The day started by travelling into town with Ralph and Sonia. They were on their way to the Dieter Rams exhibition at the Design Museum and I was leaving them to head for the dentist. I had an hour to spare so I walked through a number of department stores and caught the tail end of the sales. It is still a disappointment to me that I don't need anything so spending money is not needed. I still love the poodling around and window shopping and a little make-up purchase satisfied the shopping gods.
After the dentist I stopped at a little cafe and had some lunch while people-watching and then made my way to the Barbican Centre. Tonight was the opening night of an exhibition of the work of designer/architect, Ron Arad. Before going to the exhibition we went to a lecture with Arad, Christopher Jenks, Bernard Schumi and Peter Cook (Archigram) discussing the 1970's and architecture, design and creativity in London. It was a real buzz to see these old guys (some even older than me) that I had learned about in the early 1970's through Ralph and his architecture studies, right there a few feet away from us, discussing the zeitgeist of my early years in London.
The 1970's in London were really exciting years. They were the years in which I really discovered the 'growth movement' and the influence of the California centre, Esalen, on group therapy and communication. They were the years in which I discovered my guru and met an entire new circle of people. London was strange and a bit Dickensian in 1970 when I arrived. There were no supermarkets, just these funny little corner shops and they opened weird hours and closed on Thursday afternoons for what was quaintly called 'half-day closing'. The food was absolutely disgusting. Eating out was out of the question and I think that because the English had no real cuisine, unlike the French and the Italians, the ground was fertile for new chefs and restaurants to begin to flourish. Fashion was either wonderful with great shops like Biba and places like Carnaby Street, or nylon and crimplene old lady type clothes. There seemed little middle ground. It was a city of extremes.
During the early 1970's we had a miners' strike and power cuts that led to three day weeks and power cuts on a rotating basis for all of the UK. I remember going to buy groceries in a shop lit by candles. We had no central heating in our little house and would sit round a paraffin heater probably poisoning ourselves with paraffin fumes. What was worse was our tiny terraced house had no indoor plumbing. We had an outside toilet only and no bathroom or bathtub. This wasn't that uncommon in 1970's London. We used to go to dinner at friends' houses and arrive with shampoo, soap and towels and shower before dinner.
It strikes me that now we have heating and indoor plumbing and 24 hour supermarkets and we are not much happier. Being young helped. I'm sure it's easier to put up with physical inconvenience when you're younger, but also the 1970's were a time of genuine possibility. London was so ripe for change that anything and everything seemed possible and we felt we could do anything we wanted and to some extent, we did.
There was real creativity in the air. Architecture and design were only part of the integration of all these areas of innovation. We suddenly started questioning how we related to each other, our environment and our world. It was the beginning of genuine transatlantic travel. In those early years in London I would only get back to the States every two years or so and then a man called Freddie Laker came along and practically invented the idea of no frills cheap air travel. Suddenly the world got smaller and the global village was born.
I was reminded of all of this listening to these old architects tonight. I laughed at the fact that they all wore black, the uniform for designers world-wide. Pretty much the whole audience wore black - it looked like a cliche design funeral. After the lecture we went downstairs and wandered around the Ron Arad exhibition. There was music, a vodka bar, loads of cool, hip Londoners and us.
What a nice day and what a great city. I love living here.
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