Christmas Is Coming

A few weeks ago I promised I'd tell you when the signed and numbered special edition of Preposterous Erections was available. Well, an emptying stack of boxes now sits at the Goldmark Gallery, and you can order a copy here. Or better still ring the gallery on 01572 821424. I'm very pleased with the production of it, everything from the Horton Tower label placed in its recess on the front cover cloth to the contents of the red pocket at the back. This has a sheet of pretend stamps tucked in it showing nine of the towers (Royal Mail Stamps please take note) and a limited edition signed print of my cappriccio painting of seventeen of the towers. Enigmatically complete with a giraffe and an elephant. This particular edition is limited to only 100 copies, and is a non-preposterous £50.

Unexpected Alphabet No 20

I've been reading Ian Nairn's incomparable Nairn's London recently, and mused over his phrase, used a couple of times, of places being 'plugged into the big city'. Well yesterday I found the perfect example of what he meant. I was in conversation with the good folks at Daniel Lewis & Sons on Hackney Road. For 215 years they have supplied London with metals of all shapes and sizes, and much more besides. I was there discussing a pallet of thin aluminium sheets being printed on by the Goldmark Atelier for the inimitable Nelly Duff gallery, coincidentally just round the corner in another fascinating city enclave, Columbia Road. "They're doing what with them?" they said at Lewis's. "And who's the Goldmark 'otel anyway?". So it went on, until I noticed the afternoon sun highlighting this enormous wooden coat-of-arms on the wall. And then, as we ended up out on the pavement, I saw this beautifully lettered vitreous enamel sign, presumably denoting a previous encumbent. With that comma hinting at another sign now missing from the next bay down. And I just had this overwhelming feeling of London life going on for so long in this terrace of businesses, stretching back over the years. The shouts and arguments, the clanking of iron and steel and trains whistling and rumbling over the nearby railway bridge in and out of Cambridge Heath station. Somebody came in and asked for 24 big rubber wheeled castors- "With or without brakes?"- and a pretty girl poked her nose in through the door, thought about saying something and decided not to. All of us plugged into the big city.  

Lamport in Diapers

Lamport is a small estate village roughly halfway between Market Harborough and Northampton. On the main road you can see a pair of magnificent swans rearing up on the gate posts to the mid seventeenth century Lamport Hall, and turning into the village one notices
the charming juxtaposition of the Hall to All Saints church. The village street runs inbetween them without visual hindrance from the Hall, and it's down here that we will find the polychrome brickwork of the 1854 estate cottages. We often seeing decorative brickwork like this, but on this scale? It's as though someone read the plan wrong, as in Spinal Tap's miniature Stonehenge. We call it  'diaper', meaning an ornamented pattern, a word also used by our friends across the Atlantic for nappy. Quite how that happened is a mystery, unless it's to do with criss-cross patterning being water and whatever-else-proof. My second photograph above (doesn't England look good at this time of year?) is of another Lamport estate house positioned deliberately, one imagines, a little bit away from the madding crowd. 

A Bouquet for Cheltenham

Well. A very big thankyou to those of you who found me in Gloucestershire yesterday for The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed myself so much in a tent. It was quite extraordinary, and thankyou so much to my new friends who so generously looked after myself and Only Daughter. Even Frankie Dettori managed a smile over his crustless cucumber sandwich. Coming up soon: Diapers in Lamport.

Preposterous

After ten years of gestation it has suddenly run up and tapped me on the shoulder. It seems so long ago now when I said to the person who was to become the Wartime Housewife "I want to do a book on English Towers". "Yes", she said, "And you could call it Preposterous Erections". Oh how we laughed, but lo and behold here it is. And what fun I've had. Climbing hills, spotting 'Twr' on Ordnance maps, being told of them in evening pub conversations. Once or twice I came across extraordinary erections that weren't towers exactly, but I couldn't resist including them. An immense pale green coal hoist in Goole, a white cloche-shaped folly high above a Cheshire town. And something new and utterly brilliant that appeared just in time to close the book with. Amazingly I've been asked to go on about them at this year's The Times Cheltenham Literary Festival. I'll be in a tent in Montpellier Gardens on October 9th at 4 o'clock, and in Quinns Bookshop in Market Harborough between 6 and 8 on Friday October 12th. You'll need tickets for Cheltenham, nothing for Quinns.

If all this wasn't enough, in a few weeks time the Goldmark Gallery are issuing a limited edition hardback. I'll be posting about it soon, but there'll be only 500 hardback copies, of which 100 will have a pocket containing a set of tower stamps and a signed Preposterous Erections cappricio print containing seventeen of the towers. After all this I shall need to go and lie down. Preferably on top of a tower somewhere with suitable company.

Seeing Red

In 1979 I had the idea of creating a red poster, just for fun. It was simple; all I had to do was collect anything that was red of a convenient size, (pillar and telephone boxes were out), and arrange them on a photographer's studio floor. For weeks I rummaged through draws, trawled supermarkets, hung around waste bins. Friends used to my sudden and inexplicable passions either gave me things or lent them. Finally photographer Mike Brown let me into his vast studio in Leicester and I started laying mountains of stuff out on the floor. The camera had to be on a special rig above it all and I spent hours saying things like: "Just move that lightbulb one centimetre to the left of the child's shoe". This is the result, and very excitedly we thought of doing a yellow one, a green one- you get the idea. Well, it didn't happen, and the original print got lost. Until a couple of weeks ago when it resurfaced in a designer's plan chest in Gravesend and I'm thinking of doing a print of it. The plan chest went on e-bay, the print came to me. So thankyou Maggie, you're a star. A Red Star of course.

Brighton Rocks

And so to Brighton. Well, Hove, actually. Although you never really go to one without the other. We turned up on Hove Lawns at 8.30 in the morning, for a reason that I'm sure will be expounded upon soon by the inestimable Wartime Housewife. For the first time in years I was able to just relax and take it all in. Being so early meant the light was just right for snapping Nash & Georgie's Holiday Pavilion. And oh what light. This time of the year means the sun's lower, perfect for photographing all those extravagant terraces and squares by father and son architects Amon and Amon Henry Wilds, and for picking out the details in shop windows in The Lanes. I chatted to a bloke who was doing the music for a film on Cezanne (only in Brighton), and he was revisiting the town after having lived here for ten years or so. "You have to watch it", he said, "It gets very seductive". I know what he means. It's any number of towns for me. The Brighton of Graham Greene's novel and the 1947 film Brighton Rock still showing through, the Brighton of the Len Deighton-scripted film of Oh! What a Lovely War that one uses to put back the vandalised West Pier. Piper aquatints, Southdown buses. The air, the light, the people. And that so pertinent quotation by Keith Waterhouse: "Brighton always looks like it's helping the police with their enquiries".