Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells and Scotney Castle

We decided to head down to Kent for a country drive since it was such a lovely day.  

We drove just over an hour to get to Tonbridge (not to be confused with Tunbridge Wells).

Tonbridge has a nice old castle ruin that we had a wander around before heading off to Tunbridge Wells.

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Tunbridge Wells was founded around some iron rich natural springs back in the 1700's and "taking the waters" soon became a trend for the dandies and how dee doos of English society.

There is a lovely pedestrian mall called the Pantiles with shops, cafes etc. We stopped for lunch at a cafe and listened to music from a country & western group. There was a whole bunch of yanks promoting 4th July independence day (I don't really understand why considering it was a war with England that they are celebrating, but hey, the yanks are a strange lot).

After lunch we decided to head over to Scotney Castle. This is a National Trust managed property that was bequeathed when Mrs Betty Hussey died in 2006. Everything was handed over lock stock & barrel leaving furniture, art works, clothing and all manner of personal effects - and 1 cat still lives there.

It was £10 each to go to the house and gardens, so we decided to splurge and get an annual National Trust membership for the 2 of us for £80. This gives you free access to all 300 National Trust properties - so we figure that within a few weeks we will have covered the cost of our investment.

The new house was built in 1836 from stone quarried from the back yard. The house sits on impressive gardens that have 2 major highlights:

1) The quarry used for the house was converted into a lovely garden which accentuates the fall of the land,

2) The old castle - a stunning old building on an island in a lake for protection. Now in partial ruin it is a delightful building in a stunning setting.

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We ended up spending quite a few hours just enjoying the day (26 degrees and mostly sunny - believe it or not) in the beautiful gardens.

 

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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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QR Code of my business card.

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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).

Dulwich Farmers Market at Dulwich College

Today we took a walk down to the beautiful Dulwich College to the farmers market.

On the way there we went through Dulwich Park and enjoyed the lovely flowers still blooming, lots of white & pink blossoms in the trees.

Ying and the blossoms at Queen Mary's Gate Dulwich Park.

Dulwich College Main Building 

I wasn't that fussed about the farmers market to be honest, I just wanted an excuse to be able to walk around the college which is made up of these absolutely gorgeous buildings with amazing ornate finishings and details. In the above pic, each window archway for example has a stone carved head, probably of a former head master. The buildings were lovely. 

Dulwich College is set on quite large grounds firmly butting up against Dulwich Wood, and Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Golf Course - check it out on the map here. It is a boarding school for boys from age 7 - 18.

It has large sports grounds which gives it a really sense of grandeur and of being in the country.

This is the cricket pitch and club house at the college.

They have a small farmers market at the school (we aren't sure of the frequency - probably monthly). Not too much there, but some nice breads, olives and meats.

Stalls under the school clock tower.

Sun shining on the college and the market.

Looked like a little chapel with a wedding going on.

On the way home we ducked back through Dulwich Park and found a section where there are 4 ping pong tables available to be used. They are made of concrete with steel nets, very sturdy.

We'll be looking to get some ping pong paddles & balls now for a bit of a friendly game (any challengers?).

And a spring walk wouldn't be complete with some pics of lovely flowers in the park - so here are my 2 choice ones.

In front of an old gate keepers cottage.

 

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Look! Up in the Sky - it's Empty

The weather this week has been amazing - nice long sunny days, clear blue skies and spectacular red sunsets.

One noticeable difference for the later part of this week to other blue sky days is the total absence of the usually criss crosses of vapour trails (contrails) left by jet air craft ferrying people across Europe.

We aren't seeing any of this for a while.

But courtesy of the Icelandic volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajokull Volcano (nope I can't pronounce it either - but you can hear it here) no aircraft can fly in pretty much most of the UK. Airports have been closed for 3 days and it looks like the volcano is still erupting and spilling ash & gas out into the UK airspace - insert Iceland joke here (at least they are back to exporting something, they didn't cripple the UK with their dodgy banks but they'll get us this time etc).

The ash is also causing spectacular sunsets bursting with red & orange and really setting the evenings on fire. We are seeing colours that could be similar to those immortalised by JMW Turner back in 1815 when he painted many scenes with amazingly vivid colours attributed to the ash that was in the sky from a volcanic eruption of that year.

Chichester Canal by JWM Turner.

I love this painting and I think that it captures a magically sunset to a greater degree that a photograph.

So enjoy the crystal blue skies - you may never see them again (unless you are back in Oz in the outback!).

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Daffodils in Spring

A lovely part of London in the early spring is the sudden awakening of millions of daffodils. They literally pop up everywhere, some (like the photo) are planted, but many just seem to appear in random places providing a lovely splash of colour after the drab winter.

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Driving on Tower Bridge

I recently had to drive across London and unwittingly ended up driving over Tower Bridge (at the royal speed of 20MPH) and couldn't resist snapping a few pics as I was rather excited.

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We are now officially Londoners!

So we made the move from Guildford to East Dulwich over the Easter long weekend and can now officially say we are Londoners!!

The move was pretty easy - as you expect when you have virtually nothing to move, we did a trip on Thursday with the little Peugot full of clothes, then again on Friday when we went to clean the house at Guildford. We have to go back this Thursday to do the `check out'. One of Ying's friends is going to come around and pick up my desk, luckily he has a big 4WD and will be in Guildford and lives in Forest Hill ( next door suburb to East Dulwich).

We are loving the new flat as it is much more homely that Guildford with proper rooms, a lounge, a nice big kitchen, a good sized bedroom and an office for me. Also a sofa bed for those of you wishing to come visit.

We did a trip to Ikea today and got some chairs, an office chair and a bookshelf (no bits left over - good as gold!).

So now we are at home and looking happy to be settled for some time (believe it or not :)

If you haven't got our address or phone number, then shoot us an e-mail.

I'll post some pics soon.

Moving to London In Less Than 2 Weeks

After living in the beautiful Guildford for 8 months, we have decided to move closer to London so that we can have easier access to London to enjoy the london urban life. It will also make it easier to catch up with friends and meet new people.

So with our usual style, we found this lovely 2 bedroom flat in East Dulwich on our first day of hunting. Since we'd done the research on locations and knew where we want to be, it wasn't hard to make a decision once we saw the lovely flat, especially it comes fully furnished.

We are very impressed by the number of parks around us considering it's only 5 miles from the heart of London. The local landmark Horniman Park and Museum is only 2 minutes walk on the East side; to the west is the nice big Dulwich Park; to the North lies the Pecham Rye Park and to the South we've got the ancient Sydenham Hill forest.

 Horniman Museum

The local East Dulwich High Street is very lively and has great vibe, with a lot of shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants lining on both sides. The more posh Dulwich village is also within walking distance.

In less than 2 weeks, we'll be moving in and start a new life once again! We can't wait to explore the local parks and pubs and be part of the local community. Evidently the local online community forum is one of the liveliest in the UK, at least that's where we found our flat!