There is a very good swimming pool in Swiss Cottage. It is in the Swiss Cottage Leisure Centre, Adelaide Road, NW3 3NF. The premises are managed by GLL in behalf of the Camden council.

The teaching pool is perfect for toddlers. It has been closed for the most of September and all October so far. The website of the company managing the premises does not offer updates about the closure of the teaching swimming pools. To inquiry about updates, you may phone 020 7974 2012, option 9 to speak with an operator.

This is no ordinary installation. The visitors are expected to play not a music instrument but a whole building. An old organ in the middle on the huge roundhouse connects to all the pillars of the dome. The sounds of the organ are in fact emitted by the structure of the building.

I was surprised to arrive at the Roundhouse on the first day of the interactive sound installation and find a short queue waiting to sit at the organ and “play the building“.

The crowd at midday was composed by some “culturally active” and straightforward arty visitors and a few parents with kids. The sound itself didn’t impress my 2 years old son. The keyboard of the organ is divided in three sections: motor, pipes and percussion. The sounds are too grave, dissonant and too metallic and acute respectively. The result is a bit of an resonating cacophony, even when the building is played by musicians.

The stage is however spectacular and dramatic. The organ looked like the brain of a crazy scientist connected to the building by the multicoloured axons of its neurons.

Thank you David Byrne for the experience. The installation is hosted by the Arts Council and Camden for the experience.

There is a delightful little garden in St. Johns Wood, North West London.

One of its boundaries is the noisy Wellington Road, near the glass-covered Park Plaza Sherlock Holmes Hotel in London and the Lord’s Cricket ground. The address of the former burial is Wellington Place, Wellington Road, NW8 7PF.

The St. Johns Wood burial ground dates from 1807. It covered an area of two and a half hectares (six acres). The burial ground was used from until 1855 when the St. Marylebone Cemetery at East Finchley was opened. There are thought to be 50,000 graves here.

For more information about the park, call the City of Westminster council at 020 7641 5271 or check the list of all Parks Gardens and Open Spaces managed by the City of Westminster.

The Mill Lane Open Space is a diminutive natural area in West Hampstead. Its narrow entrance does not anticipate the nice surprise that this piece of London nature is. It is in Mill Lane, London Borough of Camden, NW6 1. It is owned by LB Camden.

There are two great things about the space: the pond and a corner with a large pile of logs. They both support a good number of frogs and newts.

We visited the site at the end of May. Some big Yellow Flag Iris (Iris pseudacorus) dominated the dry pond. The plant is native to Britain but cultivated worldwide. In some regions, the flag iris scaped to become an invasive aquatic plant. Its rhizomes make the pest practically impossible to eradicate.

In Mill Lane however, the flower is a very nice feature of the site.