I had to renew my passport which necessitated a day-trip to Peterborough in Cambridgeshire (London couldn't fit me in until days after my travel dates). Peterborough calls itself a 'Renaissance' city and claims to be one the sunniest in the UK. Also, it has a sizeable Italian and Portuguese community. Sometimes, small cities that are off the tourist map and overlooked in favour of more recognised destinations can hold a pleasant surprise. I didn't expect campaniles and sun-drenched piazzas - otherwise surely we would all have ticked it off - but one travels hopefully and I like to keep an open mind.
Peterborough is the gateway to the Fens (La Porta delle Fenzini). Topographically, The Fens is a very flat place between two slightly undulating places, one of which is the North Sea. By contrast, The Chilterns offer almost Tyrolean high drama. It is a landscape at its best in winter, I fancy, when mist and fog descends, lending its Anglian monotony a diffused, ghostly watercolour mood. I noticed that a good many people there were large-boned, healthy and somewhat ruddy of cheek. The latter, not unsurprising, as they are buffeted by a year-round wind straight off the Urals, without an hill between there and Poland to slow its velocity.
The lady at Window 6, at whom I smiled lavishly while handing over my documents in the hope that she might fast-track me, returned my smile with a look of benevolence rare in a civil servant and told me that I could pick up my new bio-metric passport in four hours.
Things To Do In Peterborough When You're Waiting For Your Identity. There
is the 12th-century
catedrale, a splendid example of Early English Gothic, and of which the city is justly proud. Unfortunately, it is surrounded by an example of 1980s style town planning: carbuncular, municipal; an unfathomable one-way system, a branch of
Ethel Austin and the predictable attempt at European cafe culture in the form of a small, draughty plaza visited only by mackintoshed pensioners and bus fumes. I ordered a pesto and brie panini. Regrettably, it did not tantalise. Umbria receded and, with it, the promised memory of a distant summer, as I realised that its authenticity lay only in its wrapper.
Stamford. We will go to Stamford. Lying 15 miles to the northwest (20 minutes by car, 2 hours on horseback) Stamford is a gem of a town. Straddling a modest river tucked within the border of Lincolnshire it is a symphony of Regency Gothic - but with the volume turned down - and built in York stone. Unlike other pretty towns, Stamford is too reserved or sensible to Disneyfy itself with the confectionery of souvenir
shoppes and themed
experiences.
There are some antiquarium book-shops (
Treks And Palavers by Captain R.R. Oakley,
My Vagina, Your Vagina by Dr. Hildegard Hanff), some nice places to buy scented candles and an antique shop. As everybody left this antique shop they said
thank you to the Rugby-playing male assistant behind the counter. After years in Spain this strikes me as peculiarly English. What were they thanking him for? "Thank you for being so
attractive." Or "Thank you for over-charging me, you
devilish brute." We were going to pop into one of Stamford's pubs - which are all seemingly owned by a brewery called
Everard's - but it's all non-smoking now, so one didn't see the point.
Back to Peterborough. Picked up the passport. Mission accomplished. Awfully big day out. Snored all the way to South Mimms.
As mentioned in my previous post, one of my favourite painters is Edward Hopper. Aside from an aesthetic appreciation of realism, he was an artist who lived at a time (and in a place) that was very dynamic, exciting and fuelled by an optimism for the future. Engineering -- the dream of Leviathan in steel -- soared ever upward to meet the true blue of democratic skies, spanning once unfordable waters and chewed up miles of prairie between its locomotive jaws so that the California Zephyr and the Commodore Vanderbuilt could glide onto the marbled Roman concourse of Union Station. With the automobile revolution Americans began to explore their own vast continent: bitumen adventurers in synthetic fabrics driving the wheel into a new and savage topography -- overnighting on atolls of neon and paleolithic airconditioning. Early to mid-century America.
Hopper was often perceived as being a symbolist because the positioning and the expression of his characters often suggested an acute detachment. In retrospect it perhaps suggested an emotional and psychological distancing in a rapidly modernising world that would eventually herald a New World dystopia. However, Hopper's real passion was not symbolism but sunlight. Look at how the western sun hits the wall above the spartan motel bed. I'm sure he thought very hard about this: the intrusion of light. 
Gowanus is an overlooked industrial neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York. It is bordered by Red Hook and Carroll Gardens to the west, Park Slope to the east and is characterised by the Gowanus Canal which, once a busy cargo hub, has declined in tandem with domestic shipping. The canal is heavily polluted and urban legend claims it as a Mafia dumping ground. A character in Jonathan Lethem's detective novel Motherless Brooklyn refers to it as "the only body of water in the world that is 90% guns." As other areas have become re-zoned for residential purposes, Gowanus maintains its identity as a district that continues to offer affordable work spaces to artists and individual businesses. A long-abandoned transit authority power substation in the area has been reclaimed and occupied by squatters and artists who oppose corporatisation by Wall Street. It sits on a site worth $27m but has yet to be re-developed because it's located next to the Russian-style environmental disaster of the aforementioned canal. I'm a libertarian and I believe that empty, abandoned buildings are up for grabs. 
A local artist, Ella Yang, has produced a number of oil paintings depicting the urban landscape in and around the Gowanus neighbourhood. The two featured here are from a series titled "Representational oil paintings made in Brooklyn without Irony". Some of these works appeal to me because they offer up a certain romanticism in the way that beauty is revealed in the distinctly ordinary. Her style is American realism, and vaguely redolent of Edward Hopper, one of my favourite painters. For me, sometimes the seduction of a painting lay in its power to produce the wish to step into it. Depictions of urban settings: canals, wharves, warehouses, bridges and streets arrow-straight can have this effect on me in a way that a picturesque mountain pasture never does. 
