The London Daily Newsletter Wednesday 26 July

Portobello Farm
Portobello Farm House was approached along Turnpike Lane, sometimes referred to as Green’s Lane, a track leading from Kensington Gravel Pits towards a wooden bridge over the canal.

In 1740, Portobello Farm was built in the area near what is now Golborne Road. The farm got its name from a popular victory during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, when Admiral Edward Vernon captured the Spanish-ruled town of Puerto Bello (now known as Portobelo in modern-day Panama). Green’s Lane became known as Porto Bello Lane; the title which it held by 1841. The farmstead extended westward beyond what is now Ladbroke Grove covering land afterward occupied by St. Charles Hospital. The Portobello farming area covered the land which is now St. Charles Hospital. The farm itself was sold to an order of nuns after the railways came in 1864. They built St Joseph’s Convent for the Dominican Order or the Black Friars as they were known in England.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Paddington Station at Night (1992) Since Doreen Fletcher (born 1952) was a teenager, she has been committed to drawing and painting what might be termed, ‘the almost gone’ – her immediate external environment and the traces left by people on the surface of things, in city and landscape, urban and rural

Doreen Fletcher

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster