Category: Cranes

Dramatic sky over Brixton

For all I know the sky was quite dramatic over other places too, but it was in Brixton that I saw it:

Often, when I show photos here, they were taken days, weeks, months or even years ago. Yesterday, there were photos that were taken ten years ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but: the above photos were taken earlier this evening, when I journeyed out to Brixton Curry’s PC World Carphone Warehouse or whatever the &&&&& it’s called, to try and to fail to buy a new TV. Which means that this is topical meteorological reportage.

Click on any of the above photos if you wish, and if you do you’ll get the bigger versions. But I actually think that the smaller versions are more dramatic, because more abstract and less of something. Like little oil paintings. Especially the first one.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Eight

Today being the BMdotcom day for cats, and now also for other creatures, here is another creature, in this case a chicken, in an advert:

And here, photoed by me recently, outside the Old Vic theatre, is one of these excellent machines referred to in the advert, in action:

You can surely see what I did there, and I assure you that it was no fluke. I waited for it to say 8. I also have 9 and 7, because I wanted to make quite sure. I have been photoing these excellent machines for quite a while now.

The 8build website. They’re doing some work on the Old Vic.

On the left in the distance, nearing completion, One Blackfriars. I find liking this Thing a bit of an effort, but I’ll get there. I always do with such Things. According to that (Wikipedia), One Blackfriars is nicknamed “The Vase”. I smell, although I have no evidence for this, an attempt at preemptive nicknaming, by the people who built this Thing. “We’ll call it The Vase, to stop London calling it something worse.” That’s what happened with The Shard, after all. And that name stuck.

I tried to make the title of this “8”, but apparently a number with no letters is not allowed.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Window cleaning cranes in Victoria

I find myself becoming ever more entertained by those cranes at the top of buildings, for cleaning windows. The ones that look like this:

Is it a crane? Is it roof clutter? It’s both!

The above photo was taken in March. And then, in April, this month, I took this next photo, because, although not by itself very significant, it really adds to the story being told above:

I did a bit of cropping on both these, to make them more identical, in all but the essential difference they illustrate.

For you see (which you now do), this particular window cleaning crane has the trick of disappearing into the (very visible) roof of its building like it’s not even there.

One moment: roof clutter, of the most obtrusive sort. Next thing you know: roof clutter gone.

There is another such window cleaning crane, very near to the above window cleaning crane, in fact just across the road from it, on the big ugly building with the curved roof, from which a window cleaning crane with a curved bit of roof on it occasionally emerges. And in February, I chanced upon this window cleaning crane in action:

From form emerges function. Function functions. Then function disappears back into form, like nothing had happened.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Three Walkie Talkie photos

First, when they were still building it, as viewed from the south side of the river:

And now, from a little spot in the City called Bunhill Fields, which is a graveyard, through some leafless trees:

The first photo was photoed five years ago last Thursday, and the second was photoed ten days ago.

The more I see of this Big Thing, the more I like it. And I am hearing others say that they like it too.

While I’m about it, one of its admirers singled out what happens at the top of the Walkie Talkie. This looks like this:

I took that in January of last year.

Quota construction

I’ve spent my day pondering my talk on Friday evening, so here, it’s quota photo time, four of them, taken last October:

What we are looking at is the building activity now happening between Waterloo Station and the river, photoed from the Waterloo Station side.

I fear that this buildings are going to have looked prettier when being built than when built.

Hope I’m wrong.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Up on my roof – at Samizdata and here

I just did a multi-photo posting at Samizdata, with have a dozen photos all taken from my roof, which ended with a picture of the Houses of Parliament by day, and then two shots of the same thing last night, with added fireworks. Happy New Year, and all that. Again.

Here is another fireworks shot that I took last night that I particularly like:

I like how each little sub-firework has only just got started and is a small bobble rather than shooting madly off in all directions, as you more usually see.

Another thing I can see from my roof is the Shard’s eccentric top:

That was taken earlier in the year. The Shard also was looking a bit dramatic last night, by which time the cranes that had been operating in the foreground of this particular view had departed:

My usual excuse for my bad good photos is that a Real Photographer can go to the exact same spot and take the same shots properly. But if any Real Photographers buzz on our front door and expect to get out onto our roof, well, that might not work. Personally, I would allow it, on condition that I was permitted by the RP to photo him or her taking his or her photos.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Are London’s cranes about to depart for a few years?

Usually, I do quota postings in the small hours of the morning. Today, I am doing my quota posting in the big hours of the morning, to get it out of the way before a rather busy day, at the end of which I do not want to be fretting about doing a quota posting. Although, actually, this posting has now turned into something a bit more substantial than that, and I changed the title to something more meaningful. So anyway, yes, cranes:

Ah, cranes! Those structurally perfect votes of confidence in the sky. Those cranes were snapped from the south bank of the river, looking across at The City, on the same day earlier this month that I snapped yesterday’s quota photo. What that new Moderately Big Thing is, that some of the cranes there are ministering to, I do not know, but I like how it looks, in its incomplete state.

With Brexit, will the cranes vanish for a few years, until London sorts itself out and finds itself some new business to be doing? Crexit? (You can always tell when a word has well and truly caught on, because people immediately start trying to apply the same verbal formula to other things. Brexit, verbally speaking, is the new Watergate. Frexit, Swexit, Thisgate, Thatgate, etc. etc.) I thought that the cranes were going to depart after 2008 and all that, but the money people managed to keep the plates spinning on their sticks, and London’s cranes carried on. How will it be this time?

Here is a very pessimistic piece about Britain’s prospects, for the immediately foreseeable future. Does this mean that my crane photo-archive will, in hindsight, be the capturing of a moment of the economic history of London that will now pass? If the cranes do go, how will they look when they return? When the new cranes move in, in ten years time or whenever, will cranes like those above look strangely retro, like digital cameras circa 2005?

Or, will the cranes never return, but instead be replaced by magic electric guns which fill the air with muck and sculpt a building out of the muck, 3D printing style, all in the space of an afternoon?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Sickness and sunset

Being sick as in feeling sick, and occasionally being sick as in being sick. As in expelling stuff I had previous eaten from my mouth.

Quota photo time:

There was so much light crashing across London from west to east that evening the eastern clouds were lit up pink, like they were a sunset or something. So I know what you are thinking. It must have been one hell of a sunset to do that. And you are not wrong:

If I wasn’t sick I probably wouldn’t indulge in such a lurid sunset, which I photoed last Saturday evening on Tower Bridge. But I am sick. I can do what I like.

Actually, it’s already getting better. But wish me well anyway.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Ballerina and crane

Yes, again, but I do love her, especially now, when she presides over all that noisily aggressive building work all around her at the top end of Victoria Street:

Nothing says old school femininity like a ballerina, and nothing says old school masculinity like one of those extendable (but not at the time fully extended) temporary cranes. Men are here. But if here is the top end of Victoria Street, so too is the ultimate lady.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A weird view of the Wheel – and cats in Tiger

Yesterday I visited a shop called Tiger in Tottenham Court Road. Here is the sign about it that sticks out into the road, even though what I thought I was photoing at the time was the Wheel:

That’s actually one of my favourite views of the Wheel, because it is so weird and unexpected. We’re looking south along Tottenham Court Road, with Centre Point on the left as we look. You hear people seeing this, and saying: Oh look, the Wheel. Wow.

Tiger has lots of stuff in it, which I haven’t time to tell you about now but will hope to do Real Soon Now. But what I will say (today) is that, after a bit of searching, I found cats, in the shapes of: a cat mat, some cat suitcases, and some tigers:

Too knackered to say more now. Suffice it to say that Tiger is a veritable cornucopia of cheap and cheerful stuff.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog