More use of other people’s art, but Swindon, where I stayed after yesterday’s walk, seems to have quite a lot of it and much of it is pretty good. Better than covering these hoardings with advertising anyway. I have noticed in Manchester that there is a mural which is simultaneously an advert, however: corporate public art in other words…. Let us hope this trend is generally resisted.
The Uffington White Horse is 360 feet long (110m if you insist) and may be over 3,000 years old. Most of the hill figures carved into the chalk downlands of southern and eastern England are modern imitations but this is the real aboriginal deal. Like most art, it’s designed to be seen straight on, not at some oblique angle from just above its top right-hand corner. But it’s still mighty impressive. Whomever it was first dreamt this up and then managed to organise its production — I say, good for them.
For more pictures from today’s walk see my other blog.
Surely the title of this post is self-explanatory. I love it. I just wish I could remember exactly where I took this picture: it is somewhere on either Howland St or New Cavendish St, somewhere very close to the BT Tower. But I cannot find it on Google Street View (last updated in that area in about 2021) which suggests it has only been there for a couple of years. Great effect, though: and presumably functional in some form or other. Going on the way all the pipes run into it I assume this is the air-con, or possibly the pillar of the structural integrity of the superframe, or something.
I have no problem using other people’s art to pep up the blog and this is remarkably good. Apparently, with a pair of 3-D glasses on, it comes out even better. So effective is it that I resisted the temptation to post something from this afternoon’s football match, although Rochdale 2 Morecambe 4 was such an unexpected and pleasing result that the temptation was a strong one, I must admit.
This memorial consists of 2,711 stone slabs — officially ‘stelae’ — of varying height arrayed across an acre of ground near the Brandenburg Gate: more land formerly occupied by a part of the Berlin Wall, in fact. For more, see this page. That’s three pictures out of four that highlight a less favourable element of this country’s history but at least they seem to be prepared to remember in public.
For the second time in a week Bradford proves a decent choice for an evening out, even if it was a little wet, and the city can continue to ascend the rankings of Most Depicted Places on the blog, a list on which it now rises to 9th (see the stats). It is one of those northern towns which celebrated its Victorian wealth, here based on wool, by building a magnificent municipal headquarters of the kind no local authority or government would dare to risk now, for fear of being slagged off for misuse of public funds. But why not do it this way? Works for me.
This was just seen in passing this morning: my walk to work is so familiar after more than twenty years that even minor alterations are easy to notice. At some point in the last couple of weeks this has appeared in a window near the Old Quadrangle. Information searching reveals that this is a new ‘Infected Blood Inquiry Memorial’, which will be officially dedicated in a couple of weeks’ time.
The inquiry into how more than 30,000 people in the UK were given blood infected with HIV or hepatitis prior to 1996 (3,000 of them have subsequently died) reported its findings in 2024. Amongst the recommendations in the report were that “there should be a memorial”. As it is declared, so it shall be — so here is that memorial. I get the point: as you can see here and there, these specimen bottles are each filled with a little scroll of paper, with handwritten inscriptions — and that one little kiss, which makes the photo, I guess. But a memorial like, say, your average Cenotaph, this is not: and it doesn’t help that it’s inside a building that will only be open some of the time. (This is not a criticism of the University of Manchester by the way.)
This would all be of only passing interest were it not that one of my friends is represented in here. When I first moved to Yorkshire in 1991 I got to know Dave Chamberlain, of Low Row in Swaledale, who was a haemophiliac and was infected with HIV thanks to infected Factor 8. Dave was one of the people who was very friendly to me, a new ‘offcumdun’ arrival into the community, and did not have to be — it is because of these people I remained in Yorkshire and never went back down South. When I heard he had died, in the late 2000s sometime, I was very upset. Whatever ‘compensation’ this inquiry determined was just, imposing this two decades after his death, and nearly 35 years after the fact of his avoidable infection, seems more of a cynical and meaningless gesture rather than any acknowledgement of true culpability. Sticking a bunch of little bottles in a window in a university building, one that is off the main road and which passers-by don’t have a lot of reason to notice, is probably much the same.
Over time a collection of movie posters has built up in one corner of the house and, lately, we have been displaying them in circulation. Time for a changeover. The name of the one going up is on its tube. Surely any true movie buff will recognise the one that’s coming down after a couple of months on the wall.
The Lostock Arms, just outside the railway station of Lostock near Bolton, may once have been a busy and thriving place — but it obviously wasn’t busy enough, in the long run. I have no idea how long it has been closed but the longer it does stay empty, the more work it’ll need to return to life. Probably it is caught in some kind of planning limbo: there are a couple of old pubs along the A646 through the Calder Valley that have been in this state for a quarter of a century now (like the Woodman in Charlestown). As a society we seem no better at using our building stock in efficient ways than we do most other aspects of our environment.
Couldn’t decide between two pictures today and went with this one largely to avoid having two pictures in the same weekend taken in the cinema. But this one will do. It has been a while since something has used the dry dock in Hebden town centre, but this barge obliged today while also being quite well-decorated, although what a tsunami has to do with the water on a canal does pass me by. Wishful thinking perhaps?
Being 42 