Category Archives: Architecture and design

January 8, 2010

Goodbye to Peckham

By elsiem

Tomorrow sees the consolidation of my stuff and the beloved’s into a single location. I love my egg, and I’m delighted that we will be able to stop having the “Where are we going tonight? Is there any food at your place? I’m not sure I’ve got clean socks there” conversation, but I will miss being a part-time courtesy Peckham resident. Here, as a goodbye, are my favourite things about Peckham:

  • Peckham Library is a beautiful thing, and really the heart of the town centre in a way that the architects must have hoped for but couldn’t have predicted. Peckham is slowly, stealthily, undergoing a gentrification of the subtlest kind, and the library is the best and biggest symbol of it. It is also the site, approximately, of the Sunday farmer’s market, source of excellent meat and veg.

  • The all-night off licence on Asylum Road: the source not merely of late-night emergency wine, but of really nice late-night emergency wine, because the owner is a wine enthusiast and specialises in buying the last few bottles in discontinued lines, so that he gets them at a knockdown price which he then passes on to his customers.
  • Morrison’s supermarket. I am not a Morrison’s connoisseur so perhaps they’re all like this, but Peckham Morrison’s is so big and glossy and colourful that it’s more like a proper American supermarket than the inferior English version. They sell everything you could think of, and plenty that you couldn’t. I think I could live for a year in Peckham Morrison’s and eat something I’ve never tried before every day.
  • The neighbours on the road we will shortly be departing are almost uniformly friendly and charming. This is unique in London, in my experience. At least, I had very nice neighbours in Dulwich once, but Dulwich is different. Plus, they were ladies of a certain age who were more or less guaranteed to give no trouble, whereas there’s much more of a mix here. But people say “hello” as you walk past them, and put Christmas cards through the door, and yesterday one said “let me know if you need any help moving; I’m really good at packing boxes!”. What nice people they are. What a shame to leave them behind.

Our neighbours in Herne Hill, on the other hand, do at least provide excellent anecdote material.

1 comment   |  tags: , | posted in London

November 20, 2009

The TfL graffiti challenge

By elsiem

TfL is running a poster campaign as part of its Art on the Underground initiative. It consists of a series of quotes which, according to the website, “provoke thought on life in the city”.

One of these is a quote from Gandhi, which I’ve seen proudly displayed at various points along my commute to work. It reads

“THERE IS MORE TO LIFE THAN INCREASING ITS SPEED”

As I spilled off my overcrowded Jubilee Line train after waiting an unfathomably long time at London Bridge, and squeezed my way on to the Central Line only to spend five minutes sitting in a tunnel, it occured to me that the expression of this particular sentiment is rather brazen on TfL’s part. I am very well-behaved and couldn’t possibly consider breaking the law myself, but I hereby offer £20 cash money to the first person to send me photographic evidence that they have found one of these posters and added the line

“ON THE OTHER HAND, IT WOULDN’T BE A BAD PLACE TO START”

Leave a comment   |  tags: , | posted in London, Public transport

August 13, 2009

Capsule living

By elsiem

I refer to my flat as the egg because it’s small but perfectly formed, but this is the real thing, almost: a beautifully aerodynamic mobile home of which any chick could be proud (sorry):

rollingstone-ed04

Read the full story over at Inhabitat.

Leave a comment | posted in Buildings

August 5, 2009

Lilies

By elsiem

I can perceive intellectually that lilies are attractive; I just can’t bring myself to believe it in my heart. The problem is one of association. Just as meeting a lovely Nigel can convince you that it’s a nice name when it plainly isn’t, lilies’ ability to give me an instantaneous, powerful and lasting headache prevents me from appreciating their aesthetic charms.

That this is a minority opinion is borne out by the two – two! – women who separately got on to my train this evening carrying large bunches of lilies. The first landed at the other end of the carriage, but the second came and sat next to me. The journey only takes ten minutes,  but I knew that was long enough, so I got up and perched myself close to the door, breathing fresh air for as long as I possibly could before it slid shut.

I felt a bit bad for the woman. I wanted to explain, but my bad feeling for the woman was trumped by my wish not to have people thinking I was a madwoman on a crowded commuter train.

Fortunately, as I was leaving the train I caught a potent whiff of essence of male armpit, which put all thoughts of lilies – which put, in fact, all thoughts – immediately out of my mind.

1 comment | posted in Flowers, London

July 7, 2009

Photo

By elsiem

A publisher of tour guides has written to me to ask whether they can use one of my Paris photos in the next edition of their guide. I said yes, of course, but I do hope they straighten it up a little before they publish it:

It’s a little wonky, non?

1 comment   |  tags: , | posted in Architecture and design, Buildings, Other cities, Photos, Reasons to be cheerful

May 27, 2009

Erratum

By elsiem

When I said

Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.

What I really meant was

Not including London, Paris does human-scale street life…etc etc.

London is bigger, so there are more places where it doesn’t happen, but when it does, it’s as good as anywhere else’s. I was reminded of this yesterday coming through Brixton Market, which is still the most interesting place I know in London.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Architecture and design, London, Other cities

May 15, 2009

Paris

By elsiem

…was still lovely, of course. We caught the sun on the first day and I realised I hadn’t been there in good weather since 1998. It makes walking with no particular purpose in mind much more appealing.

In my second, or maybe third, year at university, I wrote an essay about Haussman’s Paris, and the period between 1853 and 1870 when he, along with Napoleon III,  was responsible for what amounted to a wholescale razing and rebuilding of large swathes of the city. Huge numbers of slum-dwellers were effectively banished; their homes replaced by shiny new apartment buildings which only the rich could afford to live in. This is still the main reason why Paris’s inner city, in the sense in which we use the term, is largely outside the city.

Anyway, one of the things Haussman succeeded in putting in place was a set of rules governing future development in the city, which meant that subsequent building projects have had to abide by the aesthetic rules devised during his period as Prefect of the Seine. As a result, one of the most immediately Parisian of images is the wide, tree-lined boulevard edged with elegant buildings of greyish-white stone, never more than five stories high.  This is the Paris that Haussman defined, and it’s still there much as he envisaged it.

And yet, there’s more variation in Paris than you might think, and it’s the sudden differences as much as the general sameness which make it a beautiful city. Not just the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou, but the unexpected sights which lurk around every other corner: a flea market; a gloomy courtyard, usually occupied by a grumpy-looking cat; a carousel; a sudden sharp hill leading up, or down, to a new vista. Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.

And it has La Grande Arche de la Défense, which is really big and has a hole in it:

grande archeMore photos here.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in Architecture and design, Buildings, Other cities

April 30, 2009

Gay Paree

By elsiem

paris

I’m off for three days of eating, drinking, eating, walking and eating. I fall in love with Paris all over again every time I go, including the time when I went with both my siblings, and my brother had to come a day late because his passport had expired, and my sister got food poisoning and puked all the way home.

Have a lovely bank holiday weekend, unless you’re outside the UK, in which case just have a lovely weekend. Or is May 1 a holiday everywhere?

Leave a comment   |  tags: , | posted in Other cities, Reasons to be cheerful

March 3, 2009

Olympics site

By elsiem

I forgot to mention an inadvertent bit of tourism which I did on the way to Norfolk: at Stratford station we spotted what can only have been the 2012 Olympic village.  It’s in the very early stages of being built, but the scale of it is awesome already. If you can find an excuse for going to Stratford, go there sooner rather than later.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , | posted in Architecture and design, Buildings, London

February 22, 2009

Taipei 101 revisited

By elsiem

There was a programme on BBC2 this evening about Taipei 101, the counterweighted skyscraper I wrote about a few months ago.  If you can endure Richard Hammond (who, separated from the others, is fairly inoffensive, though I prefer the wild-haired one and have no time at all for Clarkson), it’s worth checking out on the iPlayer.  The show focuses on the various feats of engineering which went into the building’s construction, and I was pleased to discover that the story of the building is just as fascinating as the finished product.

It also has the world’s fastest elevator, which travels at the unlikely speed of 1010 metres per minute.  I’ve had my ears pop in Japan’s fastest elevator, in the Yokohama Landmark Tower, but at a piffling 750 metres a minute it barely compares.  (Though looking it up now I discover that it’s also the world’s second-fastest elevator.)

Anyway, I’ve never been to Taiwan, though I’d like to,  so I don’t have any photos of Taipei 101.  Instead, here’s a photo of the view from the top of the Yokohama Landmark Tower, reflected in a mirror inside the viewing gallery:

landmark

1 comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Buildings, Other cities

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