Covent Gardens to Hyde Park

On Saturday just gone we took the train into town and made our way to Covent Garden to take a look at the market there and then to have a walk across London to Hyde Park.

The market was not as big as we expected, but the setting of it with the cobble stone piazza style square with the lovely market halls in the middle was much nicer than we expected. We had a wander around and had an early lunch some fancy beef (from a rare breed of cow that wanders the rolling lush green hills of Devonshire and gets massaged every day) on a ciabatta with greens, It was pretty tasty.

After lunch & a wander we headed up to Monmouth Street to see if we could find the original Monmouth coffee shop. Luckily we did (thanks to my fancy navigation in my phone).

This store was a lot smaller than the one at Borough Market, but really had a great buzz about it, and of course the coffee was great. I love the simplicity of the decor, the no nonsense feel of it and the real `earthiness' you get from the wood, the smell of the coffee and the grungy hipster dudes and dudettes serving you and yelling out to each other through the never ended hubub.

From there we sauntered down to Picadilly Circus and  headed east to Hyde Park.

We popped into this quaint commercial art gallery called Hauser Wirth - 196A Picadillym London, W1S 4AX. They had an exhibition on of art from a woman called Bharti Kher. She had some really interesting stuff, but the highlight was without a doubt a whole room full of massive mirrors with identical, but amazing, intricate frames. Each mirror was broken in some way but was covered in stick on felt dots. Having an entire room of these mirrors on a white background was quite striking. We were lucky to be the only ones in the room when we arrived up stairs, so the impact of the vision really was amazing.

This one could be straight out of a horror film like "The Ring":

The gallery was pretty cool, spread out over 4 floors but with each room containing just one installation. The basement was a bit weird - full on industrial with large circuit board cupboards, exposed cabling and really low light - complete with an usher reading a book by torch light to set off the mood. The only art downstairs was some big mechanical that looked like a Tim Burton inspired super sized mix master.

Hhm, too many beers at lunch?

From there we wandered through Green Park and saw lots of Elephants. These elephants are to be seen everyone in London at the moment as part of the London Elephant Parade - 250 elephants are painted by local artists & celebrities to raise money for Asiatic elephant conservation. There are some really cool ones around. You can even download the route map and walk around to see all 250+ of them if you have the inclination!

We escaped the elephants and went through the Wellington arch and paid our respects at the Kiwi & Aussie war memorials. The Aussie one was a masterpiece in design terms, it is a huge stone structure with water running down the front. What you see from a distance is the large engraved names of many historic battles fought by Australian troops (Kokoda, Tobruk, Okinawa etc). But it isn't until you get closer that you realise that the entire wall is engraved with names, not soldiers names as you usually expect, but the 23,844 towns in which they were born. It really is a wonderful monument to those that died in WWI & WWII.
They have a great website too - http://www.awmlondon.gov.au/

After that we headed into Hyde Park proper - had a wander around, Ying was disappointed that there were no speakers at the speakers corner, but the highlights were this enormous pink tent for a charity walk - http://www.walkthewalk.org/Home

and a really cool horse head statue up near Marble Arch

By then we were pretty shagged and went home for tea a bit of a lay down.

So a good day out all up. You can see the full gallery of pics here.

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Art Connoisseurs? Not us! A trip to Tate Modern

The wind, the rain and the general unpleasantness of today made it an `indoor' day. 

Being the weekend we wanted to actually go out and do something, so decided that we would head over to the Tate Modern (just near the London Bridge train station) for a dose of culture and nice wander around.

The Tate Modern itself is pretty spectacular comprising of a huge space reclaimed from an old power station. The mind boggles now at a power station like that being built on the banks of the Thames looking directly across at St. Paul's Cathedral - particularly as it sat empty from 1981 to 2000 when the Tate Modern moved in.

Apart from the building, the space and the location we were pretty underwhelmed at the art. Now neither Ying nor I are experts in art, but I just have to say that this modern art is a bit odd. 

It seems to me that these artists are just not part of the fabric of reality - it seems everything is over analysed and just a little too `interpretive'.

Take a look at these examples:

Sticks with Ribbon

What's this one mean - no idea but it looks like the start of a good bonfire.

Greek Nude with Pile of Clothes

Now Ying reckons this is means that your naked body is wonderful and that you don't need clothes. I said it was representative of a material society where it is easier to dispose of your clothes than to wash them.

Either way - it's a naked statue with a pile of clothes - not really art is it?

There were a couple that I liked, this one is definitely my style:

This is pretty big at about 4m wide, the entire thing is painted in dots. I could see that on the lounge room wall no worries.

Then this one was really good - this bloke took photos of himself getting buried in the dirt and you can see in the sequence that he slowly disappears - but what is really great is that with German TV, over 9 days during a prime time TV show they showed one of the photos each day for 2 seconds - no announcements, not information - just a guy slowly sinking into the ground over 9 days. That is quality art in my book.

So it was a fun day out exploring, but I think that we will be happier looking at the art in the British Gallery and places where the art has a bit more realism (is there a comic museum I wonder - that would keep me entertained for awhile).