23, Crundle Road, the erstwhile home of Ms. Park Choi Hui, is an important address in the history of London's Korean and Nuristani communities. Recently I have gained access to the house and completed a Sketchup model showing the house and garden as they were during Ms. Park's lifetime.

Plans, elevations and views prepared from the model are presented here in the hope that they can be of assistance to anyone trying to recreate the drama of Ms. Park's life and achieve an insight into her extraordinary mind.

If you are researching Ms Park's life or work, or were a friend or colleague, then please feel free to get in touch with me and I will send a copy of the model.

I would like to express my gratitude to Sir Clive James for helping gain access to the house, and for agreeing to omit certain details of Ms. Park's life from his recent book, Cultural Amnesia.

Plans and Elevations

Plans and elevations of the house show a Victorian worker's cottage (1888, in fact) in typical 2-up 2-down format, with a side entrance typical of the smaller type of cottage.

The rear extension is where Ms. Park mainly lived and worked, especially in the 'Gallery', the skylit room at the rear of the house.

The summerhouse in the garden is now ruined, partly due to the elements and partly due to the sad events of 1989, so a reconstruction is shown here.

Cutaway Views

Ground Floor

The ground floor comprises the front room (which Ms. Park never used, for fear of having bricks thrown at her from the street) and the dining room, where she famously slapped Harold Wilson, an event recorded in detail in Clark's Notes from a Shadow Cabinet.

The kitchen, between the dining room and the Gallery, has been greatly changed since Ms. Park's death, with new cabinetry put in and the great Victorian hearth removed.

The Gallery, by great good fortune, remains almost wholly unchanged since the day Ms. Park laid down her brushes. Missing the sun-drenched hills of Nuristan, she installed the skylight in the 1975, starting a local trend that has seen several structures on the street given the same treatment.

The garden still contains the Kalasha Birch, the tree of which Ms. Park said "I shall cut a switch from it that shall beat the Amir back to Kabul", prompting her brief incarceration in France in the 1980s. It figures in the background of many of her later paintings.

Second Floor

The two upper rooms of the house figure very little in Ms. Park's letters and paintings, the reason being the extreme steepness of the staircase. It's hard to imagine the woman who led 2,000 mostly wounded civilians across the Hindu Kush to safety in China being baffled by a cottage staircase, but what many people, even those close to her, were hardly aware of was that by the Crundle Road phase of her life Ms. Park's many injuries had caught up with her -- indeed by the late 80's she had neither of her original feet.

Views

A few views of the house as Ms. Park might have seen it are included here out of interest.

Below is the sight that would have greeted Ms. Park's visitors as they walked up Crundle Road. Ms. Park was active in the cause of Nuristani emancipation until the end of her life (as well as being south-west London's greatest painter) and the house saw a constant stream of visitors.

Next, the view from the top rear window over the flat roof of the extension. I include this because of the startlingly close resemblance it bears to the late painting The Governor's Mansion, 1895. Can it be that Ms. Park's extraordinarily powerful vision of Nuristan on the eve of conquest and Islamicization was actually influenced by this expanse of roofing felt? If so, then I feel it makes her achievement greater, not less. Finally, a look into the Gallery from the garden, showing the patch of light from the skylight, the hanging basket by the front door, the Fletton brickwork that appears in so many of the great woman's paintings. Not shown: the Han Gang Industries 'Air Whip' Moisture Condenser whose remains still stand in the back garden. I hope you have enjoyed this mini-mini-tour of the house on Crundle Road. I think I was very lucky to have the opportunity to survey and model the structure and I sincerely hope this work will one day contribute to our understanding of a very remarkable woman.