Thursday March 24 started cloudy and then by early afternoon it started to rain, and continued to rain and rain until at least midnight. High around 12C.
The Hoxton provides a breakfast in a bag delivered to your room at a time to your liking. We have our 9:00 a.m. delivery of yogurt (soy in my case), a banana and orange juice. There is also tea and coffee in the room. A small fridge has a bit of room as there is no mini bar (all very cool).
We, of course, have been trying coffee shops in the 'hood. On Thursday we went to Ozone Coffee, just a few blocks away. It has great coffee as it roasts its beans on-site, serves excellent looking food and has very friendly staff who gave us restaurant and other recommendations.
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| Allan at Ozone |
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| Downstairs with roaster and other tables |
After coffee, we went to the National Portrait Gallery to see two of the temporary exhibits. The first was entitled
Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky. The paintings were all on loan from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The exhibit focused on the great writers, artists, composers and patrons who helped develop an extraordinary rich cultural scene in Russia between 1867 and 1914. In 1856, the same year the National Portrait Gallery started in London, Pavel Tretyakov started to collect Russian art. He donated his collection of about 2000 works to Moscow in 1892. His collection forms the backbone of the State Tretyakov Gallery.
The paintings included portraits of Dostoevsky, Mussorgsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hertzen and many others. It was an excellent exhibit. Many portraits were by the great realist portrait painter Ilya Repin (1844-1930), but other greats were well represented.
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| Poster for Russia and the Arts |
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| Pavel Tretyakov 1883 by Ilya Repin |
One of my favourites was this brooding image of Dostoyevsky (1821-81) painted by Vasily Perov.
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| Dostoyevsky 1872 by Vasily Perov |
There was a wonderful picture of the art collector and patron Ivan Morozov with a Matisse in the background.
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| Ivan Morozov1910 by Valentin Serov |
There were also wonderful portraits of Nikolai Gumilev (1886-1921), a Russian poet executed by the Cheka (Soviet secret police) in 1921 and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), the great Russian poet, by Olga Della Vos Kardovskaia. Gumilev and Akhmatova had been married from 1910-1918. We had just seen the bust of Akhmatova in the Taormina sculpture garden.
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| 1909 portrait of Gumilev and 1914 portrait of Akhmatova |
The second exhibit we saw was
Vogue 100: A Century of Style that showcased the remarkable range of photography that has been commissioned by British Vogue since it was founded in 1916. The exhibition was structured in a reverse chronology, starting with the present decade and moving back through the decades to the very first issue. There was a room with a copy of one issue a year for all 100 years of Britsh Vogue's existence. It was a blockbuster exhibit featuring significant photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Mario Testino and many more.
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| Alexander McQueen October 2009- by Tim Walker |
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| Dame Vivienne Westwood October 2009 by Tim Walker |
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| Poster |
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| Deauville Rendez Vous Marte van Hamster and Stella Tennant September 2012 by Mario Testino |
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| Modern Mariners Put out to Sea by George Hoyningen-Huene July 1930 |
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| Lady Elizabeth Paget as the Lady of Shallot July 1936 by Cecil Beaton |
We stopped for a very late lunch/ pre theatre bite at Dishoom, a restaurant serving a modern take of Bombay street food. The flavours were great. We had tried to get in the evening before, but it was packed. Luckily at 4:00 p.m., there were lots of tables available.
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| Inside at Dishoom |
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| Bhel--very tasty |
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| Chicken tiki |
After our meal, we walked up the street to the original branch of Monmouth Coffee on Monmouth Street and had another good coffee.
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| Coffee stop at Monmouth Coffee in Covent Gardens |
We wandered over to the newly relocated Dover Street Market-- it is now on the Haymarket. Cutting edge clothing in a four story building that is fun to look at, beautifully displayed, but, with very few exceptions, too expensive to buy.
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| At the new Dover Street Market |
We took the tube to the Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre on Southwark Street near the Borough Market. We had tickets to our second Florian Zeller (the French writer and playwright) play, called The Truth. This time it was a comedy about the complex relationships of two couples entangled in the politics of extra-marital affairs, friendship, deceit and ultimately, the truth.... The writing was brilliant and the play was fast-paced.
It starred Alexander Hanson (West End and Broadway actor); Frances O'Connor who was most recently in the TV series Mr. Selfridge; Tanya Franks who has appeared in Broadchurch; and Robert Portal, another British actor. All were superb. Florian Zeller clearly has a broad range, as The Truth was great comedy, while The Father, which we saw Wednesday night, was a serious drama.
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Internet pic
The Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre is a great modern space located behind a restaurant. It seats around 200 and was a full house for the performance we saw.
We headed back to our 'hood for a late night snack at the Ace Hotel, located just a few blocks away from The Hox.
Friday March 21was our last full day in London. We awoke to brilliant sunshine and it stayed that way all day. High about 15C. After our Hoxton breakfast, we went across the street for our coffee at another great coffee shop called Attendant. What we are finding is that a lot of independent coffee shops have kitchens and serve up very good food during the day. A few, like the Shoreditch Grind, even serve cocktails in the evening.
Communal table at Attendant
Coffee prep
My espresso and Allan's flat white
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Yup!
We took the tube to King's Cross/ Pancras station. We went to the British Library's Alice in Wonderland exhibit, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publishing of the book.
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| St. Pancras station |
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| Signage at the Library |
It was a small exhibit and free to the public. The British Library has the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll's (1832-1898)
Alice in Wonderland, with his original illustrations. He left the manuscript in his will to Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired him to write the book. She sold it in 1928 to an American to pay estate taxes after her husband died. The manuscript was given to the British Library in 1948, in part as thanks for Britain's role in World War II.
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| White Rabbit |
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| Original Alice manuscript |
The exhibit had an excerpt from a 1907 silent film with Alice and the White Rabbit.
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| White Rabbit in the early film |
There were also copies of other versions of the Alice story through the years, with different illustrators. The original illustrator of the first published version, John Tenniel (1920-1914), was a political cartoonist for Punch magazine. His illustrations were largely followed in subsequent editions.
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| Outside of the Library-Newton by Eduardo Paolozzi 1995 |
After our visit to the Alice exhibit, we walked along Euston Road and then down Marlybone High Street, which has become a "shopping street" with a definite French flavour-- lots of Paris based stores with cafes. We had a sandwich at Paul, a Parisienne bakery. It was lovely to be walking in the sun.
We stopped for a coffee at Workshop Coffee, just a block or two from Oxford Street.
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| Workshop Coffee |
A bit more wandering and then we took the tube to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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| Inner courtyard at the V&A |
We went to see a major retrospective of the work of American photographer and film maker, Paul Strand (1890-1976). It was a wonderful exhibit. Strand was very left wing and his photography and films often reflected his politics. There were excerpts from films he made- one calling attention to the plight of southern US sharecroppers. The exhibit also showed the progression of his work from abstraction to candid street portraits to global photography as he often travelled to political hot spots in the world. Strand left the United States in 1950 due to anti-Communist persecution and lived the last 26 years of his life in France.
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| Signage outside museum |
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| Wall Street 1915- one of his best known photos |
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| Untitled (Pear and Bowls) Twin Lakes, Connecticut 1945 (cubist influence) |
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| Rebecca 1921 (his first wife) |
We stopped at our hotel briefly and then headed for dinner at Oklava, a modern take on Turkish food, recommended by a woman who worked at the Ozone coffee shop we had visited on Thursday.
We had a fabulous dinner and were lucky to get two seats at the bar in front of the open kitchen. It was lots of fun watching the kitchen operate.
We shared a roasted cauliflower with red onion and pistachios in a chili sauce.
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| Roasted cauliflower |
We also shared a flatbread with lamb on top and an accompanying salad.
Finally, we had lamb chops done in a pomegranate molasses sauce with red onion and cilantro and a date butter on the side.
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| Lamb chops |
We went back to our hotel and packed. We have had a wonderful time in London, however, we are finding it outrageously expensive and quite frantic. Our "London Blitz" ends on Saturday March 26. We head back to Toronto on a 6:00 p.m. flight. I will post a few pictures of our Saturday late morning walk and lunch when I return.
It has been a great adventure and we are glad you have travelled with us.
