Archive for the 'Places' Category

Looking at the images in the slideshow above (taken by British documentary photographer Dave Wyatt), you’d think they were snaps of a quaint English market town or a Dutch or German village. And you’d be wrong. The photos were taken in China. Shanghai, in fact.

Shanghai?

But where are the pagodas and curly slate roofs, rounded doorways, bright red paint and lavish dragons of old Shanghai? Or even the imposing, megalithic skyscrapers and roaring highways of new Shanghai, proclaiming here is a modern city of the East?

Well, this is Thames Town China. Its website says, “Loud, dirty Shanghai seems a far cry from the yew and plane- lined avenues and cobbled pedestrian-friendly streets of ThamesTown. Here the broad sun-hats of the Chinese workers putting the finishing touches to the development are the only indication that you are on the outskirts of China’s biggest city. Not in a posh commuter town in the stockbroker belt of a British city.”

The blurb goes on: “Residents can sip their bitter in a traditional English pub, “The Thames Town”, as children scamper across the medieval market square to a bilingual school, while red-brick warehouses form a commercial area on the waterfront. Developers are targeting British companies such as Tesco and Sainsbury to add to the authentic high-street feel so the town’s expected 10,000 residents can shop in true British style. There are sporting facilities and everything a town of its size should have.”

This is apparently one of nine towns in this area modelled on European market towns, including Dutch Town, German New Town, Nordic Town and Italian Town (with Venetian style canals!). Unnervingly, the website declares proudly that German New Town, was designed by Albert Speer, the son of Hitler’s favourite architect….

I find it curious that the aspirations of the rising Chinese middle classes would be to live in a mock-European setting rather than in surroundings inspired by their own heritage and perhaps re-modelled for the 21st century. I could understand the desire to live in modern houses with all modern comforts and facilities but it’s the recreation of Victorian or Tudor houses that are then modernized with fake modernized medieval streets that is odd in my mind. There is also the fantasy of what England is - or perhaps should be - like that seems straight out of an Enid Blyton book: lovely local colour down at the pub while The Famous Five and Secret Seven scamper safely in the market square.

Meanwhile, in the real England, Victorian terraced houses are pokey and dark, Tudor houses are impossible to upkeep because of Grade II listing, youths are knived outside pubs, others vomit and piss in the street on a Saturday night, the homeless sleep in the streets and cars clog up the market square and medieval streets.

Hmm, maybe we in the UK should all move over to China to the sanitized version of our towns…!

And perhaps that’s the point of these fake places. People can live the idyllic lives they imagine in “exotic” surroundings, without ever leaving home and without ever having to deal with the real natives of those “exotic” settings. Who needs reality when these days, money can buy you your dreams…

But having said all that from the cynical Brit part of me, being an Enid Blyton fan, there’s a part of me that fancies living in a fantasy version of Old Blighty! What about you? Would you like to live in Thames Town or Italian Town? Or what about if an Old Shanghai Town were to be built next to Surbiton just outside the real London?

Slideshow photos: thanks to DaveWyatt on flickr.com

One of the most interesting things about living in London is that history is all around us - often going back hundreds if not thousands of years. But I often tend to forget that history isn’t just about the great national monuments like Nelson’s Column or the London Wall and other tourist attractions. The suburb I live in in South London goes back to medieval times, I believe, though there are no visible remains of the Dulwich of that period. The current “settlement” arose in its present form in the Victorian times, created by developers out of fields and farmland for wealthy London businessmen and merchants who wanted to retire out of the smog-filled city to the countryside.

How do I know all this?

Dulwich has the good fortune to have a very knowledgeable local historian, Brian Green, who has written a number of books about the area when he’s not busy running the local art shop/ stationers. He gave a talk last weekend at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on Victorian Dulwich, which has changed the way I look at my little world around my house.

I tend to stride purposefully from home to the train station or bus stop and back again or hurry along to the local shops, not noticing much around me other than that I’m in a pleasant leafy suburb. After Brian’s talk and his brilliant collection of photographs ranging from fields and muddy lanes and a few grand Georgian houses (pre-1850s) to horse-and-buggies along the high street (late 1800s) and architectural details of terraced and semi-detached houses (as they are in the present day), I find myself looking at the houses and streets around me as if I were a tourist, ticking off in my head the various points he had highlighted for us. For example: ah, yes, there’s a Florentine style turret. And here’s a Victorian Gothic arch. There’s some Swiss hanging droplets. And some plaster heads and carved foliage - inspired by the Doge’s Palace in Venice.

These details were made available by builders in their catalogues to independent housing speculators looking to make a buck. The speculators developed clusters of houses (with a minimum of 6 houses per site) back in the late 1800s as an economic upturn fuelled a Victorian “buy to let” market. Aimed at the up and coming middle class family, the terraced houses in East Dulwich aspired to grandness within a modest budget.

But the market floundered as uptake of the properties did not meet initial expectations. The reason? Public transport to Dulwich was practically non-existent so the clerks and office workers targetted by the speculators didn’t come in their droves as hoped. It was only some decades later when the commuter railway was built in the wake of the Crystal Palace exhibition complex that this part of South London revived.

These days, we’re still cut off from the tube and it’s a hassle to get to and from London on the trains, with their ever reducing timetables, and on the buses, stuck in traffic endlessly along the Walworth Road. That’s the thing about Dulwich that we moan about - but it is also the thing that keeps this leafy “village” still village-like. So, while the Dulwich of today is home to both the wealthy and not so wealthy, at the end of our long days of slog in the smog-filled city we can still all enjoy feeling as if we’ve retired to the country for the night!

Photo of Lordship Lane: with thanks from ideal-homes.org.uk
Photo of Brian Green and me: my own collection

I love autumn.

After the heat of the summer, the cooling air is so refreshing. But it’s not yet bitterly cold because the energy of the sun absorbed by the earth over the last few months still maintains an underlying warmth so we can wander around in T-shirts but without that feeling of oppressive heat that characterises July and August. We’ve had a couple of fantastic weeks here in London when we’ve been able to bask in the gentle sunlight in the garden without burning to a crisp or gasping for air. But it’s distinctly colder now and you can feel the radiating warmth from the earth slowing dying down.

It’s not just this sense of being air-conditioned while the sun shines that I love. September here in the northern hemisphere is the time for new beginnings - even as the year is waning. It’s the time that the new school year starts and my first experience of September in the UK was coming to London in 1975 to start my first term at a British boarding school. It was all so new and different from Malaysia. I was excited, scared, nervous, curious and full of wonder all at the same time - at this new country, the pale people, the different way of doing things and at the new adventure lying ahead of me. This September mingling of warmth and coolness always reminds me of that time.

And I guess each year, it’s not just the school kids and students who start new adventures in September. This is the time when everyone else also comes back from their summer holidays, refreshed and reinvigorated. The streets of London noticeably fill up again after the summer lull and the traffic is worse - that part of September I really dislike! Projects that have been postponed over the August holiday period get picked up again. There’s a sudden spurt of activity as people catch up with each other.

I often feel energised in the autumn. I’ve started running again - I had been finding it awfully painful trying to keep that up over the summer because of the heat and now, the cool air makes plodding round the park so much more bearable. I’m starting a new book project - which, fingers crossed, if all goes well, will come to something: more on that next week after a meeting that I’m having with my editor at Kogan Page… There’s a round of talks I’m scheduled to give as well as a bunch of social activities with friends. Yes, autumn is the time of new beginnings.

I’m struck by how the changing seasons really influences the way we mark time here in the temperate zone. The financial year is marked out in quarters and the legal marker dates for leases and quarterly payments fall on traditional feast days that celebrated each distinct season. When planning medium to long term projects in the business world, there seems to me a natural tendency to think in three month chunks. In our daily lives, we look forward to or plan for Christmas, Easter, the school holidays in July and the time when people are back from their holidays in September. We notice the winds and rain or storms during the “in between” seasons of autumn and spring. We grumble about the rain in winter - and also the rain in summer. We look back at our lives in seasons - “I remember around Easter last year…” or “Aaah, the summer of 1976…” (famous for its long heatwave).

I’ve never lived in Malaysia as an adult although I grew up there - it’s on the equator and has a warm tropical climate year round. I’ve also never lived in a place like California where there seems to be perpetual sunshine and an even temperature. I wonder how I would mark time if I were to migrate there? How would I remember my past if it all looks and feels like one season? Would I miss the variety of having a different ambient world every three months - and the opportunity to have a change of wardrobe every few months? Or would I just embrace the year round sameness and be glad that I were no longer in rainy London?

Photo: thanks to hichako from flickr.com (CCL)

Today, 23 Sept Sydney woke up to an eerie dust storm - the red dust from the outback has been picked up by strong winds and blown across the country. Experts have attributed this to climate change and the ongoing drought afficting in Australia.

I picked up the above photo from the Guardian Online website, one of a gallery of amazing scenes. (You can check out the gallery by clicking on the pic alongside). Wanting to find out more- and especially how this phenomena is being covered online - I had a meander through the internet to see what else was out there.

There are a lot of home videos on Youtube, uploaded by Ozzies affected by the red storm - mainly shots of their backyard and local area. The most interesting video of the batch is a slideshow compilation of photos sent in to ABC Radio Australia by their listeners:

On Flickr, there’s also a group project on Flickr, “The Red Sydney Project - Dust Storm Days”. One of the group administrators explains on the group page:

“We awoke to an intense glow. We rose from our beds and we started shooting. This group is a collaborative effort to capture a virtual Sydney from Sept 23 - the morning when an eerie duststorm captivated thousands of digitial cameras across the city.We hope you’re enjoying the group photos, so far. The response has been tremendous and the photos are stunning. We welcome shots all shots from the dust storm including NSW, ACT and QLD.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed! 1000+ photos!”

Anyone who has a Flickr account can join the group and at the time of writing, there are 368 group members (up from 367 even as I was viewing the page!). The slideshow below shows the photos submitted by the members to the group pool:

There’s a map, too, showing where the photos were taken as well as a discussion forum.

For background information about the environmental conditions that caused the dust storm, The Sydney Morning Herald has a good slideshow with audio interviews on top explaining the issues. There’s no embed code for me to bring that over here so you’ll have to go over to their page for the meteorological backgruond.

Word based blogs have been secondary in this news event, with many of them posting Flickr items or linking to news reports (rather like me here on the other side of the world!). This is not surprising as the phenomena is obviously best captured visually. I’ve found a few brief blog accounts:

Silvermonk

Travelblog

Wedding Planning Tips

When I posted an link to the Guardian photo on Facebook, an Australian friend based in London added a comment to say that he’d been in touch with a friend in Sydney who reported that everything had cleared by midday and blue skies were back.

My childhood friend from KL, Mei W, sent me a link awhile back to a blog all about my old school Bukit Bintang Girls School, Back to BBGS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

I was at the BBGS Primary School 2, from between 1973-75, after which I left to come to school in the UK. Although I was there for only a short period, I’ve always had fond memories of the place and the friends that I made there.

Sadly, the school is no longer on its original site. In modern KL, the location is prime real estate, right in the middle of the shopping district. It clung on for as long as it could but eventually gave in to commercial pressures around 1999. The site is now the location of the luxury Star Hill development of condos - Bukit means Hill in Malay and Bintang means Star.

Although the primary school building was more modern than the colonial style secondary school, I loved the school building for its open verandahs and I seem to remember giant banyan trees and rain trees in the grounds. There was a very basic canteen near the playing fields selling laksa and friend noodles as well as stinky salted fish satay sticks and bubble gum. I would sometimes buy a bowl of laksa (10 cents, I think) but other times bring in home made sandwiches - chicken, corned beef fried with onions or fried luncheon meat, or home made fried rice.

I can still remember the names of some of my classmates - Gwen, Bek-Ngan, Jia Yee, Latifah, Valencia, Dolly, Helen. My class teacher was Miss Teh and our Malay teacher was Cik Zaleha. Miss Ma, the principal, was a very elegant Chinese lady who always wore a cheong-sam. Her deputy was Mrs Bux, whom we were all scared of because she had a very stern presence.

There were 50 pupils to class and I always came bottom - 49 or 50! - except in English, where I usually got 100% in all the tests. My family despaired that I was a dunce. At best, I was lazy and didn’t study as I should. They tore their hair out that my father was spending all that money to send me to school in the UK - what if it all turned out to be a waste of his hard earned money and I spent my years in England a layabout, good-for-nothing dunce? What if I never amounted to anything?

I think my difficulty at BBGS was that the text books and schoolwork was in Malay and I had previously gone to an English language school. We spoke English at home. I read in English, wrote in English, thought in English. At that point, the medium of instruction was still English and my friends and I also spoke in English. I was finding it hard to deal with the school work in another language, even though it was the national language of Malaysia. Also, I knew I was going to school in England and that I would never need to use Malay there so what was the point of it all?

In the UK, it took me awhile to adjust but as it turned out, this is where I thrived. I was still never top of the class to my extended family’s disappointment but I’d come in at respectable above average ranking. I never matched the string of A’s that my parents and uncles and aunts boasted of in their O’ and A’ levels but trundled solidly along with Bs mostly and the occasional shocking C and even an E! But I think I found that being in England suited me and I felt free to develop those other talents that I had that couldn’t be measured by exams.

But there are many things about Malaysia that I miss - the food, the climate, the warm and friendly Malaysian way of being, Malaysian English, the rain trees, that orange sunlight in the evenings after school. And although I did dismally at BBGS from an academic point of view, I had a happy time there with my class mates and my memories of the school and the sense of place I have about it makes me sad that it is no longer there physically in the location that I remember. Reading through the Back to BBGS blog has made me feel a bit like an old lady, looking back at her young days!

Back to BBGS is the personal blog of an Old Girl, Joanna Yeoh, and collects the memories and stories of BBGSians. It’s a huge undertaking for one person - thank you, Joanna, and all power to you - and all the BBGSian contributors - for creating such a fantastic resource and archive!

Photo credits:

Modern Bukit Bintang - thanks to Sham Hardy from flickr.com (CCL)

BBGS school sign - thanks to Suriani Sanusi from the Back to BBGS blog

The Japan Matsuri (festival) is coming to Spitalfields in London in on Saturday 19th September this year. The aim is to celebrate “Japan and its rich culture, arts & crafts” in festival welcoming autumn, according to the Japan Matsuri website.

The festival is organised by The Japan Society and the Japanese Residents Association and they are taking a very “Web 2.0″ collaborative approach, asking people to tell them “what you would like to see at the Matsuri through our blogspot. It’s your festival, we want your ideas to be included!” They are also calling on “all young artists with an interest in Japanese themes to perform on our stages” and “if you are a Japanese catering company or restaurant, or if you run Japan-related craft business, interested in holding a stall at the festival contact us”. The contact details are on the Matsuri website. There are already 7 comments with suggestions on the site at the time of writing so do go over and add your ideas to help make it a user-generated festival!

I’m definitely going to try to go along if I’m not out of town that weekend. The new re-vamped Spitalfields is a great location and the festival looks like it will be really interesting and fun - in particular, I’m keen (as usual) to check out the food stalls!

I first heard about this event via bespoke tailor Carol Alayne who blogged about this festival on her blog Tailoring For Women - it will be happening on the doorstep of her studio in Spitalfields. Thanks for the tip, Carol.

Picture: from the Japan Matsuri website

In my last podcast (#23) I started an occasional series called “My Local London” where I share some of the things about London that I find interesting, unusual and fun, as someone who has lived here for over 20 years. In that podcast, I talked about The Fourth Plinth on Trafalgar Square. Today, I’d like to share with you a riverside walk we did the other day from Richmond to Hampton Wick. I’m doing this by way of a written post instead of a podcast as I didn’t bring my digital recorder with me on the walk - and also, I’ll be including some directions about the walk so you may want to print out this post if you want to go on the walk yourself.

One of the best things about London is the River Thames, which bisects the city from West to East. You can walk along most of the Thames Path across Central London through some of the city’s most historic sites. You can also head out East towards the sea or West up towards the source. I’m particulary fond of the western segments from Hammersmith westwards. You can do most of them in short, manageable legs as there are many tube or train stations that make it convenient to walk along in half or full day chunks.

The walk we did this week started at Richmond station. Coming out of the station, turn left and walk along the high street (The Quadrant) full of shops, cafes and restaurants. Richmond has the feel of a lively, cosmopolitan - and affluent - town and you could spend quite awhile shopping in the upmarket boutiques and refreshing yourself with cappucinos and lingering over lunch. But we were out for fresh air and exercise so we strode past them all briskly, heading down The Quadrant until Duke Street where we turned right.

Duke Street open out onto Richmond Green. Walking diagonally left across the Green, you suddenly have a vast sense of space after the confines of your tube or train journey and the hustle and bustle of the high street. At the far corner, aim for Old Palace Lane, a cute little street of workers cottages that look like they have come straight out of Wordsworth’s Lake District - but no doubt costing millions these days!

At the bottom of Old Palace Lane, the river opens out to the left and right, with Twickenham Bridge on your right. Turn left and the footpath will now take you all the way to Hampton Wick, with the river on your right.

The route takes you past some lavish houses and flats on your left, with cafes spilling out onto the paved riverside walk. There were ice cream vans and scores of young kids and teenagers as well as young families and older couples mingling in this area between Twickenham Bridge and Richmond Bridge.

Once you pass Richmond Bridge and head onwards to Petersham Meadow, the scene becomes quieter and more rural. Up on the left, the red Gothic building of The Star and Garter nursing home for ex-servicemen and -women rises up over the meadow. The path gradually narrows as trees and shrubs now close in and it suddenly feels like you’re in the middle of the countryside, with very few other people but a few cyclists and other walkers.

This lovely rural section carries on for a few miles until you reach Teddington Lock, where smart apartment blocks appear on the far bank across the neatly tended lock. At this point, you can cross the footbridge to the other side and head towards Teddington Station but we stayed on the south bank and carried onwards towards Hampton Wick.

At Lower Ham Road, we came across a canoe club and several teams of school children learning to canoe in single kayaks and also a team of them in a double catamaran. It looked great fun to be careening through the water on such a bright clear day - although the kids were having some difficulty co-ordinating their strokes: they needed a big scary guy beating a drum Ben-Hur style, I reckon…

Just before Kingston Bridge, we found the Boaters Inn, an unexpected gastropub in a rather unprepossessing wooden building. Our feet were aching and we were ravenous so we stopped for a late lunch - and to our delight, the food was delicous, the portions were huge and the inside of the Inn has the feel of a modern brasserie! Between us, we checked out the fish and chips, fish pie, pan fried mackerel and grilled pork chop before diving into chocolate brownies and ice-cream, summer pudding and lemon cheesecake. Yum!

Moving on, we came to civilization at Kingston Bridge where there is a huge John Lewis! We didn’t tarry there for a shopping break as we would have liked but now headed to the north bank across the bridge for a stroll in Hampton Palace Park, which is free and not connected to the palace itself these days. Back in the day, though, it would have formed part of Hampton Court Palace grounds, as signified by the landscaped water feature and fountain in the park that draws your eye to the eastern facade of the palace in the far distance. As we meandered through the long grass, we came across herds of deer that glanced up curiously at us, descendants from the deer that Henry VIII used to hunt here.

The original plan had been to walk all the way along the river to Hampton Court train station but after just over 8 miles, we were flaked so we headed to Hampton Wick station which was nearer and headed back Waterloo (trains are every 20 mins or so and journey time is about 30 minutes).

The map of our walk is below - click on it to go to a detailed view with mileage in Google Pedometer:

Resources:

There are a range of guides to the Thames Path

loclon

When I visit a different culture or country I like to make sure I eat the local food as much as I can — and if I possible, immerse myself completely by not having any meal that comes from my own British or Malaysian culture.

I spent a few days in Strasbourg recently with my mother and sister. It’s my mum’s 70th birthday this year and my sister and I took her on this trip as a birthday treat. We were all curious to try the local Alsatian specialities as Strasbourg is right on the French/German border and the French cuisine there has a heavy German influence.

We were immediately charmed by the city of Strasbourg when we arrived. The old city is essentially an island encircled by canals and River Ill. It is largely pedestrianised in this area with most people walking, cycling or using the very quiet and efficient tram system. Many of the buildings date from the mediaeval period, with lots of timber framed houses that seemed to me more Bavarian than French. The main cobbled streets are punctuated by quaint little alleyways where we discovered many little boutique shops, cafes, restaurants and winstubs, the Alsace region’s equivalent of British pubs or Holland’s brown cafes. Everyone was very friendly and helpful — and we were struck by how most people easily switched between French, German and English.

On our first day, we came across what seemed to us a typical winstub down a side alley near the cathedral. It was a bright sunny day and it is a moment to adjust to the gym light when we stepped through the heavy wooden doors. It reminded me very much of a typical British pub, with exposed wooden beams, wood panelling and coloured glass in the windows — but with a more rugged roughhewn ambience. We excitedly chose three platters from the Alsatian specialities section of the menu. I had confit de canard while my sister chose the knuckle of pork and my mother had the selection of smoked meat: sausage, belly pork, ham and some kind of meatball pate. When the dishes arrived, they were completely enormous and loaded with piles of sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. We dug in with relish as we had not eaten since very early in the morning and we thoroughly enjoyed the first quarter of the meal as the unfamiliar tastes of smoked meat and sour cabbage gave us the sense of having arrived in a foreign and exotic place.

However, the novelty began to wear off as we realised that we were already full and still had a mountain of meat and sauerkraut to wade through. It was not long before we were soundly defeated.. We waddled out into the bright alleyway, blinking in the sunlight and feeling rather like battery pigs that had been forcefully stuffed with food and were now being momentarily released into the exercise yard.

I don’t know whether we were just very un-lucky or whether it’s just that Alsatian food is ultimately not to our taste but after a couple more meals in the local restaurants, I was pining for rice and some stirfried vegetables. The smell of sauerkraut seemed to permeate most of the restaurants and brasseries. When we ordered other more specifically French dishes rather than the Alsatian meet specialities, they seemed to be heavily laden with cream and left us feeling solid, stolid and staunch. Even their salads seemed to come sob and in thick, creamy mayonnaise style dressing. We tried the other local speciality, flamenkuchen, which is somewhat like a pizza but with a very thin crusty base and made with sour cream and smoked meats — that also had the effect of making me feel rather queasy and stuffed to the gills afterwards.

There were some wonderful patisserie is and I have to confess that we voluntarily indulged in a mouthwatering pastries filled with custard and cream and sugar and chocolate. These definitely made up for the sauerkraut! But, unfortunately, their effect on our stomachs and waistlines were not filed different from the stodgy main meals…

Some evenings, we were too tired after a day’s sightseeing or shopping, and instead of going out to a restaurant, we had a picnic in the hotel room of onion tart, quiche lorraine, smoked meats and olives. One night, we finally crumbled and dashed to a Thai restaurant and had some lovely rice dishes, to our great relief! Unlike most Thai restaurants in the UK, the portions were enormous and the duck dish that I had was one of the tastiest meals I had all holiday — the dark was done with a spicy prawns with a hint of coconut: an unusual but very successful combination.

I was very relieved to arrive back home to my usual diet of fresh vegetables, salad, brown rice, brown bread and light sauces. Which is not to say that I am vegetarian or vegan or anything other than a hearty meat eater! One of my favourite meals is a nice thick slab of steak. But what the holiday did make me realise is that my general daily diet is pretty healthy. I’m just not used to thick cream sauces, preserved vegetables and preserved meats, overly salted food and sugary things made with white flour. All these things are wonderful treats from time to time and enjoyable for being occasional indulgences - but having them every day and every meal is just way too much for my constitution to bear!

I am now going to spend the next few weeks working of all the Michelin Man tyres that have appeared round my midriff in the last few days. It’s not going to be much fun starting up my running again as I will be lugging this extra weight around with me!