The Xtra Diary - Golden Union Fish Bar Celebrating 150th Anniversary

Published: 20 August, 2010

THEY don’t need much of an excuse to throw a party in Soho these days. 

Diary dropped in on the Golden Union Fish Bar in Poland Street this week, under the false impression it was celebrating 150 years of batter and newspaper. 

We should have remembered that golden rule; never believe any statistic (and especially statistics conferring “the first” of anything) that comes in a press release. 

Sadly the 150 years of fish’n’chips, isn’t anything to do with Soho, rather a different chippie in the east end. 

Nevertheless, the Golden Union is enough of a West End institution for a plug, and it looked like there were plenty of happy customers taking advantage of their £1.50 promotional meal for the first 150 customers.

Academy of colour in The Mall

ALISTAIR Butt’s Midsummer at Covent Garden fits well within the Mall Galleries’ latest show, a celebration of some of the very best contemporary work of professional watercolourists.

If that’s not to your liking there are views of Westminster Abbey, sunlight over Albert Bridge or even City Hall on an overcast day!

Butt is a member of the Royal Society of Marine Artists, well represented here with many coastal scenes, but the full range of works is impressive. Watercolour Academy, which opened on Wednesday and runs to August 27, displays a richness of styles, techniques, subjects and locations from bandstands and souks to glassmaking and orchestral practice, from Venice and Marrakesh to Totnes and Leigh-on-Sea.

All 140 or so pictures can be bought using the interest-free Own Art loan scheme and entry is free to Westminster Res-card holders.

• At Mall Galleries, SW1 
www.mallgalleries.org.uk

Puccini and a pint in the pub

INTREPID director Robin Norton-Hale turned the world upside down earlier this year, when he decided to stage Puccini’s La Bohème in a pub in one of the less fashionable parts of north London. 

The purists were spitting into their gin and tonics but that didn’t matter because, as far as the critics were concerned, he pulled the rabbit out of the hat, managing to do what few had done before him and popularise the most resistant high art there is. 

Now the magic formula is moving across to London to Paddington. 

The Opera Up Close company has been invited to a venue, where very few fat ladies have sung before, the Chippenham Pub in Paddington. 

There will be a free one-off performance next Tuesday starting at 6pm as part of the Paddington Festival. 

Clare Presland as Musetta in the original north London production earlier this year.

New York and New Yorkers in focus

NEW York is a city that it’s almost impossible not to have an image of. 

Its soaring skyscrapers have made it the most photographed skyline in the world. 

A new exhibition from Brit, turned New Yorker, Jason Bell, which opens at the National Portrait Gallery this month, adds to the collective picture in a rather unexpected way. 

He has photographed some of the city’s 100,000 expats – famous and not so famous – to offer an insight into what it is about the Big Apple that is so captivating for the English. 

Titled Englishmen in New York, it avoids the cliches of Upper East Side wealth or brownstone Brooklyn, preferring to capture his subjects doing what New Yorkers do best; working. 

You can catch images of Kate Winslet, and author Zoe Heller  as well as chefs, a helicopter pilot and even a rat-catcher.