clerkenwell & spitalfields

On Jan. 8, Shane and I meandered through Clerkenwell and Spitalfields, discovering Brick Lane along the way. We chose to do these walks because our students are staying in Clerkenwell, and we wanted to be able to tell them a little about the neighborhood they would living in for the next three months. We learned that the name Clerkenwell comes from the the words "Clerk's Well," and that, although the neighborhood has recently become a desirable place to live, it hasn't always been so. Dickens set much of Oliver Twist here, which is a fortunate coincidence, as my students will be reading that novel in a couple of weeks. Highlights of the walk included the Sadler's Wells Theatre, the area around Smithfield Meat Market, and the priory church of St Bartholomew the Great, which has recently been featured in many television shows and films. We didn't go into the church, as we were feeling cheap and didn't want to pay the admission charge. Nevertheless, I plan to go back, perhaps to check out a musical performance there. We did, however, visit the small museum at St John's Gate, an interesting early sixteenth-century structure that is the remains of a monastery that was on that site.

While walking through Clerkenwell, I found a house featuring a common misspelling of my surname:

That look on my face must be one of contempt for those who somehow feel "Benyon" is a viable appelation. Bah, humbug.

We then took the Spitalfields walk, which took us past Petticoat Lane, Brick Lane, and through Spitalfields Market. At the outset, we caught a pretty good view of the Gherkin (aka the Swiss RE building):


Brick Lane is fascinating, and I'm eager to try some curries when next I'm there. Brick Lane is the heart of "Bangla-City," where folks of Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian descent live. It has historically been a place where outsiders of various kinds have found a home, including the Huguenots and Askenazy Jews. Along a small side street, we found some very hip clothing stores, hairdressers, bars, and Rough Trade East. The original Rough Trade shop is right in my neighborhood off Portobello Road. I don't know why I failed to take many pictures of Brick Lane, but here's a a bit of graffiti I found on one of the walls along the roads leading from Brick Lane to Spitalfields:


That night, Shane and I went back to Sadler's Wells to see Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorheads. I loved Bourne's Swan Lake, which I saw a couple of times when it first showed in L.A., but his adaptation of Edward Scissorhands is downright dreadful. The production is cloyingly sentimental, and it relies on the most over-used stereotypes of American middle-class culture. The music is uninteresting, and the choreography is just plain corny. The dancers grimace and grin in the most obvious ways, and the movement is comprised of uninteresting pantomime and slapstick gimmicks. We got cheap tickets through the TKTS booth on Leicester Square, and our seats were good, but five minutes into the performance, I thought to myself, "Oh no. What have I gotten myself into?" I survived the ordeal, but the following photo records the evidence of the toll it took on me: