Maybe we should club together to get this. It looks like a bargain, frankly.

ta to Christopher Harvey for the link

Had a very pleasant evening last night dancing in the shadow of Greenwich Power Station with Blackheath Morris Men, and underneath the wonderful Greenwich laser.



I've never been particularly impressed by Greenwich Power Station from a distance, I think it's those chimneys that look like piles of sticks held together by tape. Up close however, it's rather fantastic - whilst no Gilbert Scott, it does have that "industrial cathedral" look, with massive windows and huge internal spaces. Also, unlike many of London's great power stations, it's still working (on gas rather than coal) providing back up for the London Underground system.

Getting to Greenwich from Lewisham by bus was a ridiculous palaver however - taking an hour and 25 minutes - enough time to have walked there and back and halfway there again. An old lady with a stick at the bus stop complained that she'd been waiting for over an hour for a 180 or a 199. There seemed to be no good reason for their absence. I blame Boris Johnson, this never happened when Ken was in charge.

Nice to see the other team members again, and the ladies from Dacre Morris, I'm really hoping I can start going to more morris events soon.

Although I was initially sad to see the Middlesex Hospital in central London demolished, it has to be said that the newly revealed views of the Post Office Tower from Berners Street are stunning, not to mention the new expanses of sky.

A temporary oasis to be savoured before the groan-inducingly named "Noho Square" goes up and blocks everything again.

I'm very grateful to markhammonds and his family for taking an hour and a half out of their London sightseeing tour to meet up with our family at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday. It was fun.

Ruth walked Jack around on his "lead" (unfortunately this is neccesary as Jack has a tendancy to start running and never looking back), whilst I sat May down on the RFH balcony and watched the world go by. May was in heaven- gurgling, reaching her arms out to the passing boats, clapping, and practicing her new laugh - a slightly sinister, throaty "heh-heh-heh" chortle.

Mark arrived with his wife, Danny and their two kids - my first meeting with the lovely Lydia, and we adjourned to the bar of the RFH, where we swapped holding babies, and Mark's son Alex tested the aerodynamic qualities of a bag by throwing it repeatedly over a balcony.

It wasn't especially easy to have the kind of wide ranging conversations I used to have with Mark - we mainly stuck to childcare and sleep, although Mark did mention that my old secondary school in Middlesbrough, "Bertram Ramsey Secondary School" had been demolished to extend the car park of the hospital he works in. Whilst I can't say I had the happiest of times there through the mid '70s, I was a little miffed that they've demolished five years of my life without even consulting me.

Bertram Ramsey was never going to win any architectural prizes, being a classic example of sixties "big school" design, it was perhaps most noticeable for being the work of John Poulson, the disgraced British architect.

It's also rather sad that the first Google entry for my old school takes you this blog...

If anybody has any photos of the old place, please get in touch.

Two buildings from my route to work are being quietly dismantled-

The Swiss Centre in Leicester Square. I won't miss this one really, an ugly early 70s construction, with a long abandoned cinema (where Ruth and I once saw "Short Cuts" on a really hot day- the air conditioning was broken), a horrible looking bar and tacky souvenir shops. I will miss the klonky bell ringing automatons though. Sorry I never got film of it before it was dismantled. I wonder what happened to it? I'd hate to think it all ended up in a skip.
YouTube has some film-



The Middlesex Hospital. Where for many years I gave blood in a wood panelled room overseen by an imposing portrait of a man in a moustache. This rather lovely brick building seems to be disappearing behind white tarpaulins to make way for the enormously depressingly named Noho Square. Most of the impressive front has seems to have been raised to the ground, including the clock, but it looks like a little bit of frontage will be kept to add some period charm.



"Noho" though. It makes me want to weep.

Firstly, can I say outright that I have nothing but praise for the way we have been treated by Newham Social Services, especially compared to the dire and utterly dispiriting experience we had had at the hands of Lewisham...

However, at the gloomy, cell-like building in Newham where we twice waited over an hour and a half to be seen by adoption panels, this is the public sculpture they choose to display on the wall above the entrance-



It appears to be a man throwing himself off the roof.

My Favourite Tower

I read on Ladywell Green Councillor Sue Luxton's blog (via Andrew) of an application to demolish Lewisham's marvellous Adhesive Specialities building, near Ladywell station-



This building has long been a favourite of mine - I think of it as a distant cousin, and less flamboyant relation to the wonderful Hoover Factory in West London (not only a wonderful building, but the inspiration for one of Elvis Costello's best songs - read more, with lovely pix here)

For those that can be bothered (and I don't necessarily include myself in this) there are people you can write to listed in Sue Luxton's post, should you wish to comment on the proposed demolition. I might just do so.

In the meantime, I continue to entertain the fantasy of walking through the front doors of "Adhesive Specialities" announcing - "I'm looking for some glue, but not just any kind of glue...."

"You've come to the right place sir!"

One of the (many) delights of charity shopping, and especially of the "50p book shop", is picking up something you know nothing about, and finding it to be absolutely fascinating.

So it was with the book "Concerning Archigram..." by Dennis Crompton, a history of the Sixties alternative architecture company Archigram. I was initially grabbed by the Situationist style "detourned" graphics (and sure enough, Situationism, and in particular Ivan Chtcheglov, were an influence, alongside Buckminster Fuller and the more experimental modernists), but further reading proved to be fascinating. Playful and not entirely serious, very few of their designs seemed to get much beyond the drawing and architectural model stage, but nevertheless they seem to exist happily as thought experiments and exciting possibilities.

I also realised I'd seen as exhibition of some of their work at The Tate, because I remembered the "Walking City" :- "The Walking City is constituted by intelligent buildings or robots that are in the form of giant, self contained living pods that could roam the cities. The form derived from a combination of insect and machine and was a literal interpretation of Corbusier's aphorism of a house as a machine for living in. The pods were independent, yet parasitic as they could 'plug in' to way stations to exchange occupants or replenish resources. The citizen is therefore a serviced nomad not totally dissimilar from today's executive cars. The context was perceived as a future ruined world in the aftermath of a nuclear war.". OK, ok, that seems a bit barmy doesn't it?(and apparently Archigram members were encouraged to read science fiction: I'd never have guessed). Another idea was one of the "Plug-In City" in which the city almost works like Lego, with "no buildings but just a massive framework into which dwellings in the form of cells or standardised components could be slotted into. The machine had taken over and people were the raw material being processed, the difference being that people are meant to enjoy the experience". Again, far fetched, to put it mildly, but perhaps if more of our architects had the scale of imagination of these sixties bods, then we wouldn't end up with buildings quite as boring as, say, Lewisham Police Station, or that apparently windowless brown block behind Lewisham Shopping Centre...


EDIT: Fantastic Archigram Website!

Hurrah! My local charity shop has reinstated it's "all books = 50p" policy!

Yesterday I stood prevaricating over a huge book of British Architects, about the size of a small table. Actually it seemed to be a big advertising puff for Terry Farrell (I'm not a fan) and Associates. I could have had it for 50p. In the end I decided I didn't have room. Instead I got Ray Bradbury's "I Sing The Body Electric", "The Penguin Book of Interesting and Curious Numbers", a guide to English cathedrals, and the "Index on Censorship A-Z of Free Speech".

Curiously, the Ray Bradbury had a "Client Card" inside, used as a bookmark. The client was one "Robert Maxwell", with an 071 telephone number, whose office was "Maxwell House"...

Whadya reckon?

I'll scan it tonight....

I've had to do a bit of research on Carl Nielsen lately.

On his Wikipedia page I'm alway's struck by the same thing-

Didn't he have a lovely house?-

Another side of Middlesbrough, to contrast with the "Boro Tintin"-

Steve Rose waxes lyrical over the new Middlesbrough Art Gallery -MIMA.

He scotches the Boro's reputation as a cultural desert-
To be fair to Middlesbrough, despite its reputation for crime and pollution, it is no cultural desert. Even if the old Middlesbrough Art Gallery was a converted doctor's surgery, the town's own collection of post-19th century art runs to more than 3,000 pieces, and includes works by David Hockney, Bridget Riley and Stanley Spencer. There is a wonderful brick locomotive by David Mach in nearby Darlington. Standing in Victoria Square in the centre of town is Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen's only large-scale sculpture in the UK, Bottle of Notes, a homage to another famous Middlesbrough escapee, Captain Cook.

and describes the new building

Simple as it is, Mima's detailing redeems it from blandness. The planes of the facade shift across one another, and the roof line, the steel cables, the glass facade and the limestone wall are all set at slightly different angles, creating a hazier transition between interior and exterior. The surface of the limestone wall itself shifts intriguingly in texture and regularity, and even around the back of the building, the plain white render is broken with a pattern of aluminium grooves.

It sounds terrific, but I'd welcome the views of my Boro correspondents markhammonds and gazbro. Does it look anything like this-?



The article includes a curious mention of "another famous Middlesbrough escapee, Captain Cook". Ignoring the fact that Middlesbrough didn't exist when Cook set off, I quite like the term "escapee", I suppose that's what I am. But the old place does seem a lot more appealing than it did when I left in 1985.

spoombung used to complain (with some accuracy) that all avant electronica/glitch records of the late 90's would have a photo of a modern building on the cover. Almost invariably.

I suppose this was the sort of thing he had in mind-

I took this photo on my way into work this morning, it is, of course Sanderson, a place I've longed to wander into whilst exclaiming "do you know who I am?"...

Like spoombung's buildings, I've noticed that a lot of my 60's avant garde classical records have modern Barbara Hepworth/Henry Moore style sculptures on the covers. They look so dated now.

I don't know about you lot, but I've always enjoyed a good flying buttress-



They're great, aren't they?

Having better things to do on Friday, like drinking with mates, I missed a great article by Jonathan Glancey about The Post Office Tower- the spindly classic of 60's architecture that hangs over my workplace.



I've always been a fan, even when it lost the title of tallest building in Britain to the far uglier Nat West Tower and then the stumpy monstrosity in Canary Wharf.

I was lucky enough to be taken up to the viewing platform as a 10 year old child, and I remember being awed by its futuristic "2001" quality, and the amazing view over Central London. It was shortly after my visit that it was bombed, resulting it being closed to the public ever since (some 34 years now). Curiously although many remember the bombing, far fewer remember who did it, it wasn't the IRA, but Britain's own anarchist/situationist terrorists The Angry Brigade. Their cause may have been forgotten, but the result of their action lives on.

Thirty four years closure for one fairly feeble attack seems a very long time. Surely with the addition of a few airport security features (like at the Empire State Building) this modernist masterpiece could be re-opened? And a clean wouldn't do it any harm either.

Oh, and yes, it's called The Post Office Tower, and I won't hear otherwise.