Category: London

How the old version of New Scotland Yard used to look before they knocked it down

In that posting I did yesterday, it would have made sense to have included also a photo of how the old New Scotland Yard building used to look, given that I showed photos of how the place where it stood looked after it had been demolished and what is now there instead.

So, here is that old New Scotland Yard building, viewed from the roof of my block of flats, in 2016:

Not an especially distinguished building. Just a Brand-X Modernist box. I was fond of it because of its gloriously exuberant roof clutter, in such delightful contrast to its austere and repetitious facades. (The red spike in the foreground is the red spike on the top of the Headquarters of Channel 4 Television.)

Here is an earlier photo I photoed back in 2010 of this same building, from, of all out-of-the-way spots, the platform of South Bermondsey Railway Station, which is a substantial train ride away from my home off to the far side of London:

Yes, there it is, between the “other” Parliament Tower, the one with four spikes rather than just the one (plus a clock), and the Big Thing at the Elephant and Castle with the three holes in the top (seen sideways on).

Don’t believe me? Zoom zoom, crop crop:

That’s definitely it, I think you’ll agree. I didn’t realise I even had this photo until quite recently. I love these accidents of visibility, involving London’s Big or in this case not so big Things. It is a constant delight to me when out and about just what you can see, from just where.

Presumably you can now see the new Towers that they have built there instead, from that same South Bermondsey platform. Memo to self: Go back there and check that out.

How we got another look at 55 Broadway

I literally only photoed two photos today, and when I say “literally”, I actually do literally mean literally, which is not how it often is these days. The first photo I photoed was of this taxi with advert photo, and the second photo was this:

My purpose in showing this photo is not just to show how what used to be known as “New” Scotland Yard has now been turned into flats for the well off. It is also to illustrate a common urban phenomenon, which is how building projects in great cities have a way of temporarily revealing great buildings. 55 Broadway was almost hidden by New Scotland Yard, which was a huge slab where the new towers now are. Now 55 Broadway is back to being almost hidden, by those new towers. My photo of the new towers does enable you to see 55 Broadway lurking in the back there, if you know what you’re looking for. But it makes little impression.

Here, on the other hand, is a photo I took of the same place a couple of years ago, with me standing a bit further down Victoria Street, which shows 55 Broadway much more clearly:

What that shows is what an impact this building had when it was first built. Time was when in was among London’s biggest Big Things.

It helps that the weather that day was a lot nicer.

Taxi with Rokit Phones advert

I was out briefly today in the gloom and rain, and did very little photoing. But I did photo this taxi with advert photo, at that favourite taxi haunt, the top end of Horseferry Road, where it does that weird right angle turn towards Victoria Street. I often go past that spot. So anyway, yes, taxi with advert:

Like many businesses, the taxi with advert business has been suffering a Lockdown-induced slump. Not enough people around to attend to the adverts. Not so many taxis, because fewer people needing taxis.

But some businesses have been prospering, notably anything involving communication at a distance.

The above taxi advert is one of the few taxi adverts I’ve recently spotted which is both elaborate (meaning: goes all over the taxi), and recent (as in: first time I’ve seen it (and definitely not seen it until Lockdown got under way)).

Buy yourself a Rokit phone on Amazon, although why you’d want to do that, I have no idea. Its main feature seems to be that on it you can see a large library of nonsense in 3D, so it seems to me like a toy for unemployed morons. Which is just my grumpy old git way to say: not for me. But although the product put me right off, the advert for it cheered me up a bit.

Quota gallery of rather distant photos of the QE2 Bridge at Dartford

I am getting out far less these days, but am determined that this blog shall not degenerate into a mere succession of rants and complaints about politics. There is more to life than all that stuff. One of the essential features of freedom is that you are not personally obliged to obsess about whatever happen to be the dominant political narratives.

So, a quota gallery of bridge photos, which I photoed on June 10th 2014.

It’s the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge at Dartford, and the furthest bridge downstream before you get to open sea:

As you can see, I didn’t get as near to this bridge as I might have, just within sight of it, which was the limit of my ambition that day. But the day was a fine one, and the foreground clutter and low-tide mudscapes were diverting. And the walk back from this spot, back to London, was most enjoyable, aside from the stench of some huge sewage processing plant, or some such thing, that operates around there.

Memo to self: Take another trip out to this bridge, and get nearer to it.

Two versions of Boudicca and the Wheel

I haven’t managed many London photos here recently, or at any rate not as many as before You Know What. But here are two, of the same scene, differently lit, and both elaborately cropped to make them cover the same visual territory:

On the left, how it Boudicca and her daughters and her horses and her chariot, with the Wheel and its shadow behind her, were looking on a sunny-with-clouds day back in February 2016, and on the right the same stuff quite recently, on the same day I photoed this dramatic skyscape, just over a week ago now.

On that same day on October 10th, with its dramatic sky, I also photoed another version of the shadow cast by the Wheel upon the Shell Building, shadows of all sorts, and those particular ones especially, being something of an obsession of mine. This is partly because it goes to how people see, compared to how cameras see, which is another obsession of mine. We see shadows one way, and cameras see them another way. Even as we look at shadows, We sort of unsee those shadows, so that we can grasp the reality of the shapes in front of us, and discount those light contrasts. We project what we know is going on in front of us, past the shadows, so to speak. Cameras just gobble up the contrasts created by the shadows and report them faithfully.

Police horses

Friday is my day of the week for creatures of all sorts, and today BMNB has already featured a butterfly and a bee. But now, four horses, spied and photoed by me, near my home, on my way home from shopping, this very afternoon:

The first two. brown and black, were past me before I could get my camera out from under my shopping, so I only got them from behind. But the second two, black and white, I saw coming from a distance, so I got a better photo of them. But then, another photo of the rear end of the white horse seemed in order, because the colouring of this horse was so pleasing. I seem to recall, as a kid, being told that white horses are called “grays”. This photo perhaps explains why that might be. White horses of a particular sort have a natural tendency to turn gray, in parts. Is that it? Could well be.

These were Police horses, of course, them being the only sorts of horses to be seen around London SW1. Police horses need to live near where these demos are liable to happen, but in between demos they need exercise. They can’t just be stored in a shed, like guns or truncheons or complicated cars. And, around where I live is the perfect spot for this exercise. It’s an area bounded by busy roads with names you’ve heard of, like Victoria Street, Horseferry Road, and by the River Thames. But in between these roads, nobody goes, because this place is not on the way to anywhere else. So, perfect for SW1 Police horses to stroll through without any nasty surprises or causing any traffic complications with their slow pace of movement and their preference for walking next to each other.

East India DLR station

Yes, it’s 2017 again, April, and I’m on my way home after a hard afternoon’s photoing out east. I get to that moment when suddenly, snap, my energy is all gone, and I just want home. So I drag myself to the nearest rail station. And this time, that rail station was East India:

Something to do with the East India docks, I presume.

Why show photos of that? Well, London can’t be all spectacular Big Things and lavish world renowned river views. Much of the secret of great cities is the amount of humdrum and utterly replaceable stuff they contain, and replaceability equals growability. A city can’t be great if it’s not growing, and it can’t grow if everywhere in it is finished.

As for the architecture, if that’s the word, of places like this DLR station, that’s now reached that awkward spot of being too new to be old and picturesque, but not new enough actually to be new any more, like pop music that your elder brother likes.

Which means it’s architecture that nobody (apart from me) thinks worth photoing. People just use it constantly, and forget about it. But there it is. One day some of it will be old and picturesque, and there will be complaints about it being torn down to be replaced by further humdrummery, or perhaps by resplendent and finished Big Things.

Meanwhile, I find that such railway stations are not only deserving of themselves being noticed, but are often, because of being elevated (to enable their tracks to go over existing roads) very good spots for noticing other things. Like the Shard (8), or that building rather cheerfully tricked out in yellow, green and blue (7). The building in (4) was trying hard to look good also, even if I reckon it failed. Or how about that strange bus stop road colouring that looks like a carpet has been unrolled (6)?

I’ve never understood those strange rolls of wire that you see beside railways (11). Is that for if they find they need more wire, which they can then pull towards them through tubes? That would make sense.

I do understand selfies, and the hair pats that so often go with them (12). I reckon they were lining themselves up with the Shard.

Perhaps most diverting of all, to me anyway, is the contrast between the extreme fussiness and complexity of the main body of this thing (1) (2) (3), with all its “expressed” structure (think of the just-that-bit-earlier-than-this Lloyds building in the City), with the relative banality of what the fuss is all in aid of (5). The architects of these places had their heads full of bigger, more award-winning Things than they were allowed actually to build, as architect heads so often are.

Really go places!

Another taxi, another advert, saying this:

That’s right: PAY FOR YOUR JOURNEY WITH AMERICAN EXPRESS AND REALLY GO PLACES.

Unless this happens:

Same photo, photoed in the summer of 2017 outside the Royal Albert Hall, but with the bigger picture included.

2020? Really going places is not something being much encouraged.

CCTV sign – Elizabeth Fry sign

Here are two signs that go rather too well together for comfort, I think you’ll agree:

And I bet I’m not the only one to have noticed, as I did in May 2017. The photos I photoed just before that and just after that were both moderately close-ups of the Walkie-Talkie, which gives you a rough idea of where this was.

Makes me think of this.

Although, when I image googled the Fry sign, the only images I got with the CCTV sign included were a couple of “alamy” photos. I hate “alamy” photos. They have “alamy” scrawled all over them.

Learning how to photo my Last Friday of the Month meetings

Here’s a photo photoed years ago during one of my Last Friday of the Month meetings, at my home.

It took me quite a while, as in many years, to get that photo. What I wanted was what my meetings were like, but with no faces visible. Convivial, but with no conviviality being facially expressed. And it took me years to work out that the best way to get what I wanted was to stand on a chair and hold the camera up as high as I could, photoing lower limbs, but no faces, and photoing the kind of (decidedly junky) food that I serve.

It will definitely be quite a while before there are any more such meetings. Public moods can change radically, so never say never, but if the public mood concerning socialising remains at all like it is now, these meetings may already have seen their last. We shall see.

More generally, this is why photoing is a specialist activity, by which I mean that you have to work away at particular sorts of subjects before you get the hang of how best to photo them. I have photoed lots of digital photographers and have got quite good at it. I have not photoed many social groups.

You may say, well, given what you wanted – lots of youngish and casually attired bodies but no faces, a down-market style of hospitality – an aerial photo was the obvious answer. Well, yes, once I realised this, it was obvious. Once the obvious becomes obvious, it is indeed obvious.

A great deal of knowledge (all knowledge?), I believe, consists of that which is – has become – obvious. It’s just that it takes a while for the obvious to become obvious, for the penny, as they say, to drop. Many learning experiences have an element of Why-did-I-not-think-of-that-until-now? about them. Learning stuff need not lead to arrogance; it can lead to humility, as each step forward in knowledge proves how slow-witted you were to make it as slowly as you did.