London… Lets ‘ave yer!

I once read an article on Youth Crime, which had a wonderful quote from a teenage participant in the 70s, along the lines of “someone gets a wierd idea and then it just goes from there.

As you will know, we like to break up the monotony of the year, especially the winter blues with a little trip, and we thought about a quick night in Manchester or Newcastle – just places we’ve not been for a while. Various things, childcare and so on, jiggled the whole week about and after a couple the idea of “lets go to London” just went from there…

So 600 and odd quid later on trains and hotels, three nights in London were booked…

I do love London, and I miss the regular trips I used to take with work, and my partner has not even been for over 20 years. So this is very exciting.

With my current explosion of my artistic practice, I was also very excited about a couple of shops that I really wanted to see in person, and I am very interested in the development of Kings Cross, which was wasteland as I remember it from my regular trips, and just starting to take off when I breifly visited with my son. So much to do, so little time.

In fact we packed a lot in. Of course London has The Underground (which I also love with a boyish fascination) so it’s quite easy to get places quite fast – and even on a Sunday most places seem to be open until at least 6 in the evening.

We stayed in a basic Premier in St Pancras – Cheap (for London), cheerful and you know exactly what you are going to get (though we did wonder when booking the option for a “room with a view” and what the non-view provided – the back end of another building, if that, it seems.

We got in at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. No train pictures this time as it was a stright direct hop from Leeds. One of the places I wanted to visit was Cass Art in Islington – their flagship store which is amazing. Firm restraint was needed…

It was great just to look around the old warehouse that is their Islington Store. I brought a lovely tube of their own brand Blue Violet watercolour (PV15, Ultramarine Violet) which is lovely, and some Turquoise (PW5, PB15) and Geranium Lake (PR112) oils which you will see tests from very soon. Then they gave mke a tube of Lemon Yellow (PY3) oil for signing to their mailing list – so I have a nice set of cool primaries there. My only dissapointment was that they say they stock Culture Hustle products – but these were quite limited. Given Culture Hustle’s sometimes sluggish lead times I had hoped to get some more of their powders, but didn’t see any. Still, it saved me money, I guess.

Camden was always on the itinery, and we thought a Sunday evening would be a fair time. It was interesting to see what has been done there, various changes, closures and buyouts, but the place clearly goes from strength to strength and two large container developments are recent(ish) additions. It almost became a little overwhelming and we took refuge in The Good Mixer for a couple of pints, before heading back to Kings Cross for the third on the London Bucket List – dinner at Dishoom.

This was simpy amazing, if our ordering was a little overambitious and we had to take some home. I’ll write more about Kings Cross and the Coal Drop Yard development later, but suffice to say the scale of the place in the old railway buildings is a fitting development to the area.

Oh, and in case you are wondering. Here’s “The View”. Could be better, could be worse.