I defy anyone to find a further reach of St St Alfege’s Advent Windows concept – it really is becoming global these days. What I love about it is that, as each new community becomes inspired, the concept morphs and changes, and becomes even more fabulous.

Long-term Phantomites will remember Benedict – photographer, artist, toad-wrangler and generally splendid Greenwich-eccentric who despite departing these shores several years ago now, still haunts both the town – and this blog – from time to time.

Benedict and Mrs Benedict now live in Toronto but Greenwich still haunts them – and continues to inspire their work.

Daily Flag for Daily Bread is a community art project where residents of two streets (a truly hyper-local event) unveil one flag each over the 24 days of Advent.

In many respects it’s similar to the Greenwich project – each house makes a flag, any media, any method, everyone in the area strolls round and enjoys the results and, presumably, chomps mince pies and drinks mulled wine (or the Canadian equivalent – what is it, Benedict?) – with one rather groovy exception.

There’s an online auction to buy the flags afterwards, for the charity Daily Bread Food Bank, which helps to supply food for people who can’t afford to buy it.

I’m going to get Benedict to send me a photo of the streets with the flags on show, but the flags (so far) can be seen here. My pic is of Benedict’s own  - he was Number One (of course – you’ve got to have some perks…) though its benign appearance has a rather disturbing concept behind it. He tells me

It is an abstract interpretation of of the rather alarming stats that (last year) there were over 800,000 client visits which means that 1 in 6 people in Toronto will use a food bank in the next year.

Scary stuff, eh…

If any of them take your fancy (the flags, not the food bank users, keep up at the back there…), I can’t think of any reason why you couldn’t bid on it and bring a little Greenwich-inspired art back to its roots…

William Robert Johnston, borrowed from www.johnstoncollection.org

Not much good has come out of the Queensland floods. Even less is going to come out of this terrible storm. Jane (who lived in Circus Street as a child and, given her current residence is in Brisbane, probably wishes she still does) did the sensible thing. She got the hell out and went to stay with friends in Melbourne, and while she was there made a little discovery. 

She went to visit a charming little house-museum, The Johnston Collection, which is stuffed to the gills with fabulous antiques, many of Greenwich extraction. Apparently the collection’s so massive that it doesn’t all fit at once and it gets rotated four times a year.

Born in 1911 in Lilydale, Australia, William Johnston was obsessed by antiques from a creepily early age – his grandma gave him a Minton bone-china mug when he was eight and that was it. He was going to be a collector. And since the only way the son of a boot maker is going to become an antique collector is by being an antique dealer, that’s what he did.

And the guy was savvy. Australia’s still a young country. They prize their antiques. Britain, after the Great War, was a different place indeed. And by the end of WWII, the landed gentry were at financial breaking point. Just the kind of point that if a persuasive art dealer knocked on the door of their country pile and very nicely offered to take their old junk off their hands in a discreet fashion, they might well be tempted. He shipped the best stuff back to Australia by the container-load and dealt the rest out of his shop in Greenwich.

I’ve been trying to find out where that shop would have been – there were many antique/secondhand/junk shops in South East London in the sixties and seventies (if you want to know what one might have looked like, check out the seedy store David Hemmings visits in Blow Up (it’s implied it’s in Charlton, but could, frankly ,be anywhere; the film’s geographical accuracy is about is reliable as Thomas’s memory.) Jane thinks it was in King Edward Crescent – but I can’t see that there ever was a King Edward Crescent in Greenwich.

The romantic in me wanted to think it’s the Creek Road Shop that Geoffrey Fletcher sketched and which now resides in the Museum of London Store, but it turns out Kent Antiques was actually at 14, King William Walk. 

Apparently he was yet another  Greenwich Character (where have all the characters gone?)  Jane says “he was rumoured to be a taciturn chap who wouldn’t sell you a piece if he didn’t like you.  With that attitude, I’m sure there must be someone remaining in Greenwich  who remember a bad tempered  git in Kent Antiques.”

But for all his git-hood, the guy was basically a good egg, who was absolutely sure what he wanted to happen to his collection when he died. He wanted the public to enjoy it as much as he had. He left his collection, house – and, very sensibly, enough cash to endow it forever – to a Trust on his death in 1986. And it looks utterly charming. It’s gone on the list of Phantom fantasy visits.

Jane’s not the only person who is wondering if anyone remembers Johnston. The museum is currently creating a book to celebrate its 25th Anniversary this year and is keen to hear from anyone who remembers him. I bet Dick Moy would have known him. Sadly he’s not around – but the seventies really wasn’t that long ago (as we were talking about yesterday) and I’m guessing there are still antique dealers out there who might recall him, or even one or two people who got thrown out of his shop because he didn’t like the cut of their jib.

If you remember Kent Antiques do contact the museum. They point out they’re not actually allowed to publish their postal address (not sure how you’re supposed to visit; presumably you call ahead) so you have to phone or contact them via one of those annoying internet forms (which I personally refuse to fill in) rather than a straight email address, which is a shame. But perhaps not everyone’s as paranoid about personal info as me…

And if you do remember him don’t forget to tell us here too…

Visiting the Greenwichs of the world – so you don’t have to…

Thought it was about time I did another in my ‘Global Greenwich’ series, about the sundry Greenwichs (what is the plural for ‘Greenwich?) around the world.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for any amount of time may remember my outing to Greenwich, CTT – a slightly baffling visit to a satellite town within commuting distance of New York, where I managed to see about two human beings in the whole visit.

If you recall, I’d been somewhat floored by, when I actually came to get off the train, there being two Greenwich, Conneticuts – within four stops of each other. I reckoned they must be about six miles apart, so it seemed a bit unlikely that they’d be part of the same place – especially since there was a large expanse of water between them – but it seemed equally unlikely that someone would have been unimaginative enough to give two places so close to each other the same name (albeit a very good name, natch…)

The only thing to do was to hop back onto the train, go three stops along and see the other one – ‘Old Greenwich.’

The railway line goes over, curiously enough, one ‘Greenwich Creek’ – though it’s slightly swankier than its gritty London cousin. You don’t get this sort of view from the DLR:

From the train it looked like a cross between a beach and a marina, though finding my way back to it without a car was going to be tough…

I’m not really sure what I expected from ‘Old Greenwich.’ I mean – nothing in the US is particularly old, even on the East Coast, but some of the places in the main town had looked as though they’d seen a couple of centuries.

Old Greenwich’s clock told me the place had been established in 1640. There didn’t seem to be much – if anything – even half that age surviving – but I guess we can’t boast much better in this , the way we play fast and loose with our heritage on occasion.

It was certainly grittier – somehow more ‘human’ – than the Stepford-Wives territory that the main town had been. There were fewer upmarket stores and chi-chi coffee bars, and – heavens – there were one or two actual people in the streets, but again I just didn’t get anwhere near that nigh-on smothering friendliness I’ve found elsewhere in the States. If anything they seemed even more reserved than us Brits…

The main street is low-rise, large-windowed and expansive, if rather short. I wandered up and down its entirety in about ten minutes; most of the shops – a craft store, a couple of homewares emporia and a toy store of the variety I remember as a kiddie – seemed to be shut, though it wasn’t lunchtime. At the far end, the impressive fire station is easily the largest building around:

A charity shop (not a thrift store) was open and had people inside it. Since there appeared to be an age before the next train back, I wandered in and checked out exactly the same sort of tat we have in charity shops over here (albeit rather more expensive Stateside) and enjoyed a chat with a lovely old guy who, as soon as he found I was from Europe, told me all about his forthcoming trip to Turkey. I asked him about the history of the town; he didn’t know. I asked about the beach. He waved vaguely. Who wanted to talk about local things when there was Turkey to be discussed?

There was still ages to go before the train back. By this time I was getting hungry, so stopped in the only cafe I could find for a tired salad and a so-so coffee. It was a pizza place, but the girl told me they only fired up the oven on Wednesday evenings.

I tried wandering down a few side streets. The same large, close-boarded houses as in the main town, each with its own neatly-clipped lawn and Stars and Stripes flag. The odd car in the drive. But again – no one. Anywhere.

I found the bookstore. Surely here there would be something about the town’s history – even, perhaps, what made the place tick. A sign in the window asked me not to let my dog jump at the plate glass as the window was Stella the cat’s favourite sleeping place, but even Stella the cat was nowhere to be seen.

After a discussion, the assistants agreed that there had been a book about Old Greenwich out sometime, but it wasn’t in print now. Later, I looked up the town’s history on Wikipedia and though it couldn’t explain why there appeared to be two towns of the same name within six miles of each other, it did at least say what the book Murder in Greenwich that crops up on Ebay from time to time is referring to…

When I came out of the bookshop, I found the only decent-looking caff in town. A converted – what – bank? Town hall? Market building? – now a trendy wine bar. I’d just had a bad coffee and a horrible salad round the corner but I went in anyway. While I’d been eating said horrible salad, I’d missed a train. At least the coffee there was good.

There was one place left to visit. The mini-supermarket. There was still 35 minutes to the next train and I was virtually next to the tracks, so I wasn’t in a hurry. Here is a list of things I bought:

Extra-large, extra tough muffin cases
Birthday candles in the shape of Champagne bottles
An orange
Cat breath-fresheners
A box of Dots

I had exhausted Old Greenwich. Rather, it had exhausted me. If there was a beach to be found, I had failed. If there were humans to be found, I’d failed there too.

I’m sure I missed something here. The party that was going on right round the corner, if only I’d gone one street further, perhaps. Please – if you’re from Old Greenwich, CTT, and you’ve stumbled onto this blog by accident – put me out of my misery and tell me where that party was…

My conductor, a cross between Ned Flanders and Tom Hanks in Polar Express, punched my ticket and I settled back in my seat, waiting for some countryside. Of course it never came. New York is exactly like London – a big old sprawl – even leaving the state and entering Conneticut. The only bits that hasn’t been built on seem to be the gigantic cemeteries. With mile upon mile of close-boarded houses, each with attendant Stars & Stripes flying proudly outside, I turned back to the train map and idly wondered what lay beyond my destination, just a single stop away now.

I have been thinking for sometime about the other Greenwichs in the world. It’s difficult to count them as I keep finding new ones, but my current estimate is at least 22 – scattered around virtually everywhere but Europe and the Far East. I thought it would be fun to visit them all eventually, even if it may take Some Time.

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be notes for some hideous “humorous” travelogue I’m planning to write. I am not packing a fridge in my luggage or planning to join in local pastimes with grinning natives. Just a little overview of a few of other Greenwich’s we could have lived in.

It seems almost banal to start in Greenwich Village – especially since I’ll wager several of you know it better than I do. But it’s the easiest to get to and I was there anyway. And bloody freezing. I never manage to make it to Manhattan in the spring or fall. It’s always at the bloomin’ extremes of New York temperatures.

The Village is one of the few areas of the island that isn’t on the grid plan, and it’s remarkably easy to get lost. Old streets, some of which are cobbled, twist and turn and come out at places you’re sure you passed ten minutes ago. It has some genuinely old buildings in it, and much of it is defiantly non-New-Yorky.

Twin Peaks

The area runs from roughly the bit under Union Square (14th St) to a little above the site of the World Trade Center, mainly on the west side. In fact Greenwich Street used to run from the Village right down towards Battery Park until it was dissected by the Twin Towers. In most of the proposals for the site’s rebuilding Greenwich Street is reinstated. The area to the very far West is now the uber-trendy Meat Packing district.

The main part, though, is centred around the few roads surrounding Bleeker, which was once the hippest hip street of all. It’s just about clinging on there, and some of its iconic shops, clubs and cafes remain, albeit more as tourist traps than poets’ haunts. It’s better by night; by day (when I was in a fit state to take photos) there is something a little seedy about it. There’s a fantastic sort-of ‘map’ of Bleeker Street here.

It has always (well – up to about 20 years ago) been a place for outsiders – from the jam-packed immigrant populations of the 19th and early 20th century to the alternative cultures of the 1950s and 60s, it’s been hip for being different. Innovative. From funky nightclubs, new-wave writers and a positive explosion of musicans, actors and designers to the backdrop of the gay rights movement, from ancient Italian delis and cheesemongers to spangly jewellery stores and the world’s first condom shop, Greenwich Village has seen its share of life.

Its heyday as a beatnik haven is long-past. Where once lived artists, creatives and hedonists, now wealthy businesspeople who like to think they have a little bohemian left somewhere in their soul have bought-up and gentrified the area’s cute little backstreets. Think Soho/Hoxton/Spitalfields. The artists are brought back to decorate the swanky apartments and allowed to add local colour to the place as long as they behave themselves.

That’s not to say that it’s a dead area. There’s still plenty going on and if you’re more likely to be sitting next to a rank tourist like me than Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg or Bob Dylan in Le Figaro, then let’s face it, you’ll be adding to the-problem-with-Greenwich-Village too – it’s a victim of it’s own success. Another stop on the tourist trail.

What I like about it is that they’re actually proud of their history here. Everywhere you look there are plaques and notices telling people what things are or were. We could learn a lesson there…

Washington Square, the Village’s centrepiece, has been in the middle of being tarted-up for as long as I can remember. It’s still mainly chainlinked-off; you still can’t get to the triumphal arch, though one or two little corners remain for those with iron constitutions, thick coats and an inexplicable desire to play boardgames in sub-zero temperatures.

There are one or two must-sees. The Stonewall Inn may look sleepy now…

…but it was one of the most explosive places on the planet in 1969. If you don’t know what happened, read about it here. There’s a park nearby with some scarily lifelike sculptures based on the the history of gay rights in the area.

A couple of things I really enjoyed this visit:

The Strand Bookstore. Yes – I know – a perennial favourite but it’s a must if you’re a secondhand book nut. 18 miles of books, they boast – mostly second hand, but there’s a whole section downstairs of new releases that had been intended as review copies.

Unoppressive Non-Imperialist Bargain Bookstore – I went there merely for the name. It sells remainders – worth a browse.

Century 21 Cheapo department store, not really in the Village, but just off Greenwich St so I’m counting it. As you should know by now, The Phantom is a total cheapskate and makes a beeline for this and Syms every time New York turns up in the diary. It’s not a pleasant experience as such – but it’s so damn cheap it’s worth the fight. Avert your eyes if seeing Ground Zero makes you squeamish.

Merchants House Museum This was my find of the trip. Nestled between building sites and high-rise car parks, this early 19th century townhouse, a sort of cross between Dennis Severs house and The Geffrye Museum has been preserved exactly as it was in Victorian times. It’s not quite in Greenwich Villlage either, being across Broadway, but it’s well worth seeking out.

Built for a wealthy merchant in the 1830s, the house was very grand for its day, with all the latest mod cons and fashionable decor. Massive parties and balls were held there while the merchant was still making money. But he was unable to continue the line with a son and as the area went ‘down’ socially (it’s right near Bowery, one of the worst areas in days gone by and still not the best) the house decreased in value. They were stuck there.

Gertrude, the youngest daughter, never married and continued to live in reduced circumstances until her death in 1933, still using the old 1850s stove and a tin bath, having never redecorated. Some farsighted soul decided to preserve it – and it is a fascinating place. Don’t expect to find more than the briefest mention in tourist guidebooks, but do make an effort to see it next time you’re there. And take directions. You could walk right past it.

Sadly my camera’s memory had filled up by the time I visited this fabulous place, and when I took it into Circuit City to buy some more they burst out laughing and got all the other assistants to come see the hilarious ancient camera (it’s five years old.) Sure enough, after visiting numerous other stores, I have discovered my camera is obselete – I couldn’t get memory anywhere, or a replacement for the battery which is really rather pathetic now. I’ve heard of a place in Dartford that sells batteries for obselete cameras and mobile phones (I’ll report back on that one) but a new one might be in order. In the meanwhile I leave you with this – a bijou little place up for sale, just in case you fancy a quick fantasy…