From Luddenden — setting for yesterday’s blue-sky picture — to London, which is rather bigger, but in which the weather continues to be very pleasant. The blues seen here come partly from the sky but also this glass, which was a vivid blue and caught the eye. Clare gets on, at least in part, for the second time in three days and soon will be surpassing Joe in terms of the number of blog appearances overall.
What goes down South, must come back up North again (at least, unless one wants to be paying hotel bills for an excessive length of time). I don’t know where this train was going, but I was on the 10:30 back to Leeds, and then home.
“God’s Own Junkyard” — and that’s its official name — is a bar/café in Walthamstow, London, but that doesn’t even begin to describe it. In fact it’s a museum of neon; what you see here is barely 1% of the whole stock. I wonder what their electricity bill is like.
Down (or is it up) to London, just for the day. My hotel room had a fine view of the city, and I took several photos of it as the sun went down. This one was fairly early in the sequence but going monochrome seemed to please Clare, who chose this one as her favourite.
On this, the 101st day that London has appeared on this blog, we had left for home by 10am, but there was still time to discover another of the quiet little corners that make this a pleasant city in so many ways, and partly explain why I come back so often. Granville Square sits not fifty yards off the Kings Cross Road, right in the centre of the city, but you wouldn’t know it on this glorious June morning.
Back in the long hot days of June 2018 I spent a whole working week in London, most of it here, in McGlynn’s pub on Whidborne Street (see this photo for instance). Finally it is open again, albeit for outside drinking only, so I and the other customers stoically ignore the fact that it is about to rain. Tonight’s real significance was that this was the first night I have spent away from home in 2021. Life, of a sort, returns: but not yet in full.
This is the 99th London shot to feature on here, by the way.
I don’t (always) live the high life in the hotels of London, you know… In fact this time I stayed via the good graces of my friend Eric, and here he is seeing me off as I head home once more. Him, and his roses. I was home by lunchtime.
This is the 98th London shot to feature on the blog, so next time I visit it should hit the century mark.
On an evening where the British government spasms idiotically again in a desperate effort to prove its own relevance, it was nice to be out in beautiful sunshine and to get a sense of just why people are prepared to pay large amounts of money to live in Docklands. Stay free, everyone.
It’s my birthday tomorrow, meaning today’s post marks the end of a ninth complete year of this blog. Am I feeling morbid? Not particularly, I just thought this grave (in Bunhill Fields, London) was kinda cute actually. The hair is getting greyer but I am still an old Goth at heart.
The slightly overblown title of this post is not mine. As explained on a notice board beneath this tree, ‘Spontaneous City has been designed for the Tree of Heaven in Duncan Terrace Gardens [in London]… The design of the bird boxes is inspired by the architecture of the Georgian houses and 1960s flats that surround Duncan Terrace.’ So there you have it. I didn’t see any birds using this bijou residency, but maybe they can’t afford the rent on an Islington property.
Being 42 