As seen from the little-used western footbridge at Victoria station. This picture features many of the same buildings as were seen last Monday — but, you know, a little closer up. And a crane. There’s always a crane.
A small, but nice thing about coming to work somewhere else is that it changes my commute to ‘the office’, or in this case, ‘the hotel in which the teaching is taking place’. Instead of sitting on a Northern Rail cattle truck in the February rain I get, for a couple of days, to take a 10-minute walk in the sunshine. I can’t just walk through the park though, as currently it is occupied by a food festival, the gate of which can be seen behind the sign. Maybe I’ll have time to check it out on Sunday, but not today.
Yes, I know, the skyscrapers are somewhat on the slant; but it was either them, or the sign. Such is the impact of cheapo gear. I’m impressed my camera still works, in fact: it’s reaching the three-year mark, which has been the historic limit for them since I started taking pictures every day.
I have nothing against the Chelsea Hotel in Toronto — if I had I would not have come back here to stay for another two weeks, on top of the time I spent here earlier in the year. But I would like to go home now, and instead, I ended up for various reasons obliged to spent almost the entire day locked in my room, working. This semi-abstract architectural shot — one wing’s worth of floors 14-27 I reckon –thereby epitomises the day. A photowhack too, meaning, the only shot taken today.
Clare has flown out to Toronto to join me for a few days, and why not, it’s a fine city to explore and also to look at. The skyline seems very well balanced and the CN Tower sets it off excellently. The best view of it is from the islands just offshore in the Lake, which is why a lot of people go there on a nice day — though she made it before the weekend. I like the shape her shadow makes on this one.
You realise I haven’t actually done much while I’ve been here in Toronto, right? I mean, in a non-work sense. The various urban scenes from the city reflect this, all taken within walking distance of both my hotel and the building at the University of Toronto where I have been working. It’s quite an attractive city, if a bit generic, which is why so many movies are filmed here as its streets can substitute quite adequately for those of New York. The weather continues very pleasant.
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.
Manchester once again plays host to the Conservative Party’s annual Conference, and today was the day that the Party and its state police force graciously permitted the parallel annual Protest March. This was safely kettled somewhere to the right of Deansgate, as we look down it here. The whole city centre was cordoned off to cars, and eerily quiet, apart from the distant drums of the protestors. Ahead are Beetham Tower and the West Tower of Deansgate Square, the tallest habitable buildings in the UK outside London: monuments to a particular kind of property-driven capitalism that the Conservative Party fully epitomise. No one can be publicly seen to question it, to ask whether this is really the way that we want to structure the world. The waiting police vans make sure of that.
So the first stop on my tour of Asia and Australia is Dubai, just for forty-eight hours. My colleague Alex and I were worked hard all day in the University of Manchester office that exists here, in the ‘Dubai Knowledge City’ — which like the rest of this place has been raised out of the desert over the last fifteen to twenty years or so. The towers in the background are the Marina Towers which apparently started the whole property boom off as this was the first place in which non-nationals had been allowed to buy freeholds in pretty much the whole of Arabia.
But though I don’t know this place, not after one day (who could) and so can’t call this a considered opinion — there’s something about it which just leaves me cold. It’s just the antithesis of things I like about the world, in so many different ways. The chopped-up palm trees are my attempt to somehow encapsulate these feelings. The symbolism is deliberate.
Old and new London… Renzo Piano, architect of the Shard — tallest habitable building in Britain and the second-tallest freestanding structure, after the Emley Moor TV mast — claims to have been inspired by church spires. Myself I think he was inspired by Tolkein. If this isn’t Sauron’s tower Barad-Dur, I don’t know what is.
At least the sun came out this afternoon, its last rays of the day illuminating the skyscrapers that have grown up recently in the Deansgate area of the city. Old timers would not recognise some parts of Manchester now the years-long construction boom is starting to top out.
Being 42 