Follies and Funerary Art

Despite declines in Covid levels a visit to London still seems like a risky adventure and if yesterday's experience is anything to go by it will remain that way for a while, so I may not repeat it very soon. Being outside, even sitting in the chilly wind with Dr RedMedea at a café in Lower Marsh, was fine, but the afternoon trains became busier than I might have liked and I was glad to avoid them when I could.

Tempted by some images I'd seen I wanted to visit Gunnersbury Park. This is a delightful and amusing landscape but illustrates very neatly the difference between a true Gothic Garden and a garden which just has Gothic follies scattered around it. There is nothing awe-inspiring about Princess Amelia's Bathhouse constructed over its grotto, the arched walls of the Kitchen Garden, and even the Tower at the far south end of the park, even though that does a fair stab at looming over the pond (it shelters, rather dilapidatedly at the moment, a boathouse); they are all simply appealing decorations, added to the fine Orangery and the Temple beside a lake near the house. It's the smaller of the two houses which provides perhaps the most Gothic experience, thanks to its ruinous state.

Next to the park is Gunnersbury Cemetery, with its memorial to the victims of the Katyn Massacre and especially numerous Polish and eastern European graves:

And a short walk brings us to South Ealing Cemetery, older and more umbrageous (or perhaps that was just the weather).

A moderate risk taken, then, for the sake of Art!