The Regent's Park

Even though today was another brilliantly sunny day, we started our Sunday adventures by descending into a darkened 14,000-square-foot hall in the basement of the University of Westminster that used to be part of the School of Engineering, but which now serves as an exhibition space. We were here to see Ashok Sukumaran's installation The Neighbour, which consists of a camper van and a mobile home, both of which visitors to the exhibit are free to enter.

The bedroom in the mobile home is filled with illuminated photos, and the living-room tapedeck played music as we walked through the cramped space.

The camper van also had music inside, and it wasn't until we were sitting in the van listening to the music that Bob said, with a degree of surprise, that the trailer was moving. We hadn't noticed it while we were in the trailer, but it was indeed moving very smoothly from one end of the hall to the other. Bob decided to sit back down inside the trailer for the (very slow) ride.

After the darkness of exhibition space, the sunshine seemed even brighter as we walked into nearby Regent's Park, which was full of people, flowers, and birds on this breezy spring (now officially!) day.

Although we've walked through The Regent's Park many times, we usually end up on the eastern side of the park, and today when we walked into the part of the park called Queen Mary's Gardens, we realised that we haven't been here before:

This sign was a bit strange,

as was this sculpture!

Our favourite discovery today was the secluded garden at St John's Lodge, whose entrance gate is easily missed, and which feels like an exclusive, private garden even though it's open to the public. The view from the gate doesn't give much sense of the lovely greenspace just ahead.

The inscription on the plinth of this next sculpture reads, "To all protectors of the defenceless."

We somewhat reluctantly left the garden and returned to the lake, where many colourful birds were busy on the water.

As we continued walking north, we came close to the zoo grounds, and got a peek at a wonderful animal that had been one of our favourites when we visited the zoo, the okapi:

We left The Regent's Park by Primrose Hill Bridge, which leads rather appropriately into Primrose Hill (the neighbourhood and the park).

The neighbourhood is full of pretty terraced houses and always makes for a nice stroll.

We stopped for coffee in this packed neighbourhood pâtisserie, which this dog looked into before deciding to take his business elsewhere--maybe because the only free table was the one crammed behind the door?

We ended the day by sitting in on another taping of the BBC-4 radio-show The Unbelievable Truth, which has yet to disappoint:

When I put our names in for the ticket draws for the current series, we hoped we'd end up getting free tickets to one, maybe two, of the four tapings, but we ended up getting tickets to all four, including the last one still to come later this week. If you're curious about the show, you can listen to the first episode (which was actually the second taping from the current series that we attended) on BBC iPlayer for the next week. And if you like what you hear, subsequent episodes should appear on iPlayer in subsequent weeks!