To The Manor Born

I've been being all posh n' artistic again, innit. Yesterday Lilac Lady and I stayed out of the pub for ooh, must've been at least half an hour to visit Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery. It's got a fantastic exhibition on right now, The Witching Hour.

Billingham: untitled from Black Country

A range of photographic, paint and video art exploring the uncanny, spooky and unnerving within the urban environment. Uncanny, familiar streets in the half light from Richard Billingham's Black Country combined seamlessly with Toby De Silva's Haunted, a slide show of bland publicity photos juxtaposed against the supposed ghost stories they link to, alongside examples from Jack, the locations of the Ripper Murders as they look today. The use of light and warm colours to bring 'past crimes' into our perception of 'modern' urban crime (whether from news or TV drama) is fantastic. There are a few 'curve balls' in there, too: a photograph of a scarily nationalistic house- bright daylight but you could tell that something angry brews behind the rows of misintepreted red crosses and images of St George. A fantastic exhibition for a free, local gallery to be offering.

Toby De Silva- Jack: Annie Chapman

The other excellent thing about Pitzhanger is that it is also a Soane historical house, created by the architect and inhabited by Henry Walpole before a long and varied life as, amongst other things, an early public library. It is still very much a working building, hosting photoshoots, weddings and workshops of various types. The downside to this is that there really isn't much furniture, however this allows features such as pannelling, amazing plaster ceilings and statues to shine:

Oblivious man ruins gatehouse shot shocker. but this time the
lady IS wearing lilac.

The grounds are now a pretty lovely (and well facilitated) park

WOW! Ceiling.

Anyway, by now you are probably considering tweeting Perdita because clearly, someone with more intelligence and taste than she is somehow hacking her blog. But never fear: 'tis I. Following this cultural type debacle we immediately skipped off to the pub and then a favourite Chinese restaurant. The kind of classy venue where the starter is this big:

And where they have a wine so luxuriously vintaged, they have to cover the label with their own logo:




Seriously though, this is a fantastic restaurant. Click for more info!

 Om nom nom and a happy new year, bunnies!