If you get beyond the intimidating entrance of Greengrassi/Corvi-Mora gallery, you’ll see this rather splendid illustration of London, Westminster and Southwark on their wall. Unfortunately we can’t read the date but we’re guessing 1854?
Category Archives: culture
more images from Everything is about to happen
This time they are all safe for work.
An illicit cookbook (mushrooms are banned in Kennington remember):
An Atlas of the New Testament:
FT III:
Road and Rail Links Between Manchester and Sheffield:
Preston Bus Station:
Selwyn’s Law of Employment (but is it art?)
Ex-library book and 1 Day Diary:
Everything is about to happen is “an ongoing archive of artists’ books selected by Gregorio Magnani” showing at the Greengrassi/Corvi-Mora gallery until April 26th.
Greengrassi/Corvi-Mora art gallery
You could live in Kennington for decades and never happen across Kempsford Road. You could live on Kempsford Road and have no idea there’s an art gallery there. But there is – Greengrassi, AKA Corvi-Mora. Even the doorbell is hard to reach – presumably short people aren’t big art buyers.
If you can find the gallery, we recommend visiting between now and April 26th as the main room downstairs is showing Everything is about to happen, “an ongoing archive of artists’ books selected by Gregorio Magnani”.
All the books and pamphlets are either self-published or from small publishers. So yes, what we’re talking about here is a load of art books by people you’ve never heard of, laid out on a huge wooden table. It’s much better than it sounds because so many of the books are intriguing and/or beautiful, like the room in which they’re displayed.
These books celebrate the mundane, cheap jokes, puns, sloganeering, and porn… all the classic themes of modern art are here. If you want to read them in depth you are supposed to take them into the reading station and don white gloves.
Or rubber gloves if you want to look at the top ones below (n.b. this next image is NSFW, unless you work in a modern art gallery or The Locker Room):
Opening hours: 11am to 6pm Tuesday to Saturday
Address: 1A Kempsford Road (off Wincott Street), London SE11 4NU
Kennington guerrilla gardening
The nice people at Kennington Flowers have made Kennington Cross even more colourful by planting flowers in the tree pit in front of St Anselm’s Church. Perhaps fuelled by Coffee Mob coffee, they’ve broken away from the staid confines of traditional garden design and gone for something akin to a Skittles spillage:
While we’re on the subject of guerrilla gardening, would anyone like to claim responsibility for the cyclamen in the tree pits further up Kennington Road? North Kennington is home to the founder of GuerrillaGardening.org Richard Reynolds (Britain’s 24th most influential gardener), but we’re assured these cyclamen are not his handy work.
Anyway, well done everyone – keep planting.
Charlie Chaplin at age 27 in 1916, when he lived in Kennington
Looking like he was in Mumford & Sons
“Did you think I’d forgotten you? Perhaps you hoped I had.” House of Cards is back.
The second series of the TV drama that took Kevin Spacey away from Kennington is out now on Netflix.
We’ve watched some of it already – it’s just as good as season one, but the bit where Francis murders the president is way OTT.
Kennington residents can get a free trial of Netflix here.
Lambeth Walk
Lambeth Walk was immortalised in a music hall song from 1937. When the song was written, 159 shops lined the street and catered for every need, including eleven butchers, two eel and pie shops (one with a tank of live eels outside), a bird dealer and a tripe dresser. To read about the history of the street, go here or to this site which has some great old photos and maps, dating back to a time when it was surrounded by fields.
While the street declined in the second half of the last century, it’s on its way up again, along with the rest of North West Kennington, with lots of cool, creative businesses opening up nearby such as architects, a violin maker, a poetry school, pop up bars, and of course Damien Hirst’s new gallery coming soon.
Here’s the former Pelham Mission Hall, now the Henry Moore Sculpture Studio which is part of Morley (adult education) College:
On the left of the photo, on the first floor, you can see the outdoor pulpit, once used to offer two-for-one perfumes to the market-goers below in exchange for their attendance at church.
(Incidentally, there’s a Henry Moore sculpture on display close to Kennington, in the middle of the Brandon Estate.)
Lambeth Walk’s other great surviving building is the former Lambeth Baths, which since 1971 has been the Lambeth Walk Group Practice award winning GP surgery (who knew that there were awards for GP surgeries?):
Bonnington Cafe
Bonnington Cafe has been a mainstay of Bonnington Square since the squatters moved in in the early 1980s. At that time, many of the houses didn’t have functioning kitchens, so members of the community took turns to cook for each other in the communal cafe, using ingredients either bought from or scavenged from the nearby Covent Garden food market.
The cafe still operates in this way, run as a co-operative, with a different chef cooking every day, but it’s now open the wider public as well, and it’s a truly magical place to spend an evening. Needless to say, the food can be a little hit and miss depending who’s cooking, and there are generally just two choices of starter, main course, and dessert, all vegetarian and some vegan. But the food is cheap, it’s BYOB with no corkage charge, and the atmosphere is invariably great, with candles, occasional live music, a wood fire on cold nights, and above all, a real sense of community (the cafe doubles as a community centre). Just don’t ask for the “special stuff”.
Here’s a video about the Bonnington Square squatters, including plenty about the cafe (thanks to @taxbod for the link):
excellent new single from South Kennington resident Kyla La Grange
It’s called Cut Your Teeth
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/128153460″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
Meditation at the Jamyang Buddhist Centre
Happy new year.
Are you starting the new year in need of spiritual sustenance? Get yourself down to the Jamyang Buddhist Centre on Renfrew Road in North Kennington, one of two Buddhist centres in Kennington with a third one on the way in the former Beaufoy Institute.
On January 6th from 7.30pm till 9pm is one of Jamyang’s regular Introduction to Meditation sessions. We’ve been to one of these sessions before. What can we tell you about it?
– You’ll have to take your shoes off.
– It’s not a brazen attempt to convert you to Buddhism – Buddha barely got a mention.
– There are opportunities to ask questions. Someone else asked the question we should have asked – how to stay awake during meditation? The instructor did provide some practical suggestions but also said it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep, at which point we nodded off.
– They do a nice quiche and salad in the cafe during the day.
– It’s free but donations are welcome.
– Meditation is scientifically proven to boost concentration, reduce stress, depression, anxiety and addictive behaviours, and can even help with physical problems like heart disease and chronic pain (sorry we can’t lay our hands on the scientific proof right now).
So, all in all, an ideal opportunity to have a look around the Buddhist centre – which has a nice, welcoming vibe whatever your religious beliefs – and to try napping meditation.
Read about the history of the building – and old courthouse – here.
The Courtyard Cafe, featuring a Buddha in a glass cage made from pure Nepalese gold:
