Doctor Who Reflections Posted 12/22/2008 5:59:14 AM It's a sad reflection that the best bit of acting in the entire episode came when the two daleks exchanged a significant look behind Hybrid Sek's back, with narrowing of eye piece, and waving of suction cup, quite clearly conveying, "He's lost it, you know."Otherwise the episode was as meh as last week - the tragedy wasn't tragic, the plan was never going to work, and the daleks just weren't very scary. Roll on Martha's-mother-disapproving-of-the-Doctor next week is what I say. (0) Comments

Of Poodles and Wonder Woman Posted 12/17/2008 9:16:55 PM A couple of news stories caught my eye today:I wonder if Jodi Picoult can do something interesting with Wonder Woman?And secondly, remember the wolf in sheep's clothing? Here we have a sheep in poodle's clothing.I am confused by the fact that the date of this article is not 1 April (0) Comments

Turf, Yes Turf Posted 12/15/2008 5:39:38 PM I am childishly pleased with myself, after laying a grand total of three square metres of turf this evening:Let's hope it rains long and hard tomorrow, and settles the turf in.Okay, that wasn't very exciting except to me, so for a bonus here is the set of hanging pots which is furthest along in my garden:Note the nasturtiums still stubbornly growing upwards - sooner or later they will dangle over the sides, I hope. Uh, not that they ever did last year.p.s. Fancy a 25,000:1 shot at winning a 600,000 home? It'll 'only' cost you 60. (0) Comments

Huguenot Walk Posted 12/10/2008 12:48:58 PM Happy St George's Day to my English friends! *invites you to admire my tremendously kitsch icon*And on to Doctor Who. That episode really wasn't worth waiting for, was it? It totally failed to grab me, but I will cling to the sapphic undertones and the musical theatre joke as consolation.Still, I did manage to have an interesting time on Saturday, with a bit of social history. I went on a guided walk around Spitalfields in the East End of London (named after the medieval hospital that once stood there). The theme of the walk was the history of the Huguenots, who came there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the East End has been a hotbed for immigration and social struggle since it was built, so it turned out to cover a lot more.The Huguenots were Calvinists, who fled religious and political persecution in France. Somewhere in the region of half a million of them left France eventually, so it was a massive migration. And 50,000 or so came to England, mainly to work in the silk industry, although they were involved in plenty of other trades too.The houses that the Huguenot have left behind belonged not to the weavers, who probably rented space in tenements long gone, but to the Master Weavers, who gave out the work, collected in the cloth and leased out the looms. This is Fournier Street - the glass fronts at the top of the houses are the weaving lofts, where they finished off some of the work:I posted some time back about the Museum of Immigration, which is close by in Princelet Street and served successively as a Huguenot weavers house, a home to Irish migrants, and a synagogue for Polish Jews. I re-visited it on the guided walk, although it was not open due to a chronic lack of funds.The other favourite example of the effect of the waves of migration is the Brick Lane Jammie Majid (mosque). This was built by the Huguenot as their church in 1745, and then spent time as a Quaker House, an Orthodox synagogue, and since the 1970s is a mosque serving the Bangladeshi community which now dominates Brick Lane.But we also visited a place that was new to me. Now trading as the Hanbury Community Centre, it started life as a Huguenot church, passed through the hands of a variety of denominations and eventually became the church hall for the Anglican Christ Church. Which is when the political history really started. The match girls strike in 1888 was organised from here. And if you want to understand why the Trades Union movement started, just read about the conditions they endured, and their hours and their wages.Details are on the plaque here:And speaking of the Anglicans, here is their church, built by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1729 , when the church authorities noticed that there was now a huge new community on their doorstep where it was easier to find a French church, or a Quaker house, or a synagogue, than it was to find an Anglican place of worship.It's just a wee bit dominating, isn't it? Not hard to read the message.So, where did the Huguenots go, as they were replaced by these successive waves of migration? They moved out into the suburbs, and assimilated and joined the mainstream. And one of them is a very distant grandparent of mine. Once the history walk had ended, my friends and I settled down to enjoy the contemporary culture of the area, with an excellent curry. Then we walked north to the Geffrye Museum, which started life as almshouses, built in 1714 (so contemporary to most of the other things we'd been looking at) and is now a museum of interior design. It's a wonderful green oasis off Shoreditch High St:And it has a lovely herb garden behind, sandwiched between the almshouse and the railway.And finally, on the way back to Liverpool street, a last contemporary building is this Georgian shopfront (from 1756), one of the very few left in London. Bow windows like this came along with the invention of plate glass. Add gas lamps and a fresh lick of paint and you could be back 250 years ago:It's a very interesting place, altogether. I've picked out the eighteenth century stuff, but there's everything packed together there. And more change on the way - the City (the commercial part of London) is moving east, swallowing up Spitalfields as it goes. I visited an archaeological site a few years back behind Spitalfields Market, which had thrown up burials dating back to Roman times, and the layout of the medieval hospital grounds. Now there's a huge tower block rising on that site, and Spitalfields market (another thing founded by the Huguenots) is itself under threat of redevelopment. Tempus fugit. (0) Comments

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