Category: London

Now thrive the scaffolders and the craners

Quota photos, yes, but I trust amusing ones:

That’s the Tate Modern extension nearing completion, photoed by me five years and one day ago. So not really now. But the scaffolders and the craners do now still thrive.

Quota photos because I spent the morning failing to finish another piece of writing which just grew and grew. And now, I have to go out and Do Things, which always tires me out these days, so I wanted to have something here before I went out. More later. Maybe.

I hate not being able to go up that Thing and photo London and photo others photoing London. Can wait until it opens. And will. But would prefer not to be having to.

The Singing Cabbie

I am still keeping an eye open for interestingly decorated taxis. I’m looking through the archives to see when I first started noticing such taxis, when they started getting to be interestingly decorated, that kind of thing. In 2008, it would seem I wasn’t noticing such things at all. But today, out in Victoria Street, I hit the taxi advertising jackpot:

It’s not that good a photo, but it’s a great taxi-with-advert.

I was mystified at the time, but knew that, since I was photoing a website address as well as a taxi, that the mystery would be cleared up as soon as I got back home.

Long story short, he really is a singing cabbie. Let me spell this out. He drives a taxi. And, he sings. And, he sometimes does both at the same time. And as is appropriate for a songster, he is also on Twitter.

I love London.

An old photo of a Robert Burns statue

I didn’t know until now that London had a statue of Robbie Burns, but apparently so:

How did I learn about this? I learned it from my photo-archives. I photoed this statue on August 29th 2008. The statue is one of several in Victoria Palace Gardens, a stretch of greenery-with-statues just downstream from Embankment tube station. Having photoed that photo, I gave it no more thought at all, from then on. Until now.

Partly it’s just that I quite like that photo, despite the over-brightness of the white building in the background. My camera then gave me rather mixed results.

But it is also, of course, that now is a time when statues are all over the news. Maybe Robert Burns, Sottish poet of yesteryear, will get involved. He must have said a few things that the Black Lives Matter people would disapprove of, it they were told about it. As they might well be told, by people trying to make problems for the Scottish Nationalists.

In other statue news, I see that Gandhi is now getting the treatment from the protesters. He said very un-woke things about black people when he lived in South Africa, but I suspect that what the people organising this demonstration really hate about Gandhi is that he is a Hindu hero, and the wokists are pro-Islam and consequently also anti-Hindu.

Get your fake-photos Rendaroed

So I open up Guido Fawkes to see what political bullshit is happening (that posting being an example of Guido at his considerable best) and top right, there’s an advert for something along the lines of (it’s gone now so I cannot be exact) “3D renderings of 2D architectural plans”. Having long wondered about who does all those fake-photos, like the ones that I like to stick up here from time to time, such as the ones in this earlier posting here about a possible new City of London concert hall. (I wonder how that’s coming along.) So, I click on the advert, and find my way to Rendaro.

Here is a fake-photo example of their work:

What I would really like (Google?) would be an advert by an enterprise which which 3D prints 3D models from 2D architectural plans, and better still, somewhere I could go and take a personal look at such 3D models. And where I could photo them.

But meanwhile, these fake-photos are a fascinating fact about modern life, and especially modern architectural life. They mean that both architects and designers can see what they are cooking up even as they do their cooking (the design equivalent of sticking your finger in the stew and sucking it), and all manner of onlookers can look over the shoulders of the designers, and also see what’s being cooked up. People like me can see London’s Big Things coming, years before they’re actually built, while still having time for a life doing other things besides.

However, the very ease with which these 3D renderings can be churned out has the paradoxical consequence that, unless you are paying very careful attention (that is, unless paying such attention is your full-time (see above) job) you can never be sure what will actually end up getting built. I, for instance, constantly image-google for some London Big Thing that I happen to hear about which is in the planning permission pipeline, and I immediately get half a dozen different visual versions of it, each recording a particular stage that the design went through while they were trying to get decide what they wanted and then trying to get permission for it from the politicians.

Which means, strangely, that the only way that you can be sure how a new London Big Thing will actually end up looking is to go there and actually look at it when they’re actually building it, and see if there are any fake-photos of what they’re actually doing on the outside of the actual fence around the actual site. Failing that, you just have to wait and see. See, that is, the actual Thing itself.

Pigeon scarers in focus – Strata out of focus and in focus

I am now wrestling with the writing of a potential Samizdata piece about The Riots, so here, by way of fending off a day of oblivion here are some quota photos.

First, a favourite photo of mine photoed several years ago, of a surveillance camera with some anti-pigeon spikes on it, just next to the south end of Waterloo Bridge:

I think you can see how such spikes wouldn’t protect statues very satisfactorily from pigeon shit. Like I said, towards the end of this, someone should invent a miniature electronic version of this, which would freak out pigeons but be invisible.

Note how, above, the Strata (the one with the three holes at the top) is clearly identifiable, even though hopelessly out of focus. As is Strata in this next photo, which I photoed yesterday, from a bus, through one of its windows:

This is a key test of a Big Thing. Can you still tell what it is when out of focus? If no, then it’s not a Big Thing. Strata is. (What with it also being Big enough.)

And here is the Strata photo I photoed of Strata about one second later, with the focus now working, again through the same bus window:

That may be it here until tomorrow. If I don’t see you again today, or even if I do, have a nice today.

A rather clumsy attempted solution to the unprotected bike problem

In my various earlier postings about e-scooters, I mentioned the fundamental problem of bikes for getting around on. Because bikes are so big and clumsy to take with you everywhere, bikers must constantly leave their bikes unattended, which means they regularly get damaged and/or stolen.

This afternoon, while out-and-about out in south-east London, I encountered and photoed a very partial answer to the bike protection problem:

I’m guessing that how this works is that you have a special key that lets you into this contraption, to insert or remove your bike.

Setting aside the sheer bother and expense of this thing, the bigger problem is that your bike problem is not typically confined to one spot. The problem follows you. Wherever you go, you may want to get shot of your bike for a while, and bam, sooner or later it gets wrecked or nicked. At least with hired bikes, there is a choice of places to abandon the bike. With this thing, you need to hire a whole new metal tend for each spot you might want to stop at. No. Comments telling me otherwise would be most welcome, but as of now, I just don’t think this works.

If, despite my grumbles, you want to investigate further, I took (see the photo on the right of the above three) a photo-note of the website to go to.

Lockdown chat with Patrick

On June 2nd, Patrick Crozier and I had another of our recorded conversations, this time about Lockdown.

In the course of this, I refer to a photo that I did take, and a photo that I didn’t take. The photo that I did take was this:

That being me, and another bloke, recording the fact of empty shelves in Sainsburys. The photo that I didn’t take, but talk about with Patrick, is the one I should also have taken of how the shelves laden with less healthy food – crisps, chocky bickies etc. – were crammed with yet-to-be-sold stuff, a lot of it offered at discount prices.

Patrick, in his posting about this chat, mentions something he thought of afterwards but didn’t say during, which is that what may have been going on with the crisps and bickies was not that people were shunning unhealthy food, but rather that they were shunning party food, on account of there suddenly being no parties being had. Good point. In my photo above, you can see in the distance, the drinks section. Plenty of drink still to be had also.

I remember, when I used to do chat radio, I used to regret not having said things I should have said, either because I had them in mind but forgot, or because I only thought of them afterwards. But, in due course, I realised that what mattered was what I did say. If that was reasonably intelligent and reasonably well put, then I did okay. People wouldn’t say: Ooh, but he forgot to mention blah blah. They would merely decide whether they liked, or not, what I did say.

Well, this time around, I think there was a huge elephant in the virtual room that we didn’t discuss, which I am sure some listeners would expect us to have at least mentioned. Sport. As in: There hasn’t been any! Patrick and I are both sports obsessives. He is a Watford fan. But he has had no Premier League relegation battle to warm his heart during the last few months. I love cricket, not just England but also Surrey. Likewise for me: nothing, despite some truly wonderful weather at a time when it’s often very grim. But, not a single sporting thing, other than ancient sportsmen reminiscing about sports contests of yesteryear on the telly. Yet we never mentioned any of that. Since a lot of the point of our chat wasn’t to yell at politicians and scientists, hut rather just to remember the oddities of our own lives now, this was a major omission. We talked, as we always do whether that’s the actual topic or not, about war, this time in connection with the question of which economic policy attitudes will prevail during whatever attempts at an economic recovery start being made in the months to come. Yet sport, the thing that has replaced war in so many people’s lives, got no mention by us.

Churchill boarded up

So there I’ve been, quietly photoing statues, for all kinds of trivial reasons, such as: that they can be relied upon to stay still; and: they won’t make a scene about being photoed. And now, all of a sudden, statues are news:

I got that photo from Guido Fawkes. Apparently this is how Winston Churchill is now looking. Memo to self: check this out.

Reflections from One New Change

Rootling through the photo-archives, as I have been doing a lot lately, I came across a directory devoted to One New Change, and the views out over London you can photo from it.

Views like this:

Clear enough. Sky, very clear.

But then, I came upon this photo:

Weird. It’s some kind of reflection, obviously, but what it is reflected in? What was I doing to get that? I set the problem to one side and forgot about it.

But then, a few weeks later I think, I went back to the same directory, and came upon the answer. Because, here (below) was the same photo, with me merely holding the camera differently:

I photoed the photo where the reflected scene is horizontal from a similar spot, but with the camera turned round about two hundred and eighty degrees from how it looks in one immediately above.

Here’s another version of the above that makes everything clearer, by supplying some context:

That photo also shows how the top of One New Change itself looks.

You know me. I don’t just like to show you my favourite photos. My favourite photos are often puzzles, photos that make you, and for that matter me, ask: What’s that? And I want to find out, by looking at other photos taken at the same time, and then I want to explain them all to you, with all those other photos included in the posting.

Also, modern architecture is shiny.

Signs of our time

Regulars here will know that I love to photo signs and notices. So evocative. So precise for defining a time, a place, a mood, or an official attitude. And never more so than right now:

Those are some signs I photoed yesterday, inside the entrance to Oval tube, and on the side of a bus. Right now, such verbals are commonplace. Soon, we must all hope, they’ll become an impossibly weird reminder of an impossibly weird time.

Here are three more that I photoed in April, of signs in shops windows:

On the left, the bog standard sign that happened in nearly every shop. We’re shut for the duration. Sorry. In the middle, the regular signage at the front of my local chemist, and on the door, a scrimmage of irregular signage, concerning this and that. And on the right, one of the signs saying: We’re still open. Come in. Buy stuff.

Finally, one of my favourites, from way back in March at the Wigmore Hall, at one of the last public events I attended, a performance of all the Beethoven String Trios, as I recall. Superb. We were up in the socially distanced seats at the top and back of the hall. Normally the Wigmore would have been packed out for a show like this, but this time, there were empty seats. If we’d known then blah blah, we’d surely not have gone.

They don’t allow photoing of performances, but at the beginning and at the end, you can photo away, so I photoed this, at the beginning:

And we obeyed. My impression, as I recall it, was that there was actually less coughing than usual.

A great souvenir sign, from pretty much the exact moment when it all suddenly kicked off and got serious.