It’s a Sunday afternoon before a Bank Holiday and I am doing nothing in particular but it’s given me time to write about what we got up to the last Sunday before a Bank Holiday. Which was also nothing very exciting but it was un-exciting in a geeky music fan way.
The short version is that we found St Charles Square, which has recently been memorialised in a blur song:
The “why” of this story is a bit longer. Blur have featured on this blog a few times – from a trip to France where I referenced every song on Parklife to actually seeing them in the flesh at Wembley last year (albeit from a long way back). And of course, we have this Parklife landmark just a few minutes’ walk away from home:
Essentially, we found ourselves childfree and directionless in West London that Sunday. Not quite lost on the Westway, but we did at one point pass Under The Westway:
We’d dropped Eva off at a bowling party in Queensway and Reuben was playing DnD with friends in Dalston so we could have just gone home and waited for the chicks to return but we were so close to that Square that I figured we might as well jump on a bus and see what there was to sing about.
Funnily enough, the bus we’d got on the way there from church also had a bit of a blur-themed stop:
From Queensway, we jumped on a number 70 bus which not only passed under the Westway but also crossed Portobello Road, which I think is referenced on a song from “Modern Life is Rubbish”. I did not get a good photo of the sign.
But here we are at the St Charles Square bus stop:
We were on the lookout for the sign in this tweet but – spoiler – we never did find it. We did walk round the entire square, which is no way a square, and found a few signs but none that matched exactly.
And when I say it’s not a square, I really mean it. These yellow highlighted bits are what is labelled as “St. Charles Square” and yes, we did walk down each of these offshoots to see if we could find the right sign.
And on the unhighlighted bits, we found some interesting Things to See, like this house which is more plant than dwelling:
And this office building, which used to be a furniture depository:
It felt like we were in Hampstead Garden Suburb or some kind of far off village rather than a few minutes north of Notting Hill.
After such a lot of adventuring, we naturally retired to the pub:
And on the way back to Ladbroke Grove happened to catch a band called Phantom Limbs, rocking up a storm on the pavement:
So this might have been the epitome of LWAT “Just Wandering” but it was a fun afternoon’s walk and another pop culture landmark to add to our list, alongside the house from “Spaced” and the phone box from the back of “Ziggy Stardust”. Not bad for a Sunday Sunday walk in the park….
