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Letter
We have been back to normal shop hours for two weeks now: the shop windows
have been redone (a handsome picnic basket is the ‘prop’ for The
Fortnight in September, a Kennedy poster for The
Expendable Man), the blue winter pansies are in the window boxes and
we have had a spring/autumn clean ready for the pre-Christmas rush.
The main change on Lamb’s Conduit Street has been the opening of a Starbucks.
We are loyal to Tutti’s opposite, from where we get salad or brownies
most days, as well as to Kennards next door from where we buy bread, cheese
and, sometimes, a ‘home-cooked’ lunch. There has been much opposition
to Starbucks; we support the protest in one sense (alas, it’s the first
non-independent business in the street) but in another we like seeing more
people sitting at tables outside or working on their laptops inside; and we
feel that another coffee shop provides a much-needed escape for the parents
who have children in Great Ormond Street Hospital.
There is now a website promoting the independence of our street -
lambsconduit.com - and there has been some comment in the press, with a
photograph of Rupert Everett, one of our local celebrities who opposes the
Starbucks opening, and Notting
Hell Rachel Johnson suggesting ‘a protection order to make Portobello
Road a slow shopping area, like Marylebone High Street, the centre of Paris,
or Ludlow in Shropshire’ (The
Independent). Certainly Bloomsbury is changing, and will do so even
more when Eurostar begins to come in to Kings Cross in 2007 and people start
going (‘flocking’ the estate agents call it) to the re-vamped Brunswick
Centre (cf. the very interesting article called ‘The Regeneration of
the Brunswick Centre’ by Maren Harnack in the Twentieth
Century Society Newsletter for Autumn 2006). Again, this puts us in a moral
dilemma; we are opposed to more chains (Hobbs, Carluccio’s, Strada, Waitrose),
but not completely...
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Hilda Bernstein in the 1940s
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However, this has been a very sad week for us. On September 8th Hilda
Bernstein died in Cape Town. She was one of the leading people of her
generation in being an effective fighter against apartheid and then writing
her memoir The World
That Was Ours about it. She was 91 and had been frail for some time,
but she was quite unlike anyone else I have ever met, a large statement but
a true one: not only was she unimaginably brave and determined, she was gentle,
funny and brilliant. I had known her for three years, and when I say known
I had only been with her on half a dozen occasions. When we said goodbye
in her Cape Town flat (we had gone to South Africa for two launches for The
World That Was Ours) Chris and I sat in the hire car and cried.
We knew we would never see her again and we minded far, far more than about
most people. There was an appreciation of Hilda by Glenn Frankel, author
of Rivonia’s
Children, in the Washington
Post and the Guardian ran
an obituary on September 18th. We are about to reprint the book, which of
all our (nearly seventy) Persephone books is the one that I feel most strongly
about. This does not mean it is my ‘favourite’, but I feel deeply
proud to have published it, and I admire it, and Hilda, more than I can say.
Hilda had a very strong aesthetic sense (she was a successful painter, after
all) and in this context may we commend Illustration magazine which
recently had a wonderful article about Edward Bawden (who did the illustrations
for Good Food on the Aga).
For anyone particularly interested in illustrated books, we also have Miss
Pettigrew Lives for a Day, The
Runaway and Gardener’s
Nightcap and are about to publish Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd’s Plats
du Jour with illustrations by David Gentleman.
Two lovely Persephone readers have mentioned us in their blogs: Rita Konig, ‘Girl
About Town’ at Domino magazine
in New York: (American readers can pick up the latest copy of Domino and
see it in there as well); and Velvet
Empire.
And Show
Cook, an excellent cookery website, has published a long appreciative
extract from How to
Run Your Home Without Help.
Nicola Beauman
15 September 2006
Lamb’s Conduit Street | 
