I love walking along London Southbank – here a just a few things that have caught my eye…
Highgate Wood – London
Highgate Wood is my local park – a place to walk, dream, relax and play. Part wildlife reserve, part Victorian park it lies on the ridge just below Highgate village. A remnant of the ancient forest of Middlesex, today it’s an extension of our backyards – with a semblance of the village life in the urban metropolis. In the summer the playing fields, centred around the mock-tudor cafe, become an idealised vision of the English village, with its cricket pitch, football games and children’s parties. Despite its village pretensions, it remains a truly urban space with joggers, dog walkers, buggies and tourists jostling for space along its paths and buses to central London running along the roads at its edges.
Garden barge square – an oasis on the thames
Reeds wharf on the southern side of the thames near Tower bridge is home to a floating garden – formed from a series of barges at the 200 year old Downings road moorings. The garden square is home to 70 residents with the gardens literally sitting on the barge roofs. Its a green oasis surrounded by the steel and glass of luxury apartments – all vying for their riverside space.
We are the 99% – Occupy London Stock Exchange
‘We are the 99%’ is the refrain from Wall Street to London, from Oakland to Tel Aviv. A growing chorus of international resistance to the maintenance of the status quo following the impact of the financial crisis on individuals and societies across the developed world. As the 99% suggests the frustration lies with growing income inequality and the fashion for austerity that is eroding the broad social benefits that in many ways are the key to the social compact that binds societies together.
London series – Harringay Green Lanes food festival
The Green Lanes Food Festival celebrates the diverse mix of communities that live in and around Green Lanes. On 18 September 2011 almost 20,000 people walked down Green Lanes – just one month after the London riots. Green Lanes itself is an ancient London thoroughfare that was originally a cattle route from Hertfordshire to the Smithfield market just outside the city gates.
Kings Cross central
Continuing the theme of the London Street Photography festival I took the opportunity to join a guided walk by Alan Dein around the KIngs Cross area. The walk, part of a programme of events planned as part of the festival, took us behind KIngs Cross and St Pancras stations – a vast re-development site.
London series – Kings Cross
Behind the glorious facade of St Pancras station and the newly renovated platforms that deliver us to exotic European destinations lies a post industrial landscape. The district north of St Pancras and KIngs Cross rail stations is an area in re-generation – one of the largest areas of re-development in central London. But also behind these modern facades lies one of the oldest christian sites in England, dating back to the 12th century – the old St Pancras churchyard.
The London Street Photography Festival
The occasion of the first London Street Photography Festival has acted as a bit of a catalyst to complete a…
The impossible letters
The impossible letters – how can read the letters of the alphabet in everyday objects, in buildings, on the street? This was the project challenge for a group of photographers who participated in a workshop organised as part of the inaugural London Street Photography Festival. After reviewing the work of the two course conveners – David Gibson and Jesse Marlow (also the winner of the festival’s international award), both members of iN-PUBLIC – and a selection of other street photographers, it was time to wander the streets around Spitalfields and Shoreditch. This is my contribution to the task – followed by some loitering at the Ten Bells afterwards…
New Stolpersteine and London images
Le flaneur spent Christmas 2010 in Dusseldorf enjoying the snow but also exploring the pavements to discover new stolpersteine locations in the city. This most recent journey brings the total number of individual addresses to 43. These new additions build on existing concentrations and introduce new locations to the catalogue. This most recent set of additions has also encouraged a revision of the existing structure of the series, reflecting the organic way the project has grown and evolved over the past two years.
London Series – Clerkenwell and Smithfield – Crime, revolutions and executions
Crime, revolutions and executions seems an apt subtitle for Clerkenwell and Smithfield – a district that has housed prisons, acted as a site for public executions and has been the chosen residence of its fair share of revolutionaries over the centuries. Clerkenwell (Clerks Well) and Smithfield (Smooth field) are two ancient districts on the boundaries of the City of London and over the centuries have seen multiple waves of development – from fashionable districts in the 17th century, through industrial revolution and post-war decline to come full circle to trendy districts in the 1990s. An example is the Clerkenwell house of detention – first a prison, later a school and now – luxury flats (though the prison cells remain in the basement).