A Journey of Discovery

As a born and bred Londoner I am bound to say that my natal city is the greatest in the world. I fully realise how subjective this statement is, I doubt there is a person alive (or dead) who has managed to visit every city on the planet in order to make comparisons, and I am a particularly impoverished international traveller. However, I stand by what I say simply because London has everything I want and still has the power to surprise and excite me after half a century of living in the bosom of the Great Wen. I also feel as I grow older that the city feels more organic, and that I am part of it, whether this is the premature onset of senility or something more profound I do not know, but I love the idea that all that has passed here is just waiting to be resurrected by an inquisitive mind and that the knowledge to be gained will make me even more of a Londoner than I already am. This particular adventure started in the London section of Foyle's bookshop on the Charing Cross Road on a balmy August Saturday in 2010, I picked up a book call London Plaques by Derek Sumeray and John Sheppard and, as I leafed through the information packed pages it felt like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle was falling into place. I instantly purchased the book and repaired to the Angel public house on nearby St Giles High Street for a pint and a perusal. Like most Londoners I was aware of the blue plaques celebrating the lives and achievements of the capital's finest citizens, now I had in my hands a guide to all of these, and more; Plaques erected by organizations as diverse as the Dead Comics Society and the London Hellenic Society; and not only people, there are plaques commemorating places long gone, especially in the City of London, and these in particular have the power to bring the past alive; some1,800 plaques in total. I decided there and then that I would attempt to visit and photograph them all. My first two forays into the field were made using detailed itineraries compiled from the book planned to include all the plaques in any given area, but I found this approach strangely unrewarding so now I leave the book at home, using it only as a reference tool and just wander the streets photographing the plaques as I find them; using this method it will obviously take more time to visit all of the plaques on offer, but I am not in such a great hurry and, as the good doctor said: when a man is tired of London.......

Wednesday, 17 November 2010

Arthur LOWE


2 Maida Avenue, WC2 (Dead Comics Society)

Arthur Lowe is best remembered for the role of Captain Mainwaring, the overbearing commanding officer of the Warmington on Sea home guard in the much loved comedy series Dad's Army. It was a classic series for many reasons, the most obvious being the inspired writing and the faultless casting but for me it works on another level that is very difficult to articulate; there is an element of harking back to a "golden age", the austerity of the war and the sense of purpose felt by even the most unassuming members of the community is so far removed from the selfish society we inhabit today, where people have abdicated all responsibility for their actions and and the camaraderie engendered by a common purpose is completely absent; I mentioned a "golden age" but I cannot imagine a future generation looking back on this time with nostalgia, you could say the Golden Age of golden ages is over. And then there is Captain Mainwaring, I would suggest he is a far more complex character than he at first appears, a man with a deep sense of duty and personal courage; and of course when he is not putting Warmington on Sea's finest through their paces he is a bank Manager, needless to say of the old school, complete with bowler hat and tightly furled umbrella. You would definitely know your place if you met him in a professional capacity, not like his modern day counterpart who probably rollerblades to work and spends his weekends attending illegal raves in disused warehouses in achingly hip inner city locales that were last week's ghettos, how could you trust someone like that with your money? But Mr Mainwaring whether kitted in ill fitting fatigues or tailor-made pin stripe could be given charge of the nation's piggy bank with absolute confidence.
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