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Hello again, now that Im back living in London, I plan on visiting the many markets dotted around this city and sharing my discoveries with you. Today we have a little journey through Camden in North London and Covent Garden in Central London.
I absolutely LOVE markets. I love the mixture of interesting things, things made by hand, other things salvaged, vintage things and especially things for eating!
Im really hoping and praying for some warmer weather though because I lose feeling in my fingers trying to shoot with my camera in this cold!
Camden Market
When the weather IS warmer, I will definitely be visiting again to sit outside and eat Moroccan food while smoking a Shisha! I am also IN LOVE with those stained glass lamps, I wanted to buy each and every one!
Covent Garden Market
Do you have a favourite market in London you can recommend I visit? What about in your own city, what do you love about your favourite market?
I had the pleasure of spending a week at a low impact, self-sufficiency community called Lammas in west Wales earlier in the year. They run various courses, one of which is the Low Impact Living Experience where they teach you about various low impact building techniques that you get to help out with hands-on, as well as how they got planning permission to go ahead with this way of life on the land they bought and the various struggles and accomplishments along the way.
Pembrokeshire in Wales is a very beautiful place. Lots of lush rolling green hills and fields and windy rickety roads in the countryside.
A week spent in the fresh air and expansive countryside with like-minded people was just what I needed. I got to share hopes, dreams and ideas with people on the same journey as I was, as well as learn first hand from those already living the low impact, self sufficient dream. It was an eye opener to experience the lifestyle that up until then had only been a dream. Building with hand tools from reclaimed and hand made materials is very hard and time consuming work, but equals in satisfaction once accomplished.
The other people on the course ranged from mid 40s to mid 20s couples and singles from all kind of backgrounds and present lifestyles. We spent every night around the kitchen table inside a stone 100 year old house with a massive kitchen fireplace eating the most delicious food Ive ever eaten made lovingly by a young man who joined the course simply to cook for us. We got to experience bee keeping and willow basket making as well as listen to fabulous stories told to us by a resident.
We were befriended by cats and horses and dogs everywhere we went. We got to get our hands dirty helping the residents with their various jobs while also learning the reasons behind the methods. We learned about cob houses, turf roofed houses, round houses, reticulated timber roof houses, timber framed buildings, permaculture, off-grid living, water generated electricity, solar power and I also got to use my first ever compost toilet over-looking the most incredible views.
We watched videos on Permaculture while drying our wellies out on the fire place and listened to some course goers singing folk songs they’d learned growing up.
On the last evening we gathered bits of dried wood and holly berries and wild flowers to decorate a large table in the hub house where we feasted before ending the night around a fire and listening to more folk song and music.
It was an incredible experience, to connect with others and with Mother Nature in such a raw and beautiful way. I am so thankful that I got to experience this week and meet such wonderful people.
Shortly before I moved back to the UK from Australia, I visited a friend in Melbourne and we spent almost every day on the fabulous, trendy, cool and hip Chapel Street.
I already knew about Chapel Street thanks to Amy Duncan, an amazing illustrator and tattoo artist working out of Chapel Street Tattoo. Check out her work here!
Chapel Street is definitely my kind of place! Packed back to back with vintage stores, cool cafés’ and coffee shops as well as quirky book stores with cats asleep in the afternoon sun. Yellowbird Café was my favourite place and where my Feature interviews took place.
Unfortunately I didnt have a lot of time here, only a couple of days, but as usual, I got trigger happy with my camera!
I definitely need to visit NYC again. 5 days was just not enough time and Im not your typical tourist. In fact I had no desire to go to all the usual New York tourist places like Times Square and The Statue of Liberty…
(I probably wont visit Gotham City in February again!)
I did manage to visit three museums, my favourite being the MoMa. It was fantastic to see the paintings I had learned about in Art Class in school. I found the Guggenheim a waste of time, the staff were all grumpy (very unusual for New York in my experience!) and it was just boring. The only thing I enjoyed about the Guggenheim was this amazing brownie I ate…
I also made it to the American Museum of Natural History only to find out its simply HUGE and would take almost two days to see completely. Since Ive already been to a similar museum in the past, it was kind of boring, that is, until one of the guards decided to take me on an impromptu personally escorted tour which made everyone look at me like I must be a celebrity! He told me how his second job used to be a Michael Jackson impersonator and once he found out it had been my birthday the day before, he sand me happy birthday as Michael Jackson! So that museum ended up being fun
The highlight of my trip was meeting in person and spending quality time with the amazing, determined, sassy firecracker that is Jasmin of Vintage Vandalizm!
I would have liked to have spent a lot more time in Brooklyn and art galleries. I had a wonder around the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village and SoHo but I mustve missed the streets where all the cool things people say there is, were… However, we did come across a very cool and unusual hair salon called Tommy Guns. You can read more about this awesome salon over at Vintage Vandalizm.
Next time I visit (in the summer!), I will make sure I hit more bars and restaurants and explore Brooklyn. I wanted to visit this cool 50s pinup style bar called Nurse Bettie as well as Gaga’s boyfriend’s bar St Jerome’s.
Another fabulous store I found in Williamsburg was Malin Landaeus, a vintage clothing store run by a lovely lady and her gorgeous daughter, Nova. It was packed with beautiful hand picked items and delightful accessories, one of which was a miniature harmonica on a chain. I got to have a lovely chat with Malin and her daughter and she told me that she also hosts Designer Archive viewings in her apartment above the shop by appointment.
Malin Landaeus
Select Vintage Collections
115 N. 6th Street @ Bedford Avenue
Williamsburg
(+1) 646 361 0261
11am – 9pm everyday
open till 10.30 Fridays & Saturdays
Here’s a short video of an installation at the MoMa, I couldve watched this all day!
And a video of a DuWop group called Acapella Soul singing at Union Square station. I was almost in tears when they finished!
While I was visiting Australia between 2008 and 2010 I spent a few months volunteering on an organic farm in southern Western Australia through WWOOF.org.
WWOOF stands for Worldwide Opportunities On Farms and for an annual fee, you are provided a very detailed book of all the organic and biodiversity farms in your country. All you have to do is find your area and run through the list of hosts to see which ones catch your eye and then call them up to see if they are taking on hosts at that time.
The way it works is the host provides you with a place to stay and food to eat in exchange for your work on their farm. Where you sleep can vary from a tent to a separate building from the main house to a room in the main house. The food you eat is usually what you harvest during the day so you get to eat a very healthy, chemical-free diet!
The work is very rewarding, planting seeds and watching them grow and then harvesting them to eat later that day straight out of the ground was the highest reward for me. I thoroughly enjoyed learning what each plant needs to thrive, how to companion plant to diminish the chance of disease or pests (organic farming uses no chemicals to ward these off obviously) and getting my hands dirty!
Walking up at the crack of dawn took some getting used to and because you cant just spray everything with chemicals on an organic farm there was a lot of manual labour to take care of the plants. Obviously the work varies from each farm, the details of which are usually laid out in their description in the WWOOF membership book and not to mention, you should make clear what you are expected to do before agreeing to go to the farm.
I was very lucky with who I worked for as I met some wonderful people, got to stay in the guest bedroom of the beautiful self-built main house as well as use the pick-up truck to go on day trips on our days off which meant we got to explore the gorgeous surrounding areas.
WWOOFing is possible in just about every country and is a great way to see the world without spending too much money or if you want to immerse yourself in a certain culture and learn a language, its an excellent way to do so if you have a small or zero budget.
My annual membership back in 2009 was $50 Australian Dollars from what I can recall and if the pictures in this post (shot by me on the farm I worked at) dont convince you to give it a try, then I highly recommend it!
