Thorough Borough

A walk through Borough Market is always a particular pleasure, whether the stalls are crowded with produce or not. First there's Southwark Cathedral towering over it all like a lost Cotswold abbey, and then the railway crossing over the Thames and negotiating the tight curves of track over the viaduct to London Bridge station, the wheels squealing like bacon slicers. Unmitigated Readers may have heard me go on in this vein before, but I expect it will be an annual event like reading Three Men In A Boat. To be on this train and look down on the backs of houses and narrow streets is to experience the ghost of Dickens and the faint outlines of a Gustav Dore engraving. We sauntered through on Thursday, admiring hand raised pork pies and these pheasants bringing a whiff of misty shoots out in the Shires to the noise and bustle of London streets. Was ever thus, the countryside meeting London, and what better place than this with the added extra of the Market Porter pub smelling of stale beer on its wooden floors and fresh Harvey's Sussex Bitter in the taps. Sometimes the eyebrows get raised (Scottish Camembert at Neal's Yard) but overall this is a joyous place to be. Right, time to get the game chips prepared and a frypan of bubble and squeak I think.

Mirror Image

Genuine pub mirrors are getting rarer. They were always vulnerable to someone putting a pint glass or somebody's head through them, and I don't doubt that in the excesses of so-called pub restoration in the 60s and 70s a good many were chucked into skips. We then had to endure reproduction mirrors that were, in effect, just silk-screened glass. None went as far as to reproduce the cut-glass ornamention that added so much in flashing facets of light. So I was very pleased to come across the mirrors still extant in the Dog and Duck in Bateman Street, Soho. After a hard early summer's morning photographing the Household Cavalry in Hyde Park, (a commission, not an obsession), I found myself almost alone in this tiny pub with my hand clasped round a pint of Harveys Sussex Bitter. The mirrors along the wall opposite the bar are amongst the best I've ever seen, and when I asked the chap behind the bar if he minded me photographing them he looked up from his Sun and stared at the mirrors as if he'd only just noticed they were there.