They have gorgeous, original art nouveau fireplaces at 5 Osborne Road. It’s probably inappropriate to say so, but honestly, they’re almost worth a trip on their own. I personally wouldn’t have wanted to live with the large 3D image of heads emerging from a swamp over one of the fireplaces, but Àine King’s large oil paintings of stone walls and Cornish landscapes are strong and more accessible, as are Katie Lewis’s abstract landscape prints. I was surprised that a tiny, framed piece of landscape-in-a-matchbox by Anthony Hodgson hadn’t been snapped up for the very modest £8 being asked. And I think the little hands that created the framed Dalek drawings downstairs have a promising future.
Just time on this trip to fit in one Independent Open House, The Tulip House in Chester Terrace. Centre stage is held by Christina Ure’s paintings of flowers, but I’m taken by Peter Nott’s restrained, subtle oil studies of French bridges and water. Their talents seem to have been passed on to seven-year-old Ethan Nott, who’s already offering his own range of greeting cards. And I can hardly leave without mentioning Bill Black’s attractive cityscape-as-texture photographs.
I dash back to the station realising that I’ve only visited five of the twenty-seven venues on the Fiveways trail. I’ve missed out on sinesthetic art, collage handbags, digital giclée images, clay silver work and tin automata. Why no brassières?

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