Category: Scaffolding

Keeping up appearances with scaffolding and pictures

I don’t know exactly where this was, only approximately. It was somewhere in the vicinity of Leicester and Trafalgar Squares, these being the places where I photoed the photo just before this one and just after this one:

But I do know for sure when I photoed this photo: April 30th 2015. And I know for sure that I like it. I hope you do also.

It’s that we see both the picture they have created, because of it being mostly front lit, and the means by which the painting is suspended, because of it being partly back lit, that I particularly like.

LATER: I also greatly like this, which was photoed about an hour later:

That was then playing at the Playhouse Theatre, Northumberland Avenue. It was a musical, apparently. Blog and learn.

Now thrive the scaffolders: Near Waterloo

Photoed by me, just over two years ago, from Lower Marsh:

Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between scaffolding and actual building.

Urban picturesque

Indeed:

Photoed by me in September 2013.

I have labelled this photo “NearlyEverything” because for me, it has nearly everything. Scaffolding, roof clutter ancient and modern, a crane, Magic Hour light, the lot. Well, not the lot, there are things I like that are not present in this photo. But a lot of the lot.

There is even present a favourite item of London public sculpture, in the form of the statue of Mercury that adorns a building on the north bank of the River called Telephone House. If you follow that link, you’ll learn nothing about this sculpture being there. But it is.

Googling for “mercury statue” is greatly confused by the fact that a statue of pop singer Freddie Mercury has recently been on display outside the Dominion Theatre, across the road from Centre Point.

When you don’t know it’s temporary

It’s all very well to say, as I often do, that it makes more sense to photo temporary stuff than stuff that will be around for ever. Sometimes, you do know that something will be temporary, like scaffolding. But often, you don’t know that something will disappear until suddenly, poof, it disappears.

Take those yellow river buses, named after various Shakespearian ladies, that once upon a time used to go up and down the River, for instance. Here is one I found in my photo-archives, photoed on a dim and dreary afternoon in February 2003, arriving at its one-and-only London landing spot, just next to the MI6 Building:

Who knew beforehand that this would stop happening, on account of London’s new super-sewer demanding this landing spot for its own purposes?

Says a rather plaintive London Duck Tours:

Please note that we are no longer able to operate our usual range of tours due to Thames Water’s compulsory purchase of our slipway to build the next phase of the Thames Tunnel super sewer.

For the present time, we will offer a selection of entertaining and informative LAND-based (road-only) tours. Please note that these tours do not have a river splashdown and we do not offer individual tickets.

Happily, long before this particular Duck Tours disaster struck, I photoed the above photos, simply because I enjoyed what I was seeing. Fond thanks to my old Canon A70, despite it having had only x3 zoom.

Are these yellow Duck Tours river buses still operating? I don’t recall seeing any of them even on dry land recently. But, what I don’t recall is a very large category nowadays.

The new Google building in King’s Cross is taking shape

And the shape is the big green thing that someone has stuck in the middle of this photo …:

… which I found here. More about this building-to-be here.

On the right, King’s Cross railway station. On the left, St Pancras railway station, which is where the Eurostar trains go to and come from. It’s a pretty well connected sort of place. And proof that physical connection remains important, in the world of virtual connection that Google does so much to route us all about in.

A while back I was in and around all this with a friend, and just before I photoed these photos, I photoed these photos:

There’s something very appealing to me about the big concrete towers that signal a big new project like this one, towers ministered to by cranes, cranes which on sunny days often leave shadows on the towers. In a few months, all will be completely different. No sooner are these towers built than they are smothered in something else, after which some degree of permanence will return.

And whereas those earlier towers and cranes I linked to were for Brand X unaffordable apartments, the above towers are being built for one of the great economic and political facts of our time.

The Helter Skelter that never was

I don’t often often get close up with the Big Things of the City of London. Mostly I just admire the changing scene they have made for London over the last two decades, but from a distance.

But in November of 2012, I did get close to these Things, and in particular to the new Big Thing then under construction, known by its makers as “The Pinnacle”, and to the rest of us as the “Helter Skelter”.

Here is a smallish gallery from that expedition:

A sneaky selfie in the last one there.

The Helter Skelter turned into something else just as tall, but bulkier and duller, as recounted in this angry piece. Which means that my expedition captured a fascinating passing moment in London’s architectural history. The stump that was all it was then remained a stump, and then turned into the Biggest Thing in the top photo here.

I have mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, the Helter Skelter would have been more elegant and recognisable. And it would also have been a great place to shoot a remake of King Kong, with KK sliding down it, carrying an English actress with him on his lap. On the other hand, the current architectural hulk that is catchily known as “22 Bishopsgate”, now nearing completion, being so very bulky and inelegant, will positively demand a much bigger Big Thing next to it, in the fullness of time. Rather in the way that Guy’s Hospital was, for its time, so big and ugly that it made the Shard happen.

Yesterday in Euston Road

Yesterday I met up with a friend in Kings Cross, and afterwards, what with the victoria Line being all over the shop, I walked along the Euston Road, to places where other tube lines could be easily reached.

Here are a few of the photos I photoed:

My usual preoccupations are on show. Signs (ph4 ph5), sculpture (ph5), things that look like they could be sculpture but are not, like scaffolding (ph8) and like those strange yellow things (ph7). There’s even a photoer photo (ph3), outside St Pancras. And a taxi advert (ph2, about how you can “ID yourself”.

ANPR, I now learn, refers to Automatic Number Plate Recognition, which it would appear that motorists don’t need to have explained to them. But what are the strange yellow things? Weights to stop the fences being pulled over, is my guess.

Plus, note the surveillance camera, top left, in the last otherwise oh-so-pretty photo.

More pleasingly, I like how that glass penthouse-like (pentoffice?) addition has been added to the slightly older brick structure (ph6). The opposite of roof clutter. A lot of architecture is about adding stuff to already existing buildings these days. Which makes a nice change from smashing everything down every time, which they of course still do a lot of.

Adding stuff includes adding paint, to an already existing building (ph1). That building always amazes me whenever I see it. It’s a bank. There seems to be an architecture rule that the more flamboyant the building, the duller the institution that occupies it. Vice versa often applies too, I think.

Blue sky – sun – concrete – cranes – crane shadows

Every time I go to St James’s Park tube I go past the cranes that are labouring away to make The Broadway.

Yesterday these cranes were looking especially fine in the late afternoon sunshine, casting some excellent shadows on the concrete towers they are busy constructing:

And as you can see, I also got some photos of the sun hitting one of the crane towers, that approached in dazzlingness what I was seeing myself, which I usually find rather hard to do. Photography is light, and the light was especially good yesterday.

The way I see it, there’s not a lot of point in making something eternal with the magic of digital photography if the thing you are photoing is pretty much eternal to start with, especially if many others have also eternalised it. But The Broadway will already have changed from what it was yesterday.

Now thrive the scaffolders: The Albert Hall

The previous posting concerned August 4th 2017. Here are two photos I took on August 4th 2018, of scaffolding:

Another posting in what might in due course become a series, although I promise nothing.

Shame the weather on August 4th 2018 wasn’t as good as it had been exactly one year earlier.

Early light

Yesterday I went on the expedition I told myself yesterday I’d go on, which was good. Although, I didn’t do the Dangleway bit at the end, because I was too knackered.

Sadly, though, the weather forecast did something it never does usually. It was a bit wrong. It promised cloudless sky at the end of the expedition, but in reality, the cloudless sky came only at the start:

Cloudless sky turns almost any situation into a photo op, for me anyway, and those are four very early photos I photoed.

First, an orthodox photo with lots of blue sky, taken of the new apartments in Victoria Street that are taking shape, which I go past on my way to St James’s tube. When finished they’ll look approximately like this. That was their guess in 2016, so by now the guess will be different, but so what.

Second, the box of covered scaffolding on the right of the first photo was behaving in a particularly fun way. It is usually quite fun, but this was funner than usual.

Third, the sort of photo I quite often take when in a train. Nothing remarkable about it. Reflections in the window? Why is that a problem?

But fourth, it gets interesting. The train was travelling very slowly, because of overheating track or some such thing. And this last photo was taken when the train was stuck, immobile, between stations, next to a wall. What we see there are not shadows, they are the reflections (see above) of what is to be seen through the train window opposite. What I like is how very recognisable that building is, the one with three holes in it. To me, anyway. And that’s clearly a crane tower in the foreground of the reflected scene. Which is good.

Photography is light.