countessian

spanish place grey

Sometimes, when it gets stupidly hot, I think about London.

I miss kebab shop cheese burgers and weather that allows for layering and even the customer service patronising bit-whiney-really tone of voice when you have to phone the bank or something, of course, but most of the time I spend thinking about random mental (mental like in my brain, or mental like mad?) snapshots of phone boxes and road signs and church doorways.

I used to wander by St James’s Roman Catholic Church, Spanish Place, on lunch breaks from my first office job at No 1 Marylebone High Street. I never went in or took pictures until six years later, on a trip back to my old life from my new one in Los Angeles, with an American in tow so I could be like a tourist.

The building actually sits on George Street, with Spanish Place around the corner. The first chapel on the spot (well, across the street) was used by the Spanish ambassador and his court during the reign of Elizabeth I, and served as a sanctuary for English Catholics, too. When the new structure was raised, an unofficial connection with Spain remained although the location was no longer directly on Spanish Place itself.

Can we raise some kind of English sanctuary out here in the desert? Wait, would I want to go there if there was one?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 11:20 am. It is filed under documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.