The Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity with Saint Jude, Upper Chelsea, sometimes known as Holy Trinity Sloane Square

Today I take my eldest son to the church. He doesn't really want to go, but he is off school with a rather vague tummy ache. I was all ready to put him into class despite his grumbling but he had statistics and the time of year on his side - his teacher said, seeing his pleading face - 'there is a bug going round and it is contagious, I would take him home'. I could see a flicker of triumph in his pale blue eyes and by 11 o'clock after a few rounds of undisturbed-by-brother Wii while I vacuumed and cleaned he announced he was better. 'Oh good.' I said we can go to a church. He wanted to argue and did try but we went anyhow.

Briefly before that we played his christmas game of 'Rush Hour'. I bought it for him with some money from a great aunt. I think it is a game for one person really but we helped each other. I hadn't played before. On a gridded board small plastic coloured models of cars, vans and lorries fit in units of two or three squares. From a natty drawer under the grey square grid, cards tell you how to arrange the cars according to level - beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert - then you have to free a red car by reversing or advancing. I am not completely sure I have pinned down the essence of the game by this description - basically the car is stuck and you have to free it in as few moves as possible. We work through beginners to intermediate, high fiving, and only writing this do I think probably a pattern emerged, but I/we didn't notice it. We just started each match from scratch - always thrilled when the red car emerged free.

At Sloane Square I expect him to ask if we can go to Peter Jones. It is where we buy shoes and indeed toys. But he doesn't. I think he is slightly fascinated by this glimpse into his mum's secret world - what his mum does when he isn't there. Almost a philosophical question for a young child. If you are there for them? Who are you without them? Though perhaps I am worrying about this anyhow, for as UOL and I attempt to fathom our L there are a few pockets of uneasy but exciting secrets squeezed into my days and occasional evenings that never had any spare time before. Here too, writing this - attempting to describe what I think - it is apparent it is only ever an approximation, a sweeter more lilting version of the mess that I often feel, and it reveals the impossibility to trace or catch thought fully.

My eldest child is by nature an absolute unbeliever. 'God's a baby in the bible and Allah is a pigeon' he once said to me. His sharp brutal wit shocking me. He is still a little kid. Even Santa gets fairly short shrift - ' I know it is you mum.' Today, despite the irritation about the non tummy ache it is nice for the two of us just to be together. For he skips alongside and holds my hand. Which his younger brother normally does. Though his questions are like rounds of sharp pins.

'Can you measure a globe and work out how many miles the earth is?'
I have a stab at explaining scale
His mind fizzing like strip light flashing to on. Aha he says, it depends how big the drawing is. A drawing of a house could be more centimetres than a street. Or a town. Yes. I say.
How many is it?'
'What?'
'Miles round the earth?'
'I don't know. Shall we look it up when we get home?.....' That feeling other parents might just know.
A pause.
'I love you Mum.' Back into thought.

In the church he is ill at ease. He attempts to swagger against the dim grainy light. 'It's creepy Mum.' He says. No. I say, look at the pictures in the windows. The stained glass is rich with beautiful colours and drawn figures but he doesn't know the basic bible stories and can't really follow the narratives. I made this choice early, instinctively, not to take him to church, not to send him to a church school but seeing him so out of water in a place of worship makes me doubt myself. Not even to think about what to believe seems a position of lack. We look at the font, the ceiling buttresses, he notices and likes the light fittings. 'The whole place is HUGE mum' He says. He is right. The nave, the width of the church is extraordinary, almost a square. Later I read it is the widest church in London, eclipsing St Pauls by 4 inches. Then as we inspect the pulpit. 'Is this what you do for your JOB?' A slight incredulity. 'No' I say. 'I just like looking. Having a think. Having a think about the history.' 'Oh.' He says. We both like the Memorial Chapel at the south side. It is like an elegant peaceful room with dining chairs. But perhaps for both of us a more manageable size.

Sitting writing this, with a guide book on my knee, the Memorial chapel being slight denigrated for being a later, lesser design I realise I could have helped him more if I had been able to tell him the history. Broken my own rules by looking it up before we went. I feel slightly disappointed that I hadn't thought this through. Sometimes there just isn't the time to do things properly. Though also, I hope, just to look, without pressure is a good thing too.

Built in 1888 by John Dando Sedding who was inspired by the work of Pugin ( see Farm St ) and an exponent of the Arts and Craft Movement John Betjeman later called it 'the cathedral of Arts and Crafts'. Their message to make everyday things beautiful and to revere Nature through crafts, painting and architecture, in a time of industrialism, The East window (which saved the church from demolition in the 1970s with the help of JB ) is the work of Burne Jones and William Morris and was meant to be a window with 'thousands of bright little figures.' Though infact there are 48 prophets, apostles and saints against a William Morris natural foliage background. On the south wall, tucked into the back, under a stone carved freize of grapes that looks like it never got finished, there is a small Millais painting or sketch of Jesus in his father's carpentry workshop. Which is beautiful. A realistic idea of a workshop with dirt and dust, and wood. But I try to look it up and I can't find a reference to it. I wonder if I got it wrong. Though there is a painting at Tate Britain that seems to match some of what I remember - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_in_the_House_of_His_Parents, so maybe it is a sketch connected to that painting.
I have never liked the pre raphaelites or even the arts and crafts movement much. Both always seemed to be based on fantasy to me, but a slightly dishonest sexual/industrial fantasy, where women didn't come off very well. But I like this sketch, I like the realism, the sense of family. I might go back and look at it again. I wish too that we had slowed down and considered it together, but my son was itching by then to light the 20p candle I had promised if he was a good. Which we did.

Reading the history I start to like Mr Sedding - he designed and helped his wife complete the medieval style embroidery of the altar cloth, which is now at the side of the church behind glass, drawing the thistles at each end from those in his own garden and in an age when previously architects would not have spoken to the masons and carpenters he, an important architect of that time used 'to run across the scaffolding shouting with the builders in their own language'
Also I find he said.
"It is well for a man to have a circle of religious exercises that can so hedge him about, so get behind his life and wind themselves by long familiarity into his character, that they become part of his everyday existence…" .


Later, we pick up the youngest from school, and meet exh to go to the last counselling session for the boys. It is the first time exh has come and we are all nervous.

But we are signed off. The boys are really pleased that their Dad came. That he took part. That he saw their drawings. Though Exh says to me later, surprised. how disturbed the drawings seemed.

I think we have come a long way. A trapped red car surrounded by the juggernauts of alcoholism, denial, manipulation and my own part in all of those. I remember talking to someone I worked with at the time I felt completely trapped about setting up a website called 'Should I stay or should I go?' I would have liked it to exist. I wanted advice. I wanted to be given permission to leave. But, and I thought after playing that Rush Hour, that change is made by small moves of reverse and advance, reverse and advance, the pattern not quite clear, the solution often feeling far away, then a sudden run, a rush and the red car off the board into freedom. That it is worth learning to recognise even small feelings of being trapped and devising strategies of questioning curtailment early. But I also thought change itself is the same. It isn't a dramatic announcement but a series of tiny moves, of back tracking, sudden accelerations, of getting used to, of discovering, finding out if that route is possible while launching into happiness.

Amen

St Paul's Wilton Place, Knightsbridge

My favourite toy on our shelves is a perspex children's tool box with red, slightly wobbly clasps, that we call 'The City Box'. In it are: shiny, shaped bricks, in 80s colours - old, wooden, coloured tiles, bought from a car boot sale in a 50s tin with a picture of a red-haired girl holding two puppies on the front - a string bag with German ( I think ), wooden houses, horses, hedges, a school house, a church - a tiny, slightly torn box with thin bits of wood painted as sky scrapers that funnily enough U,OL brought back from Russia as a present years ago, before he went to live there, when we were still together - a metal souvenir of the eiffel tower, another of grand central station in New York and a model of a bullet train and two bags of Muiji city blocks -those pale wood blank shapes of city monuments, one marked London and another New York. And the children always moan that I make them put everything back in the right bags and boxes. Though eventually, with encouragement they do.

Cycling alongside Buckingham Palace back from my trip to St Paul's, I am unsure how to write this. I don't feel attached to what I have to write about. The Tractarian movement initially championed by St Paul's church is difficult to fathom as a non believer in the twenty first century, though at it's core is the division between the Church of England and the Catholic church and the overlaps between the two. But, the beautiful view of Big Ben through a gap in the expanse of trees and then the hoop of the wheel above Horse Guards Parade remind me of the blank wood of the Muiji models and of the cities we have made laid out on the carpet. Invented metropolis that have included a school with horses in a hedged playground, the gherkin building alongside the statue of liberty and a high-speed, japanese-style train link made in bright orange and blue bricks alongside tiny skyscrapers of all colours. A city made from scratch.

To visit the church I park the bike in Hyde Park, jostling with the Winter Wonderland and Knightsbridge shopping crowds. Like time has tipped into Christmas. Everyone busy. A family walk past, wrapped up against the cold, talking about somewhere I know really well from my childhood in Hertfordshire - they must have come up on the train for the day. Though there are many different nationalities in the throng. Somehow I am against the tide, I am not going to Harrods or Harvey Nichols, I am not going ice skating or on a helter skelter. I am trying to cross the road into the quiet, grand, residential street, with a few Embassy flags visible, past a stately hotel with doormen outside.
St Paul's is set back from the road with a tall, dark tower, made from dirty stone, but I can see there are lights on, and the door is open. A man with a knapsack squeezes in before me as I stand in the porch fiddling my phone to silence. There is singing inside the church and for a minute I think maybe there is a service, though it is Saturday afternoon (the boys are at swimming lessons). When I step inside I realise it is a rehearsal. Gathered on the steps infront of an ornate rood screen, are singers and musicians, the music grand and beautiful. I stand, slightly self concious watching them, I am not sure where the man in the knapsack has gone. The church has a beautiful, high roof with wooden, carved trusses, a wooden gallery with carved angels looking down and tiled panels, like murals along the walls, almost pre-raphaelite drawn, showing scenes of Christ's life, and slightly awkward paintings of the stations of the cross sandwiched between each panel. The church is really clean, the carpets just vacuumed, everything polished. I am slightly embarrassed to interrupt the rehearsal as I look quickly round, worrying about mud from my boots on the carpet. When I leave I pick up a leaflet for the concert that evening, Handel's Coronation Anthems.

I know, I think, cycling home, I will let myself finally buy the book of London maps, that I have eyed covetously in the nearby amazing map shop 'The National Map Centre' on Caxton St. The shop is where I have found many of the old maps for this project. But this book 'Mapping London' which charts in maps, the growth and expansion of London from the initial clusters of population on the banks of the Thames costs £39.95 and I have looked and looked at it but not let myself buy it. I thought I would ask for it for christmas, but my mum and dad have already bought me an expensive cup and saucer to match the set I am collecting. ( I know, I know, I don't think my priorities are always right, but lovely things do make me happy.) And there isn't really anyone else I can ask for such an expensive book. But the building of this city, has become, suddenly the key - the population and expansion of London and for a moment with excitement, I think oh go on, just buy it. But the shop is not open. Perhaps a good thing, with christmas, my son's birthday and swimming lessons to pay for.

Instead I buy 'London. A Social History' by Roy Porter from the Westminster Bookshop on Artillery Row. Which is like a bookshop in a film, or a portal to another, slightly older, well-read world. I also buy a copy of 'On Churches' John Betjeman for my dad's christmas present and the nice, northern, gently spoken, man who is passionate about the books he sells gives me a pound off and we talk about the snow.

This is what I garner.

Around 1700 Celia Fiennes was impressed to find 'London joyned with Westminster...'

By 1760 When Lord Chesterfield built his mansion facing Hyde Park, the site was so rural he quipped he would need a dog for company.

It is just numbers really:

'London grew astonishingly in the nineteenth century, with its hordes of labourers and landlords, it pen-pushers and porters. Between 1841 and 1851 alone, some 330,000 migrants flooded into the capital, representing a staggering 17 per cent of London's total population. Of these 46,000 came from Ireland, fleeing famine and swelling the London Irish community to around 130,000. In the 1850s a further 286,000 migrants arrived; in the 1860s 331,000 Before 1840 the majority came from the south-east but by the 1860s, with agriculture in crisis, the net widened; all were drawn by the hope of work.'

Tobias Smollett's country character Matt Bramble says, 'What I left open fields, producing hay and corn, I now find covered with streets and squares and palaces and churches....Pimlico and Knightsbridge are now almost joined to Chelsea and Kensington and if this infatuation continues for half a century, I suppose the whole country of Middlesex will be covered with brick'

And a beautiful description by H. Llewellyn Smith,
'The contagion of numbers, the sense of something going on, the theatres, and the music halls, the brightly lighted streets and busy crowds - all, in short, that makes the difference between the Mile End fair on a Saturday night and a dark muddy land, with no glimmer of gas and with nothing to do. Who could wonder that men are drawn into such a vortex?'

Knightsbridge was, until 1824, a boggy and dangerous route threatened by highwaymen and thought too marshy for development. From 1825 Thomas Cubitt, the master builder developer who worked for the Marquess of Westminster, and on many projects ( including the nearby east front of Buckingham Palace, parts of Stoke Newington, Clapham, Camden and Pimlico) brought gravel up on barges from St Katherine's Dock ( which he was also developing ) and laid out his most prestigious development including Belgrave Square. He was the first builder to employ his own craftsmen and labourers. Also cannily he established brick fields in Barnsbury and built Cubitt Town on the Isle of Dogs, as a complex of sawmills, timber wharves, and cement and iron works which serviced his many projects. Thomas Cundy Junior ( there were three - senior, junior and the third) who all worked for the Grosvenor Estates alongside Cubitt designed St Paul's at Wilton Place. Initially ( and with great controversy ) the church was the first in London to champion the victorian Tractarian movement, ideas coming from Oxford emphasising a return to the ritual and traditions of the Catholic church and condemning the state as weakening the church.


I worry that I am an old fashioned mum, an old fashioned person, caught up in all these thoughts about old theological beliefs and educational toys. City boxes are not,after all, X boxes. Though my youngest son recently made a Wii out of a cardboard box, drew switches and cut handsets from card, biro-ing controls. The three of us played imaginary Wii for an hour. Tennis, running races, skateboarding, and ski ing. It was really good fun, though I wondered what the neighbours across the way would have thought at our strange antics. Though they probably just thought we were playing Wii. I don't think imaginary Wii and real Wii look much different from a distance.
Infact I have already bought the boys one for christmas ( though they haven't even asked for one - I think they just don't believe I will go for it) - so the neighbours will have to get used to us waving our arms around in our small living room. Though on Sunday, glancing across, Great Peter Street while we were having breakfast we saw framed in the window of one of the flats opposite a big, naked lady, like a Rembrandt painting. Which has made us laugh for days.

Finally, I read in the Guardian magazine this weekend in an interview with Gordon Brown and it says in a sneery kind of way,

'Brown would probably have been more at home a century or more ago when politics was about morality, principles and ideas.' Not bad things to aspire to I think, just not what we have at the moment.

This morning on Radio 4 it said Nick Clegg had been advised not to ride his bike in case someone pushes him off.


Amen