I have been to a few of the world’s railway stations and the view from Blackfriars, built on a bridge over the Thames, is surely one of the best there is from any station. Turning one’s back on the trains to concentrate on it is quite logical.
Our journey home from Bristol is being done via London, as we had cause to visit the capital for the David Bowie archive and exhibition which has recently set up home in the V & A’s ‘East Storehouse’, built on the former Olympic Park site. And here it is. It is like some giant retail warehouse, a huge Ikea or B & Q, only for art, not flatpack furniture or tins of paint. And, in fact, B & Q might well be more clearly organised. Obviously there will be some logic behind it (I guess the people running the V & A do know what they are doing after a century or more of professional work in this area) but it’s certainly not obvious to the casual visitor. All the various stairways and walkways just add to the impression of this being some giant labyrinth, a massive Escher print.
“The future belongs to those who prepare for it today”, says the text on this latest bit of street art. Well, I’m saving for retirement — or trying to. Will that do, do you think? I guess I’ll find out at some point, for sure.
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 don’t know, I spend the whole day — and a public holiday, no less — in one of the planet’s most significant cities and I feel like depicting at the end of it is breakfast. What this says about me, I no longer care. Actually I am quite happy with this picture: like many of the ones I like the best it is the one I intended to take when pressing the shutter. Over the road, the “Good Fortune Studio” stayed just like that throughout my 48 hours at this particular Travelodge, and that says something too.
The players of AC Soulseek ponder the 45 minutes that are to come, though not without unhappiness, as they are 3-1 up at this point. Wasn’t I here basically a year ago? Yes, but I cannot honestly think of a more agreeable place to spend a Sunday morning in London — as long as it isn’t raining.
The Hindu religion seems quite into its animalistic deities and idols, so I am sure that Ganesh and all his colleagues are quite happy that this superbly kitsch temple facade in Walthamstow has clearly become home to a number of pigeons.
I like the Barbican estate in the City of London, particularly on a sunny and pleasant day. If someone were to offer me the chance to live anywhere in London (it’ll never happen) I would choose here, it just seems like a fairly peaceful and attractive spot despite, or perhaps because of, all the brutalism. It’s interesting to look at a map of modern London and trace the outline of the old medieval, walled city: many of the place names make it clear what used to be there — Moorgate, Smithfield, Barbican.
A first-ever visit to Kew, and yes, it counted as work — as the nation’s premier botanical gardens this was a crucial node in the networks of information, learning and capital which formed the basis of the British Empire from the 18th century on, and to which St Helena and Ascension Island were intimately linked. Ahead, one of the entrances to the Temperate House, which at one point was the largest glasshouse in the world, and is still the largest surviving Victorian one.
Being 42 