Norrkoping: Arbetets museum and weirs
July 17th, 2011
Author’s note: I wrote this article and included the photographs to go with the post above entitled Sheffield: The Furnace Trail. In the summer of 1989 I was working on a general cargo ship called the Hudsongracht which made several port calls in Sweden of which one was Norrkoping. On a walk around town I came across this weir which took my breath away in both its size and force. I later visited the museum detailed below.
It has a parallel industrial history to the Northern towns of England and waterworks to match. I can still remember standing stunned in amazement at the force and grandeur of the water flowing over the weir at Norrkoping and have included a photograph of it below from Google Earth.
Rebuilding the City: 1951 and Now
July 3rd, 2011
In spite of the mens’ final at Wimbledon the function room on Level 5 of the Royal Festival Hall was all seats taken to hear several well known experts on architecture and housing speak to the assembled along with a lesser known figure of equal importance being Jean Symons, clerk on site during the building of the Royal Festival Hall.
Paul Finch was chair, and introduced the meeting allotting each of the speakers fifteen minutes each, starting with Jean Symons who spoke from notes very movingly about her time on site and the scenes that surrounded her.
On passing through Glasgow
June 17th, 2011
Travel has long been a pleasure of mine and it had been many years (nearly 19 years in this case) since work had called me North but the opportunity to catch up after almost two decades of change was irresistible. So much is new, the Foster Armadillo concert hall, BBC Scotland, the new Zaha Hadid Riverside Museum, the Science Museum and several bridges. But better still so much is still there from last time. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh buildings, the wealth of good architecture and the friendly people.
Glasgow is a city that grows on me each time I go. Here are a very few shots of places I passed by, some of which I had time to visit and others not, but there’s always next time for it’s a city that draws you back.
On arriving at Central Station . . . let’s park our bags and . . .
Virgin Pendolino
June 16th, 2011
UPDATE: 25/8/16 Following the Corbyn silly season story I’ve had another look at the seating plans five years on. The Virgin East Coast Mallards don’t suffer from what I experienced in 2011, the seating plan shows three first and six standard rather than the four first and five standard on the West Coast in 2011.
The Virgin East Coast HST seating plan shows three first and seven standard class carriages.
The Virgin West Coast updated seating plan may be downloaded here
Original article 16th June 2011
I had my first ride in a Virgin Pendolino recently, standard class (as we kept being told on the tannoy – there’s nothing like being repeatedly reminded you’re a pleb), forward facing and aisle, aircraft seating, quiet carriage. On the plus side the ride was comfortable, quiet and fast. On the minus side it was like sitting inside a small aircraft with 2+2 seating, with the luggage inside the cabin, and insufficient luggage racks at that, and in the wrong place.
The Scissor Maisonette
March 21st, 2011
I’ve combined the contents of this former article with the page linked from the main menu entitled Scissor since there was a lot of unnecessary duplication of content and therefore if you click the title of this article it will now take you directly to the Scissor page, having lost nothing in the process but complexity and duplication.
Where We Live Now – City of Towers
March 10th, 2011
For over thirty years I have lived with the memory of this excellent documentary City of Towers and just occasionally I have a glimmer of hope that it will be shown again. Today the page was visited by somebody at the BBC.
A visitor from webgw3.thls.bbc.co.uk (132.185.240.123)
arrived from www.google.co.uk“WHERE WE LIVE NOW:1:CITY OF TOWERS” 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/CityofTowers.htm
at 11:12:06 on Thursday, March 10, 2011.A visitor from webgw3.thls.bbc.co.uk (132.185.240.123)
arrived from www.google.co.uk“WHERE WE LIVE NOW:1:CITY OF TOWERS” 1-10,
and visited www.singleaspect.org.uk/doc/wwln.php
at 11:11:49 on Thursday, March 10, 2011.
If you have a copy of this film and are willing to show it, even as a private showing please get in touch. This film was a landmark of its time in revealing the inadequacies and destruction wrought by an over enthusiastic application of Modernism to housing and city centres and the history that was destroyed in the process. Christopher Booker was one of the first to recognise the damage being done.
UPDATE: I now have a copy of this film, read more about it at the following page:-
Utopia London – Tom Cordell
December 15th, 2010
New Royal London Hospital – Yuk!
November 14th, 2010
What a mess. I don’t often take an instinctive dislike to a building but this thing is on such a gargantuan scale that you can’t ignore it, unfortunately, you have to have a view on it. It is out of scale with its surroundings to an alarming degree, ugly, with few windows and a most unattractive finish on the parts that aren’t blue panels.
Out of keeping, out of place, out of scale, I wish it was out of sight.
A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain – 22nd Nov
November 14th, 2010
Monday 22nd November
Owen Hatherly
In his provocative new book, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherly analyses the architecture of the neoliberal credit boom and discusses its merits with speakers including Lynsey Hanley, author of Estates.
Level 5 Function Room at Royal Festival Hall 7.45pm £7.50
‘Pevsner for the PFI generation’ – from the AJ
October 28th, 2010
Reading today’s email from the AJ, Owen Hatherly struck a chord when he commented on the difference in quality between todays lousy flats (of which I have much to say elsewhere) and the golden age of post war building, in an interview with James Pallister. The article begins as a review of Hatherly’s book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain.
JP Was there a golden age?
OH No. It’s a terrible cliché but in any given period most architecture is not very good. There are periods when we hit upon a decent standard and I think one was in the late 19th century, as well as the 1950s and 60s.
To a large degree, in terms of hygiene, services, the amount of light and air coming into the flat, the amount of green spaces, the length of tenure, the best public housing built in this country occurred between 1945 and 1970 [despite the fact that] there were some very well-publicised disasters and some very poor planning. A lot of it was mediocre, though it was good mediocrity. But compared to contemporary standards, which is below Parker Morris standards, it was vastly superior. I sincerely believe that.
https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/critics/-pevsner-for-the-pfi-generation/8607518.article
Of all people it’s Boris Johnson who’s doing his level best in conjunction with Alex Ely of MAE llp to bring back some standards into housing, after 30 years of much poorer quality housing in cities.
BBC Open Book 21/8/11 included a section about Pevsner, available here:- Open Book – Pevsner
Pevsner section starts at 1m 15s in, don’t be put off by the unedited section that precedes it.
More on the life of Pevsner here:-