Category: London

Two favourite footbridges

Indeed:

They are both about the same size, and both, in my photos, pointing in the same direction. Otherwise they could hardly be more different.

On the left, a footbridge which forms part of the walk from the downstream footbridge beside Hungerford Bridge, which enables you to carry on walking a bit above ground until you get to Charing Cross Station. This is one of my favourite walks in all of London, perhaps partly because it is so very short.

And on the right, the footbridge across Floral Street that connects the Royal Ballet School to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is not one of my favourite walks in London, despite being very short, because I can think of no way that I’d ever be allowed to walk this walk. I used to work in a bookshop that started out in Floral Street and then moved but only around the corner, so I used to see this little bridge often. I wondered how one might contrive actually walking across it and I still do. Getting to know some ballerinas would be a start, but only, I suspect, a start. Maybe they permit occasional tours at prearranged times, but I doubt it.

Both these photos were photoed early in 2004, with my Canon A70. This was around the time when I was just beginning to get the hang of how to photo London in a way that I liked.

I’m pretty sure I have shown these photos, or photos a lot like them, before, on one of my various blogs. No matter. These bridges are nice enough for me to be able to repeat myself about how nice they are.

Pavlova from a distance

If in doubt, here at BMNB, I go with Pavlova:

Okay, not bad. But the interesting thing is how far away I was. This next photo, done about a minute later to emphasise this, shows that we are actually way down Victoria Street, next to House of Fraser, quite a bit further away than, say, Westminster Cathedral:

That vertical smudge of sunshine between the big column in the foreground and the building on its left as we look is where a tiny and distant Pavlova was doing her dance. My eyesight is such that although I knew that’s where she was, I couldn’t properly see her.

But my camera, a rather recently acquired Nikon B700 (and yes mine is red also), was able to see Pavlova very clearly. Although, the slightest motion of the camera meant I completely lost her from the picture, so I had to have several goes at photoing her before I got what I wanted.

I wish I could tell you that these photos were photoed in the last day or two, but sadly, they were not. Last September.

Rapid electric charging station in Woolwich

Further to this posting about electric cars, incoming from Alastair, photoe by him a few days ago:

The temporary railings show that this is new.

Everything depends now on the cost. Can you get further, for less, with one “filling”? If so, then there follows the rapid switch, followed presumably by a price hike (to stop regular electricity bills going through the roof and (worse) regular electricity supplies being buggered up and to encourage popular demand for new power stations (surely including nuclear)), followed by the slow but sure demise of the petrol car.

I take the point made in the comments on the earlier posting about how this will cause demand for electricity to rise. Nevertheless, a step-by-step process is easily imaginable, unlike with electric scooters going more than trivially faster than regular scooters. Electric scooters of a speed worth bothering with will require infrastructural upheaval. The difference between building this charging station, and that power station, repeatedly, each in just the one place, and on the other hand re-building the entire road system, all gazillion miles of it, to the disadvantage of all larger vehicles (definitely including electric cars), at huge expense, is all the difference.

Out east in 2012

I haven’t been getting out much lately, so am instead exploring my photo-archives.

These from March 24th 2012, when I journeyed (and not for the first time) out east to the Victoria Docks, in the vicinity of the then-under-construction Emirates Air-Line, which is that strange ski lift that goes across the River:

As you can see, I especially like the cranes. And the barbed wire. There were even pylons to be seen. Best of all is that newish (-ish now) footbridge.

I used to love that place, and especially then, with all manner of new stuff going on. Memo to self: go back and see how things there have changed. Because, they have surely changed quite a lot.

And this could be the biggest change of the lot. Apparently, spurred on by TikTok, people have recently been riding on the ski lift in large numbers. There’s a first.

London Fields creatures

And I don’t mean creatures to be seen in the fields of London. I mean creatures to be seen in a particular place in London called London Fields. Until recently, I knew London Fields only as the title of a Martin Amis book.

But, earlier this month I journeyed out to London Fields, to see it and to meet up with a friend.

And I photoed creatures.

Photo 1:

The creature with the devilish horns being the bit that particularly interested me. The rest is, to me, incomprehensible.

Even more impressive, creature-wise, was this:

In this we observe two creatures combining to mimic a third creature. Rather good, I think. I wouldn’t want to shrink it and have it permanently on a wall in my home. It’s not that good. But I like that I could photo it.

Here is the original photo from which the above square was picked out, which included a human:

London seems to be divided into places where this sort of thing is allowed, and even encouraged, and the far greater number of places where it is very much not allowed. I live in the latter sort of place, which is duller, but maybe also safer.

London Fields, the book (see above), is a tale about a murder.

INTERNATIONAL CHEESE

Michael Jennings, who is the technical curator of this blog, likes cheese, so maybe he can tell me how I managed to photo this photo:

The thing is, I remember seeing this in front of me recently, just as my train was about to depart from Victoria, and I photoed it, going to a bit of trouble to get it nicely lined up. But the train departed before I was able to discern what the original origin of the message was. “INTERNATIONAL” is just about decypherable from my photo. “CHEESE” is definite.

But who or what was promoting INTERNATIONAL CHEESE? Google google. It’s this. It’s a shop, at Victoria Station. That’s got to be what I photoed.

The Tripadvisor reviews at the other end of that link are what you might call “mixed”. I no longer trust the Internet when pseudonymous people review products, so that severely negative review first up means, to me, nothing.

When taxation is defenestration

Daylight robbery, …

… via Mick Hartley, to whom thanks.

For this guy, only the window tax is “daylight robbery”, because that’s the only tax he can photograph.

Whereas, for this guy …

The age of colourful architecture is getting nearer every day but will still take quite a while to arrive

There’s another street furniture competition going on, in London so I got an email about it. Follow that link, and you will find photos of the shortlisted ones. Here are six of those photos:

You know, if you are any sort of regular here, what I am now going to say about these.

Colour.

Architects only get to do big buildings when they are about sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. Until then, they get fobbed off, and that’s if they’re lucky, with jobs like designing street furniture. This is because the people who decide who does big buildings are themselves so very, very old.

Now, look at these photos again, and imagine all the children in the photos thirty years older, and doing big noticeable buildings.

It will be a different world.

And as I have recently already said and will now say again, lots of people will hate the new style and suddenly become nostalgic for the dreary rubbish we all have to put up with now.

Architects are soon going to get over their obsession with black, white, brown and grey, and generally pale and lifeless shades of boring … and start doing proper colour on the outside of their now boring buildings, big time. This is a stylistic pulse that I do happen to have my finger on, … and I know whereof I speak. And it can’t come too soon, I say.

Well, when I wrote that I was feeling impatient. My message today is: it’ll happen, but I’ll have to wait a while. The kids doing this are still only kids. As in: around thirty. But give it another thirty years …

A strange discovery on the other side of the River from me

Just over a year ago, in May 2020, I went walkabout, across the River, after Lockdown had really started to kick in. At the time, I wrote here about how I crossed Lambeth Bridge, and then …:

… wandered in the general direction of Waterloo, and made a strange discovery, which I’ll tell you all about some other time, maybe, I promise nothing.

Just as well I said that, because nothing further materialised here about that strange discovery, until now:

I love that these galleries are now so much easier to contrive, and so much easier to click through for those on the receiving end of them, than they used to be with the Old Blog.

As for the photos in this gallery, I remember at the time thinking that maybe if I wrote here at the time about this discovery and how I wandered about in it, I might get myself into trouble, for, I don’t know, trespassing or something. The place was totally deserted, and I remember getting the distinct impression at the time that the front gate at the top of those stairs was only unlocked because whoever should have locked it forgot to lock it. So, I hesitated to show photos like these, and then the photos sank into the ocean that is my photo-archives, and I forgot about them.

I suspect that my then undiagnosed lung cancer was already making me a much more timid soul, less inclined to just barge into whatever places I felt like barging into (provided only that nobody physically stopped me), and more inclined to fear being filmed and then arrested. Silly, but as you get older, the answers you get when you ask yourself the question “What’s the worst that could happen?” start getting a lot worse. At that stage, I was still willing to do dodgy things, but was already reluctant to brag about having done them here. What if some legit inhabitant of this strange place were to google its name and encounter all my photos? What if I then got blamed, however unfairly, for some disaster that happened there, at around the time I visited?

Until I stumbled upon it, and stumbled up the stairs into it, I had no idea at all that this place even existed. I imagine these “creative” little districts eking out their existence where the owners are still making up their minds what they will really be doing with their property, and in the meantime could use a trickle of rent from the kind of people who are trying to get started in this or that line of “creative” business, but who don’t have a lot of heavy and complicated kit that they’ll have to shift if they make any sort of success of what they’re doing and then need to move somewhere smarter. I plan to return there to observe any changes I can, although I promise nothing.

In among all the creatives, there seemed to be some railway inspectors of some sort. Like I say, a very strange place indeed.

In several of the murals, there are strange creatures, as well as people. Hence this posting appearing on a Friday.

Quota gallery of Broadway progress

As foreseen yesterday, today was indeed, although well worth the strain, … strenuous. And I am now determined to keep this posting short, unlike last night’s exhausted ramble.

In among yesterday’s sunshine and strenuosity, I photoed these photos, of progress on the Broadway:

They’ll be posh flats, basically. I seem to recall recently wondering if this project would ever make a profit. Well, another photo I photoed yesterday was this, which has a bearing on that matter:

Although, that could just be inflation happening before anyone official is prepared to talk about it already being on that sort of scary scale. But, even if inflation is now surging, the fact that house prices are also surging suggests that houses, or in this case flats, are at least keeping their value.

These new places will not be to all tastes, because new buildings seldom are. But I think I’m going to rather like them. Apart from down at ground level, where all new modernist buildings are invariably dull and unwelcoming, on account of modernists not knowing how to do front doors, but refusing to do them anciently, which would cheer things up no end. But like I say, they refuse to do that.

And that’s your lot for today. I’m off to bed now.