Music Hall Madness
We had ambitious plans for Wednesday, but when the girls got up they were feeling a bit sub par, so we decided to rein it in a bit and stay close to home. Cosiness was required. The girls took themselves out for breakfast while I did some work and when they came back we hopped on the DLR to Shadwell and visited the one, excellent charity shop I have found in my weeks of walking. I have found several ok ones and a couple of terrible ones but this one is a keeper.
We all love hunting for treasure and a good charity shop is a find to be shared and enjoyed. After all the hype we didn’t find anything, but there were a few near misses and a couple of maybes if we had been feeling extravagant or if I had room to clutter. It was good enough that even though we didn’t get anything, we didn’t feel cheated and are already planning another trip for when they come down again.
Wilton’s Music Hall is only a ten minute walk away from Shadwell so we wandered over to take a look, even though it wasn’t open. It’s still a gorgeous building despite being better from the inside. One winter I had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing an adaptation of John Masefield’s Box of Delights there with my friend Claire. It’s one of our favourites and they did it so very beautifully. The RSC are putting it on this winter if you’re interested in seeing the play in a slightly less exquisite setting.
Wilton’s is the oldest surviving music hall in the world. It started life in 1859, although the buildings that now make up the space were built in the 1690s. After it closed as a music hall, it was bought by a group of Methodists who used it as a mission and soup kitchen. It provided warmth, food and a safe space for people from the poorest of London’s neighbourhoods. It was closed as a mission in the Sixties and scheduled for demolition, spared only when public figures like John Betjeman got behind the campaign to save it. Then it went into show business of a different kind. It became a space used by film and television companies. The video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax was filmed there in the Eighties which made me squeak with excitement. It was restored in the 2010’s with the help of a Lottery grant and is now used for all kinds of artistic endeavours. The restoration was done sensitively so that you can see the layers of history and life in the building all around you. It reminds me a bit of the concert space at Alexandra Palace, which is equally beautiful.
Once we had had a nose around, we headed back to Limehouse and to The Grapes pub where we had lunch. Owned by Ian McKellen, who I am led to believe pops in and even does the pub quiz from time to time, it’s a strange and lovely place that smells quite strongly of river water and beer. I wrote before that it features in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend
“A tavern of dropsical appearance… long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. It had outlasted many a sprucer public house, indeed the whole house impended over the water but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver, who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.”
It is indeed, dropsical, crooked and tiny. You get the impression that if more than ten of you arrived for a beer, some of you would have to sit on the other’s laps. Nothing in the pub is straight, walls billow out, floorboards skew and buckle and stairs are vertiginous. The whole edifice really does seem to be clinging onto the paving stones for grim death as the Thames seethes outside and raps at the windows to be let in. We ate upstairs, perched on stools with our dinner resting on upturned beer barrels, feeling quite at sea. Outside the window the tide was up and the river was very much with us as we ate, its choppy, grey brown fingers tapping at the locks. Half way through a great lunch, the heavens opened and it was hard to tell where the sky and water started and ended. It felt quite biblical, if you could get triple cooked chips in the Bible.
I was all for bedding in for the rest of the day, but the girls declared they loved walking in the rain so we staggered up into Canary Wharf and home. I had optimistically and some might say foolishly, gone for a cotton sundress that morning and by the time we got back to the boat, it was wrapping itself round my calves in clingy, wet sheets. It was a two hot water bottles and winter pyjamas type affair to get warm. I hung my sundress in the shower and you could hear the water dripping down the plughole for some time after we returned. A fitting symbol for the British summertime I feel.