catch a cab back to Baker Street.

The second journey is the one walked by the intrepid Richard Hannay in John Buchan's classic conspiracy thriller The Three Hostages, just after World War I, following the first clue that leads him from Oxford Circus via Camden Town to Gospel Oak at the Heath's southeast corner. His walk takes him past the apartment block at 122 Portland Place from which Hannay would later escape, disguised as a milkman, in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

The most sublime Hitchcock image from the 1930s is of the unattended horse-drawn milk-float in Park Crescent. You can get to Camden Town by the Nash Terraces of Regent's Park's Outer Circle or Albany Street, from the top of which, at the White House, the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale ran his espionage ring in the 1960s. Camden Town is where the nine-year-old Charles Dickens lived in Bayham Street, as well as being the home of the Cratchit family in A Christmas Carol and the inner-city area transformed by the coming of the railways in Dombey and Son. At Parkway, Camden Town, is Palmer's Pet Store, above which the Communist leader Bennett lived in Graham Greene's It's a Battlefield. (The black-and white shop front remains intact but inside is now a fashionable café, Yumchaa.)

Going North by the Holmes or the Hannay route takes you through George Orwell territory-in the mid-1930 she lived in Warwick Mansions, Pond Street, 77 Parliament Hill, and 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, and worked at a bookshop called Booklover's Corner (immortalised in Keep the Aspidistra Flying) in South End Green, as recorded by a plaque on the corner. At Gospel Oak you'll reach Gordon House Road, along which a psychopathic hitman drives on his way to a killing on the opening page of Ruth Rendell's The Lake of Darkness. Cross over to the Heath and climb to the top of Parliament Hill, where D. H. Lawrence and Frieda watched zeppelins bombing London in World War I, as described in Kangaroo.

Philip French
Philip French is The Observer's film critic, author of Westerns, and co-editor of The Faber Book of Movie Verse. He was named Critic of the Year in the 2009 National Press Awards.

Moro

Moro
34-36 Exmouth Market EC1
020 7833 8336; www.moro.co.uk

Samuel Clark married Samantha Clarke, and the two chefs took a leisurely ramble through Spain and Morocco. They had ravenous appetites, as lovers do, and they ate everything in sight. When they returned to London they couldn't stop craving those flavours, and they began thinking about food in a whole new way. The result was Moro ("Moor"), the restaurant they opened in 1997. The instant you open the door, you are transported into an intensely fragrant, ornate Arab-Spanish world. The authentic, powerful food is based on recipes and cooking methods that have travelled through the centuries. Because the Clarks feel that cooking over live wood or real hardwood charcoal is integral to their shared vision, you'll find a big, wood-burning oven taking pride of place in the kitchen. And although their food is uncomplicated, it is far from crude. A whole sea bass, seasoned with lemon and fennel and roasted in that oven, is drizzled with pan juices and served with a chunky relish made of roughly chopped pistachios and garlic, given added mystery and allure by orange-flower water, lemon, and mint-flavours that have been entwined since antiquity. Gleaming ruby-red seeds from pomegranates, long cultivated in Arabia, transform a rustic parsley-grain tabbouleh into a sumptuous side. The Clarks have a family now, and a second home in Spain, but they still eat everything in sight.

Jane Lear

Jane Lear, a food and travel writer based in New York City, is the former senior articles editor at Gourmet magazine. A contributor to The Gourmet Cookbook: More than 1000 Recipes and Gourmet Today: More than 1000 All-New Recipes for the Contemporary Kitchen, she also co-wrote (with chef Floyd Cardoz) One Spice, Two Spice: American Food, Indian Flavors.

Moro is also steeped in Mediterranean culture, in particular, that of Andalucia, where the cuisines of southern Europe and North Africa create a delicious synthesis; last time I ate there I started with quail in flatbread with pistachio sauce, followed it with wood roasted peri-peri chicken with coriander rice and rocket salad, and concluded with fresh raspberries on a bed of Jerez cream. As you eat you can watch the chefs at work in the open kitchen at the far end of the restaurant.

Clive Sinclair

Clive Sinclair, born in London, is the author of novels including Blood Libels and Cosmetic Effects. He is a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the PEN MacMillan Silver Pen.

A Connoisseur's Afternoon

A Connoisseur’s Afternoon

Jeroboams
50-52 Elizabeth Street SW1
020 7730 8108; www.jeroboams.co.uk

H. R. Stokes
58 Elizabeth Street SW1
020 7730 7073; www.henrystokes.co.uk

Tomtom Cigars
63 Elizabeth Street SW1
020 7730 1790; www.tomtom.co.uk

Fulham News
200 Fulham Road SW10
020 7351 3435

Battersea Park
On the South Bank, across from Chelsea SW11
The Peace Pagoda is by the river in the centre of the park.
www.batterseapark.org

There are very few “secrets” in such a busy, gossipy city as London, but there are some simple, unexploited pleasures. One of mine would be this.

Take a car or a cab to Elizabeth Street in Belgravia, where you will find a lot of what you need to nourish body and soul. At Jeroboams, pick up some good bread and cheese and a bottle of better-than-average white burgundy; a 1996 Meursault would do fine. While the cab is waiting, nip into Henry Stokes’s bookshop at No. 58, a small, village-like affair, but with a well-chosen stock of current titles. Buy something. In the same street, Tomtom Cigars will sell you a Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2. Now divert the cab to Fulham Road, where you will find the world’s best newsagent, Fulham News. Buy an armful of your favourite papers and magazines, then have yourself dropped at the Chelsea Bridge entrance to Battersea Park. I love Battersea Park because of its oddness: it was built on spoil from the excavation of the Royal Docks, and asparagus was cultivated here.

Anyway, select a bench overlooking the river, somewhere near the Peace Pagoda. On a weekday you will have the place entirely to yourself so, if you have remembered your running stuff, hide the food, papers, and books and take a turn around the park’s perimeter. This is about a mile and a half, so not too demanding, but enough to justify the indulgence of the food, drink, smoke, and reading you are now going to enjoy.

The view from your bench is beautiful and evocative:  this is Whistler’s and Wilde’s Thames. It is wonderful in warm sunshine, even lovelier in autumnal mist. From the bench, as you munch your bread and cheese and slurp the wine, you can enjoy one of the best urban views in Britain: Wren’s dignified Royal Hospital and then the gorgeous red brick houses of Chelsea Embankment, these last Britain’s most singular contribution to the history of world architecture. If you have brought two bottles, you can sit and wait and watch the sun go down over the eccentric Albert Bridge and the lumpy old Lots Road Power Station. For less than the price of a pretentious meal in a mediocre restaurant, you have had some of the very best London has to offer.

Stephen Bayley
Stephen Bayley was responsible for the Design Museum and created the Boilerhouse Project at the V & A. His books include Woman as Design, and he is a columnist on The Times. He currently runs a small design business in Soho.

The Roof Gardens

The Roof Gardens
1938, Ralph Hancock
99 Kensington High Street w8
020 7937 7994 or 020 7368 3993; www.roofgardens.virgin.com

If you're tiring of the summer crowds in Kensington, turn down shaded Derry Street and look for a large, imposing doorway marked 99 Kensington High Street. It appears to lead to the offices of some well-heeled company, but go inside, sign in at reception, take a lift up to the roof, and then step out into one of London's strangest secret gardens. Floating an improbable thirty metres above the traffic of Kensington High Street, and sprawling out over one and a half acres, the Roof Gardens boast fully grown oak and fruit trees, a stream stocked with fish, and four resident flamingos, named Bill, Ben, Splosh, and Pecks. There are fine views over the crowded cityscape of Kensington and Chelsea. Opened in 1938 atop what was then the Derry and Toms department store (part of the Barkers group), the gardens were created at the behest of Barkers' vice president, and designed by Ralph Hancock (architect of the Gardens of the Nations at Rockefeller Center, New York). Today the Roof Gardens are owned by the Virgin Hotels group and open for public viewing on select days only: phone in advance of your visit to check access, and then wander through a 1930s departmentstore president's dream of a gracious shopping experience.

Helen Gordon
Helen Gordon is a journalist, editor, and the author of Landfall. She was formerly an associate editor at Granta magazine. She lives in East London.

The Topolski Century

The Topolski Century
1975-1989, Feliks Topolski
Hungerford Arches
www.topolskicentury.org.uk

The Topolski Century, housed unpromisingly in a railway arch on London's South Bank, is the city's only permanent exhibition devoted to a single artwork. Vibrant and violent, this expressionist collage chronicling the glories and horrors of the twentieth century displays all the decadence and cruelty of a canvas by Dix. Part maze, part stageset, pure art, it gains added drama from the trains rolling towards Charing Cross Station overhead. Every visitor to the National Theatre or Royal Festival Hall should allow time to experience Feliks Topolski's unique vision.

Michael Arditti
Michael Arditti is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and critic. His novels include Easter, A Sea Change, and The Enemy of the Good.

Rochelle School Canteen

Rochelle School Canteen
Rochelle School
Arnold Circus E2
020 7729 5677; www.arnoldandhenderson.com

From the street, the only sign that there might be somewhere to eat in this former primary school is the typewritten word "Canteen" next to one of the buzzers (the bottom-right-hand buzzer-the last one you would look at) outside the Boys' gate.
     If you're lucky enough to hear the gate unlock (the Canteen is open only on weekday lunchtimes), when you step through, you'll see a beautiful lawn, wooden tables, chairs and benches in the sunshine, and a bike shed that has been converted into a restaurant. The school is now used for studio space, so there might be some well dressed artists on their lunch break. The owners, Melanie Arnold and Margot Henderson, are married to Jon Spiteri and chef Fergus Henderson, respectively, who started the renowned St. John restaurant, and Rochelle Canteen has many of the same impeccable qualities: nose-to-tail eating, with fresh ingredients and simple dishes. Everything on the menu is good, but I'm always drawn back to the purple sprouting broccoli with anchovy, their pies for two, and the chocolate pot.

Joe Dunthorne
Joe Dunthorne was born in Swansea in 1982. He is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Faber New Poets 5, and a novel, Submarine, which won the Curtis Brown Prize and is being made into a film by Warp Films. He currently lives in London and is a striker for the England Writers' Football Team.

Freud Museum

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens NW3
020 7435 2002; www.freud.org.uk

In a perilous last-ditch flight from the Nazis, Sigmund Freud arrived in London with his family in 1938, moving into the substantial red brick house in Hampstead which he predicted would be "his last address on this planet." The following year he died of cancer of the throat. This, the most atmospheric of all London museums, is strangely little known. At its heart is Freud's own study and consulting room, drawing its peculiar aura of enchantment from his famous collection of antiquities in bronze, stone, and terracotta, sent on from Vienna, and enriched by the colour and texture of the carpets and hangings. Most magnificent of these is the five-sided deep-red-and-blue rug, woven by one of the tribal groups of the Qashqai confederacy of Western Iran, draped over the couch employed by Freud for his analyses. Dream on.

Fiona MacCarthy
Fiona MacCarthy is a cultural historian and author of biographies of Eric Gill and William Morris.

Cruise from Little Venice to Camden Market

Cruise from Little Venice to Camden Market
Little Venice to Camden Town by barge, along the Grand Union Canal (seasonal)

To journey by the canal is to see a place from an entirely different perspective, and this short trip, about twenty minutes, is no exception. It starts in Little Venice, with its respectable, fashionable villas and houseboats; dives into a tunnel; comes up briefly for air in an estate of low-cost housing; then goes back under a bridge, and immediately you are among millionaires' mansions on the edge of Regent's Park. Beyond them is the tranquillity of the park in a deep cutting with overhanging trees. The canal bisects the London Zoo; we saw gazelles and heard the squawk of tropical birds. Just after the Zoo, the barge takes a sharp left turn by a floating Chinese restaurant before arriving in Camden.
      The barge drops you right at the centre of the Camden market. The day we went, there was a cloudless sky with bright sharp sunlight, so that the arrival at the crowded market, with is bright colours and exotic smells, owed more to a Conrad arrival at some riverside town on the Congo than to a North London market.

Charles Marsden-Smedley
Charles Marsden-Smedley's design practice specialises in museum and exhibition design.

Egg - one of London's most unique boutiques.

Egg
36 Kinnerton Street SW1
020 7235 9315; www.eggtrading.com

A cobblestone's throw from one of my favourite hotels, the Berkeley, is Egg, London's most unique boutique, though the shopkeeper, Maureen Doherty, probably wouldn't like it to be called that. It's just a little whitewashed place-a nineteenth-century building, originally a dairy-that sells a cherry-picked collection of items that Maureen (who, before Egg, worked mainly with Issey Miyake) has found on her travels and fallen in love with. I worked here years ago, when I fancied the idea of becoming a fashion stylist; somehow, miraculously, in a world of online everything, it has managed to stay just as under the radar now as then.
      The shop-which feels more like it should be in an unexplored corner of Scandinavia than in bankers' Belgravia-sells diaphanous cotton, linen, and silk separates made in Tibet; lightly quilted blanketcum--shawls made from unusual, almost Anglo, vintage sari fabric; poetic straw hats made by the German label SCHA; delicate, hand-blown Japanese glassware; and a very small stock of kitten-soft cashmere knitwear that the designer, Sine, can never make enough of.
      Egg's customers-perhaps "followers" is more like it-are a mix of dames, divas, gallerists, artists, and style-makers; the late Hardy Amies used to come and perch on a stool, stick in hand, for a gander and a natter, and Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren still make regular pilgrimages.
      Maureen has just started stocking some of her wares at the Comme des Garçons Trading Museum, in Tokyo, but, luckily for us, for the time being, she remains, with her of London that time and fashion have yet to erase.

Summer Litchfield
London-born Summer Litchfield, formerly arts editor of UK Esquire, is a freelance journalist writing for the Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and other publications. She writes extensively about restaurant culture and is working on her first novel.

Dennis Severs' House

Dennis Severs' House
1724; 1979-1999, interior, Dennis Severs
18 Folgate Street e1
020 7247 4013; www.dennissevershouse.co.uk
Tours only. Check website for schedule.

Dennis Severs' House is a museum of sorts, but also the very opposite of a museum. It's a Georgian terraced house tucked in a back street between Spitalfields Market and the City, restored in the styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Californian artist Dennis Severs, who died in 1999. The best time to visit is a dark winter evening (you have to book a slot beforehand). A man in a black shirt and black trousers will open the door (you have to knock, there's no bell) and take £12 off you, in return for which you are allowed to walk around the house for forty-five minutes. The man will tell you that you have to do this in complete silence. There is no electric light in Dennis Severs' House, only candles and open fireplaces.
     Stumbling from room to room, you feel not only like you are travelling back in time but like you have walked straight into a Dickens novel, or the Hogarth painting that hangs in one of the rooms. There are half-made mince pies on the kitchen table and spilt glasses of punch in the smoking room, and there's a real canary in the lounge. Occasionally, you can hear the haunting chime of clocks, the rattle of a horse-drawn carriage outside, and the creak of footsteps in the room next door; it's as if the people who used to live here are standing around the corner.
     As with any good story, you feel like you've uncovered a secret by the time you get to the end, the last room in the house. On the top floor, eighteenth-century opulence gives way to shocking nineteenth-century poverty. The wallpaper is peeling off the damp walls, the bed linen is filthy, there's a stench of oysters and vinegar, and it's freezing cold. It comes as a shock when you realise the banisters have been burned for firewood: such was the completeness of Severs's operatic vision that he has planted the seeds of its own destruction inside it. As youn walk into the cold winter night, you will try to touch the next automobile on the pavement just to see if it's real.

Philip Oltermann
Philip Oltermann was born in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Since 1997 he has lived in London, where he works as an editor at The Guardian. He is writing a book on Anglo-German meetings.