London

The Hitchcock mosaics in Leytonstone (© Rob Greig)

See Alfred Hitchcock in relief
Mosaics at Leytonstone tube station capture key scenes from 17 films by the master of suspense – including a rather disturbing avian attack from ‘The Birds’ – just round the corner from his birthplace.

Swan Upping
The two things everybody knows about swans is that they’ll break your arm and that they belong to the Queen. In defiance of the first and celebration of the second, an annual swan upping ceremony has taken place on the third week of July for the past 600 years in which the Queen’s swan keeper plus swan markers working for the Dyers and Vintner’s Livery Companies row the Thames in skiffs marking the spring’s new cygnets.
Third week in July 2008, River Thames, commencing on Monday at Sunbury and ending at Abingdon on the Friday. Feature continues

Horseman’s Sunday
Bringing together the twin themes of churches and animals, St John’s in Hyde Park provides the only chance you’ll ever get to see horses getting blessed. The vicar of the church rides on horseback to bless 100 or so horses in a ceremony that dates back 40 years, when the Hyde Park stables were in danger of getting closed and this was concocted as a way of drawing attention to the problem.
St John’s, Hyde Park Crescent, W2. Sept 21 2008.

Swim with Peter Pan
Every year since 1874, the members of the Serpentine Swimming Club have spent Christmas morning swimming in the icy depths of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, competing for the Peter Pan Cup, originally presented by JM Barrie. Watch and wince.
Serpentine, Hyde Park, W1. Dec 25 2007.

Eat pizza in a Turkish bath
A Victorian craze left London dotted with dozens of Turkish baths but few remain committed to their original purpose of encouraging nude, manly sweatiness. One cracker is this mosque-like structure on New Broad Street that’s since been converted to an Italian restaurant.
Ciro’s, 7-8 Bishopsgate Churchyard, EC2 (020 7920 9206).

Bless sore throats
Every February a ceremony takes place in London’s oldest Catholic church, St Ethelreda’s, on St Blaise’s Day (St Blaise saved a child from choking to death on a fish bone and so is patron saint of throat sufferers). Two candles are tied together, lit, and touched on to the necks of people suffering from sore throats.
St Ethelreda, Ely Place, EC1. Feb 3 2008.

Feeling Gloomy at Bar Academy

Go miserable clubbing
Melancholy pop and bedroom anthems thrill the regulars at this club night. How did they celebrate their recent second birthday? With Gloomyoke (sad karaoke), and speed hating.
Feeling Gloomy, Bar Academy, 16 Parkfield St, N1 (0844 477 2000/www.feelinggloomy.co.uk) Saturdays.

See judges armed with flowers
Enjoy 20 minutes’ respite from jury service by watching men in funny hats perform an ancient ceremony involving a bunch of flowers. Among the court traditions remaining from the days when the Old Bailey was contained within the grounds of Newgate prison is that of the judges carrying a bunch of flowers at the beginning of each session, a practice allegedly developed in an attempt
to mask the stench from the cells.
Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, EC4.

Saw bones
There surely can’t be many places where you can watch demonstrations of operations performed without anaesesthia. We’re not knocking the state of London’s hospitals, but pointing you towards the Old Operating Museum, Britain’s only surviving nineteenth-century operating theatre, located in the garret of St Thomas’s Church in London Bridge.
Old Operating Theatre, 9a St Thomas’s St, SE1.

Worship with clowns
At the lectern on the altar stands a man dressed in an orange fright wig, face painted white and with a bright red nose; his congregation stares back, respectfully silent despite being dressed in a wide range of clownish garb with faces daubed with grotesque smiles or maudlin tears, baggy trousers parked on wooden pews and oversized boots plonked on padded foot rests. Welcome to Clownsville, aka Holy Trinity Church, Dalston.

Clowns – originally from London, but now from all over the world – have been meeting for an annual memorial service since 1946, originally at St James, Pentonville Road, a church chosen for its connection to Joseph Grimaldi, the king of the clowns. Grimaldi was born in London in 1778 and by the time he died and was buried at St James in 1837 he had revolutionised clowning. His skills ensured that the clown was more than just a fool; he developed visual tricks and physical comedy, poked fun at the audience, introduced satire and elements of music hall, making the clown central to performances of pantomime and harlequinade.

Grimaldi performed at Sadler’s Wells and the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden (both venues that he is now said to haunt), his memoirs were written by Charles Dickens, and all clowns are now known as ‘Joeys’ in memory of Grimaldi’s alter ego (the Joey is also the name of the clowning world’s official magazine). Little wonder then that the world’s clowns should now choose to pay annual remembrance to their founding father, and to all other clowns who have passed away in the preceding 12 months.

When St James was demolished (although Grimaldi’s grave remains and is the venue for an annual celebration in either the last week of May or the first week of June), the service was transferred to Holy Trinity in Dalston, and takes place there on the first Sunday in February. Clowns have attended in full garb since 1967 and it also housed the Clowns Gallery – a museum dedicated to clowning – which has since moved down the road to the All Saints Centre in Haggerston Road.
Holy Trinity, Beechwood Rd, E8. Feb 3 2008.

Slip into one of the world’s most desirable suits
Savile Row of course – home to Gieves and Hawkes, Ozwald Boateng and many more. Gents flock here from all over the world, while we just have to nip into town. Utterly unique.

Rave in sportswear
Sports Rave at Platinum encourages party animals to dig out ‘Speedos, tennis skirts, riding boots and ski wear’ for a night that mixes sport with dance and features synchronised step classes and Day-glo badminton.
Platinum, 23-25 Paul St, EC2 (0207 638 4601) Monthly.

Sleep with mummies
Kids aged eight to 15 can become Young Friends of the British Museum for £20 a year. Among the benefits is the chance to join one of four sleepovers that happen during the year, where fearless youngsters can explore the museum after dark, and stay the night. It’s surprising how much a child in a sleeping bag can resemble a sarcophagus.
For info visit www.britishmuseum.org

© Andrew Brackenbury

See shrunken heads and a model of a morbidly obese man
The new Wellcome Collection really has to be seen to be believed. The only place to match it for sheer oddness – giants! brains! teeth! – is the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd, NW1.
Hunterian Museum, 35-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, WC2.

Drink in a prison cell
The Courthouse Hotel is housed in a Grade II-listed Magistrate’s Court, and you can drink in the original prison cells.
Courthouse Hotel, 19-21 Great Marlborough St, W1 (020 7297 5555/ www.courthouse-hotel.com).

Handle a bar of gold
The museum at the Bank of England has an actual gold bar on display for you to lift (in the picking up rather than running-off-with sense).
Threadneedle St, EC2.

Hang out with a dead philosopher
Jeremy Bentham asked in his will for his dead body to be preserved and stuck in a cabinet at University College London. And that’s exactly what happened.
UCL, Gower St, WC1.

Spot the world’s oldest insect
…at the Natural History Museum, where a set of insect jaws, specimen number In.38234, are believed to be at least 400 million years old.
Natural History Museum, Cromwell Rd, SW7.

The Ardabil carpet (© V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum)

See the world’s oldest carpet
The Ardabil carpet is the stunning centrepiece of the V&A’s Jameel Gallery of Islamic art. It was made in 1539-40.
V&A Museum, Cromwell Rd, SW7.

Order an edible handbag
Get a cake shaped exactly like a Louis Vuitton handbag from north London baker The Cake Fairy, who only delivers in London. At £130, it's cheaper than the real thing and tastier, too.
www.thecakefairy.co.uk

Neo Burlesque
If there’s one thing New York can’t take credit for it’s burlesque. It was in London that Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes created lewd and rude satire skits, taking them across the pond in the 1860s and kick-starting the burlesque sensation in the US. And it’s London again that is grabbing the performance genre by the tassles.

Predictably, the notion of undressing poses myriad problems for feminists. Is burlesque a continuation of the exploitation of women? Or is it empowering and deserving of recognition as a legitimate art form? That’s the basis of the discussion at the first feminist neo burlesque symposium at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama (CSSD) this Friday. Seven speakers from academic, burlesque and theatre backgrounds will lead the debate, followed by performances from the luminaries of London neo burlesque, including the boundary-trashing nymphet Empress Stah, Miss Fancy Chance, and queerlesque faces Ryan Styles and Russella. ‘I’m very troubled by the scene,’ admits organiser Liselle Terret, a CSSD drama lecturer and a subversive starlet named Doris La Trine. ‘Many women have very unclear reasons for doing it. They hold a male idea of what it is, focusing on the stripping rather than using the body to make satirical comments on everyday life. So I think we need a critical theatre debate. This workshop’s about giving it the professional critique it deserves.’

Terret wants to separate the sleaze from the satire, but Sherril Dodds, a symposium panellist, dance academic, burlesque performer and brains behind the Korova Milk Bar events, argues that there are multiple feminist approaches. ‘Some performances can be a really overt critique of femininity,’ she says, ‘whereas with others it’s about working with stereotypes and finding pleasure within them.’ She suggests leading London lady and this year’s Miss Erotic World, Immodesty Blaize, as an example of the latter, who ‘although she fits some feminine stereotypes, is a very large woman who takes great pleasure in performing.’ Panellist Lara Clifton, co-founder of burlesque agency The Whoopee Club, agrees. ‘You can’t really say this isn’t helpful for women. The idea of going to a burlesque class, where you learn to feel really fantastic in your skin and learn to enjoy your sexuality, is entirely valid for women, especially in a time when everyone is anorexic.’

The workshop also aims to quash the comparisons of burlesque clubs to strip joints. Feminists like Ariel Levy, who argues in ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture’ that women mistake stripping as sexual liberation, are quick to claim that it’s still objectification. Self-professed neo burlesque artist Empress Stah refutes this. Unlike male-run and male-attended strip clubs, she says that ‘women run the scene and it’s predominantly women in the audience. Burlesque is a backlash against conservative feminist theories or a hardcore feminist stance against pornography.’ Many panellists agree that what needs to improve is the level of feminist issues addressed in burlesque performance. ‘When people are familiar with something and start engaging with it then you can use it to address political issues in a way that’s accessible,’ says Terret, who in one skit plays a ’50s housewife who dunks herself, upside down, into an oversized pink toilet.

Dodds, however, draws an important conclusion that a lot depends on the audience: ‘I may try to do something that sets up a feminist critique but it may not come across like that to the audience because they’re not a homogenous mass. The minute I start taking off my clothes, some people may recognise that I’m playing with certain conventions, that I’m being satirical and parodic, but others may think: Wow, breasts! You can’t control how things are perceived, so burlesque isn’t always a feminist platform.’

So what about Empress Stah? She will be presenting one of her more shocking performances, ‘Queen of the Night’, on the night, which features blood supping and simulated sex. Well, she doesn’t give a feminist fuck, finalising, ‘I’m going to go straight for the feminist jugular by taking a male blow-up doll on stage.’ Perhaps, in this age of political correctness, it’s the best attitude.

Feminist Neo Burlesque Symposium (funded by Centre of Excellence in Theatre Training), CSSD, Eton Avenue, NW3 (cett@cssd.ac.uk) Swiss Cottage tube. Fri 4-10.30pm, first perf 7.30pm. £30, concs £15.

Eat fruit at St Clement Danes
This Easter ceremony in a City church sees the children of the St Clement Dane Primary School receive an orange and a lemon once a year in commemoration of the famous nursery rhyme. Jamie Oliver would be proud.
St Clement Danes, The Strand, WC2. March 21 2008.

Get a lap dance (ladies only)
Venerable lesbian stronghold the Candy Bar offers lesbian lap-dancing for girls who don't want to go Spearmint Rhino.
Candy Bar, 4 Carlisle St, W1 (020 7494 4041/ www.thecandybar.co.uk).

See Mr Punch in the Pulpit
At the annual Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet Festival most of the congregation in the front pew at St Paul’s are accompanied by puppets. The festival commemorates the occasion in May 1662 when Samuel Pepys first saw Mr Punch in England.
St Paul’s, Covent Garden. May 9 2008.

London's bun ceremonies (image © Rob Greig

Eat Baddeley Cake
There’s no shortage of places to get cake in London, but only one where it comes courtesy of a 300-year-old thespian. Robert Baddeley was an eighteenth-century actor who was the valet of the eminent dramatist Samuel Foote before following his employer into the world of theatre. He became a regular fixture at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, playing parts that would have probably got him a part in the next ‘Carry On…’ film if he was still working today – often witty servants or comedy foreigners.

Baddeley’s wife Sophia, an actress and singer, was more famous than him, a situation that undoubtedly led to some tension – particularly when combined with the fact that she was also something of a courtesan. When he demanded that she stop living with a local doctor, Baddeley ended up fighting a duel with the manager of Sophia’s theatre company. The duel was bloodless (we’ll call it a draw), but the couple split up.

Baddeley died on November 19 1794, while preparing to play Moses in ‘The School for Scandal’ (a part he had played more than 200 times). In his will he left £650 to the Drury Lane Theatre Fund which was used to took care of actors who had fallen on hard times – which became known as ‘Baddeley’s Asylum’. He also bequeathed £3 per annum in his will to ensure that each year on Twelfth Night a cake and a drink would be consumed in his memory by the cast at the Drury Lane Theatre.

If cakes aren’t your thing, free buns are on offer later in the year. In an annual ceremony 21 widows are given hot-cross buns after the Good Friday service at the 1000-year-old St Bartholomew-the-Great church in Smithfield. They are also entitled to claim six old pence, which rarely happens (frankly these cash handouts aren’t much use unless they move with inflation). These days the rules have been loosened, and the buns are handed out to children. London’s other bun ceremony occurs at the Widow’s Son pub in Bow. Each year a sailor adds a hot cross bun to a collection in commemoration of a widow who baked a bun for a son who never returned from sea.

Drury Lane Theatre, Catherine St, WC2. Jan 6 2008. St Bartholomew-the-Great, West Smithfield, EC1. March 21 2008.
Widow’s Son, 75 Devons Rd, E3. March 21, 2008.

Laugh at a fat walrus
The Horniman Museum doesn’t just have a silly name, it also has a very silly walrus, stuffed beyond all recognition by Victorian taxidermists who didn’t know what a walrus looked like, so filled its wrinkles to bursting.
Horniman Museum, 100 London Rd, SE23.

Do a silly walk in Shepherd’s Bush
…on Thorpebank Road, to be precise, where the Pythons filmed their Ministry of Silly Walks sketch in 1971.

Dine with a feline
Whenever a party of 13 is due to dine at the Savoy Hotel, Kaspar the cat is called up to take the numbers up to the less unlucky 14. Kaspar is a beautiful art-deco wooden 1920s cat, who is given his own place at the table, complete with cutlery and bowl of milk.
Savoy Hotel, 91 The Strand, WC2 (020 7836 4343/www.savoy-group.co.uk).

Leaf motif
1789 was quite a year. The French Revolution was getting underway, George Washington was sworn in as the first US president after a bloody war of independence and, in London, the plane trees of Berkeley Square were being planted. It was a revolution of a sort. While other parts of the world thrashed about in an attempt to reinvent themselves, London was quietly rebranding itself as the centre of the civilised world, a metropolis of elegant terraces and prosperous thoroughfares lined with generous shade trees. The Berkeley planes are reckoned to be among the oldest in the capital but their relatives – and many London planes are closely related since they’re cloned rather than grown from seed – have taken the place by storm. In Westminster, there are 2,646, not counting those in parks, squares and gardens.

There’s some debate about whether Platanus x acerifolia can claim to be a cockney tree. One version of its history has it first appearing in the seventeenth-century Lambeth garden of the Tradescants, a dynasty of adventure-loving Londoners who travelled the world collecting plants. It’s tempting to believe that the Tradescants bequeathed us our hardy hybrid of the Oriental and Occidental plane but research suggests that the marriage must have taken place in a warmer climate. But London was the first city to take the tree to its grimy heart. It’s a perfect match.

The plane may have been chosen by Georgian property developers for its grandeur but it’s a tough old bugger. Paul Akers, arboricultural manager of Westminster City Council, reckons not one London plane has died of natural causes. The fact that they cope so well with the muck and pollution is down to their leathery leaves – easily washed by rain – and their habit of shedding bark. ‘The bark’s like an overcoat,’ he says.

For Will Cohu, author of ‘Out of the Woods: The Armchair Guide to Trees’, the charm of the London plane is its ability to hide the uglier aspects of the capital. ‘It has this fluid shape,’ he points out, ‘and these colours which seem to strike compromises between concrete and dressed stone and brick. If you took the trees out of St James’s Square you’d see there are some severe modern façades among the period buildings but you don’t notice them; the planes break them up.’

But there’s a dark side to London’s plane trees. ‘It’s the seed balls,’ says Cohu. ‘They break open in spring and then scatter and can cause asthma. This spring was particularly bad. When people go to their GPs because their children have asthma, one of the first things the doctor asks is whether you’ve got plane trees on your road.’

Giving our children asthma is one thing, affecting property values is quite another; homeowners have become the planes’ worst enemy. ‘Nowadays, the smallest hint of subsidence and everyone howls for the chainsaw,’ says Cohu. ‘Big trees need water and, with concrete around the tree, it can’t get water; so it sends out its roots further and sucks the moisture from the London clay.’

Fans of the plane have accused some councils of replacing them with ‘lollipops’, small cherry, crab apple and whitebeam trees. Although these upstarts are pretty, they don’t cut the mustard. ‘They have to work so hard,’ says Cohu. ‘They get pissed on by dogs and run into by cars. Their life expectancy might not be more than ten or 15 years.’ Akers is insistent that Westminster still plants plenty of planes. Those in Berkeley Square are so famous that cuttings are being taken in order to preserve their particular form. ‘Most are in fine condition,’ he says, ‘but we want to renew them with trees of exactly the same characteristics if we do lose any. When we lost one in the 1987 storm, we were inundated with people offering to sponsor a new tree. People do love their planes.’

So how will the planes cope with climate change? ‘One of the parents of the plane tree, the Oriental plane, comes from very hot regions, so they’ll cope,’ says Akers. ‘But God forbid a disease entered our shores and took a fancy to plane trees. We’d be in dead schtuck then.’