Jane Dallaway

Exploring Bermondsey

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:05:00 +0100

A friend was due to be in London and available for a catch-up, and I had a vague plan to visit the Fashion and Textile Museum for the Paint! Pattern! Print! exhibition, so I decided to combine the two. I wanted to make the most of my time, and I didn’t know much about the area around the museum, so I asked Claude to devise me a plan based on things I generally like: bookshops, stationery shops, crafts, galleries, parks. And I knew I’d need a sit down with a drink at some point.

After a trip to a gorgeous little bookshop I headed off to Southwark Cathedral, an oasis of calm in the hustle and bustle of Borough Market. I loved the Diamond Jubilee Window, designed and made by Icelandic artist Leifur Breidfjord.

It was the sparkling jewels dotted through the glass that caught my eye first, and only then did I take in the rest of the colours and the general beauty of the piece, much brighter and clearer than some of the more traditional windows nearby.

I also felt fortunate to catch the photography exhibition of Peter Marlow’s work photographing all 42 cathedrals of the Church of England. I enjoyed comparing the cathedrals side-by-side. All buildings with the same purpose but with different styles and materials on show. A lovely way to appreciate the elements that are the same, and those that are different.

My next main stop was the Fashion and Textile Museum with the exhibition I’d come to see.

Not far from there is the London Glassblowing studio, which is currently showing a retrospective show of Peter Layton’s work.

I loved both the colours and shape of this piece, and the shadow it casts.

I saw these as penguins from the moment I spotted them, and was pleased to find that I was right. This piece called Birds by Bruce Marks.

This piece by Colin Reid seemed incredible. These artists really know how to handle glass!

After a quick browse of the books in Morocco Bound, I needed a coffee and a sit down, so headed to WatchHouse, a wonderfully reworked building turned into a calm and sophisticated coffee shop. There’s a lovely black and white photograph of the building on their wall, and on their about page, showing what it used to look like. I didn’t know what a watch house was, so I looked it up:

It was essentially the headquarters for the beadles and very similar ‘headboroughs’ who formed the Parish Watch

The Parish Watch was then mainly concered with keeping the peace, arresting lawbreakers, ensuring that the nightly curfew was observed etc.

Next stop for me was the White Cube gallery, another place I’d never been, nor even known about. Impressive space, so very tall, with artwork to match. The art wasn’t necessarily to my taste, but I could totally appreciate the scale.

Finally, I walked towards Tate Modern to meet my friend, and enjoyed this mural, “London Cityscape” by James Cochran, glowing in the sunshine.

All in all, Claude did a good tour, introducing me to new places I doubt I’d have found alone, all independent, all within a mile of each other, all at a chilled pace. I’ll experiment with using Claude as a tour guide again.

Paint! Pattern! Print! exhibition at The Fashion and Textile Museum

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:01:00 +0100

Earlier in the year I came across information about the exhibition Paint! Pattern! Print! The Textiles of Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, possibly via a Time Out listing, and bookmarked it for a possible visit.

The exhibition describes itself as:

Step into the exuberant world of pioneering designers Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell, from painted beginnings to bold textiles, fashion and homeware designs.

I’d never been to the Fashion and Textile Museum before, so that was interesting in its own right. I didn’t know anything about Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell before spotting the listing, but the imagery on the museum page jumped out at me straight away, their patterns and colours felt very much up my street, and that was enough to decide I wanted to go.

It was pleasantly busy, alive enough for a bit of atmosphere but never crowded. It’s a lovely building with a good amount of exhibition space. It’s exhibition-led rather than home to permanent collections, which reminded me a little of Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, another place that curates around one major show at a time and builds outward from it. I spotted a poster for workshops tied into Paint! Pattern! Print!, the same kind of thing Ditchling does well. The secondary show here was a collection of pincushions made by soldiers on active service. It’s quite moving, some of the pincushions carry photos of the person who made them, and in some cases that would have been the last image a mother ever received of her son. It was genuinely interesting, and there was something fun about the collection itself too. The info panel explained that these simple, kit-made cushions need no real skill or creative eye to produce, which may be exactly why collectors and curators overlooked them for so long, until two private collectors became captivated by them.

But I was there for Paint! Pattern! Print!, which covered two floors and was a proper riot of colour throughout. One of the highlights for me was the reproduction of their studio, fascinating and just as colourful as everything else on show.

The timeline upstairs was useful for getting a proper sense of what happened when across their working life together, though it was impossible to photograph in any meaningful way, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Upstairs in the studio space there’s a film showing Sarah Campbell painting flowers onto fabric in a simple but effective manner, clearly showing her skill and talent, and then also working with paper and card, some of which are on show too. The film was charming, and her process looks peaceful.

A few other favourites from the visit:

A headscarf, above, and the felt-tip design that was the original artwork for it.

This is a four-colour print, and yet it feels so much richer than that.

I loved all the patterns here, right up my street.

And a clock crafted from colourful threads.

I came away thoroughly charmed by both the exhibition and the museum, and I’d happily go back.

The Lancing Weatherstone

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:11:00 +0100

Thank goodness for the stone, how else would I have known that it isn’t raining?

Hopefully Lancing never gets itself into a panic fearing for a tornado just because someone nicked the stone.

Kindly really are dog friendly

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:14:00 +0100

Look at these thoughtful signs! And I don’t think I knew macadamias were toxic to dogs. Thank you, Kindly, for looking out for your four-legged customers and educating your two-legged ones.

Pride 2026

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:06:00 +0100

I love Brighton on Pride weekend. I love Brighton most of the time to be honest, but I love it especially at Pride.

Today was a hot, sunny, blue-sky day and parts of Brighton ground to a halt as the parade passed by.

So much support lined up along the route - families, friends, young, old - all there to have a good time.

A couple of placards made me stop for a moment - I have a photo of one, but not the other. The first I saw said “Too foreign to be here, too queer to be there”. Oof! Something about seeing this on a placard held by a young woman with the sun shining down really made it hit home.

The second was “The world’s on fire but you care about who I love…”, which made me chuckle wryly.

As ever, I found the experience an uplifting and emotional thing to watch.

Water: Abstraction vs leakage

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:29:00 +0100

Together, these companies abstract almost 14.7 billion litres of water every day to supply homes and businesses across England and Wales.

At the same time, they lose almost two billion litres of treated drinking water every day through leakage before it reaches customers. The figures show why abstraction licensing, leakage reduction and river protection must all be addressed together as climate change increases pressure on water resources.

Image and quote from this post. Worth noting the 14.7 billion litre total in the quote covers all the water companies in their full dataset, not just the eight shown in the chart above, so the two don’t map onto each other exactly.

I doubt I’m the only person whose response to their water company emailing them and asking them to conserve water isn’t polite. And that was before I knew about the abstraction licences. The waste figures are higher than I’d imagined too.

Sigh!

Comrades in Art exhibition at the Towner Gallery

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:11:00 +0100

I had spotted this exhibition during a semi-regular check of the Towner exhibitions page and thought it might be interesting if I was in the area. I hadn’t really thought of making it a feature visit until a friend mentioned that her husband had been really impressed by it. I found myself with a free Friday and thought I could make it part of an Explorer style day in Eastbourne. This isn’t quite how the day turned out!

The exhibition is large. Not in terms of space but in terms of pieces - 300+. And, as a contrast to the Tracey Emin: A second life exhibition I went to earlier in the year, the information panels by the side of the art were packed with context which made sense of the art, the artist and how they came to be involved with the AIA in the first place. They even provided a link to the full set of information panels. A wide variety of styles. Some pieces which may have been unremarkable had the context not being present. Several artists linking back to both the Hepworth in Colour exhibition at the Courtauld and the British Landscapes: A Sense of Place at Pallant House Gallery visited in the past couple of months. Rarely do I see so many exhibitions in a short space of time so rarely do I get to make such connections.

Some of the pieces that stood out for me mainly did so because of the stories.

The half-size reproduction of Cliff Rowe’s The Struggle Between the Unemployed and the Police Forces. After Rowe had painted this and returned to England from Moscow he didn’t see the painting again. He described it in an interview in the early 1980s which enabled its identification in Lviv in the interval between the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. I wonder what the story attached to the artwork was from the Lviv National Art Gallery perspective. Did they know whose work it was? Was it on display?

Clive Branson’s paintings from 1940. Firstly of Noreen and Rosa (his wife and daughter) which he painted after his release from being a prisoner of war based on how he imagined they were while he was in Spain, and then of wartime scenes in London.

War artists have become a recurring thread this year — from wondering what a camouflage artist even was in Chichester, to Ravilious’s own sad end, to Clive Branson’s paintings here. It seems to be a subject that keeps finding me.

And on a more playful note, the photos of “Girls in the wind” that either Betty Rea or Nan Youngman took while taking the sculpture for a tour of the East Anglian coast. Having done this myself with various objects, I delighted in seeing that it wasn’t just me!

A good, big, tiring exhibition that engaged me so much that I didn’t have time for any further exploration. Well worth a visit.

Today's walk: West Dean Gardens

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:15:00 +0100

I’d had a note to visit West Dean Gardens stored away for a while. I got close earlier in the year when a friend and I walked the Centurion Way ending up at West Dean. I’d also noted that it was dog-friendly.

So we got to visit as a full family outing, Breezy included. It was a lovely place. It felt really calm. We were tempted by the arboretum, but the open spaces to get there would be too hot and exciting for Breezy, so we parked that idea for another visit. Perhaps later in the year when the winterbourne stream is flowing or the trees are changing colour?

We enjoyed our walk around the gardens, and Breezy was delighted to see a free-range chicken near the greenhouses! (not pictured)

Some fun bits of art around the place as well.

Today's walk: The Lower Cuckmere Valley

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:45:00 +0100

This was a walk from a book we’ve had for years - Waterside walks in Sussex. The walk is ticked off at the front and has a date of 2012. No idea if we’ve done it since then.

The day started with a little rain (!) and felt a bit cooler, so we thought we could get away with a longer walk with Breezy without her overheating. This isn’t quite how it turned out. Sadly she had one of her episodes while we stopped in the shade at the visitor centre at Seven Sisters. She recovered quickly enough as she usually does and seemed to enjoy the walk. And it was lovely to see her so tired later in the day.

It was a lovely walk. And unusual in that from the end (and the start if we’d known where to look) we could trace all the paths we’d walked along

Bargello Work at Parham House

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:31:00 +0100

While walking from the garden at Parham House towards the house itself I spotted a sign about a needlework exhibition. So we headed in to take a look. I’d never heard of Bargello work before, so didn’t really know what to expect. What I found was a riot of colour, all beautifully worked to coordinate with either a flower, a piece of fabric, or an aspect of a picture within the house.

Inspired by tulips in Parham Garden

Inspired by a portrait of Susan Villiers

Inspired by James II’s saddle

This piece I think is the odd one out, as it isn’t clear what it responded to, but I rather liked it anyway. There were a few pieces like this pinned out unmounted, along with a piece still in progress that my friend, who is partially sighted, could pick up and look at more closely without blocking anyone else’s access to the wall mounted pieces.