There are many folly buildings at Kew Gardens and yesterday I learned that the person who instigated them had a swivel chair installed inside the little domed colonade at the top of the hill near the lake next to the Palm House. From that vantage point she could survey the results of the gardeners’ labour. The view would have been much different in those days but I thought I’d make a mock swivel chair video of the view from yesterday at Kew Gardens.

Many more Kew Gardens photos are amongst my photosets on Flickr such as : Kew Gardens October 2011 Kew Gardens Collection of Kew Gardens Photosets Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogKew Gardens

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Australia Garden at British Museum

AndyRob

Australia Garden at British Museum

AndyRob

Australia Garden at British Museum

Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London feels different to anywhere outside. By London, though, we are only talking about a small area of central, west and north london. Out in the banlieu, you might as well be in Bradford.

This article titled “Never has London’s atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme” was written by Ian Jack, for The Guardian on Saturday 16th April 2011 07.30 UTC In Bradford on a winter’s night 25 years ago, I stood in front of an estate agent’s window and made a calculation. For the price of our terrace house in north London – two up and two down and a bit of garden at the back – I could buy 10 similar houses in Bradford. This month I read that Burnley has the lowest property prices in England, and made another calculation. For the price of our London house I could buy 40 houses in Burnley that were averagely cheap and 80 of the very cheapest. This doesn’t mean that the differential in house prices between London and northern England has grown by more than 400% since 1986. I live in a bigger house now, and Burnley isn’t Bradford. But the gap is certainly widening: according to Halifax figures, houses in Newcastle-on-Tyne cost on average 28.8% less than they did in 2007, while in Islington they’ve risen 9.7% in the past year after changing very little – up or down – in the previous two. I look at pictures of the cheap houses in Burnley. They’re Victorian terraces. Their doors open straight on to the street, but they look solidly built from Pennine stone, no frills, but handsome. I imagine workers came home to them from cotton mills. Our house is certainly more imposing, three floors rather than two, with bow windows and ornamental red brick. But it has shallow foundations in London clay, so whether it’s sturdier is doubtful. I imagine someone who earned money in a suit, a senior clerk or a shopkeeper, first moved in when the terrace was completed in 1890. Without substantial inherited wealth, not even two-income families in the modern equivalent of those jobs could move in now. Newspapers sometimes write that the coalition cabinet contains “18 millionaires” as though it were a peculiar outrage, but everybody who’s paid off their mortgage in my street is a millionaire, if property is counted among their assets. And I stress that this is an ordinary street; until 30 or 40 years ago, a schoolteacher or a Fleet Street sub-editor could have afforded a house here. What explains my good fortune? To some extent many of my generation share it, especially if they worked in a trade or profession that blossomed in the 1980s (better, on the whole, to have been a national-newspaper journalist than a mechanical engineer). Most people I know have grander homes than their parents, no matter where they live in the United Kingdom. If they live in favoured parts of cities such as Edinburgh and Leeds, their homes are often enviable for their architecture and space. Only the very grandest of them, however, could be swapped for 40 cheap houses in Burnley. Above every other consideration – career, age – the combination of judgement and happenstance that made me a London house-owner is what explains my relative wealth. To a certain degree, this is an old story, and common to every metropolis. Moving to London four decades ago, I discovered one-bedroom flats were double the price of those I’d left behind in Glasgow. But then the 1980s arrived and the British economy’s centre of gravity shifted sharply (and to date, permanently) south. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million; 94% of jobs lost in every sector in those years were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. The traditional idea of Britain – one taught in school geography books – was a country that made its money in the midlands and the north (including Scotland, and not forgetting Wales) and spent the profits mainly in the south. But now both the generation and consumption of wealth grew concentrated in the same place, and the north-south divide suddenly marked something more fundamental than dialects and traditions. It was during this time, soon after the miners’ strike, that I stood with a notebook in a Bradford street and worked out the house price ratio. I wondered then if it could last. It didn’t seem possible that it could get worse – and for several years around the turn of the century it didn’t. Public spending financed by European grants and taxes raised in the City of London secured for many northern towns at least the suggestion of a viable future, if viability is measured in warehouse conversions, art galleries, warm cappuccino and rising property costs. The crash has since jeopardised all these simulacra of metropolitan living. The odd thing – the unfair thing, considering where the crash originated – is that the metropolis itself is immune. Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London now feels different to anywhere outside, as though you leave through city gates at turn-offs on the M25. Never has its atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme. “Revenues have bounced back and we are again seeing strong sales growth. The outlook for the UK as a whole may be gloomy but I think the long-term prospects for London, especially with the Olympics, are very good.” These are the words of Des Gunewardena, who runs a chain of expensive restaurants (Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino’s) and I read them last week in the Evening Standard, underneath the headline, “Surge in dining out feeds a flurry of restaurant launches”, next to a picture of Sienna Miller arriving at Sheekey’s. Each in the list of a dozen new restaurants still to open has the name of a chef attached. One of those already opened, the Pollen Street Social in Mayfair, took 5,000 calls looking for reservations in its first day. Beyond the hope that manufacturing industry can rebalance the economy, and the faraway prospect of a high-speed rail line to Birmingham, no government strategy exists to spread this wealth further north. The political tone is southern – look at the party leaders, or many of the Labour candidates parachuted to northern seats. It has been left to the BBC to do a little social engineering by – bravely or foolishly – relocating departments to Salford, Cardiff and Glasgow, so that half of its output will be produced outside London by 2016. Will better programmes result? Very few BBC staff seem to think so; on the evidence of BBC2′s Review Show, now made in Glasgow, extra expense in travel and hotel costs looks the likeliest difference. But three formerly great industrial cities will have BBC budgets and salaries added to their troubled economies; there will be job opportunities; the middle class in each place should grow a little larger. The staff who refuse to go are easily mocked. Haven’t they heard about the better quality of life, the Lowry, the easily accessed countryside, the “creative buzz” that’s now reported along the banks of the Clyde and the Manchester ship canal? Their reluctance to move is usually expressed in personal and professional terms: of not wanting to interrupt their children’s education, or being too far away from their show’s guests. But perhaps among their worries there’s something less easy to define; that by quitting London they’re removing themselves from its cultural, political and economic heft, which has grown so remorselessly and, whether or not BBC Breakfast gets done in Salford, will carry on regardless. The country’s centrifuge: both awful and interesting.

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Masterchef is no longer very interesting at all and there are also far too many cooking programmed and celebrity chefs on tv at present. Jamie Oliver’s dream school wasn’t exactly a success so I expect he’ll be back in the kitchen soon as well. Then there are all of the hybrid programmed that try to combine the most audience engaging aspects from across several genres. They never work very well either. Relocation cookery, gardening talent, animal casting and so on.

This article titled “MasterChef: have things gone stale?” was written by Vicky Frost, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 14th April 2011 10.44 UTC Sometimes I wonder if I’m stuck in a kind of MasterChef vortex. First there was Loyd Grossman. Then there was John and Gregg bellowing and sucking their forks on BBC2. Next came the celebrities, the professionals and the juniors. Followed by the Australians, and their version of the UK show. And now? Now we’re apparently watching the UK version of the Australian version of the UK update of the Loyd Grossman original, on primetime BBC1. Who knows where it will all end? Or indeed who will still be watching? Because while previous incarnations of MasterChef might have been stuffed with ridiculous declarations, surplus rounds that appeared to have no bearing on the result, and more passion and determination than even Lord Sugar might think totally necessary, the show was rarely boring. This series, however, I’m finding it hard to summon up the energy to last a whole episode. The problems started with the auditions. John cried in one of them. Nobody cooked a playdafoo that looked like a child had made it unsupervised, wearing a blindfold, while having a tantrum. John and Gregg didn’t patrol the aisles rolling their eyes wildly and grimacing at anyone daring to experiment like they were actually going to be poisoned. Cocky competitors weren’t totally shamed in front of each other. Things haven’t really improved since. The set seems to have quadrupled in size so that the competitors could feasibly source entirely different sets of local ingredients, and the invention test box has morphed into a whole deli. Worse are the challenges. Fair dos to Gregg for trying to ramp up the tension of cooking for a circus on Peckham Rye – PECKHAM RYE! — or making a buffet for the cast of Merlin – THE CAST OF MERLIN! – or just some students – ERM STUDENTS! – but why aren’t the contestants doing more cooking in actual restaurants with actual chefs? That used to be most of the show, now it seems to be all field kitchens and mass catering. Things got a little better on last night’s show with the arrival of Michel Roux’s croque-en-bouche and a trolleyload of cakes – although it possibly wasn’t entirely wise to draw parallels between flying for the RAF and making some sodding sandwiches, Gregg – but I still feel that I’m seeing the series out to the bitter end, rather than actively enjoying it. Even old Toorude and Gregg the Egg appear to have changed their ways. I have heard not one metallic basil; merely a sprinkle of deep, velvety, iron-rich descriptions; absolutely no threats to de-robe and dive into a pudding. Only one proper, ridiculous moment has lodged in my brain: John doing some kind of uber-camp panto hiss of “Don’t bite off more than you can chew!” at Miss Swansea. Now that’s why I watch MasterChef. Instead we’ve had a few guest chefs to liven things up. But largely we’ve been meant to be caring about the contestants and their journeys and the challenges they’ve overcome. Sadly I haven’t, and I don’t. This year’s contestants are largely oddly unappealing – perhaps because they were whittled down to a final bunch astonishingly quickly. All I’m really interested in is their best two courses, which we get to see surprisingly infrequently. It seems strange, really, that MasterChef Australia, from which the new UK show borrows heavily, can combine many of the same elements and come up trumps. But then it also does everything the British show does, just 50 times bigger. So the judges are more flamboyant, more ridiculous; the contestants live in a house together and vote each other off; they have cook-offs against real chefs; they cater amazing weddings on boats. Against that background, setting the whole thing in a vast, sunlit warehouse feels vaguely reasonable. On BBC1, it doesn’t. So: how are you getting on? Are you looking forward to the final couple of weeks in a state of slight outrage after this blog? Or have you lost interest already? And can anyone explain why, when MasterChef was on seemingly every night for increasingly idiosyncratic lengths of time, we all moaned it was too much, but now we have it once a week for an hour, it seems it’s too little – even though it’s also completely boring? A quandry no?

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The Harp is still Central  London’s best Cider pub too. The Harp - London Cider Pub

This article titled “Pub of the year award goes to a London local for first time” was written by Ben Quinn, for The Guardian on Wednesday 16th February 2011 00.05 UTC With its reputation for glitzy musicals and crammed weekend shopping, the bustling tourist magnet that is Covent Garden might seem an unlikely location for the latest official place of pilgrimage for beer purists. Yet in a first for London, a cosy bolthole in Chandos Place, near Trafalgar Square, has been named Britain’s pub of the year.by the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra). It was standing room only at what Camra described as a “true gem” where a cross-section of local workers, including musicians from nearby theatres, mingled in a narrow bar area adorned with mirrors and theatrical memorabilia. Undisturbed by either television or music, staff handed patrons samples from a range of eight real ales and imparted taste advice with all the authority of a master sommelier. “They look after their regulars very well – that’s the secret,” said Martin Knowles, a tubist from the English National Opera, sipping a pint of Darkstar Hophead with colleagues under the whir of a fan. Upstairs, a handful of drinkers relaxed in a small carpeted lounge area as the owner, Bridget Walsh, praised “good staff” for The Harp’s 17-year-old reputation. “They are the backbone, but we also pride ourselves on the range and quality of our real ale,” said Walsh, a real ale pioneer, who fretted slightly about the potential upsurge of interest in her pub, which outshone rivals from some of the more traditional real ale heartlands. Runners-up in the national pub of the year competition were Taps in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, the Beacon Hotel in Sedgley, West Midlands, and the Salutation Inn in Ham, Gloucestershire. Julian Hough, Camra’s pubs director, said the most impressive aspect of the Harp was its appeal as a true local, “even though situated in the tourist heart of the capital”. He added: “What makes a great pub is the ability for it to welcome both regulars and first time customers alike and this is something it does to perfection.” Situated close to Charing Cross station, the pub has been no stranger to awards in the past and has long been regarded with fondness by ale connoisseurs seeking a refuge to quench their thirst in the heart of the city. Beer choices generally include a mild or porter, Dark Star and London micro-brewery seasonal while real ciders, perries and malt whiskies also feature strongly. Completing a package that won over the notoriously choosy real ale drinking fraternity are award-winning real sausages in baps. Kimberly Martin, Camra’s London regional director, said: “I never ceased to be impressed or surprised by the continuing success of a pub staffed by individuals so passionate about the real ale industry. The Harp is a perfect example of how the London cask beer scene is reaching out to new drinkers.”

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The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

AndyRob

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

AndyRob

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

AndyRob

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

AndyRob

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

AndyRob

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

AndyRob

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Museum have brought a small corner of South Africa to the heart of London.

Andyrob posted a video:

Greater Spotted Woodpecker on the peanut feeder.

I just spotted a greenfinch, which is a common enough British bird, but it’s the first one I’ve seen in my East London garden.  The number of species now visiting has at least doubled since I moved in here, last century.

greenfinch pic by  Neil Phillips What I’ve come to realise is that even though we are in an inner city type borough the actual location  is right at the tip of a thin wedge of more or less continuous green space which acts as a funnel from Epping Forest. Having a few large trees around makes it a last refuge for non-urban wildlife.

Posted by Andy Roberts Greenfinch arrives