Entries categorized as ‘London’
Niceness isn’t exactly the coolest concept, but what it loses in edginess it definitely makes up for in usefulness. There’s certainly plenty of evenings and weekends I’ve just wanted to do something… nice. Urban Path has a nifty ‘Top 100′ Nicest Things to do in London, and the ones I recognise in it are certainly… nice. Yauatcha and Ottolenghi definitely fit the bill. Well worth looking at should you just *happen* to need any nice ideas of in the next couple of days….
The picture on the right is of the staircase in the big Waterstone’s bookshop on Piccadilly, a very nice bookshop where I could spend hours.
Categories: London
Very strange being on the tube yesterday, after all this. Even when the tube is packed, there’s normally a very careful sense of space around each person; a preserved isolation. People don’t make a lot of eye contact on the tube and a lot of the time they don’t chat to each other on the tube; the noise from the carriages drowns out the conversations. It’s a very different experience from being a bus; there, you catch snippets of a life from an overheard mobile phone conversation, a chat between people sitting next to each other. You can see lives at each stop; people coming in and out of shops, running to get to the bus stop on time…
The tube, on the other hand, is strangely suspended from all that. Little dark capsule of relief from all the complications of life up above. Little dark capsule of relief from a city full of other people. On the tube, you’re normally alone with your own thoughts.
But yesterday was very different. Lots of eye contact. You knew – or thought you had a very good idea – what everyone was thinking of, if not what they made of it. I don’t think anyone knows what to make of it.
Good words from Ken.
Categories: In My Life · London
London is a secret city. The maps lie about it. The first time you
discover this – probably the way every first-time Londonder discovers
the maps are wrong – is when you abandon the tube map for the first time (like a tube failure forcing you to walk to the
next nearest station…) The Tube map is, in its way, a masterpiece of
computer gaming programming. It is perhaps the most convincing and
widely accepted virtual universe ever created. Areas of Zone 1 in
London are a lot closer than it implies, and the way the “stations” fit
together makes a surprising real-world jigsaw puzzle.
London takes
time to get to know, and there are few other places I’ve been – even
foreign cities – that feel as if they are as good at hiding things as
London is. Pubs, clubs, bars, roads, buildings, gardens, parks -
you can walk down the same road for years and never know they’re right
there. It takes quite a jolt to wake you up to it – for me, it was the
red foliage I saw from my bedroom the other day. All these hidden
autumn leaves lie behind a thundering main road. And you’d never
know… (Click for bigger image).
original
Categories: London
At some point, I think I’d like to learn a lot more about clouds. For the moment however, here are some pictures, taken from behind my house at the weekend. On Saturdays, I can hear the rippling sound of the crowd when Arsenal score, because I live very close to Highbury, their stadium – the building, in case you’re wondering, is Arsenal’s new
football ground (link for general info, plus a nice render of what it will look like here),
which will seat 60,000 people and cost £357 million. Pictures were taken with a Ricoh Caplio digi-cam, as my Optio hasn’t arrived yet – pleased with the results, though.
Categories: London · Photography
…I feel like I should have at least one picture of the tube.
Categories: London · Photography
Well, I didn’t actually… but while there’s still some summer left, I’ve posted a couple more photos taken over the last few months, showing just how *nice* the capital looks when its streets are filled with sunlight. This is because I, like millions of Londoners, live in fear of the terrible shade of grey all the concrete turns as soon as Autumn comes and it starts raining…
Categories: London · Photography
It’s Monday, and it’s raining. The sun is gone, although at least it’s not as debilitatingly hot now. In honour of the start of the week, a few quick photos from my workplace window, taken over the last few months.
Categories: In My Life · London · Photography
Can’t be bothered to read Peter Ackroyd’s megalithic biography of the metropolis, but still want to be able to spout trivia about the obscure streets, strange names and unusual practices that the capital is built on? Check out This Isn’t London, a website of totally fake London history and facts…[via LMG]
“Planning permission for the London Eyeruns out next year. Remarkably, it’s been suggested that this great
tourist attraction and adornment to the London skyline might have to be taken down forever, or maybe re-erected elsewhere. So what are the other options? The wheel will be unhooked from its spindle and, thus freed, will roll around the country solving mysteries and avenging wrongs…”
Categories: Ephemera and links · London
Since I’ve had the Pentax for a couple of weeks, and TWJ for only a few days, there’s some back-log stuff to post – these are pics I took of the Trafalgar square side of the National Gallery, after it had been raining.
Categories: London · Photography
A very nice day on Saturday, so took a trip to Kew Gardens, and walked for miles… Always very strange when you end up in a park in London (or any other big metropolis), becuase you catch bits and pieces of the city through the gaps in the borders: a skyrise at the end of a path, or in Kew’s case, a 747 rumbling overhead (it’s underneath the approach to Heathrow). Anyway, stretched my legs and the Optio’s, and got some pretty good pictures of the Waterlillies. They’re in a special greenhouse built in 1852 and cover the inside. If Miss Havisham kept tropical plants, that’s what it’d look like.
Categories: In My Life · London
