Author: Leigh Hatts

The Discover Greenwich attraction which has opened in the Old Royal Naval is good news.

Really this is a new tourist information centre with a good cafe and museum attached.

The displays include some good historical information and artifacts excavated on site.

Featured is the Tudor royal palace which preceded the Naval College. We now know that its chapel, where Henry VIII married Katharine of Aragon, stood on the car park just over the fence from the the Trafalgar Tavern.

Best news is that is that entry is free even to this permanent exhibition.

The cafe is in the Old Brewery where under the new Meantime Brewing Company brewing has been resumed. The Old Brewery occupies the site of a friary whose mother house was in Ghent so naturally there is a Belgian style ale along with the traditional London Pale Ale and Hospital Porter. The latter it is claimed would be recognisable to the retired sailors who used to live at the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich.

Master Brewer Alastair Hook looks to the Thames for inspiration and talks of the many breweries which once lined the Thames in London. Some are featured in the timeline on the Old Brewery walls.

Dan Cruickshank, who appears in a film being shown on a loop, has described the Old Naval College as “one of the greatest buildings in the world” and “one of the outstanding compositions” which can be compared with Versailles and St Petersburg.

The historian claims that Queen Mary, joint sovereign with William, improved Wren’s design by insisting on the vista of the Queen’s House in the middle  of the new buildings.

He also describes today’s chapel as “a jewel box of a building”. This too is open free along with the Painted Hall.

The TIC and cafe are open from 10am to 5pm daily. Closing time seems a bit early. Walkers do like to be able to still have  tea at 5pm. But the  bar with local beer is open all day to 11pm.

There is an entrance to the Discover Greenwich complex opposite Greenwich Pier. I think this will become a stopping point for Thames Path walkers. The TIC staff are really local and well-informed.

See page 18.

‘The Great Bore’ is open this weekend at Rotherhithe before the Underground service is resumed shortly.

The Guardian has one of the many weekend reports.

Those who choose to walk through will be doing what Brunel expected when he designed the tunnel. Trains were an afterthought. Walkers can have a drink at The Mayflower where the men who dug the crossing drank in 1825-43. It took three reigns to complete the work.

See page 25.

Watercolour painter Paul Sandby is best known for his pictures of Windsor in George III’s reign.

The exhibition at the Royal Academy marking the 200th anniversary of his death in 1809  brings together his other Thames views.

He certainly knew the river well because his earliest drawing is of the Tower of London and he spent time teaching at Woolwich Arsenal.

In his 1765 The North Terrace, Windsor Castle the winding river can be seen below passing Clewer Church.  In another picture he then shows us the view back from “the Goswells”  on the south bank opposite The Brocas.

But Sandby did go further west upstream. The View of Oxford from Nuneham Courtney – Evening c 1760 shows Lord Harcourt’s ‘improved’ estate. The work was by ‘Capability’ Brown who was known to Sandby. Another is the morning view from the lock cottages showing two boats and the mansion on the hill. Today the lock has gone but university-owned house still makes a fine sight today. Sandby was very familiar with it for he taught drawing to Lady Elizabeth Harcourt.

One picture looks just like the mathematical bridge at Walton-on-Thames as painted by Canaletto but alas it is not. Virginia Water, again at Windsor, had a fine bridge too.

However, the star picture in his own version of Canaletto’s view east from Somerset House. The precise observation allows us to see the south bank as well as the north as it was in Georgian times.

This is an exhibition not to be missed.

Paul Sandby is at the Royal Academy of Arts from Saturday 13 March to Sunday 14 June; admission £9 (conc £8).

See page 90-92 and 164.

The garden at the back of Tate Modern has gone to make way for the extension and its worksite.

However, the long hoarding round the back has just been decorated with over a hundred drawings by Swedish artist Martin Karlsson.

He includes places on the Thames Path which you may have just passed such as St Saviour’s Dock and the little St Mary Overy Dock by Southwark Cathedral.

He also has a drawing of Stephen Duncan’s Old Father Thames relief found upstream on Elm Quay.

Martin calls his show London: An Imagery after Gustav Dore’s 19th-century book of drawings. It’s worth looking round the back.

See pages 31, 34 and 40.

The Thames will have its lowest tide for five years on the morning of Wednesday 3 March.

Thames 21, London’s waterways charity, is organising a deep clean of the river bed. Volunteers are invited to put on old clothes and meet at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge at 11am.  The event will be over by 1.30pm.

A pancake race was run along a stretch of the Thames Path today.

Southwark’s Shrove Tuesday race was in Montague Close where the national trail passes the cathedral.

See page 31.

News has reached me of improvements to the path between Islet Park House in Maidenhead and Cookham’s Mill Lane.

This comes from the Royal Borough of Maidenhead which has been responsible, with a Natural England grant, for widening the path and repairing the bank.

The erosion problems were mainly tackled early last year whilst the new stone surface and reduced gradient at bridges are more recent achievements.

I look forward to enjoying it shortly. Not all improvements are for the better but it is interesting that thought has been given to people with impaired mobility on this very attractive stretch with Cliveden views.

See page 100.

Paul Nash’s Wittenham Clumps painting is on the poster advertising the Paul Nash exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. It’s also the cover picture for the catalogue.

This star picture, called Landscape of the Vernal Equinox, has been lent by the Queen. This is because the painting was purchased by the Queen Mother who hung it at Clarence House.

It was one of Paul Nash’s last works and was painted in 1943 from far away Boar’s Hill where he used binoculors.

He attempted the view 26 times so it’s interesting to find in the exhibition an early watercolour, dated about 1913, of Wittenham Clumps.

This first picture is painted from the other side when Nash stayed with his uncle at Sinodun House on the road out of Wallingford. This is appropriate for another name for the landmark is the Sinodun Hills.

At the time he wrote about the marvellous countryside with “grey hollowed hills crowned by old trees”.

The show has other early work clearly influenced by William Blake. There are also pictures of Swanage where he spent much time.

Paul Nash: The Elements continues at Dulwich Picture Gallery daily except Mondays; admission £9; until Sunday 9 May.

See page 154.

Clink Street, running under Cannon Street railway line bridge, used to be a delightful Dickensian road between warehouses. It may be too light soon.

The details are on the London SE1 website.

Although this stretch of the Thames Path, just west of Southwark Cathedral, is not alongside water it was thought to be an important part of the river experience in London when the national trail was planned in the 1980s.

This year is the 200th anniverary of Johan Zoffany’s death.

The artist, closely associated with the River Thames, died on 11 November 1810.

It seems that the bicentenary exhibition planned appropriately for Thames-side Tate Britain has been cancelled for fear that it will not attract enough people.

The Royal Academy of Arts has stepped in but cannot fit it in until 2012. Fortunately that will be the 250th anniversary of Zoffany’s arrival in England from Germany.

But this year there is publication of a book Johan Zoffany: Artist and Adventurer by Penelope Treadwell (PHP £50; paperback £30).

This seems expensive but the book is a delight and has 200 colour illustrations.

The author is an expert in her field and was fired to write the book by living in Zoffany’s riverside house at Strand-on-the-Green.

When Zoffany lived in Covent Garden he had a country home at Chiswick. Its church is depicted in The Sharp Family painted in 1779. The family are on the towpath opposite with the Thames and church seen to one side of the group.

He knew Hampton well and in 1762 had painted David Garrick and his wife taking tea by the river. He also depicted them outside the Shakespeare Temple, again with a river view.

The artist is most associated with Kew where he is buried in the churchyard on the green. His tomb looks out to the Thames and his house beyond at Strand-on-the-Green.

See pages 54, 55 & 68.