Passport to Pimlico with the Pre-Raphaelites

Monday morning loomed thanks to an impending vet visit. I was head down in one of the bedroom cupboards looking for wipe down clothing for the ensuing struggle when Jason arrived back at the boat early. He is the quietest member of our family, voted most likely to give me a heart attack when he unexpectedly looms into view. When I had recovered I forgave him for frightening me to death, because he had come specially to help me with Derek.

We saw a lovely vet called Lukas, who had a fantastic tattoo which was a sort of wrist cuff of a Scandinavian forest. He was also extremely thorough and competent. The verdict is that her skin ailment is ‘mysterious’ and possibly an allergic reaction as she has neither mites nor fleas nor other creature which creepeth along the earth and biteth the bejeezus out of you. He gave her a jab to calm everything down and some essential oils which have to be applied once a week and look like something I used to put on my hair in 1985. He also discovered that one of her fangs is not all that it should be and she has an infected jaw. For this he gave us some antibiotics and an estimated bill of £520, which along with the £99 she cost for this visit means that so far this year she is giving Anorak a run for his money in the most expensive moggy stakes.

When we got back to the boat, she barricaded herself into her under the sofa fortress in protest for several hours but crept out when it was time for tea, prepared to forgive and forget for some Dreamies and grovelling apologies.

Jason had to head off to Victoria for a meeting at lunchtime so I travelled in with him. He wandered off to be executive. I wandered off to be an explorer. If you scoot off to one side of Victoria Station you come to Pimlico, which is an area that I love but not many people know about. I love it for many reasons, chief of which is the fact that for many years Pimlico was one of the kids’ favourite words and they would say it apropos of absolutely nothing at all but in such a way and with such pleasure that you couldn’t help but smile.

For me it is also the setting of a book that was extremely important to me in my teens: Absolute Beginners by Colin McInnes. It’s written from the perspective of a young photographer called Blitz Baby, who narrates his life in and around Pimlico and Notting Hill. He explores the new freedoms opening up to teenagers through his love of sharp suits, jazz, pop music and sex. This is the Beat scene but British. It kind of reminds me of On The Road crossed with The Outsiders but with a swinging jazz soundtrack.

McInnes documents the life of people on the margins, particularly the young, the Afro-Caribbean community and the gay and lesbian scene flourishing in the clubs. It’s a snapshot of a particular time and place and not without its flaws but it is a wonderful evocation of a time when people were finally beginning to shake off the shadows of the war. It’s also a gripping evocation of the Notting Hill race riots of the Fifties. The film, starring Patsy Kensit and made by Julien Temple in 1986 features David Bowie singing the title track. It’s a song that always makes me tear up.

Nowadays, Pimlico has become a place of faded grandeur. It’s a quietly wealthy enclave that runs parallel to Victoria, down to Westminster Abbey and across to Tate Britain in a kind of elegant wedge. On the edges you find the clerical version of Savile Row. You can buy your ecclesiastical robes from any number of Dickensian emporiums. Bow windows with crooked, hand blown panes of glass distort your vision into a world of wood polish, brass fittings and the shush of tape measures whisking against any number of religious inside legs.

Tiny bistros vie for trade, shunting their tables onto too small pavements. Regulars sit in the sunshine, drinking wine and narrowly avoiding being run over by buses. Charity shops that casually sell Louboutins by the handful and look more like high end boutiques cluster the streets, charging exorbitant prices and doing a roaring trade. Women with dogs and daughters, all of whom look identical, wander about in ballet flats sharing tips on their latest diets. This is the land of money, so nobody has to actually ‘be’ anywhere. One street back from the roar of Victoria, everyone takes their sweet time because that’s what money buys you.

Everything slows down here, because everything is easy. Great squares of narrow houses that look like slices of wedding cake stare out over private squares where only residents have the keys. Dark red blocks of Victorian Gothic splendour loom towards the Thames, shrouded by leafy avenues that lead you through streets that parade their pedigree. This is old, old money. It doesn’t even have to try to impress you.

What I love is the feeling that you have stepped off into a different world. As you walk through, you can see the world intruding at the end of streets. Millbank is being dug up for the millionth time. Diggers dig and pedestrians try to navigate a dizzying array of cones without falling into trenches or being run over by an angry taxi driver. Businessmen swarm the new developments of glass and steel that sprout on the other side of Victoria Street. Tourists flit like butterflies on the edges of my periphery, but not here. This is not a place for tourism. There is nothing to see here. These are not the droids you’re looking for.

I sloped into Tate Britain the back way, loathe to break the spell too soon by coming in by the river. Before we moved here I sold something marvellous on eBay and used some of my profits to buy myself membership to the Tate. All the main galleries at any Tate museum are free to the public anyway. My membership gives me unlimited access to the exhibitions which come and go through the year. It means I can go and see things I love over and over again and take my time. It also means I can take risks and go and see things I don’t think I will like but might be surprised by. I can visit both Tate Modern and Tate Britain this way and as they are the museums I visit most anyway, I know I will get my money’s worth.

I wanted to visit the Rossettis exhibition. My life as an art enthusiast started with the Impressionists. After that I moved onto a passion for the Pre-Raphaelites. I’m no longer besotted with the Impressionists, but I do still enjoy a bit of radical romance. I have always found William and Jane Morris more interesting, politically speaking and I love Burne-Jones aesthetically speaking but I have plenty of time for the Rossetti’s and in a large exhibition like this, you’re bound to see things you haven’t come across before. Apart from anything else, curatorship is always growing and changing and even if you see the same paintings you have seen elsewhere, you might learn something new about them.

I was pleased to see that there was a lot of focus on Christina Rossetti as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was also very exciting to see his wife, Elizabeth Siddall recognised for her art rather than just being the model and object of his passion. What fascinated me most was the room where they explored the lives and backgrounds of some of the models he used and looked at the Pre-Raphaelite’s more radical agendas in terms of class and social mobility.

In the later rooms, where Rossetti had become famous and his work was supremely collectable, the scale of the paintings is quite breath-taking. They are so large and so richly ornamented, they glow like jewels. It made me think of L.S. Lowry, who was a huge fan of the Pre-Raphaelites at a time when they were not at all popular. He would go to auctions and pick up paintings for next to nothing. He had a significant number of important Pre-Raphaelite paintings in his house and would move his favourites round so that he could wake up every morning and see them from his bed. When he died, a house clearance company came in to empty the house and it was only through luck that the paintings were saved.

I like to think of him, in his world of brick and chimneys, industry and soot, poverty and the drab colours of a heavily industrialised city, hunkering down with these slabs of jewel coloured beauty, drinking in the colours and the romance of a world far, far away from his everyday reality. A portable Pimlico if you will.