Here’s 1960s town planning for you. Build a concrete monstrosity of a street in the centre of your city, with a car park on top of it, and name it after a female character from that city’s history who was alluring enough to appeal to its most dashing hero. Maid Marian’s appeal is at least hinted at by whomever decorated the wall, but that’s scant consolation.
I quite like the heron mural that occupied this spot until fairly recently; now it has become this. Possibly this blog is now the only record of how it used to look. I do quite like its successor too, but this photo is more of all the various quadrilaterals on the side of what used to be the Hole in the Wall pub and has been ‘under refurbishment’ for what seems like years now.
Another early morning in Manchester. The difference in the light, bearing in mind the 45 minute gap from the time of Friday’s shot, shows the current clocking on time for the sun. I love the details on this shot, the graffiti and the print.
Was obliged to visit a place I had not set foot in since 20th January, namely campus. This mural is a relatively new addition to the landscape along the way. Very Manchester, old and new.
Back at home — for a couple of days. Time to look around and see what’s going on. This is new…. surely a portrait of Humph the Hebden Heron or one of his homies. But diminished by the red signage, so important they stuck it on twice…
Some parts of the old Berlin Wall remain in the city. Probably they could have been demolished back in 1990 but the authorities realised — correctly — that they were valuable as memorials and/or tourist attractions. Or, as in the case of the East Side Gallery, which runs beside the Spree for about a kilometer near the Ostbahnhof, an art installation; this long line of concrete has been decorated by a range of murals, including this one of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who seems to disdain the busker beside him, playing as he is on a load of old water pipes, or something.
The bees know what we’re doing… and they’re very unhappy.
Or maybe it’s a mural on the side of the New Union. Whatever…
Another campus to add to the list — Purdue University in Indiana, the people who were good enough to invite me to the USA in the first place on this trip. This place is especially known for its programmes in aviation and spaceflight — Neil Armstrong studied here (which is a cool alumnus to have) — and engineering, hence the nickname of its football team, the Boilermakers. This mural in the campus’s new learning center, open only a week, reflects this. It was a day where I was too busy to particularly get around to taking many photos, so this was a rush job I know, but there’s one thing I do like about it, which is the apparent anachronism of the guy standing on the left of the big picture: is that a cellphone in his pocket? Sure looks like one. (Actually it’s a slide rule, apparently.)
So here we are in this blog’s 26th featured country, the Czech Republic, for a few days. I am here to attend the same conference that got me to Estonia last year and Croatia the year before that. There will be more interesting regions of it to depict between now and Thursday I am sure, but once I arrived at the airport this afternoon I just trundled through suburbia until I got to my hotel then went out with a couple of colleagues and had dinner; so this suburban bus stop is all you get for now. I do like the twenty-feet-high woman on the advertising mural, however. I wonder if I can get one just like her on my house.
How awesome is this. I want to go and get my next tattoo at this place simply because of this mural. Which, I suppose, is the point, but it doesn’t make it any less impressive.
