Pig's Ear

The second day of Open House London saw us starting at this group of three Hampstead terrace houses:

It may not look like much from the outside, but the middle house, 2 Willow Road, is a Modernist dream. Built by architect Ernö Goldfinger as his family home, the three levels are filled with ingenious space-saving devices, flexible living arrangements (rolling and folding walls), attention to detail, and an amazing art collection dotting the walls and tables. Alas, no photos are allowed, but you can see a few images here. After our tour, we walked back up to the high street to grab some lunch. In all our wanderings around Hampstead, we hadn't explored the streets leading down to Willow Road, and found that this is another great part of a pretty fantastic neighbourhood, with interesting buildings everywhere.

This figure, belonging more to a ship than a house, was very startling,
but made more sense when I noticed a plaque that mentioned that the house was once home to the lyricist of the Eton boating song. Still, the figure is still highly unusual! After a picnic lunch in a nearby churchyard and a long talk with a lively elderly Hampstead resident who has lived in Hampstead for thirty years, bought her first Hampstead house for £4,500 in the 1950s (sigh), and was a wartime Morse Code operator ("My great-grandchildren are the only ones who are interested in that anymore: 'Nana, can you teach me the secret writing?'"), we got back on the tube and queued up for Handel House, where the composer lived for 36 years until his death.
Having passed by the house before, we had our curiosity satisfied today, but I would classify this visit as a must-do for Handel aficionados only, especially considering that you usually have to pay to enter and are herded into a room to watch a poorly done ten-minute film before you can explore the house. From Handel House, we walked over to Home House, a name that sounded strange until we learned it had been built for the Countess of Home in 1777. Once again, we joined a substantial queue;
here's Bob putting on his best rock-and-roll face in preparation to enter Home House, now one of London's many exclusive members' clubs. (For a £1,500 joining fee and £2,250 per year, Bob and I could become members.)
The interior is lavish

in an ostentatious way that somehow fits the house's current status as a members' club.

A woman and her son were playing chess at a table in this room,
picking at I-don't-even-want-to-guess-how-expensive-they-are sandwiches while they played. I wanted to get a photo of them, but didn't have the nerve. Our guide pointed out this organ-front, which no longer contains an organ, but is instead storage for the stereo below
and booze on the sides.
With each room more busy with ornamentation than the last, the rooms wouldn't necessarily be my first choice of location for relaxing,


although Bob did look quite comfy in this oversized chair.
The back porch is another story; I could easily sit here for hours, enjoying high tea, just like two women were doing while we were there,
and the back garden space was very peaceful.
Not being members, we left Home House and sat for a while in this nearby park, a great spot that we just stumbled on while zigzagging through the neighbourhood.

We popped into the Royal Academy of Arts to see some of the spaces open for Open House weekend, which turned out to be less than I thought, before we ran out of time and all the buildings closed for the weekend--but that doesn't mean that we were done for the weekend! We took the tube over to Gloucester Road to check out the current platform art exhibit, Brian Griffiths's seventy-metre long Life is a Laugh.


From Gloucester Road, it was a short tube ride to Sloane Square station, the meeting place for tonight's free walking tour, one of 33 (one in each of London's boroughs) put on by Transport for London in conjunction with the Mayor's Thames Festival. Our particular walk, The Old Chelsea Village Pub Walk, is put on every Sunday evening by London Walks, although today's walk was special because it was free, as opposed to the usual £6 per person! Our first stop was at the Fox & Hounds, the nicest pub of the night, without music or telly, and with plenty of low-ceilinged cosiness.

It didn't take long for the sun to disappear (our walk started at 7:00 P.M.) and it quickly became difficult to get decent photos, so bear with me! This modest, surprisingly traditional house on the corner of Chelsea's Royal Avenue belongs to Richard Rogers (remember from yesterday: the architect of the Lloyds building and the Pompidou Centre). Apparently, he likes to design the crazy buildings for other people, but when it comes to his home life, he likes it traditional, at least on the outside:
Our guide, Mary, told us that the interior of the house is supposed to be much less conventional, more in keeping with what you would expect from such an architect. Pub number two was the Phoenix, a nice enough place, but not our style at all--a bit young and upscale for upscale's sake. After we left the pub (we were spending about fifteen minutes at each place), we passed by the house where Mark Twain lived from 1896-97:
Mary pointed out several ex-pubs along the way, mentioning that six of the pubs that the walk used to stop at have now been closed--even though there are so many pubs in London, traditional pubs are slowly disappearing.

We walked past a few more "famous" houses, including the once home of George Eliot,
and the current home of the Sainsbury family (once home to Dante Gabriel Rossetti).
Albert Bridge looked gorgeous all lit up in the night:
This private home wasn't once a pub, as the sign suggests,
but has always been a private residence--the owners just put up the sign! Our last stop was at The Pig's Ear,
which in Cockney rhyming slang stands for . . . that's right, "beer"! It looked like a nice pub, more in the vein of our first stop than our second, but by this point (actually way before now) we were freezing, since we hadn't gone home between our Open House daytime wanderings in our summer clothes and our evening London Walks tour, still in our summer clothes, so we just walked to the nearest bus stop and started heading home. Although the days remain warm, even hot, by evening it's definitely autumn, with winter laughing from just around the corner, ready to devour our short sleeves.