Walk along the Thames and Visiting Turner's house

Tate Modern Turbine Hall today

With Prime Minister Theresa May to hold talks with Donald Tusk tomorrow, David Davis made a trip to Brussels to ask the EU to put prosperity before politics.

Breakfast was followed by moderating a telephone conversation between two of the German delegation and an interested UK contact.

We then had a couple of hours to kill before the afternoons visit to Twickenham. Together with a third, we strode off towards the Bank of England and then on to St Pauls.

Circumnavigating the Cathedral, we crossed the Millennium bridge to the Tate Modern for a drink and rest break. I was delighted to see the giant pendulum in the great turbine hall. The other exhibit looked like a fun collection of swings, but we had to move on again.

The path along the south bank of the Thames at full tide became ever busier with stands and kiosks as we approached the London Eye. It was too late to dash over Westminster Bridge to have a look at Westminster Abbey. We made our way to Waterloo station, bought some sandwiches, and took the Hounslow train to St Margaret's station in Twickenham.

We arrived outside Turner's House on Sandycoombe Road just as the other's of our party came from two other directions. The house was designed and built by England’s great landscape painter, J.M.W. Turner in his youth and peak of his popularity, between 1807 and 1814. He lived there with his father till about 1826. The house had been restored to its original design by Gary Butler (Butler Hegarty Architects) for the Turner’s House Trust. We had a fascinating talk by Gary, who had come specially, as we were walked around the exterior of the house first and then the interior rooms. You get a totally different perspective on a building when you have the person who has lived and breathed an architectural project talking and answering questions from craftsmen and women involved in conservation.

Things I took away from this deliberately rustic little building:

• The uneven shapes of double fired bricks and penny-line pointing - where the mortar between the slightly uneven bricks was scored with a line about the thickness of an old penny to achieve the appearance of regular brickwork.
• The location of the house, originally very much in the countryside outside London, as a rustic small  'fishing lodge', with a large garden and a fishing pond the size of three football fields and views to the river and scenes that Turner had painted.
• That Turner's father used to walk to London (8 miles) to help out Turner in his Studio, and then back.
• The red glass light in the stairwell where, when the sun shone through, a red glow would wander around the marbling painted walls during the day.

We traveled back to the Hotel and I picked up my suitcase and journeyed home. It was a great three days, but I was looking forward to coming home again.