Category Archives: Art and architecture

Traherne Windows, Hereford Cathedral

Wednesday 20th July 2022, 12.10pm (day 3,982)

Traherne Windows, Hereford, 20/7/22

File this under the ‘Someone Else’s Art’ category — specifically, these stained glass windows (of which there are four in total) were created by Tom Denny in 2007. They celebrate the life and work of poet Thomas Traherne, who wrote in the 17th century but was not discovered and properly published until the early 20th century, when it was decided by those who decide these things that he had anticipated Romanticism by about 150 years. I’ve never read the guy, but the windows are worth seeing.

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The Post Office Tower

Friday 15th July 2022, 6.30pm (day 3,977)

Post Office Tower, 15/7/22

I’m back in London again and here’s one of its best-known landmarks. Actually this hasn’t been called the ‘Post Office Tower’ for a very long time — these days it’s the ‘BT Tower’. But for my generation this always was the Post Office Tower and always will be. Tallest building in the UK from when it was built in 1964 until 1980. There’s still something cute about it; it reminds me of a big light bulb, for some reason.

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Senate House, more intimately

Wednesday 22nd June 2022, 9.25am (day 3,954)

Senate House, 22/6/22

Senate House makes its second appearance on the blog, after debuting in July 2015. This shot is something of a repeat but I had to get it back on here this week as it’s the venue for my course (we are somwhere up the wall to the right). I do like this building, first for itself and its clean lines — and it’s good inside, as well — but also for the fact (repeated from seven years ago) that it’s the model for Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. And you can quite readily picture it in that role.

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Outside the Marlborough Arms, Bloomsbury

Monday 20th June 2022, 8.10pm (day 3,952)

Outside Marlborough Arms, 20/6/22

Ahh, London. Bloomsbury. Sunset lighting up the chimney stacks, me in a pub enjoying the evening light. A day of feeling like a scholar for a change and not some glorified teaching machine. Amen to that.

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Mural on “Revolution”

Wednesday 15th June 2022, 9.05am (day 3,947)

Mural, Revolution, 15/6/22

Someone Else’s Art — but very fine it is. It doesn’t matter that her left eye is mostly replaced by the window, and the security camera totally fails to intrude, too. Great work. Sometimes even just a minor variation in one’s route to work brings new sights in view.

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Factory by Low Moor station

Monday 18th April 2022, 1.15pm (day 3,889)

Low Moor factory, 18/4/22

By Low Moor station, in Bradford, there lies this huge industrial complex: silos, pipes, frames, boxes, brickwork, but no people. It hums and burbles to itself as it gets on with whatever it is doing — there is no way to tell what this is, no corporate signage, no advertising. In the coming AI- and machine-ruled future, perhaps the whole world will look like this. But it is interesting to look at, all the same.

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Manchester, old v new

Monday 11th April 2022, 6.55pm (day 3,882)

Near Deansgate, 11/4/22

An excuse today to walk through some parts of Manchester that I don’t frequent often. Although the brick rectangle to the bottom left annoys me somewhat, I think that this shot reflects, for me, the way Manchester seems to have developed in the last ten years or more. Significant parts of it aspire to be the hypermodern ‘skyscraper forest’ these days, but the old industrial landscape hangs on here and there.

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The home district

Sunday 10th April 2022, 11.50am (day 3,881)

HB landscape, 10/4/22

Actually, home, in the strictest sense, is a little to the right of this shot. But this is, near enough, where I’ve located myself for the last 21.75 years. There are reasons.

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In the Piece Hall

Thursday 24th March 2022, 1.30pm (day 3,864)

Piece Hall sculpture, 24/3/22

Since Halifax’s Piece Hall was renovated a few years ago it has become by far the most pleasing urban space in the town. The quadrangle is currently displaying a number of sculptures by Sophie Ryder, this being one of them; I recall a similar huge grey rabbit/woman at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park around a year ago, making me think, with hindsight, that this is probably the same artist. Incidentally, as far as I can ascertain, no actual rabbits have appeared on this blog in its 3,864 days.

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Anwoth Old Kirk (Wicker Man reference)

Monday 21st March 2022, 1.45pm (day 3,861)

Anwoth Old Kirk

A brief stopover on the way home from Newton Stewart. If I was filming a classic 1970s British horror movie in the Dumfries and Galloway region, and I wanted an abandoned church as a location, I’d come and use Anwoth’s, just as did the makers of The Wicker Man. (See this page.)

11 different locations in 11 days — Manchester, Burnley, Brighouse, Mytholmroyd, Leeds, Hebden Bridge, Huddersfield, Carlisle, Polbae, Glen Trool and Anwoth. That’s the second time there’s been such a long run of variation in place.

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