I'm in the news again

Oops, this is over a week old now...

Last week I was featured in the Islington Tribune

Also see this great article on Islington Now.

Find all my guided walks on Eventbrite.

And cards here.

The London Library – a lovely literary labyrinth

The London Library sits in the North West corner of St James's Square.
It's an absolute delight; a labyrinth of rooms jam-packed with books, level upon level of lovely old books. I could live happily in there.

The books are filed in categories A-Z and you'll Chemistry next to Cheese. The open metal floors are both sturdy and space-saving. Editions of The Times are stored in red binders.

Some of the books are over 400 years old have been previously owned by historical figures and bear their annotations and/or signatures – it amazes me that members can freely flick through these treasures, let alone take home.
I was lost for words when I was there, which is odd for me, but I was the right place for that to happen.
Membership comes at a price; it's not expensive, but it's not cheap either.
However a guided tour is free.

Kings Cross ghostsigns and Pentonville Road

Last year I wrote about the Daily Express sign at Willesden and within that I alluded to signs for the Daily News.... Well, I believe I have found another one near The Poor School at Kings Cross.

Pentonville Road, Kings Cross

Shown above are three pics of what remains of a sign that would have had letters about 10ft tall. The first word is definitely 'DAILY'. The word underneath starts with an 'N' and I am pretty sure it would have been 'NEWS'. I'd be keen to find additional archive history and images about this area.
The fourth picture shows an attractive building on the end of a two-storey terrace between Penton Street and Hermes Street on Pentonville Road (this stretch features in the link above) – I have been watching this site to see what happens to these lovely two-storey because other swathes of nearby land are being developed as I write this.

Kings Cross Quarter with two artist impressions of the view and gardens 

For instance Regal Homes are in the process of creating "Kings Cross Quarter" (which quarter? top left/bottom right? What does this MEAN?!) between Cynthia Street and Rodney Street.
The fancy hoardings around the exterior of this development feature swanky letters and images that show views that will be available from probably only a quarter (ha ha, see what I did there?!) of the 118 properties within, a concierge reception area and an "exquisite private landscaped garden" (their words, not mine – check the pic above – so exquisite!). On the developer's selling site it says the apartments will be "created with luxury and functionality... highest quality finishes... Sumptuous and welcoming... perfectly designed". It's beyond me how an empty room devoid of furniture and furnishings can be luxurious or sumptuous. And the exterior will beige and bland. It looks like a clip-together child's toy to me. Beige. What's with all this beige when so many other colours are available?
And whilst I am on the subject of new build, what's going on with all this clip-on fake faded bricks that's appearing like some kind of disease? OK, so they are trying to keep the old brick 'feel' but couldn't they have manufactured them with interlocking 'teeth' edges so that they don't end up with all those straight vertical joins where the panels abut?
Anyway, enough of that... back to ghostsigns... to Kings Cross proper, by which I mean the junction in front of the station and, specifically, the end of Gray's Inn Road.

Gray's Inn Road, Kings Cross

We all know the sign for Scales, Weights & Weighing Machines above 319-321 (formerly 37 Chichester Place), but next time you are passing do stop and look closer at the rest of the terrace to the right of that and see that there are hints of letters peeping through here and there. After all, why would all those places be covered in paint if not to cover up something?
It's only a matter of time before more is revealed. Fingers crossed this happens before the decorators get twitchy.   Part of the painted sign on the 323 is visible here. I need to find some more reference on this to confirm my hunch. The Ladykillers original film features this junction and might throw some light on the matter.

Read about my cards and prints in today's Islington Tribune

#IslingtonTribune – Available free from many Islington outlets.

Click here for the online version of this article

For info of other ways to buy from me please see "Cards and Prints" at top right of this blog.

Everybody reads the Daily Express

Last month I was in the Willesden area and so went to check on one of my favourite ghostsigns.

I was glad to see that apart from a bit of graffiti at the bottom nothing much has changed since I was there in 2009. Phew!
This old hand-painted sign for Express newspapers is rather impressive, though it's really difficult to get a better pic of it than the the one shown here because nearby buildings, walls and street furniture conspire to obscure the view.
I have attempted a bit of half-arsed research but cannot find any info about the company being at this location so I would assume this was just an advertising site. But, as you can see, it's quite a sight at this site because this sign is enormous – probably the largest one I know of – it covers the whole side of a house.
On close inspection it can be seen that there have been two ads here; one painted directly over the other.
'DAILY' can be just made out covering almost all of the upper third and there are remnants of blue and yellow paint visible at shoulder level, so I wonder if the latter sign was for Daily News who I have noticed implemented a bold heavy sans face on yellow backgrounds on their ads at other locations, such as on Seven Sisters Road near St Anne's Road in Tottenham.
The earlier sign shows the ad for Express newspapers with the titles rendered in the same style as their mast heads:
   EVERYBODY READS
   Daily Express
   Sunday Express
   THE PAPER FOR PEOPLE WHO THINK
(So that's not everybody is it? Ha ha!)

That same weekend I was delighted to find some new [to me] ghostsigns in north west London which I will post about next month.

Kiosks and shops on London Underground platforms

Updated – see italics and pic below it

St James's Park station sits directly underneath 55 Broadway (see last post below).
Coming home on Monday evening at about 7.30pm I noticed the old newspaper and confectionery kiosk the westbound platform was padlocked shut.
I don't use this station often – is it permanently closed? Are these kiosks a thing of the past?

I remember with fondness the one on Liverpool Street clockwise/eastbound platform and another on the westbound platform of Sloane Square both of which were still open and trading in the 1980s. But I never thought to photograph them then and I can't find any pics on the internet now.
Does anyone know of other kiosks still open and trading on the underground network, specifically under the ground on platforms, rather than in the open air? Pics please!
Here is High Street Kensington circa 1898 and in 1936 – there are many more lovely pics on The LT museum site, but their search engine is painful to say the least because it won't let you put multiple words in the box. Grrr!

Aha!  Look what I noticed last month – there is still a functioning kiosk at Sloane Square!!!

These boots are made for walking

One Saturday morning last month I joined one of Walk London's free Winter Wanders Weekend Walks.

The tour I'd chosen was St Paul's - The Secret Corners of the City and Hidden Alleyways and Courtyards. On arriving at the statue of Queen Anne outside St Paul's Cathedral I was amazed to see more than 100 people. I thought, "oh gawd, no" and inwardly cringed. But, phew, there were two Westminster tour guides there so the pack split in half and off we went on two non-clashing routes.
I was pleased to see that more than half the group were Londoners just like me who were there to learn more about our fair city. And we weren't disappointed because June our guide was bubbling over with facts and information, all easily heard at the back through her portable public address system.
I hope there will be similar weekends happening again sometime soon. Meanwhile, get your walking shoes on and go on one of their recommended unguided walks outside the Central zone. See the Walk London site here.

The Princess and the Spacehopper

I was recently asked by an online shopping site about my worst ever Christmas present. 

Nothing immediately came to mind until I remembered one year when we set spending limits and so we gave a lot useful, silly or edible things from the pound stores. 

One of my presents from that source was a framed picture of Prince Charles's first wife. Aaaargh! Cries of 'hang it on the wall Jane; it will look lovely here... or here..." were met with "get that woman out of my house!".

I don't think I even kept the frame!

My best present? Has to be when my sister and I each got a Spacehopper. I have fond memories of us bounding up and down the garden.    

Tarted up newsagent in Dean Street

There is a lot of fuss lately about how the renovation of a newsagent in Soho's Dean Street.

Am I the only one who thinks this was a bad idea?

I was walking past it on Saturday 5th and stopped dead in my tracks, horrified at how it is now a pastiche of its former self.

As shown right, for years it had faded flaky paint. It was old, and it looked old. You could clearly see that. But now the paint has been stripped off back to the wood – a process that the Georgians certainly couldn't be bothered with – and what we have now is an impression of how the shop might have looked on the day it first opened for business.

I agree the windows look better now they have been painted to match the shop (though they could have been even better if they had been replaced with smaller panes) but all the signs needed was a coating of clear varnish. Gone are the layers of history that gave its charm. Can you imagine the uproar if Berry Brothers & Rudd on St James's Street did the same thing and removed its thick dark green paint? There'd be an outrage!

Also in Soho, not far from Dean St, between Ed's Diner and The Spice of Life, I notice another Georgian(?) shop has been reclaimed. At the moment it is stripped down the wood. I will be watching to see what happens.

This cleaned-up, pretend history brings to mind two horribly retouched wall advertisements in Covent Garden (here and here). I am all for preserving history but what is the point of retouching a defunct sign? Why not just leave it as is? As a reminder.

All this revamping and reclaiming London's history actually contradicts the rape of St Giles by plastics and Westminster's plans to renovate a section of the east side of Charing Cross Road that contains Gaby's. But more about that in a future post.

Oh dear.

UKCG urging their worshippers to go into debt

I just read this in today's Times...

It seems the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which occupies the old Astoria/Rainbow building in Finsbury Park, is encouraging its congregation not to pay their personal bills so that they will have more money to give to 'God'.

UCKG say that only when people sacrifice all their worldly possessions will their financial prayers be answered. They even offer financial 'help' with this.

It saddens and angers me that this sort of thing is still going on, and less than a mile from my front door.

Read the articles here, though you have to subscribe to the Times site (I will attempt to upgrade this in due course). And here's a 'review' of the church.

The only positive thing I can say about all this is that having a church in residence has meant that the interior of the lovely old cinema has been kept relatively intact. You can wander in and have a look around – just be sure not part with any cash when you are there.

Holborn Midtown -update

Earlier this year I wrote a post about the silly idea to re-brand the historic Bloomsbury, Holborn and St Giles area as Midtown. See it here.

Well, sadly, 'they' are still continuing with this.

Andy Dangerfield latest piece follows up on his previous BBC article and I've been quoted in there!

Women! Know your place!

That's a ref to a sketch from the Fast Show that I was reminded of when I saw the wonderful old photo of suffragettes on the cover of a copy of yesterday's free Stylist magazine that I found on the bus home last night.

So I turned to read the article on page 41 and it seems women may have made great leaps and bounds since that photo was taken but apparently we still can't do our sums....

If you look closely at the standfirst it reads,'Thanks to the suffragettes, British women were finally given the vote in 1918. Eighty-two years on, how has this hard-won right shaped politics today?'

It seems we are still living in the past.

And on the loose subject of women, I went to see 'Women Beware Women' at the Olivier Theatre the other night. It's had mixed reviews, and don't be put off by what I think is a misleading title as it's bloody brilliant; the set, the costumes, the choreography. Wonderful. Go go go!

Blimey, I'm in the Guardian

Saturday 24th April turned out to be a very good day for many reasons.

One being that I discovered that Jane's London is listed on the Internet page of the Guardian Guide in a column about London blogs.

Wow! I had no fore-warning of this so did not manage to get a copy for myself. They even put some of pictures at the bottom as used in my 'Are you feeling frisky?' post, which I thought was rather amusing and a bit ironic seeing as they were so cheeky to use them without asking. Though they don't appear on the web version.

But hey, I hope this means I get some more traffic this way and people can see that there are some even more good London sites and blogs, as listed in the column to the right under 'Other relevant links'.

Red Lions are finally in print!

At last, over 15 weeks since submitting this to Time Out, it's finally made an appearance in this week's issue. It's all about London's Red Lion pubs. If you want to see better versions of these pics, as well as quite a few others not featured in the article, then click here.

Whoah, body parts, body parts for you!

This week's Time Out fell through my letterbox today. I was upset to find the article I gave them eight weeks ago about Red Lion pubs is still not in there. Hmmmm...

But the Big Smoke section does contain 'Top Ten London... pubs with body parts in the name' written by Euan Ferguson. It's a list with just one photo of their no.5 (see small text at the bottom). And some of them are bars, not even pubs!

Well, as you would expect, anything they can do I can do better, so here are twelve of my own. Some are, I will admit, a bit silly. Only one has the same name as one on their list but it's from a different pub in a different postcode. I have put in two different kinds of arms just for symmetry, and neither is attached to a King, a Queen or a Carpenter. Plus I have also managed to avoid the obvious King's/Nag's Head because that would be too easy. Aren't I clever?! Me me me!

Old Parr's Head, N1; Bald Faced Stag, N2; Shakespeare's Head, W1; The Unicorn, N1; The Holly Bush, NW3; The Old Farm House, NW1; The Army and Navy, N16; The Crown Tavern, W1; The Cock, W1; Southampton Arms, NW1; Hand & Racquet, WC2; The Twelve Pins, N4.

Time Out's Top Ten: 1 King's Arms W1; 2 Pig's Ear, SW3; 3 Elbow Room, N1; 4 Bull and Mouth, WC1; 5 Hand in Hand, SW19; 6 Bleeding Heart, EC1; 7 Cat's Back, SW18; 8 Bishop's Finger, EC1; 9 93 Feet East, E1; 10 The Cock, EC1.

I'm in Smoke!

The latest issue of the wonderful Smoke magazine came out this week, albeit two months late.

If you haven't yet picked up a copy, then you really should get with the programme, if only to read Matt Haynes's lunatic musings. Anyway, this issue has four, yes four things, contributed by moi. As well as a whole page of coal hole covers, the three photos shown here have also been found fit for inclusion; a monkey in Holloway, a Kensington lion rampant, and Normas Snorks who I am reliably informed is AKA a docker's mistress.

Read all about it

Whilst you are looking at this and dipping into Londonist and other websites you are not reading a newspaper. Perhaps the only physical paper you look at lately is the one of the free ones thrust at you as you enter the tube station on your way to or from work. Due to these freebies, and the amount of information now available on the web, newspaper sales have dropped.

Fleet Street is now a shadow of its former self. Once the buzzing centre of the UK’s newspaper industry, busy with pubs full of print workers and drunken journalists swapping stories, it is now a quiet street of banks and sandwich bars. Though some of the lovely old pubs that still remain, such as the Punch Tavern and Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, are well worth a visit.

Around London there are signs, buildings and references that allude to the heyday of the daily printed word. As usual, all of these can be found on Flickr.

Top row: Daily Mail clock on the east side of the Barkers department store building in Kensington; National News ad in Clapham; newsagent in Dean Street; newsagent sign in Earlsfield; Daily Express ad in Willesden.

Middle row: Daily News ad in Tottenham; Daily Telegraph clock, Fleet Street; Closed newsagent in De Beauvoir; Westminster gazette ad, Stamford Hill; Evening Standard clock on the west side of Barkers.

Bottom row: Daily Express building, Fleet Street; Picture Post ad, Stockwell; Dundee Evening Telegraph and People’s Friend building, Fleet Street; Daily Telegraph ad, West Brompton; the Daily Telegraph Building, Fleet Street.

Time Out 1st April 2009 – a scottish theme

It's no joke... I've got another article in Time Out this week. Peter Watts, editor of The Big Smoke, asked me to put together the scottish theme because Gordon Thomson, the magazine's editor, is leaving and this was (is?) his final issue.

This issue is a particularly good one, not just because of my contribution, but because in the first 28 pages alone there are lots of interesting things in it including the pieces on the baroque (ooh baroque!), an interview with Wussel Bwand and a collage of articles about why London is brilliant (it just is!). And Richard Cudlip aka the cabbies capital, who I have met through our postings for Londonist, has managed to get his name in the masthead at the beginning of the Big Smoke section as an associate editor... he's put together some pieces about his observations as viewed from his black cab. Well done him!

My last article for Time Out was about closed pubs.

Overheard on a 254 bus to Aldgate

There I was sitting on the bus admiring the view when I overheard the fella behind me say to his girlfriend(?) "Ooh look Ghost Pubs... that's the Nag's Head". How amazing! They were reading my article in Time Out and commenting on it less than a yard away from me. I couldn't contain my excitement and said "Excuse me, I wrote that; that's me!". And then we chatted about the general subject all the way along Mare Street to when they got off at Bethnal Green tube. Really nice people. I hope they get in touch.

Time Out 20th November 2008

So here it is... a scan of page 12 of this week's Time Out.

I must admit it brought a huge smile to my face.

Hope they contact me to do more.

Time Out – The Big Smoke