One Kemble Street and its roof clutter as seen from the ROH floating bar

The best thing about seeing Turandot at the R(oyal) O(pera) H(ouse) earlier in the week was definitely seeing Turandot. But almost as good was what I saw during one of the intervals.

So, do you remember this?

The “this” I am referring to is the disembodied rectangular box hovering up near the roof there. I copied and pasted the sanskrit my blogging system demands for that photo from this earlier ROH posting. To quote my earlier description in that earlier posting:

I especially like that disembodied clutch of drinkers, suspended up there as if in mid air, but actually in mid mirror.

All of which means that you don’t need to remember it, because I just told you again.

Well, during the interval in question, I found myself stretching my legs inside this aerial box. From it, I got views like this:

Which was all very fine, although I can’t really tell how good or bad this photo is, because I only have this terrible little replacement screen to look at it on.

But then, things got even more interesting. I looked through that big semi-circular window, and saw other interesting things. In particular I saw this:

That is one of London’s finer assemblages of roof clutter, made all the more magnificent by being anarchically perched, like a tiny shanty town, upon one of London biggest and blandest and most geometrically severe pieces of sculpted Big Thingness from the Concrete Monstrosity era. Namely: One Kemble Street, which used to be known by the much cooler name of Space House.

If you image google for One Kemble Street, you get a deluge of photos of One Kemble Street, but just about all of them are taken from below. It’s like they’re ashamed of that marvellous roof clutter. But why? It is magnificent.

Here is another view of part of this roof clutter:

That was taken in December 2014, on the same day I photoed the floating bar in the sky, in the first photo, above.

Memo to self: check it out again, and try to photo the whole thing, in nice weather like that.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

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