Circling the Oval - doing the Lambeth Walk

If you have read my earlier pieces you will know my routine. With the aid of a wineglass I draw a circle on a page of my old London A-Z. [Click on any image to enlarge it, by the way]. 

Not quite as randomly as usual, however, this time.  I wanted to incorporate a visit to a photography exhibition (of which, more later) at Tate Britain, so the circle was to this extent rigged, and the hand of fate forced.  
Tate Britain was my start and finish point.

Thence up Millbank, gazing at the riverscape through the tubes of Millennium Pier towards our crossing point, Lambeth Bridge.

The London Borough of Lambeth is surprisingly filled with green spaces of one sort or another, and over the road, squeezed next to the Archbishop of Canterbury's London gaff in a deconsecrated but restored church is the greenest one of all - The Garden Museum, a little gem, and not only in a lettuce way.  It appears to be lightly frequented, compared with, say, the Chelsea Physic and also has a caff.  Botany and other associated content for the gentleman's cabinet of curiosities must have been in the vibe hereabouts, as not only is the tomb to the great plant hunters, the Tradescants, on this very spot, but their estimable friend and neighbour, Elias Ashmole (he of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) has given his name to a street.

If our botanists revisited as time travelers, they may find it hard to hack their way through the urban jungle, but they would find solace in such greenspaces as Old Paradise Gardens, splendidly revamped by the Labour Council and Friends.

They would also approve of the efforts at garden-making for the public good at such places as Doorstep Green, a hive of activity.

   

and only a few minutes' walk from this, 

ironically the temporary resting place for the nation's flowers.  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen here, and rest in suspended animation prior to flaunting itself in shop or garage forecourt.

The Borough of Lambeth has a commendable plan for public greenspace development, keeping mammon at bay, and their aims are not very far removed from those of their philanthropic Victorian forebears.   [ http://www.lambeth.gov.uk/sites/default/files/pts-draft-parks-capital-investment-plan-2014.pdf ].

Here is another hive of activity - an active hive project in Kennington Park, creating quite a buzz in the locality.  

Green spaces; green transport.  Biking helps, but when you live in a Victorian terrace, where do you keep your steed to avoid having it nicked on a weekly basis or falling over it in the hall?  Here is the answer: you cage your beast in a communal corral.

Nobility and the aristocracy once abounded in Lambeth; I am walking on the ghost of Norfolk House, the London abode of the Dukes of that ilk, and other great names of England have left their marks all around here too - FitzAlan, Whitgift, Archbisop Tenison ...

This is a healthily mixed community, it would seem.  Affordable estate housing is democratically managed through Tenants' and Residents' Associations.  For how long? Are commercial interests encroaching?  There already seems to be some local anxiety about gentrification by easing-out ... collaring the rebuilds for fancy-priced upmarket housing where security concerns limit access, and there is one door for the rich and another for the poor.

There are already some posh people living here, though.  This geezer reads the FT over a beverage.

I had come to Lambeth with the confident expectation that I would find everyone doing the Lambeth Walk.  I seemed to be in the right place ...

... yet I came across very few like-minded people.  Those  pedestrians I chanced across were a bit bemused by my close perusal of the A-Z and my general demeanor of the vacuous gazer.  A Rasta guy and his mate stopped me on Kennington Park Road and axed me what I was up to.  When I showed him my enscribed circle he asked me if it wasn't easier just to walk in a straight line.  Pointing down the Brixton Road he said: '...for instance if you start here and keep going you get to Brighton!' .  I shared with him a condensed account of the psychogeogaphical respectability of straight-line-walking, but followed on with two reasons from my own personal rationale: finishing where I start makes my transport arrangements to and from home rather more straightforward, and secondly, there is a kind of philosophical satisfaction in the completion of the circle... 'in my end is my beginning'... and in a fit of over-enthusiasm I may have added some Pete Seeger stuff to my reference to Mary Queen of Scots. .....  He said: 'Man, that is deep, DEEP!  Is you some kind of weasel wizard?'

Street furniture and signage; urban semiotics.  Becoming increasingly uniform and bland, you might think.  It does what it says on the tin sheet, but is so omnipresent as to frustrate its purpose.

So how refreshing to encounter a defiant witty example.
The tone is similarly elevated by the architecture.  We are suddenly transported to Florence where Figgis, a latter-day Brunelleschi capped the station booking hall with a dome as a grand signifier of the Vicorian cityscape.  
  

One might have thought that Sidney Smith would have done something of the same thing to top off the wonderfully airy circular balcony and central void in what we now now as Tate Britain.  A shortish hop over Vauxhall Bridge, via the ziggurats of St George's wharf which conceal the insalubrious places the  where vinegar making, cholera, demons, dragons and Vauxhall Motors griffins and wyverns once thrived, brings me there.

As I wander through Henry Fox Talbot's salt-paper prints in the Tate's 'Salt and Silver' show, gathered superbly well into themes, and representing the earliest systematic attempt to capture, among other preoccupations, scenes of everyday life, I find my own efforts to do something similar distinctly puny.