Open House

At Open House weekend, once a year, all sorts of interesting places open their doors to the public. This year, Walthamstow's offerings included a hipster popup bar and a trendy house extension. It has to be said, there were not many venues locally apart from places that you can just walk into anyway, like the William Morris Gallery and Vestry House Museum, but a little can go a long way. Nothing to compete with getting to visit the revolving restaurant at the top of the BT Tower (you have to apply on a lottery basis and I finally got lucky this time) but interesting enough.

We visited Sideshow first, the temporary bar space on one of the demolition sites next to Blackhorse Road station, a spin-off from Blackhorse Workshop that is only there until the end of the year. Although it is open for coffee in the mornings and as a bar a couple of nights a week, I hadn't seen it before, and the architects were there to explain about the place. It's colourful, a series of plywood walls painted in bright primary colours, with zigzag tops to remind us of the factories that have been demolished all over the area. The bar has a roof but most of the space is open to the sky. There are tables and benches, various bits of art to look at, a metal fence to lock your bike to. The colour is uplifting, as is the indoor-outdoor feeling on a fairly cold morning. The star turn though, is the Heath Robinson-ish ball race contraption. Turn a huge rubber tyre and steel balls slowly rise way above your head, propelled by a very long archimedes screw (like a wood screw but much bigger) until they reach the tipping point. From there they race round a complicated array of tubes overhead, making a lot of noise but, since the tubes are mostly opaque metal, it's impossible to work out where they are - you can only guess from the sound, and look out for them hurtling through the clear plastic bits. When the balls get down to the lower levels, there are levers you can pull to let them go a bit further, until they get back to the beginning. Worth a look on a normal opening day, probably a nice place to drop in when they open in the evening. Catch it before it closes and the excavators move in.

The other venue was quite different, a private house that has had a drastic overhaul of the sort you expect to see in Islington, not in Walthamstow. Or did until recently. Originally a quirky Warner house with tiny rooms, the back of the house has been extended to make a spacious kitchen / living room with big glass doors opening out to the garden. Upstairs, a new bedroom extension juts out from the back of the house, a tall bright space internally, on the outside clad in trendy charred timber. Charred timber is literally burnt black on the outside instead of being painted. It's burnt somewhere else, before being nailed on to the outside of the building. I was sorry to see the downstairs part of the extension - although it's also black - is not charred but painted, perhaps because all that burnt wood will blacken anything that touches it. The combination of old and new does work, up to a point. You have a sense that the original rooms are very much secondary, and there is inevitably something a bit jarring about the juxtaposition of old and new. One of the original front rooms is an office, the other is really just a way through to the back. But it helps having some old furniture in the new part. A bit of inconsistency makes for a more interesting place to live, and it's certainly a cut above the standard kitchen extensions and loft extensions you see all over Walthamstow.

On the Art Trail

With so much to see on the Art Trail this year, it's not easy to plan a tour of sure-fire interesting spots. Two things quickly became apparent though: firstly, it's much more interesting to visit someone's space and talk to them about what inspired them and how they achieved what is on show, than it is to look at a shop window or an exhibition in a public space. The other discovery was that what looks uninteresting from the short entry in the trail guide can turn out to be absolutely unmissable. Here are some of the highs and lows from the places we managed to cover so far.

St Mary's church has a huge scrawly painting by Hassan Vawda, an unframed canvas suspended above the pews, featuring a rough bearded character who might be biblical but is most likely a self portrait. The high point though, is getting to squeeze up the narrow stone spiral stair to the roof, where you can see across London to the City and Canary Wharf (see first picture). The tour also included a demonstration of bell ringing in the belfry.

At Today Bread there's a board inviting comments on the question "What's the point of art?" A relevant question that deserves a decent-sized space for responses, not the baby-size Rymans notice board they have given it, but then it is a bakery not an art centre. There is some nice photogenic lettering on the window too, but no clues to what "Growing Culture" means - later in the day I googled "today bread growing culture" and got a lot of stuff about beards. "Why CEOs are growing beards" and "Why does God like hairy chins?". Google must think I can't spell.

Invisible Numbers at Winns Gallery in the park is a mixed show of interesting if apparently unrelated artworks, although the common thread is explained in their informative handout. Hannah Ford's circus banners stand out, both for size and colourfulness and for their political viewpoint - an image of Theresa May comes at an especially appropriate time, in fact very possibly just in time. Andrew Baker and Kirsten Sibley's work on early computers (with a Walthamstow link) comes closest to the Invisible Numbers theme. At one end of the gallery are Denise Ford's calm paintings of Suffolk rope-making, contrasting with Rebecca Ward's alien Face Invader, which pumps out techno music and looks too scary to try on. Although a succession young visitors are not so easily put off.

Hewing Wittare Project Space turns out to be an upstairs Warner flat with distressed plaster, work in progress awaiting architectural perfection. It's a show of work by three artists under the title "Shapeshifting – tactics to combat drowning" and the artworks all relate to the theme of survival, hence the floor of gold rescue blankets. Pictured is one of several papier maché objects by Rebecca Glover, designed to be worn as a mask or perhaps a helmet.

Back in the town centre, Paul Tucker's photographs of trees taken over the seasons are let down by the way the Mall shows them, cordoned off in a desolate spot by the lifts. They deserve to be seen much bigger and without the clutter. We liked the idea of The Mathematics of Plants, shown in the window of XL Hair Design, but we were a little disappointed. The description talks about the whirling spiral patterns found in a surprising number of plants, but the photographs rather conspicuously didn't show that. Danny Coope's Contraptions was also a bit of a disappointment, not because we didn't like his collages but because they are just photographs displayed at the front of his amazing front garden. We definitely wanted to see the originals.

In the next street along, Gomacg - Curious Characters is an open house showing colourful multi-layered paintings on pop art themes. It's well worth a visit.

I would automatically avoid anything that includes knitting in the description, but someone told me the Howard Road House is good, and so perhaps undeservingly discovered the amazing knitted garden up there. Isaac Newton with an apple suspended over his head is a specially nice touch, along with the Smurfs, Dr Who and Einstein.

And finally, I read the description of Danny Neon Open House / Creative Vandalism and decided not to put it on my list, I don't know why because we had an entertaining time looking at the website. Fortunately we went to have a look anyway. The venue is a spacious flat above a High Street shop. Steep narrow stairs lead up to eight rooms including the kitchen and bathroom, all packed with amazing creative clutter and thoughtful and/or provocative artworks. No neon to be seen, but plenty to look at, easily the most fascinating show we saw all day.

Get the E17 Art Trail guide online here

Green Open Homes

A handful of Waltham Forest residents opened their doors to the public last weekend for the third Green Open Homes event. I wasn't expecting it to be especially fascinating but I was completely wrong. Quite apart from the excuse to nose around other people's houses, it was impressive to see so much creativity and enthusiasm for the grass roots of green enterprise. I went to six houses and only just managed to fit them all into a Sunday tour, grappling with a complicated schedule of opening times. First up was Nicola and Oli's pebble garden on Billet Road. They both work for the Institute of Making, so have some connections, among which was getting Monty Don (the TV guy) to design the garden. There's no grass or weeds, just weathered timber and smooth seaside pebbles (recycled from an exhibition), galvanised water tanks used as planters, and a lounger made out of an old futon base.

At Andrew's house in Northbank Road, I forgot to ask about the green insulation and underfloor heating features, getting engrossed in the reclaimed furniture, this blue Art Nouveau-ish dresser being the most spectacular piece, displayed to advantage with dried flowers and a backdrop of children's drawings. The garden here, though, is notable for the stacks of useful junk: several bicycles that could be made to go, a good sized wood-fired oven, and a large plastic tank that will be used for collecting and re-using rainwater.

On Chingford Road, Sue and Michael were faced with appalling damp in their newly-bought house and tackled it by putting in insulation and heat-recovery ventilation throughout. You would never know, it's so well integrated. Sue (who is an environmental consultant by day) explained how the thickness of insulation left just enough space for the sofa and a piano in the living room - otherwise they might have had to make the insulation thinner. They also built a kitchen using bought units but the worktops and cupboard fronts made out of plywood and recycled floorboards. It has amazing pull-out corner shelves and lots of nice unique features. Their side extension (the drying room) has stained glass windows from Ruby Stables and two Victorian-style drying racks, to avoid wasting energy on a tumbler dryer.

The houses in Penrhyn Crescent are a model of what social housing once was, spacious with huge gardens. Rebecca and Luke were particularly showing their solar shower and composting toilet (although Luke was keeping a low profile). The shower is wonderfully Heath Robinson. The water is heated by two big radiators painted black, inside a glass-fronted box up on a flat roof. Rebecca demonstrated how nice and warm the water gets, even tough it was an overcast afternoon. Visitors were offered the chance to try it, although I don't think anyone actually took up the offer. I didn't ask all the questions in my mind about the composting toilet, but discovered some of the reasons for making it - "a sort of hippy background" and a stay on an organic farm in South America, and simply "why not?" Both the toilet and the shower are partitioned off in the ramshackle conservatory that doubles as greenhouse, bike shed and workshop.

I visited Headway Gardens, which is a completely different kind of project. John Struthers masterminded this self-build development of ten family houses build on land once occupied by 50 lockup garages. It looks likely to kickstart another project of the same kind: members of the new Family Foundations project were around to explain the project and show people around. A hugely worthwhile scheme - I'll try to write more about this another time.

I'm beginning to see a pattern in artistic Walthamstow homes, white walls with objects and artworks imaginatively arranged, and a mixture of Ikea and recycled furniture - but also living spaces diverted to practical uses. Charlie's house in Billet Road is no exception. She's tackled a house in appalling condition with amazing energy, and made the downstairs (at least) into a wonderful mix of workroom and lounge, full of colourful lampshades (part of her upcycling business), crusty German pottery and colourful recycled bits and pieces. An inspiring end to what turned out to be quite an exhausting day.

Visiting mosques

Photo: the Masjid e Umer in Queens Road E17

A couple of weeks ago two of our local mosques had a Sunday open day, and I went along to both. This came shortly after the shootings in Paris, but I’m not going to get into that. This is a design blog so let’s call this an architectural tour, and see where we go with that.

First up was Lea Bridge Road Mosque, which was once a 1930s factory/warehouse building, now given an impressive new brick facade with tall pointed-arch windows and little minarets on the corners. Although it only occupies a bit more than half the original building, it is spacious inside. You enter at the corner, into a dimly lit passageway. I walked in, wondering if I was really meant to be there - what about shoes, should I take my flat cap off? But I was soon spotted and given a friendly introduction to the large meeting space, laid out with information posters and edible goodies. No sign of any other visitors, although I did see some later. Shoes worn by everyone in this part. My guide explained a bit about this part of the mosque, asked if I’d ever visited one before (no) and about my religion (not really), and we had a bit of a laugh about Mini Holland. Had I read the Qur’an? (sort of, have it on my Kindle). Which translation? (quite an old one, biblical language unlike the modern versions). I asked about the music that was playing, did that play any part in religious ceremony, although I was pretty sure it didn’t. He explained about the various cultural differences, so some cultures use drums or maybe some percussion, others are opposed to music in any circumstances. There was definitely no ‘have you considered converting’. Feel free, he told me, look around, take photos if you like (I had my Pentax slung over my shoulder but didn’t really like to use it), tour coming up later.

The place opened in 1977 and has a well-worn feel, evidently well used and frequently full of people, as it was on this Sunday afternoon. The tour took in the new catering extension at the back, a quick look inside the prayer room at the front, a glimpse of the next door property owned by the mosque (so we don’t get any complaints). A room for consecrating marriages, and the mortuary complete with porcelain slab and a handy pile of coffins (“we don’t usually show people this”). It is quite unlike a church - more a comprehensive community centre. Upstairs, it’s shoes off, and I was given a chair at the back of the prayer room. A huge space, a forest of columns and lovely rich carpet patterned in bands that show where to stand, shoulder to shoulder. It must hold a couple of thousand people and apparently the place is often full, especially on Fridays. Little mirrored recesses in the ceiling reflect the carpet, a colourful kaleidoscope effect. The focus of the room is the wall of windows facing Lea Bridge Road, translucent glass with subtle shadows from the strings of lights swaying in the breeze outside, each outlined with colour-changing fairy lights, and in the centre is the imam’s marble-lined niche bathed in green light. The ceremony was brief, call and response in Arabic, accompanied by the well-known prostrations: all very calm and quite affecting. Some of the old guys get chairs and do token prostrations from a seated position, so I wasn’t the only one sitting. Without a pause, the speaker switched to English, reminding us of the ‘snappy new exhibition’ downstairs. I left the building with a weighty Qur’an and an even heavier book about Islam.

After that, a quick snack before my next visit to the Queens Road Mosque. The outside is a fairly plain buff-brick building with a decent-sized green dome and a minaret on top, hardwood doors and green metal windows, steps and railings leading up to the entrance. I waited in the lobby, explaining that my wife was coming too, so there was a bit of anticipation and more of a welcome than she expected, when she finally found the place. Unlike the last visit, here it is strictly no shoes once you get onto the grey carpet in the lobby. Rather more visitors in evidence here - a toddler skipped onto the grey carpet and was shooed back by anxious parents. I was expecting some tension about women covering their hair but that didn’t happen, whether or not by special dispensation for the day we didn’t find out.

Our guide explained that the site was once a synagogue which became disused as the Jewish population moved elsewhere. It was taken over as a mosque in 1981, then demolished and replaced with the new building which was completed in 2003. We talked a bit about the intricacies of planning permission, and the huge cost of excavating a basement, which was necessary to create enough space without going over the height restriction. The inside is noticeably clean and new-looking. The entrance has benches to sit on while you take shoes on or off, and a wall of cubbyholes to keep them in. That leads to a bright spacious staircase. Our guide showed us the main prayer room first, explaining the complicated electronic calendar of prayer times, which change daily according to sunrise and sunset times. He told us the place is packed on Fridays, with barely enough space even using all three floors, so sometimes the sessions are staggered, but on this occasion only the ground floor was in use. The decor in the prayer room, like the other mosque, is marble tiles and new-looking carpet patterned in bands. We were just in time for the next prayer session, and we were both allowed to sit in a side room open to the main hall.

Upstairs was set up as an exhibition, an extensive display of posters about Islamic culture, some artefacts and a demonstration of Arabic script writing. Down in the basement, a slide show (what did Bertrand Russell have to say about Islam? Bertrand Russell?) and lots of food. Lots of people too, men and women. Leaving after an hour there, we could hardly refuse the goodie-bag containing a different, more compact version of the Qur’an - so now we have one each, or two to compare translations.

Altogether a fascinating afternoon, maybe attracting mainly people who are already open-minded but definitely educational and demystifying. Thanks, people.