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the spectator | 30 june 2012 | www.spectator.co.uk 63

ter now known as Beyoglu. Start at the House Café by the Tunel funicular and work your way down Istiklal Ave-nue though back streets crowded with tables and revellers. One can go high-low, literally and metaphorically, from flashy socialite-packed rooftop bars like 360 to grungy live music venues like Haymatlos, concealed in a crum-bling Ottoman office building. A full tour of all the hidden bars and restau-rants would take about eight years. At two in the morning you’ll find Istiklal Avenue still packed from end to end, a sight that beats even Barcelona’s La Rambla into a cocked hat.

After a heavy night in the city you may wish to escape to the Princes’ Islands, an archipelago in the Sea of Marmara where the Byzantines exiled their surplus royals and the Levantine bourgeoisie of the late 19th century built large wooden summer villas. But one has to be smart about planning a visit, because on hot summer days they are also the equivalent of New York’s Coney Island; a place where every Istanbullu who can’t afford to go anywhere else crowds onto packed ferries that resemble refugee ships. If you’re rich, take a ten-person sea taxi, about £100 each way from central Istanbul. Or take a public ferry from Kabatas, but on a weekday. On Buyu-kada, the largest of the islands, avoid the ripoff tourist restaurants on the seaside strip and hike (or hire a bike) up the mountain to the monastery of Aya Yorge, with its charming open-air restaurant and breathtaking views of the whole giant city of 15 million souls which is spread at your feet, distant and silent.

You’ve done the sights: the Hagia Sofia and the great imperial mosques, the Topkapi Palace

and the Grand Bazaar, the Bosporus cruise and Basilica Cistern. With the tourist boxes ticked and the past squared away, it’s time to start explor-ing the real, living city.

You may have had enough of muse-ums, but Orhan Pamuk’s new Muse-um of Innocence in the Bohemian neighbourhood of Cihangir is worth a visit, if only for the abiding oddness of the concept as much as anything in the exhibits. The museum and Pamuk’s eponymous novel were conceived at the same time, and as Turkey’s Nobel Prize-winning author wrote the book about love and obsession set in 1970s Istanbul, he also collected artefacts. The result is a charming confection of the paraphernalia of bourgeois Turk-ish life, from a collection of cigarette butts supposedly smoked by the nov-el’s heroine to toys, cinema posters and Victorian-era family photos. It’s a monument to whimsy, a great literary project and a vanished era all at the same time.

Istanbul is one of the gourmet capitals of the world, but you have to dig a little to find its most inter-esting vernacular food. To really get to grips with the authentic tastes of

the city, spend half an hour browsing www.istanbuleats.com, a site (and for the old-fashioned, a book) compiled by passionate connoisseurs of Istan-bul’s waterside fish-grilling joints, its raucous raki-and-mezze restaurants (known as meyhanes), and its endless varieties of street food. You can trace the social history of the city through its restaurants, or take a gastronomic tour of the rest of Turkey and even the old empire, with its Balkan, Mid-dle Eastern and Caucasian influences. Anatolian soul food restaurant Ciya, the subject of a New Yorker profile, is definitely worth a trip to the Asian side of the city, while the new bread-and-stew restaurant Datli Maya is as brilliant and tiny as its owner, culinary wizard Dilara Erbay. Those commit-ted to exploring Istanbul’s gastronom-ic underbelly can even find directions to a pair of famous rival sheep’s head restaurants located on opposite cor-ners of a crossroads. One sells the heads boiled, the other roasted (coun-ter-intuitively, the boiled is better).

Of an evening, don’t get stuck in the Old City — it’s a ghetto of tour-isty restaurants and pushy carpet ped-lars. Istanbul’s real life is elsewhere, in the mile-long strip of pedestrianised streets around the old Grand Rue de Pera, the heart of the European quar-

Istanbul

Going deeperOwen Matthews takes you beyond the tourist trail

OWEn’s Istanbul

Museum of Innocencemasumiyetmuzesi.org

Istanbul Eatsistanbuleats.com

Ciyawww.ciya.com.tr

Datli Mayawww.datlimaya.com

House Caféthehousecafe.com

360360istanbul.com

HaymatlosIstiklal Caddesi 96, Rumeli Han C Blok, 2nd floor

sea taxisdeniztaksi.com

CIty brEaks

Travel_30 June 2012_The Spectator_ 63 26/6/12 14:24:06

46 the spectator 19 November 2011 www.spectator.co.uk

On the third day, we left our original camp to ride 30 miles to the next. There were 15 of

us, including our leader Tristan Voor-spuy and two Masai grooms. We had all gathered for a moment in a salt-lick when a dik-dik, one of the smallest of the African antelopes, shot out from a bush under our feet. The horses reared and bucked, each frightening the oth-ers. One of our party, Sophie, fell on to the hard ground, and cried out in pain. She had broken her wrist.

Much of the Masai Mara is remote from proper roads, let alone from hos-pitals and doctors. Tristan did what he could by intermittent mobile tel-ephone to find the Flying Doctor. We rigged up a shelter of Kenyan kikoy to protect poor Sophie from the sun and debated, at a decent distance, whether we should photograph her as she lay in agony. On the one hand, it would be intrusive. On the other hand, when all this was over, we reasoned, she would like evidence of her adventure. We photographed her.

After more than three hours, we could hear the helicopter of the fly-ing doctor. Until then, the country had seemed quite empty, but at the

sound of the blades, a little crowd of Masai emerged from the wait-a-bit thorns and watched at what books call ‘a respectful distance’. Sophie was stretchered and sedated, and she and her mother vanished in the sky, head-ing for Nairobi.

I mention this disaster first, because it is as well to put off anyone who thinks that Voorspuy’s Offbeat Safa-ris are just elongated pony treks. You have to be a reasonably fit and reason-ably experienced rider (both of which, I should add, Sophie is), and then have a bit of luck too. You will sometimes have to ride for six hours a day, and sometimes gallop. When you gallop, you will often be doing so across mara which is pitted with holes made by spring hare (the African kangaroo). In places, these holes are completely invisible because of long grass.

You will also need to be able to stay on and get away fast if charged by wild animals. If you fall off in such circum-stances, you will almost certainly be rescued by Tristan galloping up with his whip and driving your assailants away, a prospect which many women find alluring. You may also wish to jump (though you never have to), because

SAFARI

The ride of a lifetimeIt’s not easy seeing the Masai Mara on horseback, says Charles Moore – but it’s also impossible to forget

the spectator 31 December 2011 www.spectator.co.uk 47

‘Rye Harbour’, 1958, by Roland Collins at Mascalls Gallery, Paddock Wood

44 the spectator 19 may 2012 www.spectator.co.uk

BOOKS & ARTS

FINE ARTS SPECIAL

Outside edgeUnimpressed by the relentless

barrage of blockbusters, Andrew Lambirth singles out

some small-scale gems

A lthough it can’t be easy to run a major museum in this country, and balance the books as well as fulfil a

remit to provide the best possible conspec-tus of past and contemporary art for the general public, our museums are becoming increasingly narrow in what they offer. The range of art on show in London, for instance, has shrunk alarmingly, as the Whitechapel, the Serpentine and the Tate pursue very similar programmes, vying to be the first to put on the same internationally fashiona-ble artists. Big names are required to draw the crowds, but these do not seem to be bal-anced by smaller shows of lesser-known art-ists, and the Tate in particular is failing in its role to show the wealth of art currently being produced in Britain, and the consid-erable achievements of British art over the last century (not to mention the historical collections).

The out-and-out success of Hockney at the RA and Freud at the NPG will only spur museums on to repeat the recipe, and pro-vincial museums are following the pattern. Unbelievably, an exhibition of ‘paintings’ by Rolf Harris opens this week at the once distinguished Walker Art Gallery in Liv-erpool, entitled with the TV entertainer’s popular catchphrase Can You Tell What It Is Yet? Admission is free, so I can only assume getting large audiences into the building is the aim, as if this will encourage people to return and look at something a little more intellectually challenging or aesthetically nourishing than Rolf’s daubs. In the mean-time, for many of us, the Walker’s credibility as a serious museum has been disastrously dented.

Down at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in Bristol, the attempt to lure the paying public continues (they had a dreadful show of David Shepherd’s ani-mal pictures recently) with a drawing of the American singer Rudy Vallée purported to

be a very early work by Andy Warhol, going on show in July; will this draw the punters? The RWA certainly did well with its Ravil-ious exhibition in March and April, but Eric Ravilious (1903–42) has rapidly become a national treasure, and his superb watercol-ours are now deservedly famous and widely popular. Mainstone Press has just published the fourth and final volume in a tetralogy of well-produced picture books about him, this one called A Travelling Artist (£25), while the V&A has cleverly issued an excellent but inexpensive reprint of the classic 1938 book High Street by J.M. Richards. Very scarce today, this book sells for thousands of pounds and is all too often broken up for its superb Ravilious lithographs. But you can now buy the V&A’s facsimile for just £20 — a shrewd marketing move. Meanwhile, at the other end of the publishing business, Fleece Press has produced a sumptuous limited edition volume by Mrs Eric Ravilious (aka Tirzah Garwood), called Long Live Great Bardfield & love to you all (£234).

It’s often not much fun being married to an artist, particularly if you’re also one your-self, and Tirzah was a talented painter, wood

engraver and, it now appears, writer. This book is her autobiography from 1908 to 1943, with notes taking it to the end of her life a mere eight years later. It tells the Ravilious story from the other side, and makes fasci-nating and moving reading. To coincide with the book’s publication, the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden has mounted an exhibi-tion of work by Tirzah and friends (including her husband), which goes on until 24 June. If you haven’t yet visited the Fry, I urge you to go — it is a gem of a small museum, packed full of fascinating work helpfully catalogued and arranged, with plenty of related books for sale as well as the occasional drawing. The main gallery space houses the latest hanging of the permanent collection, with a room off for temporary displays, which is where the Tirzah display is.

The Fry is a small independent museum that has not only carefully defined its role (to collect and exhibit the artists who lived and worked in north-west Essex) but also manages to fulfil it thoroughly. There are fine things in the Tirzah show — from her best-known images (the wood engravings of people, cats and interiors) to unfamiliar but

the spectator 19 may 2012 www.spectator.co.uk 45

‘Rye Harbour’, 1958, by Roland Collins at Mascalls Gallery, Paddock Wood

‘Blue Mass, Blue Angle, White Background’, c.1983–4, by Francis Davison

impressive paintings such as ‘Hide and Seek’, a very green oil from 1950 looking down on a garden sprinkled with white blossom, the burgeoning ‘Harvest Festival, Loaves and Fishes’ and three strange jungly pictures of flowers and foliage. Ravilious was not the most faithful of husbands, and Tirzah con-soled herself at one time with John Aldridge, an unexpectedly good realist painter, repre-sented here by a striking self-portrait. Look-ing at Duffy Ayers’s rather lovely portrait of Tirzah, it’s easy to understand the attraction between them.

Another out-of-town venue that puts on ambitious and worthwhile exhibitions is Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent. Its current show (until 30 June) is devot-ed to gouache landscapes by the 93-year-old Roland Collins, whose art is enjoying a massive revival of interest. Collins works in the romantic topographical tradition of Ravilious, Piper and Bawden, but has his own manner and artistic personality. A new audience is very happily discovering his skills, and sales of these beguiling paintings have been more than brisk. If ever an art-ist deserved to be better known — on the

are as rigorously balanced and adjusted as any more obviously rectilinear compo-sition by an abstract master such as Ben Nicholson.

Commercial galleries are increasingly doing the job that museums should do in mounting informative shows about artists who deserve reassessment. A typical exam-ple of this can be found in Francis Davi-son: Collages 1973–83 at Austin/Desmond Fine Art, Pied Bull Yard, 68–69 Great Rus-sell Street, WC1, until 31 May. Davison was an immensely distinguished collagist who rarely exhibited, but whose 1983 solo show at the Hayward Gallery impressed many, despite (at his request) the lack of labels and biographical information. This reclusive and difficult man was married to the artist Margaret Mellis, and was a great friend of Patrick Heron. His remarkable abstract col-lages, made entirely of torn, found paper, can be best understood initially within the con-text of St Ives modernism, though the best of them transcend that categorisation. A late series of small works, made from torn enve-lopes, is particularly beautiful and almost unbearably moving.

grounds of putting in long years of consist-ently good work to very little acclaim — it is he; the success of his exhibition is heart-warming.

Another success story attends Rami-ro Fernandez Saus (born Sabadell, Spain, 1961), whose work is increasingly sought after in this country, and whose current exhibition, Dreams in the Garden, at Long & Ryle, 4 John Islip Street, SW1, until 9 June, is almost a sell-out. The show was inspired by

a stay in the Folly Garden at Stancombe in Gloucestershire, and although Ramiro rare-ly paints from life, this extraordinary place fired his imagination and began to feed into his visions. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a big painting entitled ‘The Artist’, depict-ing a monkey sitting on a table painting a birthday cake. As always, strangeness vies with humour, elaborate pattern with rich, bright colour. Ramiro may paint with wiggly outlines like icing on a cake yet his pictures

The Tate in particular is failing in its role to show the wealth of art

currently being produced in Britain

44 the spectator 10 november 2012 www.spectator.co.uk

BOOKS & ARTS

BOOKS

Nostalgic nationalist pietyRoger Scruton’s vision of a tolerant, age-old Anglicanism —

church bells echoing over the countryside, calling the faithful to prayer — doesn’t ring true to Simon Jenkins

Our Churchby Roger Scruton Atlantic, £20, pp. 199, ISBN 9781848871984

Parish churches are the sentinels of Eng-land’s past. They soar over every town and village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede primacy to the mosque. But the Church of England guards our rituals and speaks for our communities. The English still want their local spokesmen to be vicars not mayors.

Roger Scruton should have been a bishop. He would have gone to the top, and spared Anglicans their present agony over whom to send to Canterbury. Arch-bishop Scruton would have gathered up the church’s shattered canticles, creeds and con-flicts and marched them to death or glory with learning and charm. This book is an elegant manifesto. It should have been a job application.

Scruton claims to address his biography of Anglicanism to believers and non-believ-ers alike. Since the latter includes me, and since we were both born into Nonconform-ist scepticism, I was intrigued to see how our paths could agree on so much yet diverge so widely on religion. The initial answer appears to be that Scruton played hooky from Baptist Sunday school by sneaking round the corner not, like most of us young-sters, to the nearest smoking shed but to his parish church. While we found a humanist optimism, he seems to have found a godly pessimism.

Scruton’s Church of England emerged from the middle ages an insular version of the Protestant reformation. Since Henry II, English kings argued with popes over the demarcation between church and state. Tyndale and Wyclif had forged an English proto-reformation before the messy and drawn out breach under Henry VIII. To Scruton, Henry’s apostasy was not the the-ological opportunism of a royal sex drive. It was conceived of a sacred compromise, a God-sent amalgam of state triumphant and church holy, of poetry and prose, of Calvin and Cranmer. Anglicanism was Christian-ity not as ‘outward obedience to often non- sensical rules,’ but as ‘a truer and more inward discipline’. God was not law — at least not foreign law — but love of person and love of place.

The non-believer can only find all this hard to take. Early Anglicans were all over the place, flirting with counter-reformation under Mary and conspiring against Eliza-beth. Many were vicars of Bray through the troubles of the 17th century and subsided into reactionary corruption in the 18th, self-satisfied imitators of Rome’s episcopacy. It was not Anglican tolerance that eventually emancipated Nonconformists and Roman Catholics, it was sheer weight of numbers. The church could not strip half the nation of civil rights or send it to America.

Only when seriously challenged by Wes-ley’s Methodists did the ‘genius for compro-mise’ eulogised by Scruton induce reform and rebirth. But until the late 20th century, Anglican bishops joined with the Tory right to protest against every democratic or pro-

gressive measure. They opposed an end to rotten boroughs, a wider franchise, Irish land reform, Catholic emancipation, votes for women and the parliament acts. Scruton is right to applaud the church’s promotion of much liberal learning, of great architec-ture and fine poetry, but as an estate of the realm it was a disgrace. If the bishops had had their way, Britain would have endured a French revolution.

Even today the Church of England uses its bizarre parliamentary status to oppose Lords reform and retain extraordinary con-trol over admission to many state schools. And this despite being, Scruton admits, the ‘spiritual representative of a people whose attitude to the Christian religion could be described as one of loyal indifference’.

Protestantism has long offered its adher-ents the best of all worlds. In its Anglican manifestation, it eschews gestures and rit-uals (up to a point) and resorts to words as ‘the enemy of superstition … the torch that lights our spiritual path’. Scruton sees it ‘filtered through the landscape, through the web of spires, pinnacles and finials that

the spectator 10 november 2012 www.spectator.co.uk 45

The church of Owlpen, in the heart of the Cotswolds

stitched the townscape to the sky’. Its holi-ness resides in the Book of Common Prayer, the nine lessons and carols and the echo of church bells over the countryside, calling the faithful to prayer.

He surveys all this with an indulgent eye. He might be guiding us round a much loved ancestral home, patting the Chippen-dale here, pointing to a Gainsborough there, reminiscing about a dodgy uncle, quoting Milton, Bunyan, Auden, Larkin. The very language of the church, entrenched in the 17th century and never bettered, ‘endows us with a mysterious key to God’s presence’.

Yet Scruton comes close to winking at us. He quotes Orwell’s church as ‘a con-scious artefact which, like good manners, does not bear too close an examination’. The appeal to words remains a device, a trick. Protestants may deride the mumbo- jumbo of Roman Catholicism, but they merely laundered it for north European ears. The Anglican church is not on any high road to reason, rather a more user-friendly version of the original, so as not to frighten the squeamish.

Scruton writes beautifully about a subject to which he is clearly devoted. His church was once a tribal superglue, its strength indicated by never taking real hold among the Celts. He reminds us why we love Eng-lish churches, their music and ritual, their traditions and, usually, their clergymen. But I have an uncomfortable feeling that, were he an Aztec on a ziggurat, he would equal-ly celebrate the blood of 1,000 sacrificial

virgins, hallowed by custom as it cascades down the steps to succour God’s earth.

Nor can we escape the final paradox. Women and gays have replaced Wesleyans and Irishmen to torment the Anglican faith-ful. Were Scruton true to his cause, he would surely sympathise with the church hierar-chy as it struggles ‘in prayer’ with the reac-tionaries to sustain the secular yet sacred compromise. Yet he is splendidly partisan. Present-day Anglicans are no longer Tories

at prayer but ‘the Labour party trying to remember how to pray, while not really understanding the point’.

He appears to deplore his church’s continued attempt to compromise with the state, on gender equality, adoption, homosexual marriage and sex education. What Scruton professes to be a ‘quiet, gen-tle, unassuming faith, that makes room beneath its mantel for every form of hesi-tation’ is castigated as a church in denial, cringeing before ‘the onslaught of political correctness’. I sense a man who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Our Church is beautifully written in the cadences of a lay preacher. Its nationalist piety is nostalgic and undeniably attractive. Scruton’s parting thought, that a minority Anglicanism may yet decline into a frag-mentary congregationalism, is realistically radical. He knows his faith in the round, and derives from it comfort and delight. But by deserting scepticism, he inflicted on himself a needless pessimism, when the smoking shed offered the light of reason and good cheer.

Scruton might be guiding us round a much loved ancestral home, patting the

Chippendale and reminiscing

the spectator | 5 may 2012 | www.spectator.co.uk 25

As austerity bites, competition in the high street grows ever more ferocious. Only the nim-

ble and well-financed can thrive. While January and February showed some improvement and sunshine helped boost sales in March, the trend looks likely to be lower again in April. ‘The situation remains fragile,’ said Judith McKenna from Asda, chair of the CBI retail survey panel. ‘Consumers are still holding off from buying bigger ticket items, and opting to spend on smaller “treat” purchases that give them a lift without breaking the budget.’

According to Asda’s Income Track-er, the average UK family has only £144 of weekly disposable income to spend, a fall of 6.5 per cent from a year ago. Despite this, retailers polled by the CBI predicted better trading in May: the hope is that lower inflation will encourage consum-ers to spend more. Retail shares tend to ben-efit early in the economic cycle and despite the official double dip, anecdotal evidence still suggests recovery is on its way.

Amid the gloom there have been vast differences in fortunes. Sports Direct, which owns the Slazenger and Lonsdale brands, reported sales up by 13 per cent last week and expects to do well in the run-up to the Olym-pics. The shares have risen almost 40 per cent this year but fans remain keen. Jonathan Pritchard at Oriel Securities notes ‘a relative-ly low valuation of ten times earnings and… good potential for the online business’. Inter-national luxury brands have bucked the trend with shares in Mulberry, the handbag group, up 63 per cent in a year.

Dunelm is another one to watch. A Mid-lands-based out-of-town homewares retail-er with 100 stores, it is growing fast. The shares have risen 15 per cent this year but look set to continue their run. Companies such as Dunelm and Next which successful-ly combine ‘clicks and mortar’ — stores and online shopping — are very much in favour, although Next shares (up more than a third this year) look likely to mark time after a stel-lar performance.

In fashion, good management has proved crucial. While Burberry (up 13 per cent on the year) and Debenhams (up 18 per cent) have done well, Aquascutum and Peacocks have collapsed into administration.

In such uncertain times, investors prefer companies with money in the bank. At Bank of America Merrill Lynch, retail analyst Rich-ard Chamberlain highlights companies with the potential to use cash to buy back shares. ‘Over the long term,’ he says, ‘a successful quantitative strategy has been to own com-panies that reduce their shares aggressively over time.’ That has been one of the keys to Next’s earnings growth, while Debenhams is expected to initiate share buybacks in the second half of this year.

Chamberlain also expects WHSmith to continue to buy back shares at a rate of £40 million to £50 million a year. Some City observers feel chief executive Kate Swann’s successful strategy of cutting costs and replacing low-margin music with higher-mar-gin celebrity books and quality stationery is running out of road, but Chamberlain sees further scope to cut costs. He also feels the market is underestimating WHSmith’s inter-national potential.

In the home improvement sector, King-fisher is recovering some of its old form under chief executive Ian Cheshire: its B&Q chain is

regarded as superior to rival Homebase, while Chamberlain also believes King-fisher has the potential to start returning cash to shareholders.

As for supermarkets, the picture is as gloomy as ever. ‘Against a background of falling real income, food retailers are having to work harder, [and] invest more on better stores and marketing,’ says Clive Black at Shore Capital. After Tes-co’s profit warning in January followed by marginally higher full-year profits of £3.7 billion, the shares tumbled 20 per cent and show little sign of recovering. Tesco’s UK market share has slipped as Asda and Sainsbury lure shoppers away. The received wisdom is that in Sir Terry Leahy’s last years the company reduced UK investment to finance expansion

overseas which has not yet reaped rewards; its Fresh & Easy venture in the US has to date lost nearly £800 million. The jury is out on whether new chief Philip Clarke can turn the company back onto a growth track — and the shares are best avoided for now. Of the other supermarkets, Sainsbury has the best momentum, says Clive Black, while Morri-sons is being squeezed by US-owned Asda.

One company that looks ripe for a rally is Marks & Spencer. Little seems to have happened in the two years since Marc Bol-land took over from Sir Stuart Rose at the top; in the past year the shares have drifted from 390p to 360p, where they languish on ten times earnings. However, there are signs that Bolland’s overseas expansion could soon start to bear fruit and — not before time — the company is increasing its online presence. The food side has performed well, helped by the trend for the squeezed middle class to eat premium food at home, rather than go out. And a campaign led by Joanna Lumley invit-ing customers to bring old clothes to M&S stores for recycling, dubbed ‘Shwopping’, shows a company in tune with the zeitgeist.

Investors can expect continued disparity in performance, but shares in shops that have used the past three years to invest, innovate and trim costs will be the first out of the traps when recovery finally materialises.

INVESTMENT SPECIALTough times for shopkeepers

The high street’s double-dip winners and losers

JUDI BEVAN

Judi Bevan - Investment 1_05 May 2012_The Spectator_ 25 1/5/12 17:27:14

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