I caught a train on the Mildmay line this morning to Hackney Wick: the very pretty Mildmay line, part of last year's renaming exercise for the London Overground, and called after a small charitable hospital in Shoreditch that was pioneering in the 1980s in caring for HIV/AIDs patients (other lines include the Windrush, the Suffragette, and the Lioness ...). Not only do these make London seem like a very new city to me; so does all the redevelopment in Hackney, which is also marked by some spectacular street art.
I was heading to the V & A East, which is a combination of storeage and conservation, so like being in the working bowels of a museum, for the uninitiated: a random collection of things, from antique furniture to prints and paintings and objects of household design (much like a larger version of our garage ...). It was fun to wander round, though more like a set for a suspense movie than anything - vistas of shelves that ended in a chest, a painting;
some objects rather self-consciously on semi-display, like these - well, one wasn't, frustratingly, told exactly what they were, just that they were examples of woman-decorated pottery.
Other random, or "random" arrangements, here of mannequins, were just a bit too contrived. Fascinating though it was in some ways, and as a curatorial experiment, in some respects what I enjoyed most was an inspired cheddar cheese and marmite bun in the cafe, for lunch. The mannequins, though, felt like a good lead-in to the Lee Miller exhibition at the Tate,
which was terrific - I don't think, to my shame, that I've ever realized quite what a versatile and inventive photographer she was: I only really knew some of the fashion stuff, a bit of her war photography, and of course the concentration camp images: there were a good number of images on show that haven't been reproduced previously. Much recommended.
And I then walked to Westminster tube station, with the restored clock tower that houses Big Ben gleaming in a quite startling way.
Coming back to Richmond, the Thames did look very high -
and indeed, I couldn't walk back to the hotel along the towpath ...
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