Month: January 2013

Highgate Wood – London

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Highgate Wood is my local park – a place to walk, dream, relax and play. Part wildlife reserve, part Victorian park it lies on the ridge just below Highgate village. A remnant of the ancient forest of Middlesex, today it’s an extension of our backyards – with a semblance of the village life in the urban metropolis.

In the summer the playing fields, centred around the mock-tudor cafe, become an idealised vision of the English village, with its cricket pitch, football games and children’s parties. Despite its village pretensions, it remains a truly urban space with joggers, dog walkers, buggies and tourists jostling for space along its paths and buses to central London running along the roads at its edges.

Within the grounds of the wood are the traces of it’s various residents, who have been adapting the space for centuries, from prehistoric earthworks to the asphalt paths laid out by the Victorians in the 1880s. Walking into the woods though reminds us of the ancient forest – and ponders the question – how will this place continue to evolve and be adapted?

Stolpersteine in Aachen

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Aachen the German border town that straddles Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium is probably best known for its Cathedral – the oldest in Northern Europe and the burial site of Charlemagne. The  ‘Imperial Cathedral’ is a magnificent structure, composed of several distinct buildings constructed at various stages in its long history.

But my interest in a brief visit to Aachen during a wet and cloudy January was to explore another history that lies in it’s pavements. This history is marked by small brass plaques that stand as memorials to those who were evicted, deported and murdered by the Nazis. These memorials – the work of Gunter Demnig a German artist based in Köln, seek to transform statistics into a reminder that perhaps one of these people once lived on your street corner.

I’ve already walked the streets of Düsseldorf seeking out Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstiene (Stumble Stones) and literally ‘stumbled’ across many in my walks across the city. In Aachen one of the more notable Stolperstinene is to Anne Frank, who with her mother and older sister lived in Aachen with their grandmother before emigrating to Amsterdam and their eventual fate. Today at the door to their apartment block where they once lived stands a Thai massage parlour…

Düsseldorfer Weihnachtsmarkt

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For the past 12 years I have spent Christmas in Düsseldorf – and each year I head to the Weihnachtsmarkt, the traditional Christmas market. For a month a little rural village arises on the streets of Düsseldorf. Spread across the Altstadt are lines of stalls selling traditional wooden toys, socks, crystals, and candles – the perfect solution for those last minute presents.

Yet the true heart of the market is the food and glühwein stalls, which create a meeting place in the public square. In a way it is a broader understanding of the idea of the market – a meeting place to talk, to trade and interact.

During one wet night in December 2012 I was rather delighted to see a Jack Vettriano painting printed on an umbrella…