Myddelton Square

The weather forecast this morning was cool with rain to come and the photo above will give you some idea of it. We decided to take a local walk, ready to scoot home if the skies opened.

Cat glimpsed
Photo by Tigger

We walked round Myddelton Square and Tigger’s sharp eyes spotted one of the cats that we always look out for here. I had to peer hard before I could see it. Cat score = 1 🙂

A table under the awning

At Myddelton’s deli, we found a table free. It was under the shop’s awning but this wouldn’t have offered much protection from the weather. Fortunately the rain held off.

Lloyd Square and BT Tower

After coffee, we went for a walk. It was rather like “old times” (the pandemic lockdown), when we stayed local and in consequence learned to know the neighbourhood ever greater detail, something I shall always be grateful for.

Palladian pediments

Our neighbourhood is characterised by squares, often with a central garden. Even so, they vary greatly in design. Lloyd Square, with its still private garden, is notable for its pleasantly styled houses that are grouped in pairs by Palladian-inspired triangular pediments.

Palladian pediment

Like other Georgian and early Victorian houses, these have larger windows on the ground floor and smaller on the upper floors. They also have the basement “area” which, in affluent households, would be used by servants.

An ivy “coiffure”

In Wharton Street, I stopped to photograph this house in the corner of Cumberland Gardens. Spring and summer have provided it with a luxuriant “coiffure” of ivy. I imagine that a little judicious pruning may be required to keep the upper windows clear.

Front garden flowers

Flowers in close-up
Photo by Tigger

Many of the houses in Wharton Street have well tended front gardens which have bloomed luxuriantly during the summer.

Orange-coloured fly

Gardens, of course, provide a habitat for the smaller denizens of the neighbourhood, like this orange-coloured fly going about its own mysterious business.

Patiently waiting

Where these small creatures are, you also expect to find spiders. This one, having expended its energy on constructing a web, is now resting and patiently waiting for lunch to arrive.

Spiders are – for me, at any rate – symbols of the conundrum facing the lover of nature and animals: the fact that some of the animals that we love and admire prey on and kill other animals that we love and admire. Balancing these contrary feelings is not always easy.

Prideaux Place

We walked along the short Prideaux Place, once part of the New River Estate and named after Arthur Prideaux, a director of the company, that combines Georgian-style houses with a 1930s apartment block. This leads to Percy Circus, another variation on the theme of Islington squares.

Bartlett, surgeon and accoucheur

In Percy Circus, we stopped to check on this old doctor’s sign. (Not that we expected it to have disappeared but its continued presence is somehow reassuring.) How long ago was it that Dr Bartlett exercised his skills, I wonder, and since the term “accoucheur” has dropped out of use?

The path beside Bevin Court

We took the path leading from Percy Circus and up beside the Bevin Court estate. If it has a name, I have yet to discover it.

Holford Gardens

We took a turn round the small but pleasant park called Holford Gardens. A number of streets and a square once bore the name of Peter Holford, in 1770 governor of the New River Company. Holford Square once boasted a bowling green but was so damaged in World War Two that it was demolished to become the site of Bevin Court.

Flowers, Holford Gardens

As well as a large grassy area, the garden has trees and flower beds which make a colourful display at present.

Bee at work
Photo by Tigger

Where there are flowers, we expect to see insects such as this bee, photographed by Tigger.

Trying to escape!

The park is surrounded by a fence but some of the inhabitants seem to be intent on creeping through and escaping!

The leaning tree

The leaning tree always claims my attention because of the unusually acute angle at which it leans. I find myself wondering whether it will eventually fall over or whether it can maintain its curious posture.

Glancing back down the path

Paths, like all good things, must eventually come to an end. In this case, our path ended in the streets that we crossed to return home as the promised raindrops began to fall.