Poshville part I

Hellooooooo! How are you? I’m still recovering from walking 40 672 steps in three days, and now that I’m officially a few years into middle age, that sort of thing takes it out of you. I’m not quite in napping territory yet, but I can see how it’ll happen eventually. It was basically three walks, which together ended up being a whole lot of steps, making me a whole lot of tired for the rest of the week.

Anyway, on Sunday morning I found myself in Holland Park with a couple of hours to kill, so I decided to go for an architecture walk, which has become one of my favourite lockdown activities. It’s outdoors, free and something you can do anywhere. Holland Park, for those of you who don’t know, is one of the wealthiest areas in London, neighbouring Notting Hill and Kensington. I lived here for a few months in a dark and small basement flat in the early 1990’s when I just moved to London, and I wasn’t particularly enamoured with it then either. But horses for courses. Anyway, this is the house I first took a picture of on my walk. Cute isn’t it? But it also looks like a section to the left somehow got chopped off. Do you see what I mean?

Repeating myself I will say that the architecture in London is so varied, and things can change immensely on just one street. This mid-century house was on the opposite side of the street of the chopped-off house. Crazy, huh? And then that old green lamp post! Great fun when you’re out and about looking at stuff.

Walking a bit further up and around the corner I found this Art Deco house that Dusty Springfield used to live in. I thought it was a building of flats, but it turns out it’s just one home and it’s for sale now for a cool £9.5 million if you fancy it.

Due to 2020 being such a shit show of a year, I’ve seen Christmas decorations being put up earlier than ever. Makes sense. We’re sticking to first of Advent here at home though.

It’s great how windows have become more than just windows this year too. What do we reckon? A birthday, an anniversary, a discount at the balloon shop?

This is about as scruffy as it gets in Holland Park. I think I’d go with F. What do you think?

Nice colours next to each other like that.

This church was a couple of hundred metres further down the same street as Dusty Springfield’s Art Deco house, and built in 1864 in the Eclectic Gothic style, which is slightly different from Victorian Gothic. I’m currently reading this book about different English architectural styles, but I haven’t gotten further than the building styles between 1625 and 1710, so I can’t tell you anything more about it, haha.

After a while I started heading towards the park called Holland Park (confusing I know) because middle-aged ladies need access to public toilets innit. Walked past this large building on the way there and I love that sort of tiling. So pretty.

This house was painted an amazing mint green, but it just refused to be photographed that colour, even as I kept switching the white balance.

Spotted some winter blossoms, which felt early

as autumn isn’t quite over yet.

Ahhhh, finally, in the park itself. But this is an architectural walk, so the two previous pics is all the park you’re getting. Instead here are some of the remaining parts of Holland House, which was an early Jacobean house built in 1604. This far side of the building definitely looks very Dutch with those gables. It formed a part of Cope Castle, later renamed Holland House, but most of the building got destroyed in the WW2 bombings, something I didn't know until just now when I googled it. The reason the architecture in London is so higgledy piggledy (apart from obviously being built over a very long time) is exactly for that reason, as so many buildings were lost during the Blitz. Now excuse me while I go find that loo. I’ll be back.