The Tarot Tour of London

The Wheel of Fortune card from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck -
co-designed by A.E.Waite who has an interesting connection with the Horniman Museum

Coming up next week (Thursday October 8th) at South East London Folklore Society:

'The Tarot Tour of London uses 22 of the major historical sites as the basis of the tour as they correspond with the major Arcana. There are obvious ones like the Wheel of Fortune being represented by the London Eye and the Tower card by the Tower of London. Others are not so easy to presume as it is their history, myth, legend and folklore that makes them complement the meaning of a card.

Geraldine Beskin of The Atlantis Bookshop is a Londoner and occultist and is delighted to combine the two as she presents the capital from a fresh, new angle.

The talk will start at 8pm in the upstairs room of the Old King’s Head, off Borough High Street SE1. Entrance is £3/1.50 concs.

To avoid disappointment in event of a full house you can email nigelofbermondsey@gmail.com to book in advance'

Vanished City: London's Lost Neighbourhoods

Coming up at South East London Folklore Society next month, a talk by writer Thomas Bolton - 'Vanished City: London's Lost Neighbourhoods':

'London is in a state of constant transformation, layer upon layer built up over centuries of destruction and reconstruction. There is so much change all around us that we scarcely notice it, but among the areas now vanished and forgotten are some of the city’s most famous, and infamous, neighbourhoods.

These include the most feared neighbourhood in the Western world, London’s first Olympic Park, its first port, the original Grub Street, a high society spa resort, an occult square, a landscape of ancient, mythical kings, a notorious slum, and the streets stalked by the first London serial killer. Through these streets crowd the Earl of Essex, Christopher Marlowe, Charles Dickens, Alexander Pope, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Aleister Crowley, Greta Garbo, Fu Manchu, the Ancients of Norton Folgate and the possessors of 8,000 unidentified corpses'.

Tom Bolton is the author of London's Lost Rivers, A Walker's Guide (2011).

The talk is on Thursday, February 12 at 8:00pm upstairs in the Old King’s Head Pub, The King’s Yard, 45 Borough High Street SE1 1NA.  Entrance is £3/1.50 concs. To avoid disappointment you can email nigelofbermondsey@gmail.com to book in advance.

(facebook details here)

Tales from the Riverbank with London Dreamtime + Irish tales at South East London Folklore Society

Really enjoyed 'Faeries of the Minesweeper' on 22 August from London Dreamtime. A tale of the fairies in a mill at Deptford Creek from Vanessa Woolf was interspersed with songs from Nigel of Bermondsey; costumes and settings were designed by Lucy Williams. Starting out by St Pauls Church we wound our way to a railway arch by Crossfields Estate and then across the Creek to finish up on the Minesweeper Boat.

Vanessa and Nigel on the Minesweeper, sadly didn't manage to get a good picture of them
with the many twilight ducks flying over.

They are back in action on another boat on Sunday 21 September (3:30 pm - 5:00 pm) with 'A Trip down the Thames in Story and Song' on HMS President, the 1918 ship redecorated as Dazzle Ship London by  artist Tobias Rehberger.The event is sponsored by the Londonist and is part of this months's Totally Thames season of events on and around the river. HMS President is moored at  Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0HJ.

Nigel is also busy next Thursday 11 September (8 pm) - hosting South East London Folklore Society at the Old Kings Head in Borough High Street. Guest this time is Thomas McCarthy, the Irish Traveller, Folk Singer & Storyteller. He has a repertoire of over 200 traditional songs that he sings unaccompanied. He also has an extensive story repertoire from which he shall be drawing from at SELFS. Expect to meet fairies, hunchbacks, banshees, druids, Finn McCool and Cuchulain (Facebook event details)  I've caught Tom singing a few times, including at Kit & Cutter, and he's a great talent.

Thomas McCarthy

Ruin Lust

A couple of weeks left at Tate Britain of 'Ruin Lust', the exhibition tracing artists' fascination with ruins from the 18th century onwards. London features heavily, with Transpontine content including:

Photographs by Henry Dixon of old inns facing demolition, commissioned  by the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London in the 1880s. This one is of King's Head Inn yard off Borough High Street SE1 in 1881. There is still a pub there of course, but the old 17th century coaching inn structure is no more:

The White Hart Inn in the same street was also photographed by Dixon in 1881, prior to being demolished in 1889:

Keith Coventry's Estate Paintings appear to be abstract designs but are in fact based on the layout of London estates. The exhibition features his 'Heygate Estate', painted in 1995 before the Estate became a famous ruin.

The exhibition also includes Coventry's bronze casts of vandalised saplings in Queens Road SE15 and 'Burgess Park SE5, Planted 1983, Destroyed 1988':

Laura Oldfield Ford's 'Ferrier Estate' (2010) pictures the now demolished estate in Kidbrooke. She sees ruins emerging as part of a class-based reshaping of London, and also wonders about the ruins of the future

'My psychogeographic drifts through different areas of London have become a melancholy project documenting the loss of certain aspects of the city . I return to places that have been important , sites of collective memory and desire that are being demolished. During the Blair years walking through the redeveloped and regenerated London streets was to experience alienation and familiarity simultaneously, fragments of memory would emerge as splinters in the smooth space of developers plans. Places that had been in the commons were being gated off, the consequence of a decade of corporate land grabs and sustained social cleansing. London was becoming an enclave for the wealthy, and the rest of us were being pushed out, scrubbed off the map and out of history... 

Many of the ruins we see emerging at an accelerated rate around London and the South east are the ruins of the future, the new build luxury highrises and inevitable victims of the next collapse in the property market. There are ranks of empty blocks, like Capital Towers in Stratford, bought off plan in auctions in Hong Kong and Malaysia and left as menacing totems of a speculative free for all. What will become of these places? Maybe they will end up as negative equity ghettos like the Pinnacles in Woolwich, sublet to recent arrivals from the former colonies and left in a state of chronic disrepair , or perhaps they will be seized and occupied by bands of rent defaulters, young people unable to afford anywhere to live in the South East whose desperation has led them to take militant direct action' (Laura Oldfield Ford, Zones of Sacrifice: 2010-2014)

'Ferrier Estate' by Laura Oldfield Ford

Ruin Lust at Tate Britain closes on 18th May