And It's Free!

The day will come when I have something related to the fair parish of Swanvale Halt to talk about, but that day is not yet. Instead, here is news of a pleasant surprise last Thursday when I was in London checking the route of a long-planned Goth Walk scheduled to take place in August, and having tea with a friend. Between these two events I remembered that I used to go quite frequently to the free exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection in Euston which were often fun and, well, free, so I decided to go there again for the first time in years. Sure enough, there were two shows, one about plants and one about air. The first was an exploration of the human relationship with plants, and combined artefacts with art: there was a very innovative section examining the use of plants in indigenous South American cultures, their exploitation and representation by colonial powers; the weird floating thing you can see in one of the photos is a holographic weeping eye, projecting onto a spinning fan, which inevitably made me think of Orlam. The second display was even more abstract and art-based - when your subject is air, there aren't that many artefacts you can bring out. The audiovisual presentation on the social and political implications of clouds was remarkable - I hadn't anticipated how left-wing the stance of the Wellcome might be.

And the art wasn't over! Just along the street, I recalled, was the Crypt Gallery beneath Old St Pancras church, another exhibition space I've often called in on. Was anything happening there? There was indeed - a show of degree work by a group of art graduates (I'm not sure where from). I thought whoever put together the display of curved bits of cardboard in one of the niches with the caption claiming they were 'in a dialogue with the spatial dynamics of the location, encouraging the onlooker to examine their own experience of their surroundings' was pushing their luck a bit, to be honest.

Another Gothic adventure in London many years ago was my Goth Walk about wells, which visited St Chad's Place in Kings Cross, the site of a holy well with a set of pleasure gardens attached in the late 18th century. Someone on the UK holy wells group on LiberFaciorum had been there and decided that St Chad's Well did indeed survive as a dribble of water visible below a mysterious grille in the pavement. I went to find it, and sure enough, if you peer down into the grille you can see in the photo, in contrast to all the other drains in the alleyway, there is water running - albeit about twenty feet down. Could the Well indeed survive? It would be nice to think so!