Pavlova is back

I had a nice surprise today. As time passes, the number of places I can buy the Gramophone and the BBC Music Mag keeps on diminishing, one of the few that remains being W.H.Smith in Victoria Station. It was once again a beautifully lit late afternoon, and when I stepped outside the station concourse, I encountered this beautiful sight:

Yes, the wraps have come off Pavlova. And far sooner than I had been expecting.

Several of the above photos feature the new Nova building. This fine edifice was awarded this year’s Carbuncle Cup. The dreary grumblers who award this award think that it’s a badge of shame, but I generally find it, and its accompanying runner-up collections, to be a great source of information about interesting and often excellent new buildings. Nova is wonderful, I think. I intend (although I promise nothing), to say more about this enjoyably showy yet elegant addition to Victoria’s mostly rather lumpish architecture.

In 3.2, I got lucky with an airplane.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Bounty Bars for Alfie Saggs

Yesterday GodDaughter One invited me to join her for one of her Moves, from Stonebridge Lock, up the River Lee Navigation, to Enfield. The boaters of London have to keep moving. They aren’t allowed to stay in the one spot for ever, which I bet thins down the numbers. Plus, it makes sure that the canals have lots of canal boats chugging about on them for the likes of me to photo. It’s quite a subtle rule, I think.

I took many photos. Here are some that commemorate the life and work of Alfie Saggs, the lock keeper of Pickett’s Lock, which was renamed “Alfie’s Lock” in 2015:

Alfie Saggs is well known to London’s canal boaters, but the story was all new to me. Read about Alfie Saggs here. Apparently Alfie liked Bounty Bars, and so Bounty Bars were how the boaters expressed their appreciation of his work:

It’s good that this celebration of his life’s work was something that Alfie Saggs himself was able to enjoy, and that it didn’t happen only when he died, just three weeks ago:

I photoed a lot of signs yesterday. Signs are very evocative and very informative. When I browse through directories of past wanderings, I am always glad of signs. They tell me exactly where I was, the way that mere landscape and waterways cannot with nearly so much certainty.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Quota Roller

Indeed:

From the I Just Like It collection. Photoed somewhere in the Piccadilly Circus Leicester Square region, in December 2013.

One of those photos where I moved my camera to keep it on the object of my attention as it rolled by, thereby keeping the object in approximate focus and the background not.

Nice.

I love luxurious cars driven by the ostentatious nouveau riche. (Is there another kind of nouveau riche? Probably, yes.) I would hate to have to actually look after such a vehicle throughout its life, but I love being able to photo such things, on my wanderings in London, where there are just enough of such vehicles to be amusing, but not so many that you stop noticing and stop enjoying.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Chelsea crowds at Fulham Broadway

Yesterday was a complicated day for me, and when I went out to dinner it got more complicated, because I got swept up in this:

I was jammed in a no-standing-room-either tube carriage, on my way to dinner at my friends, and at West Brompton someone who’d been sitting got out and a seat became available. Me being Old, I was invited to have it. At first I was reluctant. “I’m getting off at the next stop”, I explained. I’d be stuck further inside the carriage with more shoving when I got out than if I stayed where I was. “Oh that’s okay,” said the guy. “Everyone’s getting off at the next stop.” Eh? How did he know? Was he psychic?

He was not psychic. He was a Chelsea supporter. And so, as he well knew, were most of the other people causing the train to be so strangely packed. Above is my photo of us all waiting to get out from the rather unfortunately named Fulham Broadway tube station, which is right near the Chelsea ground, but not nearly so near to the Fulham ground.

And here is a photo I took of Chelsea stuff that was being offered to the throngs:

They had a special scarf to commemorate this one game, which I’m guessing they do for lots of games. Good thinking. The game was against something called Qarabag. Chelsea won comfortably.

Earlier, sport also forced itself upon my attention, in the form of these flags in Regent Street:

The Americans are coming.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Pede Lorean

Indeed:

Good luck getting that up to 88 mph.

Another happy memory from my wanderings around the rivers and canals way out East. This was taken last December.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Taxi with tree

So there I was, wondering around the other side of the City of London from where I live, as I like to do, and I saw this taxi with a tree behind it. But the weird thing was, no matter which direction I photoed the taxi and the tree from, the tree was always directly behind the taxi:

What gave? Answer: the tree wasn’t and isn’t behind the taxi. It was and is right on top of the taxi, made to look as if it is growing right up through it. This taxi with tree was and is: Art.

Yes, this is one of those many places where hurt-your-foot-if-you-drop-it work has recently been replaced by “creative” work. (The sneer quotes are not because creative work isn’t, but because other work so often is also.)

Here is a map of this place, together with a description of what has been happening there recently:

When exploring a new place, I always photo maps and signs which explain everything.

This map looks, I think, rather like one of those illustrations in a birds-and-bees instruction manual for adolescents.

More about Orchard Place here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Bromley-by-Bow tube to the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge

Some of the best walks in London that I have done in recent months have been alongside the River Lea. Typically, I would start at Bromley-by-Bow tube station, go south along the A12 and then turn left along Twelvetrees Crescent until I get to the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge. Then I’d go either north or south.

On one of these meanders, the weather was particularly bright and sunny, and before I even got to the river, while I was just walking south along the A12, photo-ops abounded. Or maybe they didn’t but it felt as if they did. Everything, even the most mundane of objects or lighting effects, seemed dusted by a spraycan of joy, and I can’t look at the photos I took that day without that joy colouring my feeling about the photos I took at that moment.

Photos like these:

I can’t be objective about whether anyone else might like the above photos. I was and remain too happy about them to be objective. Just looking at them when I was preparing them for this posting, I became too happy to even care about being objective.

Share my joy, or not, as you please. 1.1 just tells us where we start. 1.2 is another view from the station, but not of it. 1.3 is one of those gloriously complicated drain-unblocking lorries. 2.3 I like because the colours on the car are so like the colours sported by the building, and because the sunniness of it all is emphasised by my silhouette. In 3.2 you can just see the top of the Big Olympic Thing, an effect I always enjoy. And 3.3 features a photo of, I do believe, the Taj Mahal. Lovely.

Not long after photoing all that, I photoed these shopping trolleys.

When I returned a day or two later to retrace my joyful steps, I photoed the excellent footbridge from the Twelvetrees Crescent bridge (one of my favourite footbridges in all of London (although maybe it’s just how good it looked that day from that spot)). I photoed the Shard. And I photoed a map that shows the locality where all these delights are to be found.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Eight

Today being the BMdotcom day for cats, and now also for other creatures, here is another creature, in this case a chicken, in an advert:

And here, photoed by me recently, outside the Old Vic theatre, is one of these excellent machines referred to in the advert, in action:

You can surely see what I did there, and I assure you that it was no fluke. I waited for it to say 8. I also have 9 and 7, because I wanted to make quite sure. I have been photoing these excellent machines for quite a while now.

The 8build website. They’re doing some work on the Old Vic.

On the left in the distance, nearing completion, One Blackfriars. I find liking this Thing a bit of an effort, but I’ll get there. I always do with such Things. According to that (Wikipedia), One Blackfriars is nicknamed “The Vase”. I smell, although I have no evidence for this, an attempt at preemptive nicknaming, by the people who built this Thing. “We’ll call it The Vase, to stop London calling it something worse.” That’s what happened with The Shard, after all. And that name stuck.

I tried to make the title of this “8”, but apparently a number with no letters is not allowed.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Aug ’17 OSB6: Camden Highline

The titles of these things were getting to be too long-winded.

So yes, the Camden Highline.

Bid to turn disused railway between Camden Town and King’s Cross into elevated ‘Highline’ park

Sadiq Khan throws weight behind Camden highline project

The official website.

Where they hope it will be, just north of the Regent’s Canal:

Click on that to get it twice as big, and consequently (if your eyesight is anything like mine) legible.

Those little green circles are cameras. Presumably this means good places for photography. If and when they contrive this, I will definitely be checking it out.

Long moderately high platforms, even ones that are not very high, often supply great views, because you can walk along them until the great views appear.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

X lights the spot

Earlier this month I was in the Hackney Wick area. My object was to check out that particular stretch of water known as the Hertford Union Canal, which is the straight line of water that connects what describes itself on maps as “River Lee Navigation”, at the bit of that next to the Olympic Park, to the Regency Canal, at the bit of that at the south west end of Victoria Park. The Hertford Union Canal marks the southern edge of Victoria Park.

And I duly checked it out. As I said in that earlier posting, there’s a lot of graffiti in that part of London, and the Hertford Union Canal is also thus decorated. Or violated, if that’s how you feel about graffiti.

Here is an example of the graffiti to be seen, this time under some bridges which take the A12 and a local road alongside it across the canal:

However, by the time I took that photo the ubiquitous graffiti had ceased any longer to register. What I was interested in was the light. Photography is light.

And look what the light did next:

A mere splurge of light has been sharpened, presumably by the sunlight no longer being diffused by a cloud, and it is then being sliced into two distinct sheets of light by some kind of roadside fence or barrier (which you can dimly see in the top picture above).

Let’s take a closer look at that light, and what happens to it when it hits the canal:

Okay, let’s itemise what’s happening there. We have here an X, with four arms.

Top right arm: the light slices between the bridges and hits the wall on the far side of the canal, and the boat parked on the far side of the canal.

Bottom right: what happens top right is bounced off the water on its way to me, rather than bouncing directly to me off the far wall and directly off the boat.

Top left, and now it starts getting a bit confusing:

I think what we see there is the light bouncing off the water into the boat.

And bottom left? Now I’m becoming even more confused:

What I think we see there is the light directly striking the surface of the water, lighting up all the particles floating on it, and also penetrating the water and turning it green.

If someone painted a picture looking like all that, we’d say: you’re taking the piss. Nothing looks like that. But, it did.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog