Perigord and pinxtos: Unusual haunts in London

From the airport to central London for £2.00 a person if you can believe! And arriving via speedy bus lanes while the rest of outer London drowned in smog and traffic congestion on the parking lot that is the motorway into the city.

London’s transport problems are legendary, and likely insoluble, and I noticed in the papers that even the new mayor, Boris Johnson, resorts to a bicycle and a crash helmet to get to work. Tip, Boris: you could get there faster and safer by bus! So buses it is for the duration of our stay, and on a day when London is reeling after a young wealthy Chelsea lawyer had himself shot to death in a suicide-by-cop drama during a bout of depression and alcoholism. Sad.

Our first port of call was a walk around the law area of Lincoln’s Inn where we set out to follow a schedule set by our friend, Edwina, for travellers who’ve been to London many times but who are looking for something just that little bit different. And later in the morning the house that John Soanes built. John was an architect of the classical school during the Regency period. He made buckets of money designing grand buildings like the Bank of England façade and others less grand: the breakfast and dining rooms at No 10 and No 11 Downing Street.

He was a bit of an eccentric was John, and likely drove his wife Elizabet bonkers with his collection of art, foibles, follies and decaying chips of Roman monumentaie (that, like the Elgin marbles, Greek purists may want returned some day). He mounted these on every conceivable plane, vertical and horizontal surface, indoors and out, in his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to demonstrate classical elements of design.

So passionate was Soanes about passing on his ideas to his students that he regularly turned his house into an exhibit, before and after lectures, so that his students could see, in practice, the ideas he proposed in theory.

Like Topsy, John’s house grew until he owned three elegant addresses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, all chockers with his architectural ideas and collections. I could have spent days just following through examples of his thinking: the clever ways he thought to transmit light, funnelling it, like a magician, down through three or four floors of his home, using just little bits of slanted glass, tunnelled glass, curved arcs of glass, and glass bits angled upon other bits of glass, all allowing light into dark places via imaginative openings, funnels, grids and chinks that he’d built throughout. Amazingly effective in such a tiny space.

Another sleight-of-hand design feature that John built was the set of hinged display doors that, on first impression, appeared to simply be the actual walls of his living room. But, as they opened, virtually on invisible hinges, layer upon layer of display space like pages of a book, peeled out from the centre, specially designed to hang framed samples of both his actual and fantastical architectural design sketches. Secretive little features these were. A lot like those well hidden priest holes in Jacobean halls.

Some people have too much time to think and John probably had more than most as he spent little time enjoying life with his surviving sons, John Jr or George, as they were a disappointment to him. John Jr was constantly poorly, not at all interested in architecture, and died young of tuberculosis. Even in paintings as a boy George, the baby, had a mean and eager look. He grew up to be dissolute, a spendthrift and, ultimately, the family betrayer. He criticised his father’s work to the newspapers at a time when his mother was critically ill. This turned out to be the death of her, and pretty much the end of his father’s public career, so as a consequence, John Snr left the wealth he had garnered, his museum of a house and the means to maintain it, to the nation, disinheriting his sole remaining child. Even Fanny, Elizabet’s dog, died and left him, but was ne’er to be forgotten, for, in memoriam, in the garden, amongst all his other funereal treasures, lies an imposing dead doggie vault with the memorial writ large: ‘Alas, poor Fanny!’ Alas, poor John.

Later in the century, men like John, with wealth, shares, silver and bank notes, were able to store their valuables in large locked private vaults which they owned, or which they rented, deep beneath the streets of London in a fascinating little tunnel of secure boxes called the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit, as secure there as the Bank of England.

These safes are now called the London Silver Vaults and were our next port of call. The vaults are just like massive cubed Melco storage boxes with intimidating timers, impervious locking devices and solid impenetrable doors. Painted elegant black, white, or silver, most of the vaults are now occupied and operated by silver dealers a la the Antiques Roadshow specialists, whose vaults are filled with astonishing treasures for buyers of taste and discernment. And bank accounts to match.

Well, except for the pewter and silver plate importer who runs a ‘junk vault’ part way down the aisle: his stuff was ever-so-slightly slighted in the corridors of silver that day. The stiffer insult being that his was the only vault with any visible custom.

We chatted with the dealers who buy and sell the silver. Most are estate pieces. Many are brought in by little old ladies, down on their luck, who leave their family silver behind as they shuffle out into the light holding a fat Judas cheque between dainty, but disdainful, fingernails.

Our lunch that day was a takeout gourmet ciabatta (make mine roasted porcini topped with brie) packed in the ubiquitous brown paper luncheon bag that we took to the first cool green grassy space we came across just so we could get out of the sun. This was not just any patch of green, we discovered, as the lunch bell tolled and the Courts of Justice took a break, belching out lawyers in full regalia, assistants wheeling trolleys of loaded files, and office workers and couriers by the hundreds who descended onto our lawn en masse for the duration of their lunch hour.

These turned out to be the private gardens of The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn but were opened with kind permission of the Masters of the Bench for the precise period between 12 till 2.30pm only on Mondays to Fridays for the recreation of the general public. If they treat it with respect. (I just love these little bits of English eccentricity.)

London’s law folk came there in droves with their own paper bags of yummy baguettes, sitting or lying in groups on the grass in the sun (while we hugged the shade) in a priceless Hogarthian tableau playing out their office politics. Entertaining us for a full hour. Better than anything playing in the West End.

After a bus ride out to Hampstead, and a quick flick around the colourful West Indian Camden Markets enroute, we took a long walk over the heath watching kids throwing crusts to ducks before we headed back to town for a stop off at Gordon’s Wine Bar, down a little lane near Charing Cross station.

Think Dickens. Think Oliver Twist and Oliver Reed. Think of an aged arched brick sewage tunnel heading down to the Thames embankment, cleaned up a trifle since the 18th century, now, with a rickety platform floor allowing anyone 6 foot tall or more to bend at the waist to enter this tiny tunnel of a bar decorated in char-tinged bricks, all flat black and moody, except for the glow of dim wax candles that burn odd halos of yellow disembodied light on tiny tables throughout the bar.

You can see nothing, everything is black, and tho’ you can hear voices you can’t make out a single face or feature. This wine bar (does not sell beer!) is packed from close of work till "Time, Gentleman please!" and many an anonymous deal bartered here would be nought but in the hearing. Charming. Gothic. Quaint.

And still, in these arched dark spaces, the Artful Dodger’s offspring are hard at work even these days, plundering. For beneath the tables, in all the darkened corners, are tiny security latches put there to hold tight to your bags, cameras and other valuables to make it trickier for street kids to nab.