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Category Archives: culture
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:
Winter Screen
The spirit of the pleasure gardens is seeping back into West Kennington, if not quite reaching the decadent heights of its prime when Duchesses (including Georgiana of Keira Knightley fame), Princes and other notables – including Samuel Johnson, Handel and Dickens – would flounce around what is now Spring Gardens in hot air balloon races, watch cats dropping by parachute, and marvel at the Lilliputian King in the human zoo.
Spring Gardens was also the setting for a series of summer film screenings earlier this year, such a success that they are being reprised this week in the arches of Vauxhall station with a festive Christmas theme. Complementing the Winter Screen series is a Christmas market dishing up mulled wine or cider to raise your body temperature before you sit down, and blankets to keep you from going numb while you watch the film. We are hoping that local author Will Self will honour the spirit of Dickens and Thackeray and the original pleasure gardens and settle in to watch Elf with a mega bucket of popcorn.
Full programme:
December 2013
- Thursday 12th – Miracle on 34th street (7pm)
- Friday 13th – Elf (7pm)
- Saturday 14th – A Muppets Christmas Carol (2pm) Scrooged (7pm)
- Sunday 15th – Home Alone 1 (2pm) Home Alone 2 (7pm)
MK II:
MK I:
Ticket proceeds are going to ‘Thames Reach’, a charity who operate a local homeless shelter.
Location:
Arch 50
South Lambeth Place opposite Starbucks
London SW8 1SP
Cable Bar & Café
The South Kennington end of Brixton Road in is becoming a haven for food and drink lovers. There’s the Oval Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, plus some very good delis and restaurants which we’ll write about soon. Best of all for hot drinks and extended visits is Cable Bar & Café, from the people behind the Scootercaffe on Lower Marsh in Waterloo – a cafe so cool it wouldn’t be out of place on Redchurch Street or in The Marais in Paris.
Cable, which used to be a greasy spoon, has a similar aesthetic to the Scootercaffe, which used to sell scooters, with vintage furniture, exposed brickwork, a poster for North by Northwest, a playlist featuring Edith Piaf, Françoise Hardy and the Velvet Underground, and live music on Tuesdays (jazz, bop, bluegrass – that kind of thing). Bands playing the nearby Brixton Academy gravitate here after soundcheck, so if you see someone who looks like they’re in Gogol Bordello or Lamb of God, they probably are.
Their coffee is top notch and food-wise they offer a selection of sausage rolls, scotch eggs and cakes. The Evening Standard have been breathlessly promoting West Kennington for some time now, which stretched to this South Kennington spot not long after it opened.
They also have a piano:
Cable Bar & Café
8 Brixton Rd, London SW9 6BU
020 8617 9629
Pullens Yards
In the early 20th century, East Kennington’s magnificent Pullens Estate, AKA the Pullens Buildings, comprised almost 700 properties and stretched all the way to Manor Place. In the seventies the surviving buildings were threatened with demolition. Residents and squatters fought back (Kennington owes a lot to the preservation efforts of squatters) and thank goodness they did – these are some of London’s last surviving Victorian tenement buildings, and their workshops host a thriving community of creative people, as well as providing film sets for the likes of The King’s Speech (in the scene where the king goes to visit the speech therapist for the first time).
Twice a year they host an open day and their Christmas event is coming up next weekend. It’s the ideal opportunity to look around these unique spaces and pick up unusual Christmas presents. How about some Alex Monroe jewellery for a fraction of the Liberty’s price, or some pottery moulded from vegetables, or a handmade loot, or some architect-designed furniture, or a print of all the regions of the shipping forecast? It’s all here, in the most amazing and rather Christmas-y setting.
Pullens Yard, with workshops along both sides:
An installation of umbrellas from a previous open day, an idea that later made it to Carnaby Street:
Naomi Campbell used to live in Iliffe St, below, and, wait for it, the young Charlie Chaplin lived in one of the Pullens Buildings for a while:
The loot making workshop, who supply all Kanye West’s loot needs:
Make Space Studios
Make Space Studios is a complex of arts and craft studios run by the people behind Studio 180. If you want to see handbags made out of recycled material, screen printing of posters for leading alternative bands, and savagely accurate parodies of twee middle class consumerist products, get along to their Christmas open evening today tomorrow, Thursday, from 4pm to 9pm (sorry we got the date wrong initially). There will be mince pies, mulled wine and special magic punch*.
Make Space runs alongside the railway lines going in to Waterloo Station, while the entrance is on Newnham Terrace in North Kennington, opposite Lambeth North Tube. They also have an art gallery, The Simulator Gallery.
Follow the pink bannister below to enter and on no account allow yourself to be diverted into CP Hart, the world’s largest and therefore most terrifying bathroom showroom.
* we can’t be sure but it seems like that kind of place
Kevin Spacey: Kennington will always be my home
Kevin has heeded our call and says he will always have a home in Kennington.
Karen Gillan and Dr Who: the Kennington connections
Karen Gillan, who played “Dr Who’s sexiest sidekick ever”, lives in Kennington and was spotted working behind the bar at the Pilgrim pub on Kennington Lane.
In the 2005 Christmas episode, the Tardis crash landed on the Brandon Estate in East Kennington.
Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, was born in North West Kennington.
Bob Baker, the creator of Doctor Who’s iconic K9 robotic dog, appeared at the Cinema Museum recently.
The White Bear Theatre Pub
The White Bear, on Kennington Park Road, is a pub of two halves. The front half is an Irish sports pub with lots of regulars and rather an edgy atmosphere. The back half is an extraordinarily intimate, award-winning fringe theatre with a capacity of just 50. It was established in 1988 and actors who’ve appeared there include Emily Watson, Tamzin Outhwaite, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Mark Little, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Natalie Imbruglia.
Plays we’ve seen here:
* One about Byron, the Shelleys, and their frantic sex lives.
* A play featuring objectionable middle class couples arguing and cheating on each other over barbecues – or we saw half of it anyway (the problem with leaving a theatre this small during the interval is your absence will definitely be noticed in the second half – sorry about that guys).
* A good production of Noel Coward’s Still Life, the play on which Brief Encounter was based, which is about an abortive affair.
* Recently we saw Coward, a rather unflattering depiction of Noel Coward and his sex life.
So is the White Bear the theatre equivalent of the Locker Room? No – they had a play by Ayn Rand recently so we’re guessing that was a sex free zone. Check out their programme here and get along.
Here’s a photo of Coward (that’s him, sitting down):
Durning Library
In these times of austerity, many libraries are threatened with closure, but Durning Library will never close if the Friends of Durning Library have their way. Would any politician dare to cross this fearsome organisation for fear of a cupcake at a community event being served with a garnish of cyanide? But their cause is noble – long may they reign and long may Durning Library remain open. Just don’t mention the Tree of Heaven.
The grade II-listed library opened in 1889 and was designed in the Gothic Revival style by local architect Sidney RJ Smith whose other buildings included Tate Britain and libraries in South Lambeth, West Norwood, Streatham and Balham.
Occasionally they host talks from local authors, politicians and historians – the history of a Kennington townhouse, Kate Hoey on how to kill a fox, that kind of thing.
