The Barbican estate is home to about 4,000 people and is a huge complex in the City of London. When it was finished in the 1970s it was often decried as a brutalist architectural monstrosity. Actually I kind of liked it, I bet it’s a pretty decent place to live, with a lake and garden within its walls and generally a rather peaceful feel. Something tells me the guy seen here has been there for a lot of the last forty years.
Despite an early chill today was a very pleasant day in Manchester, as they’ve all been this week. I’m calling it spring — feels like it’s here to me. This is another street scene, I know I do a lot of them but hey, I do work for a living, and being sat in an office all day is not going to give the same opportunities as my morning walk through the city. Who knows, maybe soon I will be able to picture it without roadworks. But I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Another pleasant, sunny afternoon, although a chilly one. I know this shot would be better without the signs, but hey, that’s the clutter of modern life for you.
It’s been a VERY uneventful few days. At least this guy gave me something unusual to depict; the Boxing Day floods have provoked some vague dredging of the Hebden Water. Dredging is fine, but it just pushes the flooding downstream; what one really needs is attention to how fast the rainwater falls off the watershed, prompting (ideally) the planting of trees and the development of other facilities that keep the water uphill rather than pushing it down the valleys, only that doesn’t meet the needs of rich landowners.
Thought I’d better do a photo of Glasgow today even though I saw nothing of it except the hotel, the room where we did the viva examination, and a restaurant for lunch. Still, the view from the second of these, being up on the 11th floor of a building at the University of Strathclyde, was a damn fine one and included this monumental structure (in both senses of the word). Celtic Park (aka Parkhead), home of Celtic FC, one of the best-supported football clubs in the world, towers above its surroundings and seems colossal even from two miles away. The ‘mist’ is, rather, steam from chimneys between it and where I stood.
For a street with a pretty grand name in the centre of one of the larger cities in Britain, St. James’ Street is a rather pokey back alley. I like here the gang of urban pigeons to bottom left — the random chair — and the “Lewis Bet” sign, if that’s not a seedy backroom bookie’s I don’t know what might be.
Windsor Road, Hebden Bridge. This is fairly typical for round here. I like the way the colours of the window frames change from house to house, and also from the top floors to the bottom — for these will all be two separate houses, one on top and one underneath.
Today was Joe’s bithrday. Amazingly, I seem to as of today be the parent of a teenager. Yet it was a win-win situation for him, because almost the first thing that happened today was that we got the phone call telling us it was a snow day, thus a day off school. But he didn’t lie around doing nothing — I took him into Manchester instead, where it was just as revoltingly snowy.
Perhaps it’s a political statement. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for someone’s life: perhaps my own. Perhaps it’s just a picture of a car park barrier. Your call.
Well… there’s blossom. You can see it. But that’s the bloody British weather for you. The snow was all gone by lunchtime.
Still, I am not complaining about this photographically. This is the first picture I’ve taken in ages that I really like: one where I knew as soon as I pressed the shutter that it would be today’s pick.
Being 42 