Brian Micklethwait

White vans five years ago

Yes, around five years ago, or so, I had a phase of photoing vans, white vans in particular. I seem to recall some Labour woman politician having a go at them, and I think that pissed me off and I had in mind to stick up lots of white van photos to glorify them and to unglorify her.

That lot is just the photos I photoed in the one month of July 2016. Which means there are a great many more such in the archives of around that time.

But then, I kind of lost interest in these things. Somewhere in my somewhere-on-that-spectrum mind of mine is the notion that these collections only work if the basic shape of the things in question is the same every time, with only the decor being different. That is certainly the rule I follow with taxis. Taxis come in several different shapes, but I only photo one shape. The others don’t appeal.

One of the above white vans (photo 20) isn’t even white. I include this van because I like it, what with it being parked under one of the stands at the Oval, and it’s nearly white. I recently heard Surrey cricket commentator Mark Church describe this colour as “duck egg blue”. He was talking about the Surrey shirts for T20 games, but they looked like they were the exact same colour.

Adding Wembley to the big model of London

i’ve always liked that big model of London at the Building Centre in Store Street. Well, it’s not there any more. But, relax. It’s moved, to King’s Cross.

And, there’s now more of it than there used to be:

And that’s the new bit, off to the north west of London.

To me, this is an interesting photo, because it highlights the imperfections of this model. I don’t know about you, but to me it looks like large swathes of north west London are flooded, especially, because of the accidents of lighting, in the top right of the photo. That being because both the buildings and the ground they are stuck on are both, actually, so very rudimentary. The land is just a shiny sheet of plastic. And there’s no up and down to be seen, of the land. Only of the buildings.

And those railway lines. They look like continuous railway stations, I reckon.

I look forward to the day when you can flap about over London, for about one fine day, in a helicopter, hoovering up photos, and then shovel all the photos into a 3D-printing machine which can then spit out the final model. And, that model then looks an order of magnitude more realistic than this one does. With all the right colours and shapes and heights, as big as you want, any scale you want, just as it would look from an airplane. That would really be something.

Meanwhile, this Store Street/King’s Cross model only hints at such excellence, in isolated moments when they decided to go all-out and make at least a few of the buildings look as they do in real life, instead of like they were made of Lego (before Lego started cheating by making special shaped bits).

For instance: Oh look, there’s Wembley Stadium, looking remarkably like actual Wembley Stadium, other than it being totally smothered in whiteness. Next Wednesday, in actual Wembley Stadium, there is apparently going to be a big international football match.

Good timing for me and Patrick Crozier, because we going to do another of our recorded conversations, this time about sport, this coming Tuesday. Patrick’s going to drop be at my place, and for first time in I don’t know how long we’ll be doing it face-to-face. However, we are going to use a newly acquired microphone, which Patrick fears may not work. So we’ll have to be careful we don’t say anything so clever that we regret not recording it properly, if that’s what happens. I’m sure we’ll be up to doing that.

Sheep herding in Israel

Videoed from above by Lior Patel. Watch the sheep here. Or, watch them where I first did, at Mick Hartley’s blog.

Very social animals. Which is how one man and a dog are able to control vast numbers of them.

Sheep come in flocks, not herds. Yet, the verb is herd. We don’t flock them. Odd.

No.1 Croydon in context

I’ve already featured a photo of No. 1 Croydon here. And here is another photo here of a small poster featuring this favourite-building-of-mine, which shows that I am not the only one with a special place in my heart for this building.

But neither photo was photoed during a deliberate expedition to Croydon. The first was photoed only when I was doing a change at a Croydon Station, on my way back home from Epsom Race Course. And the second, of a little poster, is not anywhere near Croydon. I spotted it in the company of Michael Jennings, a walk away from where he lives, out east.

So anyway, here are some photos of No.1 Croydon which I photoed when I finally and deliberately went to Croydon:

Follow the first link above to see the way that No.1 Croydon is usually photoed, in splendid isolation. What I did was photo it in context, in the spirit of the second of these two photos, the one by Michael Jennings of that Gehry Museum in Bilbao.

Photo 6 is like my earlier photo, just not as flattering. And photo 7 may be a reflection (photo 8 is definitely a reflection) of No.1 Croydon, in some windows. Not sure, but I think it is. I only really included those two to make up the numbers. Seven photos would have to be in a line. Nine photos make a nice square, which I prefer.

Photo 5 includes lots of wires in the foreground, another favourite phenomenon of mine. These are wires for Croydon’s trams, as you can just about make out.

Propping up a new facade

Incoming from Cousin David:

Here is a pic which my daughter Molly photoed the other day when we were on a bicycle ride somewhere between Stratford and Bow – thinking that it contained elements that would appeal to you. What is curious is that the flat bit looks as if it might be part of an older building that is being preserved while new parts are built behind, but in fact it seems that it is new – and the rest of the building will be added to it. Another flat bit is going up in the background. Dashed odd!

Cousin David, to whom thanks (and thanks also to Molly), is entirely right that this photo appeals to me. As he knows, I have several times featured photos here of Ancientist facades being propped up while Modernist interiors are attached to the back of them. The triumph of Modernism but only indoors being a phenomenon of particular interest to me.

But, as he also probably knows, I have never featured a new and Modernist exterior being propped up on a building site in the same manner.

My guesses, and they are only guesses, are that, first, the standard of finish required for a building’s facade are easier to insist upon in a specialist factory than on a rather chaotic building site, and second, that having been perfected as a technique for propping up Ancientist facades, this propping up trick was then easily applied to another sort of facade. Finishing Modernist interiors in a factory makes less sense because they would be too bulky to bring in on a lorry, whereas the rectangular bits of a facade, being flat areas rather than volumes, sit quite well on a lorry. Also, once the three dimensional structure of a building is done, on site, it then protects the process of perfecting the interior, because that process can also then happen “indoors”, just as it does in a factory. (There may be a comment on this bit of this posting, mentioning a building in Croydon made of shipping containers, from the friend with whom I visited Croydon recently.)

Also, there’s a crane.

I now particularly welcome such incoming photos, what with me now being able to get out less. However, if you do send a photo in, you’ll be hard pushed to improve on the above photo in my eyes, because David realised that although I had observed this approximate phenomenon in action before, he also realised that I had probably not seen this exact version of it ever before. Certainly, if I ever have seen it, I have only now noticed it. Like I say, my thanks to him and to daughter Molly.

The rest of my friend’s photos of Saturday’s Covid demo in London

Indeed. Here are the rest of those photos, this time all the horizontal ones:

I’m still trying to gather my thoughts about this demo, and the many others like it, and about demos generally. When do such demos work, and equally importantly, when don’t they work? In general, i feel there has to be some sort of echo going on indoors, where the power lies, before such outdoors stuff really makes much impact.

What demos do do, I think, is create friendship networks and spread ideas amongst those doing the demonstrating. That, I suspect, may be their most important impact in the longer run.

This demo did get a bit of mainstream media coverage, despite my friend’s prophecies of a black-out. But, I suspect that this was partly because, actually, it was not that big.

Some photos of last Saturday’s London Covid demo

I am in no state to be doing to demos just now, but I have friends who have no such problems. And one friend dropped by for a visit last Saturday, bringing photos of the demo he had just attended, just as I asked him to do.

Most of the photos I photo are horizontal ones, and putting both horizontal and vertical photos in galleries doesn’t work very well, so I am in the habit of neglecting all the vertical ones, for blogging purposes.

Whatever. These are the vertical ones that my friend supplied me with:

Displayed here with the enthusiastic permission of my friend, to whom profuse thanks.

Thou shalt display photos though thou photo none. Anyone know what quotation that is a butchery of? It’s one of my favourites.

The horizontal ones will follow, Real Soon Now.

Brexit didn’t stop London’s cranes

While I’m on the subject of postings past, here is one from the old blog from exactly five years ago, featuring a crane cluster photo, which I have also just transferred to here. Brexit was then being hailed by its enemies as the latest bringer of economic doom. So, I asked, would Brexit mean the departure of all the cranes from the London skyline?

Hasn’t happened so far. I’m not getting out nearly as much these days as I’d like. But, here is a photo that a friend recently photoed in Stratford, with all its Olympic stuff, of the present state of the Olympic village:

It’s been a while since I’ve even set eyes on all the cranes in the Battersea/Vauxhall area, but they can’t all have disappeared by now, even if their number may now be starting to diminish.

And if the story I linked to recently about how there are 587 new towers in the pipeline is anything to go by, the cranes will be around for quite a while.

2008 and all that didn’t stop the march of the cranes, and Brexit hasn’t either. People all over my bit of the internet are celebrating that Brexit, economically, seems to be working out okay, five years after the vote. This has been my celebration.

A choice that we all face these days

Yes, a favourite photo of mine, at the opposite end of the spectrum mentioned in this posting from the photo in that posting, is this one:

I originally posted this photo, photoed in WH Smith Liverpool Street Station, at the old blog in January 2008. For me it remains as delicious and fresh as it was on the day I first photoed it.

I also copied the old posting across to this blog. I think the photo deserves the double immortality that BMNB may yet confer upon it.