Proud: Kevin Gill with his framed letter from President Barack Obama. Photograph: Kevin Gill
An ‘unknown’ artist’s oil-on-canvas painting of a billion-dollar bill with Barack Obama’s face on it has been gratefully received by the US president himself.
Artist Kevin Gill, 20, from Homerton, wrote to David Cameron earlier this year asking him to present the artwork to Obama when he visited. He was politely told this would not be possible, however, and was referred to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Undeterred, he asked Embassy staff if they would mind passing the gift to the 44th President of the United States, and they agreed to do so.
“I wrote to the US Embassy and said: ‘I’ve got a billion dollar bill for Barack Obama and I think it would make a great present as this is his last year in office,’” Gill told the Hackney Citizen.
After Obama’s visit to London, a letter from Washington DC promptly arrived at Gill’s home, signed by Obama himself and thanking him for the present.
In the letter, Obama said he was “moved” by the generosity and wrote that “holding firm to the ideas that unite us we can move forward toward a future of great peace and prosperity for all”.
Gift: Kevin Gill’s billion-dollar bill painting. Photograph: Kevin Gill
Gill, who is being mentored by East London street artist Stik, said he was thrilled with the response.
“To have got the recognition is a great feeling,” he said. “It means a lot.”
He added that he had chosen to paint a billion dollar bill because it represented a “first” as “there has never been a billion dollar bill” and that, until Obama’s election, there had never been a black President.
Some exhibits from the Museum of the Future. Photograph: Ministry of Stories
Novelists, illustrators and others with overactive imaginations have long concocted visions of future Londons – the dystopias of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World immediately spring to mind – so perhaps it’s not surprising children are now doing the same.
Sci-fi, futurology and fantasy lend themselves well to a city that breaks boundaries in fashion, architecture and the like, and now a “museum of the future” is to be added to the many institutions in the capital displaying objects from the far distant past.
The “museum” is in fact a temporary exhibition at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, and it will introduce visitors to possible sights, sounds, threats and artefacts from the future.
Curated and created entirely by children, whose naturally overactive imaginations mean they probably needed no encouragement, it is the brainchild of charity Ministry of Stories.
It features space-football and “evil washing machines”, and there will be five zones, each exploring a different theme including “creature attack,” natural disasters and time travel.
All of stories in the exhibition were penned by Hoxton children aged 8-12, who have been working with Ministry of Stories in its Thursday and Saturday out-of-school groups.
Hoxton Museum of the Future will open to the public on Saturday 30 July (11am-5pm) and Sunday 31 July (11am – 3pm).
Imagine what Samuel Pepys might make of Pokemon Go and you will have some idea of how our city in four hundred years’ time might look to us today.
Catch the show soon before it’s a thing of the past.
Look for birds in East London and you might spot pigeons and call it quits. But look properly, really notice what’s around you, and it’s thrilling what you can see: kingfishers, woodpeckers, peregrines, owls – and that’s before you even get to the particularly rare stuff.
London is a migration route filled with tributaries flowing into Mother Thames. There are valleys and heaths and ancient woodland. Seen from the sky our city is remarkably green. Conceiving of it like a bird might, and swotting up on plumage, has opened my eyes to new ways of experiencing these metropolitan environs.
Birds were a childhood love but I stopped noticing them as I got older owing to preoccupations with trivial things and the perceived uncoolness of ‘twitching’. Now the obsession has gripped me anew and I’m filled with childlike wonder at the richness of it all. What’s more, I’ve discovered I am far from alone.
Birdwatchers, birders, twitchers, ornithologists, avian enthusiasts – call us what you like – are viewed as eccentric bores by those ignorant of such joys. Trudging around with binoculars or a telescope and ticking off species on a list is not everyone’s idea of fun, but casual enjoyment of the natural world has huge, unappreciated benefits for mind, body and spirit.
As with all things, there are different subspecies of birdwatcher, but you don’t need to consider yourself one at all to appreciate that the sight of a hawk or the song of a whistling warbler can make memorable what would otherwise be another tedious commute or humdrum office lunch break.
“I did the London commute for quite a while,” recalls Howard Vaughan of the East London Birders Forum. “On my lunch breaks I wandered the streets and went into tiny little green spaces and found urban nesting sparrowhawks, a nuthatch, firecrests.”
A committed birdwatcher since the age of five, he now works at Rainham Marshes on London’s easternmost fringe. It’s a miraculous place where lapwing flocks float above reedbeds and acrobatic falcons hunt dragonflies in summertime.
Seals and porpoises pop up in the Thames, which flows past the reserve, and there are snakes, stoats and other creatures here too. Skyscrapers are visible in the distance and you can hear the groan of traffic from a nearby arterial road, but it’s hard to believe this is still London.
Perching: a Kingfisher in Rainham Marshes. Photograph: George Hull
“I’m from Ilford,” says Vaughan. “My mum is a Plaistow, East Ham lady, so I have the East End in my blood. When I first started birding in East London 30-odd years ago, Rainham Marshes [then a military firing range] wasn’t really an option. I used to go to the urban and suburban parks.
“I’d go birding in Wanstead Park and Wanstead Flats, up and down the Lea Valley. There are birds everywhere – that’s the bottom line.”
Gary Budden, a writer and editor at East London publishers Influx Press, also caught the bug young from his father, a working class, self-taught amateur ornithologist. Like many birdwatchers, the pair went on trips to obscure parts of the UK in pursuit of glimpses of sought-after species.
“We went all around the country doing birdwatchery stuff,” he says. “That probably instilled in me all the knowledge and gave me the passion for it. Then, when I got into my late twenties, it all just came flooding back.”
Now 33, he agrees that birdwatching tends to appeal either to children or to retired men, acknowledging: “It has had an image problem – it still has one to an extent.”
Budden’s own writing has been heavily influenced by The Peregrine, a niche work of literature by J.A. Baker, an Essex writer who was perhaps the ultimate obsessive birdwatcher.
He says there has been a renewed interest in writing about nature and the British landscape and that public appetite for the “authentic experience” that birdwatching offers is growing.
“I think people are bored, in a strange way,” Budden says. “When you go out looking for birds, you get something that counts as an authentic experience – an experience you can’t buy.
“You have to go to specific places to see specific types of birds. You can’t get that in any way other than by physically going to that place and engaging with it and knowing what you’re looking for. I think that’s part of the appeal.
“This is something that is completely outside of the human world, and it has site-specific aspects to it.”
In an age when our eyes are increasingly focused downward at the tiny glaring screens of our devices, in a country that has lost most of its large wildlife, birds remain dramatic symbols of freedom, beauty and purity.
“There is this statistic that British birds are the most watched in the world,” says Budden. “That is a curious but also rather unsurprising fact.”
Flying widgen
Is birdwatching undergoing a renaissance locally? There are signs it might be. Witness the plethora of blogs and Twitter accounts authored by youngish Hackney and Walthamstow types rhapsodising about the avian fauna of adjacent marshlands. People like Graham Howie, 37, a primary school teacher from Dalston who “started noticing” birds three years ago.
“I was training for the Edinburgh Marathon in 2012 and I used to use the Lea Valley,” he says. “I’d run alongside the canal. I used to run up and down there and see all these birds that I’d seen before but had not taken much notice of – birds like kestrels and cormorants – and I started to stop and have a look at them. The next week I took a camera and took pictures, and when I got back home I identified them. I kept doing that for a while. I saw more birds and I got heavily into it.
“Then I got to know the local birdwatching community. I met other people who were as odd as I was and got to know them and learned from them. They showed me other places I might not have known about otherwise.”
With revamped bird reserves now being created in Stoke Newington and on the edge of Walthamstow, how long before this pursuit starts being marketed as hip, perhaps with the assistance of that newly fashionable retro font that adorns so many pricy cafes?
I’m not sure I want it to be, but it would be no bad thing if birds were to become, for everyone, more than what J.A. Baker called “a tremor on the edge of vision”.
Bracing: a swimmer poses for the camera at London Fields Lido. Photograph: Madeleine Walker
There is something pure and empowering about swimming. It’s no coincidence that most religions have purification rituals involving immersion in water. Is it taking things too far to suggest the redemptive feeling of moving about freely in liquid stems from some deeply lodged memory of being ensconced in the amniotic sac, or the genes we have inherited from our coelacanth-like ancestors? Yes, to be honest, and why intellectualise something that is inherently visceral?
This book of ‘before and after’ shots of clothed and swimsuited-up devotees of London Fields Lido is pleasingly devoid of psychobabble, or indeed babble of any kind. What it is full of is photographer Madeleine Waller’s excellent portraits, some of which are on show at this much loved outdoor pool. These images, particularly the ones that show steam rising off the water as it does on cold mornings, possess a raw power.
In his introduction to this book – a typically lovingly produced hardback offering from small publishers Hoxton Mini Press – Robert Crampton highlights the “sheer beauty of the environment that open-air swimming can provide”.
“Like cyclists,” he writes, “swimmers are, whatever their competence (slow, medium or fast lane), essentially united by the vulnerability of their shared near-nakedness.”
Sure, lack of clothes equals vulnerability, but I’ve come across pensioners who swim in the lido every day and who look like they have discovered the fount of eternal youth. This book contains photos of swimmers fresh out of the pool and standing in the freezing snow, glaring defiantly in the face of the bitterly cold weather.
I’m far from a regular at the lido, but I have occasionally swum there in the deep midwinter, and I can confidently proclaim that the combination of swimming and bracingly cold weather leaves one feeling virtually invincible. As you haul yourself out of the water, you hardly feel vulnerable. Rather, you feel capable of conquering the world.
“London is a city built on water” states the publicity bumf for writer and blogger Jenny Landreth’s exhaustive guide to the best places to swim in the capital. Our city gets its fair share of watery weather too, so there is a certain logic to the fact it boasts such a wealth of places to do the breaststroke.
Landreth is an entertaining and witty writer who does not merely dive into her subject but takes a running jump along the diving board and deftly somersaults as she plunges into it. It might seem like there is little to be said on the subject of swimming pools, but many have incredible histories, and the newer ones often have a controversial past (Hackney’s Clissold Leisure Centre is a case in point).
This book also allows readers to discover sumptuous and unusual pools within easy reach of the East End such as Virgin Active Repton Park – a swimming pool in a church (yes, really) and King’s Oak Lido on the cusp of Epping Forest. Closer to home, the pool at Shoreditch House and Walthamstow Forest College Pool are also included.
Then there is open water swimming and so-called wild swimming, both increasingly popular activities. At the risk of rhapsodising on the subject, the experience of propelling oneself through the water in a lake or reservoir surrounded by fish and diving water birds is an amazing way to connect with nature, and thank goodness this experience is available at places like the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds and the Stoke Newington West Reservoir, albeit that you have to pay and wear a wetsuit to swim in the latter.
No true wild swimming opportunities exist in London, unless of course you count the Thames, which Landreth does. Though swimming is banned in the busiest stretch through central London, this book details how and where to plunge into London’s mother-river.
Which begs the question: what about the River Lea? Sure, this notoriously polluted waterway is no doubt dangerous to swim in, and there may well be bylaws banning swimming here. Still, some foolhardy adventurer should try it anyway, if only for the sake of novelty.
Swimming London: The 50 Best Pools, Lidos, Lakes and Rivers from Around the Capital is published by Aurum Press. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781781310960
A mosaic at Leytonstone underground station of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca
Waltham Forest has spawned many famous sons – William Morris, Brian Harvey and, yes, Alfred Hitchcock.
The master of suspense was born in Leytonstone and was the son of an East End greengrocer.
It is thought he got his first taste of the magic of the silver screen at the now derelict EMD Cinema in Walthamstow’s Hoe Street.
There is a plaque commemorating Hitchcock’s birthplace (now a petrol station) on Leytonstone High Road, and there’s a hotel near Epping Forest that is named after the great man.
It is also true that several glorious mosaics depicting scenes from Hitchcock’s most famous films adorn the inside of Leytonstone Tube Station.
But apart from these somewhat modest focal points, reminders of the director’s links with the East End are strangely absent. Until now.
Early this month the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow Village played host to two screenings of one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, The Birds, starring Tippi Hedren, as part of The Barbican’s ‘Hitchcock’s East End’ season.
This atmospheric small museum was decorated with origami birds, and ornithological tea towels featuring ‘the birds of Waltham Forest’ (kingfishers, kestrels, coots, etc) were among the themed objects available to buy. To judge from the demand there is no shortage of interest in Hitchcock’s local connections, and the ‘rediscovery’ of this Hollywood legend’s Waltham Forest origins has conveniently coincided with the growing cultural renaissance in this area, whose residents exult in its newfound reputation as ‘Awesomestow’.
The Barbican has produced mini walking guides which can be downloaded from its website and which let locals lead themselves on a tour of the streets the young Hitchcock would have walked down to see if they can spot features that might have influenced his films.
A big outdoor screening is, it is rumoured, being planned for this summer as the finale to this series of events. For the latest information on this keep checking The Barbican’s website.
Create London, an arts organisation that is also working on the project, says on its website that the Hitchcock programme leads towards “the opening of the new Empire Cinema in late 2014…which will form part of a major regeneration project, The Scene at Cleveland Place, a new leisure destination for Waltham Forest.”
As one of the artform’s most influential figures, Hitchcock would surely have approved of a new picture palace opening on his boyhood turf.
What a shame, however, that the Hoe Street picturehouse – a beautiful venue whose future has been the subject of a long and continuing saga – still languishes amid the ranks of London’s boarded-up ghost cinema.
Harry Young, alias Diamond Lil, stands at the centre of photograph taken on VE Day 8 May 1945 on Columbia Road. From left kneeling; Gladys Herd, Mrs Stephens, Isabella Wilkinson, Clara Hoare, Nell Lloyd, Diamond Lil, Isabella Lloyd, Alice Wilkinson. Photograph: Marie Stephens
Linda Wilkinson is an East Ender born and bred and a true Renaissance woman.
A human rights activist, she spent 30 years working full-time as a research scientist before penning a play about Diamond Lil (based on the true story of an East End drag queen whose real name was Harry Young) as well as several books.
‘Lil’ crops up in Columbia Road: A Strange Kind of Paradise. She is pictured showing some leg amid of a crowd of women celebrating VE Day in 1945.
“What did people make of it?” the author writes. “It seems nobody was much bothered. As a child I was eight before I learned Lil was a bloke and then only because one of the boys at school told me.”
Salt-of-the-earth inhabitants of the East End were, and probably still are, much more tolerant than they are given credit for. In Columbia Road this easy-going mindset helped foster the bohemian trappings the street displays today.
Part memoir, part quirky, unclichéd history, this self-published book is a cornucopia of historical anecdotes, containing photographs and reminiscences from the author’s fellow Columbia Road natives.
The roots of the street’s famous flower market are shrouded in mystery, though records show it was already in existence in the 1800s.
Precisely when and why it sprouted remains a matter of debate as poverty-stricken East Enders were not archetypal bloom-fanciers, though Wilkinson cites Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew’s observation that pretty plants are comforting to people who spend long hours labouring indoors.
What is clear is there is more to Columbia Road than flowers. Over the decades it has played host to silk weavers, body-snatchers, child murderers and Huguenot and Jewish refugees.
It was a focus of the efforts of social reformers and philanthropists like Angela Burdett-Coutts and was part of the route from Essex into London travelled by thousands of farm workers leading their livestock to the slaughter.
For much of its history Columbia Road hardly smelt of roses; close-by there was in Dickens’s time a vast and stinking ‘dung heap’.
But despite its flaws the area has always inspired great loyalty among its residents.
It is indeed a strange kind of paradise.
Columbia Road: A Strange Kind of Paradise is published by Linda Wilkinson. ISBN: 9780957329423. RRP: £12.99
Fangs for the memories: Jonathan Goddard as Count Dracula. Photograph: Mark Bruce Company
American TV show True Blood and the phenomenally successful Twilight fantasy saga have in recent years served as an introduction for many to the gothic vampire myths that seem to be forever reinventing themselves in one medium or another.
Who of a slightly older generation does not remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and are there still people around who recall the hysteria about the so-called Highgate Vampire in the 1970s?
Frankly the list of vampire-related fads is endless.
So given the public’s perennial lusting after bloodsucking fiends, now would seem as good a time as any to stage an innovative dance theatre production of Dracula, and the atmospheric surroundings of Wilton’s Music Hall in Shadwell would seem to be the perfect venue for this.
Not to mention that October means Halloween and autumnal ghouls and spectres.
“At the end of the day, so much of the book is about sex,” says director Mark Bruce, whose Mark Bruce Company has endeavoured to stay (relatively) loyal to the original Victorian-era novel by Bram Stoker – more than can be said for some Hollywood film versions.
“It’s such a strange, elusive book. There is something of the superstitious dark fairy tale about it,” says Mr Bruce.
“To me the story is less interesting when it’s modernised. I’ve set this version in Victorian times when there was all this taboo, and I think the story makes the most sense in that context.
“Nowadays we’re liberated, so it’s not so shocking anymore, but in the book there is a scene in which Mina Harker drinks Count Dracula’s blood, and at the time that would have been seen as an outrageous thing to write.”
A set built of wrought iron adds to the Victorian feel, while the eclectic soundtrack includes music from Bach and Mozart as well as contemporary classical composers like György Ligeti, who appropriately enough was born in Transylvania.
What’s more, this low-fi Dracula eschews digital wizardry in favour of what Bruce calls “traditional tricks”.
The director says that while this Dracula might not fit neatly into the conventional horror category, it contains “moments of disturbing intensity”.
The company has purchased generous quantities of good quality fake blood, and Mr Bruce says “there will be blood where blood is needed”, adding: “I hope the show gets under people’s skin.”
Of Wilton’s, reputed to be the oldest surviving music hall in the world, Mr Bruce says: “You walk into the place and you sense it’s full of ghosts. It’s perfect.”
The East End itself is an appropriate location because of its associations with the darkest aspects of Victorian London – the poverty condemned by writers like Charles Dickens and the vice exposed most notably, and bloodily, by the Whitechapel murders.
The show’s cast includes Jonathan Goddard, described by The Observer as “Britain’s finest male contemporary dancer”, who plays the infamous Count whose sinister ambitions tear at the heart of an outwardly chaste and respectable society.
Dracula is on at Wilton’s Music Hall, 1 Graces Alley, E1 8JB, until 2 November
