Visitors/ Servants

After some flipping through Ed Glinert's A Literary Guide to London (I'll have to track down the updated version as well), I decided to head down to Kensington in search of some landmarks and maybe some random walks along the way. Being in the neighbourhood was a good excuse to pop into the new Whole Foods (open for just over a week) to see what all the fuss was about.

The first Whole Foods shop in London does, of course, go to great lengths to impress, in terms of size (80,000 square feet over three floors), concept (a walk-in "cheese aging" room, impressive salad bar, top-floor space which amounts to a swanky food court where you can eat your shop purchases or make new ones while you gaze down at the street below, displays that try to convince you that you're in a London market),
and simple marketing (bakery right at the entrance with bakers pulling aromatic hot loaves out of the oven an arm's length away). And contrary to my Whole Foods experiences in Vancouver and Seattle, the prices are not really outrageous in comparison with other London food retailers. This is probably more of an indication of London prices than Whole Foods bargains, and I'm sure there are many inflated prices to be found in the shop, but the things I might buy seemed to be priced within 10% (higher AND lower) of comparable food elsewhere. The only purchases I made on my visit were bulk spices (dill and coriander), both of which were much cheaper than I've found elsewhere, and packaged for once in clear generic bags, rather than the usual wasteful bag-in-box packaging that seems standard elsewhere. Anyway, I was in Kensington to wander the streets, not the aisles, so after a long browse, I finally made it back onto the street--and charming streets they are!
My first plaque stop of the day was for T.S. Eliot.
Glinert tells this story about Eliot at this address: "Eliot soon discovered, to his astonishment, that Groucho Marx was a huge fan of his poetry and, on an imminent visit to London, wanted to meet him. . . . On arriving in London, Marx was invited for dinner and in preparation read Murder in the Cathedral twice, The Waste Land three times and 'just in case of conversational bottle neck . . . brushed up on King Lear', but all Eliot wanted to talk about was the Marx brothers' films Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera." On my way to the next plaque, I smiled at this shop's promise:
Just off busy Kensington Church Street, Kensington Church Walk is a tiny lane of shops
with this pretty cul-de-sac containing Ezra Pound's home from 1909-1914.
Again, according to Glinert, "Ezra Pound secured his fearsome reputation among the London literati while renting a first-floor room in a cottage on this hard-to-find, meandering alley. . . . When [Lascelles] Abercrombie suggested in a magazine article that new poets should abandon realism and take up Wordsworth, Pound wrote and challenged him to a duel. Abercrombie laughed it off until someone told him that Pound was an expert fencer and quite serious. Abercrombie took advantage of the challenged party's right to choose weapons and suggested that he and Pound bombard each other with unsold copies of their books." (What Glinert doesn't tell his readers is that Pound then withdrew the challenge, but at least we're left with the spectacular image.) As I walked to stop number three, I noticed this spectacular example of bricked-up windows which is likely a legacy to window tax. James Joyce lived on Campden Grove,
but what the plaque doesn't tell us is that he "disliked the area, claimed it was inhabited by mummies, and described the road as 'Campden Grave'" before leaving for Paris! My last stop was at Kenneth Grahame's home from 1901-1908:
Having passed by the plaques on my list, I wandered a bit more randomly for a while and stopped to take a photo of this sight (a first for me) on one of Kensington's side streets,
but then I realised that many of the houses on the street possessed this double-bell system!