My photographs – Page 11 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Would you like to live on top of a petrol station?

Today I staggered out to do some shopping. Well, to be more exact I walked out, but then staggered back. Whatever. Anyway, during the walking bit, I photoed just one photo. This:

The light is dim and the focussing uncertain. (I think I should start photoing more photos with my mobile phone.) But you will get my point, once I get around to making it.

My point being: That’s a petrol station in Vauxhall Bridge Road, just before I get to my shops. And above it and right next to it, people live.

Would you want to live above a petrol station? I don’t think I would.

I grumble here from time to time about health and safety, but only in a world where health and safety trumps everything else would a building such this one seem routine. Irony alert: “Health and safety” means that there are now huge risks that we are willing to undergo now, which we were not before.

Imagine living in such a place during the Blitz. Not that I suppose for one moment that anyone ever did.

Young Mozart statue in Belgravia

At the point where Ebury Street joins Pimlico Road, which I think is in “Belgravia”, wherever exactly that starts and ends, there is a small triangle of space, the most notable feature of which is a statue of a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, holding a violin:

The photo on the left there shows a bit of context, but is also badly lit, by which I mean lit from behind. I have frequently photoed this statue over the years, but never to any better effect than that. However, at the time I photoed the above photo, way back in 2004 with my antique Canon A70, I also photoed other photos of this statue that were half decent, as you can see above right, and below:

Sorry about the wire going through his head there.

This statue is quite recent, but I really like it. Read more about it, and about Mozart’s time in London in this piece. Mozart and family came to London when Mozart was eight. He and his elder sister amazed high society with their musical excellence, especially Mozart himself of course. Apparently he wrote his first two symphonies when in London.

London seems to be pretty short on great composer statues. Haydn? Mendelssohn? Both caused enough of a stir here to earn such recognition. I searched, but found only plaques. Elgar? Worcester. Vaughan Williams? Dorking. Purcell? A walk away from where I live, but I have long thought it hideous.

So this Mozart statue is probably London’s best composer statue. Any commenter who can prove me wrong will be gratefully attended to.

LATER: I forgot Bartok!

The chaos from which buildings arise

It is the sundrenched late afternoon of April 21st 2009, and they’re busy building something:

What I’m getting at with the above imagery is:

(1) This is a construction site, and these people clearly know what they are doing. Constructions almost always turn out exactly as planned.

And:

(2) Look at the state of it!!!

I recognise various individual bits of tech there, like the reinforcing rod tubes, and that big blue propeller for digging holes, to put such things as reinforcing rod tubes in. But all that stuff jammed together in a confined space like that? It looks like someone’s attic for goodness sake.

Yet, it was from this outdoor attic that there duly emerged … the Shard.

Health and safety: Before-and-after photos of the South Bank carousel

South Bank, London, 2012:

Closer up:

Same thing, 2017:

Closer up:

I have a vague recollection of this contraption having suffered some kind of accident or mishap which might have explained this transformation. But the only accident I managed to learn about today was one that happened in 2016, by which time the semi-transparent encasement had already been added.

What happened was that the carousel just stopped. So, the people who were stuck up there were that little bit safer while they waited to be rescued. On the other hand, I imagine that the covering made the actual rescue more difficult and dangerous. If so, there’s a lesson there, isn’t there?

I don’t know exactly when this change happened, although I surely have more photos in the archives that would narrow it down a bit.

Meanwhile, I am pleased about these before-and-after photos. Getting photos like these can be hard, because you have to know beforehand what is going to change. Or, you just have to photo a lot of photos.

I photo a lot of photos.

When the view out my kitchen window was interesting

Being so restricted in my movements just now has got me pondering the view from my kitchen window. It doesn’t change from day to day, or now, from year to year. But, oh, there was a time, a time when it would change from hour to hour:

Those were photoed between October 2015 and February 2016. I show some because they show what was going on. and others for artistic effect. You decide which is which. What they were doing was converting the building opposite it something different and taller, in which more living and working could happen than before.

The one that got me interested in these photos was the silhouette of the guy with the machine. But now, the ones I like best feature the reinforced concrete being destroyed. I love that effect.

The netting that you see in some of these photos is to stop pigeons crapping in the courtyard. It didn’t help with the focussing, but it does create an effect.

Memo to self: Dig up the old posting where a crane unfolded itself in this very spot.

Giving the green light to a cement mixer

For me, a complicated day. What spare time I had was spent paying attention to sport, basically to take my mind off all the complications.

So, here’s an illuminated cement mixer, which I photoed outside the Royal Festival Hall way back in 2007:

Art, I assume. But so long ago that I could not persuade the internet to tell me about it. Plenty of cement mixers and plenty of RFH scenes, but no sign of this particular combination of both.

2007 was way before I had a camera that truly suited me. That was still five years away. But these photos came out pretty well, I think. It helped that they were photoed at just the moment when daylight was about half gone, which allowed the artificial green light to make its presence felt but not to be the whole story.

One for the “You Are Here” collection

Nowadays, cameras can tell you exactly where you were when you took a photo, as well as exactly when you took it. But I can’t be doing with all that. I prefer taking photos like this one as I do my out-and-abouting, that say, as this one does, “You Are Here”:

And that one says it in French. Excellent.

We’re in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, in the bitterly cold February of 2012. Even remembering how cold that visit was makes me shudder now. But the Pompidou Centre itself was warm enough, and the views in it and from it were most diverting.

I have quite a few Paris postings here now, but have yet to transfer any of the postings from the old blog that I did about that earlier 2012 trip . My favourite, from a more recent and much warmer visit, featured my all time favourite food photo.

Vauxhall station signs and Big Things

Two photos I took within moments of each other at Vauxhall Station, in January 2011:

I show you that one because I really like it. The Three-Eyed Elephant-and-Castle Tower looked particularly good when isolated, as it no longer is, and when framed by stuff in the foreground.

And then there’s this one, which does not score nearly so well for artistic effect, but which does show you that the Shard was then in the process of being constructed:

There the Shard is, or at any rate what they’d so far done of the concrete spine of it, on the left.

I can remember having friendly disagreements with Michael Jennings about whether they’d actually build that Thing, despite all their protestations that they would. I thought they’d build it, because I’m a pathological optimist. He doubted it, because he did. Because of that, the building will always have, for me, a slightly miraculous quality about it. Michael only had to have been a bit more right than he was (and we are talking about a man who is very right indeed about a lot of things), and like the Helter Skelter, the Shard might never have happened.

On how all new building on a large scale tends to start out looking meaningless

Here are some photos I took in and around City Island in 2017, while it was in the process of being constructed:

As you can see, there are maps and images as well as photos of the finished objects, to tell you what this place was going to be like. And cranes.

City Island is a particularly perfect illustration of what Modernist Architecture has now become, and as I have said here before, I quite like it. I especially like how City Island has what amounts to a moat around it, which gives it the appearance of a micro-Manhattan.

I entirely understand why Ancientists think that Ancientist architecture should also be allowed, and I’d also quite like to see more of that. But I suspect that if there were more of that, even the protagonists of such buildings would find themselves being somewhat disappointed, both in how others react and in how they find themselves feeling about what they were in theory so keen on seeing.

The basic aesthetic problem that new building of the sort we see on City Island is the sheer amount of it that is liable to be happening at any given moment. If lots of buildings are required, all for some similar purpose, then whatever gets built is liable to start out looking and feeling rather meaningless. And that emphatically will apply, I believe, if a mass of fake-Ancient buildings is what happens. That is awfully liable, at least to begin with, to look all fake and no Ancient. To look, in short, meaningless. So, why fight it? Why not build what makes economic sense, in a style that is rather bland, but efficient and reasonably smart looking, and be done with it?

What gives meaning to buildings is not just the way they look when they first appear; it is the life and the work that subsequently get lived and done in them. Because of those things, buildings acquire a particular character, and people start to have positive feelings about those buildings, provided of course the life and work they associate with the buildings is something they also have a positive feeling about.

If people hate what happens in new buildings, they’ll hate the buildings and yearn to see them destroyed, no matter what style they were built in.