Art's Trojan Horse
A weekly podcast on Art and Life, broadcast 8pm every Tuesday
Art's Trojan Horse
Streets of Norwich, Art for Nothing, Childhood Memories
MY FAVOURITE PLACES IN NORWICH: MAGDALEN STREET
The most interesting area of Norwich for me is NR3, which extends northwards from the cathedral and along the main thoroughfare of Magdalen Street with its diverse range of shops. The Merchant House Café (linked to and next door to Anteros art centre) provides coffee and snacks day and evening. Anteros is a wonderful building housing exhibitions, the music room and a courtyard.
Wedged in between shops is the small but exciting “climbing with coffee” shop which houses both a coffee bar and a climbing wall. For artists, a go to shop has to be Anglian Fabrics (which has two shops on the street). Everything connected to fabric is sold here.
My favourite café in the whole city is Sahara. The best Algerian coffee and meals around, and I’m to be found here a couple of mornings each week. It is very friendly and inclusive. Over the street is the walled in Anglia Square. Demolition was meant to begin in May but here we are in October and no stone has been turned!
Nearby is Epic Studios. This is now a large venue and hosts Access to Music courses. It is here that Anglia TV’s Sale of the Century was broadcast – followed by Trish and the Wright Stuff.
Further up Magdalen Street there is a cluster of creativity and culture outlets. The Sound Yard, run by Sophie and Anna, is a recording studio for podcasters and musicians. This is where I will be this Saturday evening. They are staging a mini podcast festival and on Saturday evening we’re producing a spooky podcast!
Next door is my third home – Art Depot NR3. It is run by Becky Tough and Tom Simpson. The facility is a studio, a gallery and an artists’ resource. Here Becky runs ‘kick-starter’ workshops and there is a yearlong post-graduate course which feeds into The Collective – which grows and grows. There is also a crit. club providing group feedback on work, guest artists and group visits. Outside term time there are exhibitions here too.
Almost next door is a vinyl store which doubles up as a bar and, over the inner ring-road, there’s a fruiterers which sells a world wide selection of vegetables and fruit.
This is the main thoroughfare in NR3 and certainly the most popular.
Over thirteen years ago now there was an annual Magdalen Street Festival. Back in 2010, I think, I took part in the festival with a shared impromptu exhibition. While very little money seems to have gone into Magdalen Street and adjacent Anglia Square is boarded up for demolition, it remains popular.
MEMORIES FROM CHILDHOOD
I wasn’t a bright child and I’ve an official letter to prove it, a document addressed to me saying that I had failed the Eleven-Plus exam. My mother wasn’t home from teaching and I left the letter on the kitchen table and scribbled on the back of it “FAILED – gone over Mick’s to play.”
Michael lived next door and was younger than I and I feel that playing with him was some kind of way to hang on to my childhood before arriving at Secondary Modern School that Autumn.
I was a shy child and hoped to keep my head down. Mr Aston, the gardening teacher, was an ex-wrestler and only once punched me in the head. I couldn’t push my spade into the frozen ground. And, after he punched me, nor could he. Worse befell my fellow school friends. A plank of wood or a Brussel sprout stalk across their arses kept them in line.
Away from school, life was very different. My father earnt a living restoring paintings for a gallery in Bond Street. Once in a while I would return home from school and there was a Rolls Royce parked outside our house. A client who became a friend. Thus it was that I’d be called from Mick’s garden and we’d make our way to a farm house on the other side of the River Stour. Here was the local intelligentsia gathered. I recall artist Michael Ayrton and novelist Nigel Balchn but others escape me.
My shyness was useful in two ways: I listened in to their conversations and here, perhaps, began my real education; and, unnoticed, I was able to steal a few Russian cigarettes (the brightly coloured “cocktail” fags) I could impress school friends with. Also, here, in my early teens. I drank the remnants of absinthe from glasses piled up by the sink.
Worried by my slowness at school, my parents often took me to exhibitions in London, We’d catch the Jennings Coach early and arrive at Caledonian Road, Kings Cross by 10.30am, taking in the Marlborough Gallery, The Hayward Gallery and The Tate.
While continuing to make a living at restoration, my father gave up painting to write. This was 1963 and I was10. I know the year because on the back of his writing desk was the date he began his first novel ‘Erowina.’ His friend’s wife Simonetta had left her diary at our house and in it she said “Tom always says he is going to write but, like the rest of us, he won’t.”
By 1969 Tom had his first novel published, a professional stage production of ‘Curtains’ and his first play broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He was now making a living writing – just. Often he’d be at his typewriter by six am. I expect his boarding school education and army conscription was the driver. He entered the Army in 1945 in the parachute regiment but in Palestine and Egypt he was recruited to be an education tutor – teaching the classics aged eighteen! He loved the Middle East – once jumping ship to stay there! He was horrified at what became of Palestine and is turning in his grave right now.
However, he would be pleased that so many are actively opposed to the genocide in Gaza and pleased that fellow ‘creatives’ are taking action. For example, today
Artists For Palestine UK is a campaign group across all art media (though centred on performance) which calls on artists to make a pledge for Palestine against Israel’s genocide of Gaza. It includes a model Ethical Policy for Cultural Institutions.
In May 2025 our greatest living playwright Caryl Churchill withdrew support from the Donmar Warehouse Theatre for accepting sponsorship from Barclays which invests in the Israeli State. She is joined by many writers, actors and theatre workers.
Piecing together my past I understand now where my education came from.
ART, FROM NEXT TO NOTHING
Before talking about making art, there has to be the equipment and materials with which to make art.
Living life long on a budget, sourcing materials has become an art in itself. Car boots can provide the artist with an amazing array of equipment – from easels and paint boxes to boards and frames; from pastels to oil paints. And it’s always worth thinking outside the box: another’s cast off painting, bought for a couple of quid, can be the artist’s painting surface (once primed) and the frame can be utilised too.
I look out for sellers’ portfolios, which are usually offered cheap and often contain sheets of unused card and paper. Recent car boot purchases include a bag full of thirty artists’ brushes (some unused) and a handcrafted village (eleven wood and card houses) for a fiver. Often cardboard and bubble wrap are given away or cost very little at a car boot.
Charity shops are worth visiting regularly too. Often, art supplies have been left in their gift boxes, as they’re either unwanted or unused presents, or an offspring has completed their A level art course and is disposing the remnants of childhood in search of a proper career.
Garage sales are another source for the poverty-struck artist. I picked up an eight foot high easel from a kindly vicar once – for a pound!
Also, one can find hardboard, tables and stools left on the roadside – free to a good home. Kitting out a studio space feels extra special when one’s finds and small purchases have furnished the facility!
There is one last place I access materials for free – the streets. I walk around seven miles a day across the city and often pick up discarded items from the pavements. This will include items dropped from prams or fallen from an old lorry or car: suspension springs, rubber blocks, car tags (e.g. Ford logo), smashed side mirrors and various other vehicle windfalls.
This interest in street detritus began in 2003 when I created ten street poems, culled from the utility covers I found on the pavement or in the road. Punctuating these finds were often discarded objects – part of a toy, a hub cap, etc. So, in a sense, my poems were actually mini-documentaries charting a specific street.
The poems were published as ‘Ten Pavement Poems’ (Rant Score, (2003), three appeared in a couple of little magazines, I performed them and in 2006 Mark Sargeant made a film of one pavement poems, ‘Goaded Earth.’ Subsequently, I used the found pieces and texts in exhibitions in Cambridge, Great Yarmouth and Norwich. Most recently, they featured at a slot at Broken Spoke Cabaret, Great Yarmouth, July 2025.
I have also created reliefs and printing blocks from the found objects taken from the streets around where I live.
What I like about this strand of my work is that sense of transformation, that cross-over, from one form to another – film, performance, exhibition and publication. They are both poetry and are not poetry; and they are an inescapable reality, which – ironically – many people find absurd!)
Also, my relative poverty has given me this subject: the Goaded Earth, which children find easier to take in than adults, who accept a view from above (from the circling satellites) is a norm, rather than explore things falling to pieces on the ground. And things are certainly falling to pieces.
