I went to London today, to view some art. The suggestion came from an old colleague, someone I'd not seen for a long while, and who had been proving so elusive that I'd given up trying to arrange anything, so I was pleased to hear from them, in a cautious way. The choice of gallery was left to me, even after I'd come up with a short-list of three exhibitions, the Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain, Shakespeare: staging the world at The British Museum, and Cotman in Normandy at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Given I was planning to visit all three at some point they might as well have taken their pick, but there you go. I opted for the Tate, on the generous basis that it was relatively convenient for their office and I didn't know if they cared enough about Cotman to schlep all the way to Dulwich, and the more selfish basis that if their attention wavered and they'd had enough after half an hour, I was a Tate member and could go back another time at no cost.
Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant guard is a large show, and you certainly need more than half an hour to get round it. We gave it an hour, and then our brains were full, our mouths dry and our backs beginning to ache. It is a good show, though. It's on until 13th January, and I wouldn't mind going back, because there is more there than you can take on board in one visit. As a teenager I instinctively fell for the Post Impressionists and the Fauvists, and regarded Victorian art as hopelessly old fashioned, but it's grown on me over the years. Some of the pictures in this show are really very weird, with their brilliant colours and hyper-real detail from foreground to horizon. Millais wimped out, in the end, and turned to landscapes that looked quite normal (and were admired by Van Gogh), while Burne-Jones abandoned social comment in favour of decorative streams of maidens as he morphed into part of the Aesthetic Movement.
Something I hadn't realised was that Tate Britain is in the throes of major building works, so the basement cafe where I'd banked on our getting a quick lunch and catching up on nearly a year's worth of news wasn't open. Whether it will re-open under a new guise or is being replaced by something nicer (it was a bit foetid and basementy) I know not. In the meantime visitors have a choice between the coffee bar near the ticket desk, which now has a chiller cabinet containing a few sandwiches, but a great deal of through foot-traffic and awful acoustics, a gallery cafe right by the Pre-Raphaelites which was simply full, or a marquee in the garden. That looked pretty full as well, but we managed to get a table and thanks to overhead infrared heaters it wasn't as cold as I'd expected. Be warned if you are planning a day out at Tate Britain, you might do better to get lunch somewhere else first, or afterwards. Unfortunately that part of Pimlico is not over-blessed with places to eat.
The Systems Administrator and I were discussing the chaos that is Gift Aid on tickets last night. At the Museum of Northumberland Life and Alnwick Castle we were asked as we bought our tickets whether we were UK tax payers and would be willing to Gift Aid the cost, then had to supply our address. I really can't believe that somebody at the Inland Revenue is trawling through the data and matching tax returns to names and addresses submitted at Alnwick Castle, so that seems a bit of a farce. At the Tate the rules have been interpreted as meaning that visitors must make an additional donation on top of the cost of the ticket for the Tate to be able to claim tax relief on the whole amount. The cost of tickets for the Pre-Raphaelites is thus £14, or £15.50 with Gift Aid. I arrived ahead of our meeting time, and looking at the queue at the ticket desk thought I might as well buy my friend a ticket. There was no clock showing the admission time for which tickets were now being sold, and if it turned out that we couldn't go in until mid-afternoon then we'd need to think of an alternative plan. The man on the desk told me that tickets were £15.50, which annoyed me. I believe in supporting art, and have a National Art Pass as well as Tate membership to prove it, but any surcharge on an advertised price should be voluntary. I declined to upgrade my membership as well, then later wondered if I should have done, but by then I was in a bad mood with the ticket buying process, and I very rarely take anyone else to the Tate. Most of what they show isn't the SA's thing at all.
After the Tate I planned to visit the Garden Museum, a short stroll up Millbank and across Lambeth Bridge. This lay on my friend's route back to the office, so they came with me and ventured in for a cup of tea. The Garden Museum cafe has just been rated as one of the top ten places to eat in the world by Gourmet Magazine (no, I hadn't heard of them either) according to The Evening Standard. This strikes me as slightly implausible for a small vegetarian eaterie in one corner of a deconsecrated church in the shadow of Lambeth Palace, but it is a nice peaceful spot. International stardom has not gone to the cafe's head or guaranteed queues for tables stretching up the Embankment, and at twenty to three there were two other tables occupied besides ours, and it was very quiet and restful compared to the bustle of the Tate.
My reason for going to the Garden Museum was actually to see their exhibition The Plant Seekers, put on jointly with the RHS. The exhibition space at the Garden Museum isn't very big, so if the Pre-Raphaelites left me feeling overwhelmed, the Plant Seekers left me wanting to know more. There are items of collecting equipment ranging from a wooden case for transporting plants back to the UK, used by Forrest, to the rucksack carried through the jungle by Tom Hart-Dyke when he was kidnapped by Colombian rebels and held for nine months six days into his orchid hunting expedition. There are journals, and beautiful painstaking drawings and paintings of plants, and old photographs. It's an interesting little exhibition, and if it whets your appetite you can always get some books on the subject. There is also a display of entries to the New London Landscape: Green Infrastructure Ideas Competition inspired by the High Line. The winning proposal, which will be built, was for a mushroom farm under Oxford Street.
The chaos of the discretionary ticket has reached the Garden Museum as well, since I produced my RHS card to get half price admission, and discovered I could get in for £3 instead of £3.75 if I used my National Art Pass instead. It is such a nice museum I feel mean not getting a full price ticket, but what's the point of having the Art Pass and not using it?
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