wheresphil

Trees

Epping Forest – Sunday 10 November 2024

It’s autumn in the UK and while Epping Forest doesn’t have the autumnal colour ‘wow factor’ that many other forests do, there is still plenty of change going on and it’s my favourite time of year to visit. Today was particularly good as we are a week into an even thin blanket of high grey cloud and there is almost no wind. These are good conditions for photography, though I would have liked it to be a little warmer. Until last week, this autumn has been quite mild, with temperatures, in the UK’s south at least, a couple of degrees above normal. It was a bit of a shock when the temperature dropped mid-week to what is the seasonal average. It was finally time to dig out and blow the dust off the warmer jackets.

I was surprised to find the forest so busy; I don’t visit as much as I used to. Pre-Covid, which was the last time I went to the Loughton Camp area, I could easily be there for a couple of hours and only a small number of other people. I guess it’s a good thing that more people are taking the opportunity to take family to the forest, but so much for relative peace and quiet. I should have put my head-phones on to drown the constant calling to errant dogs, but the forest has traditionally been the one place I don’t need to have music going to block out the world. Next time I will try and get there earlier in the day.

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I had planned to spend a couple of hours walking and managed to fill that time easily enough and other than the dog-callers I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I will go back again another time this winter, if I can fit it into what looks to be a very busy schedule.

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I chose Loughton Camp as, apart from being one of my favourite sections of forest, it’s easy to get to. Loughton is four stops up the Central Line from me and the ‘camp’ is less than a thirty-minute walk from the station. Loughton Camp is the site of an Iron Age encampment/village, potentially lived in by Boudicca as she led the resistance against Roman occupation. The site is just earthen mounds, banks and pits, there are no remains of ancient buildings or stone tombs or anything that shouts ‘ancient site’ but it’s a lovely clear section of beech forest and in the autumn it’ glorious, and it is 2000 years old.

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I must admit to having to get my phone out (I didn’t lose it this time) to check the direction to Lost Pond, not that either I or the pond were particularly lost. I used to come here so much back before the pandemic that I knew my way around quite well, the forest has changed a lot in the intervening years. I was uncertain of which direction was which, and this was not helped by that flat grey sky. Everything seemed so different.

I should have just read the trees.

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Lost Pond was very busy, and obviously no longer lost. I had to wait for 15 minutes to get a photo of this 1000 year old pollarded and copparded beech, which is just off the bank of this small and dark pond. It is my second favourite tree in the forest. There were kids climbing on it and well I’m not going to be pointing my camera at kids in a forest.

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After visiting the old beech it was time to bush crash my way down the hill to the road, and back to Loughton Station and the westbound train towards home. Next visit I will give myself more time and hope to walk most of the way home through the forest.

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Berlin wandering

Berlin – Friday 03 – Tuesday 08 October 2024

We liked the hotel we stayed in back in June, and equally important, we also liked its location on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz so agreed that as familiarity is a good thing we should stay there again. Knowing where we going allowed a swift trip from the airport, through checking in to the hotel and getting out for a mid-afternoon walk around the neighbourhood.

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We are staying in the Mitte district, which is sort of east/north east of the centre, a bit like where we live in London. There is a bit of everything nearby; shops, bars and a variety of cafes and restaurants; there is also the Babylon Cinema with its lovely neon sign. We’ve been watching Babylon Berlin on the telly and will have to go back and finish it soon.

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On Saturday morning, we caught an S-Bahn (Stadtschnellbahn or city rapid railway), train to the Olympic Stadium; home of the 1936 Olympics, and over the railway line from the Courbusierhaus block from my last post. Disappointingly, the stadium grounds were fenced off and we couldn’t get in, though I think you can visit on an organised tour if you’re inclined to. We had a full day ahead so carried on.

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As well as being a historic Olympic stadium, and the one where African American athlete Jesse Owens managed the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the Nazis by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics and showing the world that their Aryan superiority message was baseless, the stadium is the home ground for the Herta Berlin football club. There were stickers on every lamppost between the station and the stadium advertising the fact.

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I could be 180 degrees wrong but my reading of the current situation in Germany is that the country is politically on the edge. With Angela Merkel retired, replaced with the less dynamic Olaf Scholz, the influence of Germany in Europe is on the wane and the right wing are on the march, particularly in the east of the country, where Berlin sits. In recent months the AfB, the new right wing party, has made serious political gains, winning seats and entire states. Berlin, again feels like a small liberal island in a much less liberal world. While Berlin appears to me as a tourist to not be shy in acknowledging the horrors in its past I get the feeling if we travelled not too far from the city borders we would see a much different country.

From the Olympic Stadium we jumped back on a train and continued our journey to the western suburb of Spandau. We were interested in coming here ~~for the massive Ikea~~ as it is an old town, with cobbled streets and a huge old fort on the side of a lake. It sounded pretty idyllic for a sunny Saturday lunch and very much the sort of thing we like to do. The theory was sound, the reality less so.

To be fair the streets were cobbled and there was a big old fort. The cobbled streets were big and wide, not the narrow cobbles I like, and it was a bit run down and a bit depressed and not in that ‘nice’ way some areas can pull off. I’m guessing it’s one of the places that doesn’t get a lot of tourists or investment and the young people aren’t hanging round hip cafes, mainly because there aren’t any. I’m not one to cast aspersions (OK, I am) but it felt like one of those places where the AfB would get a unhealthily large number of votes.

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We didn’t stop for lunch but carried on to the fort, which unhelpfully had a juggling and acrobatic festival and it was looking like it was of full of family groups and people dressed in cosplay outfits. I’d hoped to walk around outside the outer wall, but the way was fenced off so we left and caught the train to Zoo Station, in the city centre.

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We wandered around a bit more, ate, and visited the famous KadeWe department store and took their amazing criss-crossing escalators up to the 7^th floor where we found a champagne bar and decided it would be rude to not have a glass. It was very nice.

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We followed this with a visit to the magnificent spire which is all that is left of the 19 century Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, heavily damaged during the devastating allied bombing of Berlin in the dying months of the Second World War. The ceiling was magnificent, as was the blue glass interior of the modernist church built after the war.

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We wanted to visit some of the city’s markets and had put Sunday aside to try and get to three of them, we also discovered a Saturday night market on the rooftop of the Gesundbrunnen Centre, a shopping mall a couple of train stops away from the hotel. We didn’t buy anything but it was fun, very busy with mostly young Berliners and tourists, there was a bar and a DJ, a nice atmosphere and a not unspectacular, but rather apocalyptic sunset. A marker laid down for the Sunday’s adventures.

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We visited three markets, two were a few minutes apart and a thirty minute walk from the hotel; as I said previously there is a lot happening around us. I enjoyed the first and second markets, both had a lot of interesting stuff, vintage, junk, a few records and some decent clothes. Like the night market they both had a nice feel to them and weren’t too crowded and we also didn’t buy anything.

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The third was a train ride away and was definitely more of a flea market, it was busy and I got a bit bored as there was nothing really that interested me. And yes it is all about me. It was a great morning out, doing something different in a different city is what travelling is all about for me.

The first two markets were in the old ‘East’ and close to the Berlin Wall memorial spot just off Bernauer Strasse which we visited in June, right by the station we used to get to the third market. The Wall still evokes quite strong feelings in me, it went up a year before I was born and I saw it in 1987, two years before it came down. It has a presence in my life which I can’t fully articulate. Looking at the less glamorous of photos from the 60s, both here in Berlin as well as in London and elsewhere, things really were in a bad way for so many people, especially in cities.

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Here is a photo from when I was here in 1987, looking over from the west. I’m not sure where this photo was taken, but that strip of land still exists in may parts of Berlin, maybe with a pre-Wall road returned.

Oct 1987 The Wall and East Berlin

On Monday we went to a new photography gallery and walked around a really interesting exhibition of photos of hip-hop artists, primarily US based, but there was a section on contemporary German hip-hop of which I knew nothing about. It was challenging looking at photos of inner-city New York and how terrible conditions were in the 70s and 80s, things didn’t look a lot better than the bombed out ruins of 1960s Berlin. We have treated and continue, in some places, to treat our less well off urban areas so poorly. I suspect given recent news, and more of that at the end, that this won’t change much.

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The gallery is in a very cool building, covered in layers of graffiti; apparently, it used to be full of small bars and venues, and I would loved to have visited and perhaps gone to a gig there. The bar made a very nice espresso martini pick me up as well, and the modernist loo was superb!

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It was our last day in this most favourite of cities so wandered the streets a bit more, stopping for a monstrous and delicious kebab and large bottle of beer at a street vendor before burping our way back to the hotel and preparing ourselves mentally for going home in the morning.

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All too soon the holiday was over and the ‘facing reality’ blues hit as we sat in Berlin airport over a pre-flight relaxer, aka a gin and tonic, and for me; Berlin’s supposed favourite food, curry wurst.

Back to reality and work tomorrow. We’re going to have to come back again and next time we will stay somewhere different and experience a different area. I loved the area we stayed in, but familiarity can breed contempt and I would hate to tarnish the good memories we’ve had in this city so far.

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I’ll end this post with news that hadn’t come out three days ago when I started writing, that the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called a snap election for early in 2025. With the terrible news yesterday that the US elected the orange racist, misogynist, homo/trans-phobe as president a drift to the populist right in Germany (and the rest of the world) seems almost inevitable. The world is in a much worse place than it was when I started writing and I’m glad there is red wine.

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A bit of Berlin concrete

Berlin 03 – 08 October 2024

As longer-term followers will have observed, in the last few years, particularly during and post-Covid, the blog took a massive swerve from photographs of landscapes and trees to photographs of cityscapes. I’m not sure if that change of focus was a reaction to the pandemic or how it affected me and my view of the world. I don’t think I’ve become more insular; and this isn’t the sort of place for any kind of diagnosis, self or otherwise. However, it’s still true; trees and nature walking have largely disappeared from my feed and architecture and urban walking has replaced it; especially the more ‘brutal’ type of modernist building that I’ve sort of fallen in love with. So, maybe after saying all that it’s possible I have become more insular and my world view has reduced at the same time as expanding. I must stop the self-diagnosis. I’m fine.

As our last visit to Berlin was with friends and it had a packed schedule there was no opportunity for me to disappear for a few hours and look at some raw concrete, or beton brut as the French would have it. When we planned this trip I factored in a visit to a classic Le Corbusier building on the way to Spandau on the Saturday, as well as a few hours of solo travel to see a couple of other ‘brutalist’ buildings. There will be more on the Spandau visit in the next post; but spoiler alert – it wasn’t worth it…

Unité d’Habitation of Berlin aka Corbusierhaus

Completed in 1957 it was the third building in Le Corbusier’s Habitation ‘series’. The first and best known block is in Marseilles, France. The phrase ‘beton brut’ has been attributed to Le Corb, and it has morphed in its English translation to Brutalism. It describes buildings largely made of unfinished concrete, rather than the harsh, ‘brutal’, often militaristic design generally think of when people think of brutalism. Some buildings obviously conform to that harshness, but the Corbusierhaus does not, it is just a 50s concrete apartment block outside the city centre with some very colourful panelling. It is lovely and is a tourist attraction in its own right. The only quibble I had was half the front was covered over by scaffold and cloth; oh well. If I come back it will be mid-winter when all those interfering trees are shorn of their leaves.

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Bierpinsel

We had put Monday morning aside as ‘do our own thing’ time as I wanted to get out and look at buildings and while Eleanor tolerates this with a smile it seemed unfair to schelp about looking for buildings on holiday. Inconveniently the best ones are out of town and in no way where they close to each other. There was a small wrinkle in my original plan as one of the train lines was closed for engineering works. I made some rapid plan changes and set off to visit the ‘Café Exil’ record cover; The Steglitz Tower Restaurant, AKA the Bierpinsel (Beer Brush). And wow, what a building it is! It is as mad and as glorious as I hoped it would be. Sadly it’s been closed since 2007, but achieved listed status in 2017 and more recent owners have plans to renovate the building. I certainly hope they do. It is properly fantastic and I would love to see it back in garish Café Exil red. I had a go at emulating the record cover, with limited success. I loved it…

Cafe exil Cover

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Wilhelmstrasse 150

With my plans now changed, I caught another couple of trains to WilhelmStrasse 150. A nice looking apartment block with some magnificent curving concrete painted a fetching pink. This has not been on any record cover that has passed my way.

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Band of the Covenant Buildings

With less time in the day due to some poor public transport choices (read this as me missing stations as I was reading my book on the train) and then misunderstanding some messaging about closed lines on the Berlin transport network I headed back towards Alexanderplatz and our hotel to meet up with Eleanor for some afternoon roaming. We had a loose plan that involved walking to a record shop, a photography gallery and whatever else took our fancy, as long as it ended up in a cocktail bar come late afternoon. It was our last day in the city and there is still so much to see, just around the inner north east were we are staying.

When we visited Berlin in June one of the places I was keen to visit was the concrete ‘circle building’ I’d seen photos of on Instagram. I’d spotted it from the train heading west towards the fantastic Teufelsberg on the woody outskirts of the city so had a pretty good idea where it was located. It was only when we ventured into the city centre, near to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building, that I nailed down its exact location; right behind the ‘no entry’ tape blocking off a bit of the city sacrificed to the pending European Championship football competition. Oh well, it was something to save for next time; i.e. this time.

And this time there were no restrictive lines of tape or armed coppers making sure no one crossed those lines of tape. In fact, for a series of government buildings there was very little visible security. As a New Zealander and a Brit I still find armed police unnerving, and I work in Whitehall where all the police carry guns, not seeing them here in this almost sterile, yet serene location, was verging on a relief.

I think this small block of buildings on either side of the River Spree is utterly beautiful and not because of the concrete, the design is just so fresh and free and walking around looking at them genuinely made me happy. I think the complex is called ‘Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus’ and it is made up of an art gallery and the government library, among other probably less public parts of the German government. Construction was mostly completed in 2003 so these are not the post-war concrete rebuilds you see in other cities.

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The ‘gun thing’, and yeah I will put it out there. I fucking hate guns, and everything they represent and really don’t understand this fascination so many have with them. I understand the US is just obsessed with arming everyone, seemingly to keep those who make weapons and all the bollocks that goes with that in the lifestyle they have become accustomed to, but why do the rest of us have to support that? Why do we have to see guns on our streets?

This was brought into stark relief on the opposite side of the river to the buildings above. There are four white memorial crosses wired to a low fence in remembrance of four, mostly young people, who were shot and killed by East German guards as they tried to flee to West Germany, the youngest was 18 and she was shot in 1984. Like the memorial plaques outside of the houses were Jews lived pre World War Two which I mentioned in the previous post, I didn’t take photos of these poignant reminders of humanities capability to be utterly evil.

I can’t possibly imagine what it was like for the Jewish and Roma people, the LGBTQ, disabled and other communities before and during WW2 and for those East Germans who wanted to go west to be so savagely betrayed, persecuted and murdered by their own countrymen. How fucked up was that? And the saddest thing of all is that for many around the world that hasn’t changed.

Berlin

Berlin, Friday 03 to Tuesday 08 October 2024

Needless to say, but I will anyway, that I’m really excited by being back in Berlin, even if it’s significantly cooler and a bit damper than when we were here in June. I loved the short few June days we spent here and returned home with quite a list of other things to see and do, and a plan to come back again. I suspect that I’ll have a new list when we go home again on Tuesday.

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Last time we visited I’d been sound tracking the days before with the ‘Cafe Exil’ album, a compilation of tunes that the compilers imagined David Bowie and Iggy Pop listened to when they lived in Berlin in the mid-1970s. I bought the LP when I returned to London and it’s still regularly on the turntable. Little of the music on that record is music I would’ve listened to in the past, but am much more willing to try new sounds now.

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Before this trip I’ve been listening to a couple of dance music compilations from a Berlin based label and will see how that goes while we’re here. I can’t see us going to a club mind, even if Berlin is one of Europe’s clubbing centres. There will more on ‘Café Exil’ in a coming post.

As I commented in June, 20th Century history looms large over the city. While the cold war and the Wall are the most prevalent; especially in the parts of the city we visited, the Second World War and the events leading up to those terrible six years are not written out of the city’s history either. This was particularly notable in the small brass plates on the footpath outside of houses where Jewish families lived before being brutally removed before and during the war. Over 60,000 Jews were deported from Berlin, many of those to the death camps the Nazi regime created in the east.

This is a city of dark and light, and as middle class, middle aged tourists, we really only get to experience light, and this was particularly so this weekend as it is Festival of Lights weekend; not that we knew this when we were planning the trip. We visited three different outdoor ‘venues’ over the weekend, a different one each night. It was hugely popular, with loads of families out enjoying the light shows, and unlike the UK, the security was all very low key and each location was a very pleasurable experience, the highlight being Brandenburg Gate. I was surprised, pleasantly so, at how many of the light shows included works by street artists I was familiar with; like Thierry Noir on the side of the Cathedral and Otto Schade at Potsdamer Platz.

Museum Island

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Potsdamer Platz

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Brandenburg Gate

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We did a lot of walking over the four days, averaging about 17kms a day, just meandering around with some sort of vague sense of purpose. Berlin is a very walkable city, though it has a very good public transport system which we made good use of as well. Some of the U-Bahn (underground) stations are visual treats, and I planned to take photos of them as we travelled, though really only managed to properly photograph one of them; Schloss Strasse, where the tiles were so colourful.

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I snapped a couple of images at others, though most of the stations and platforms were very busy; and I’m a bit shy when it comes to public space photography. Something I still find hard to believe after doing this for 20 years.

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That is enough for today, over the next few posts I will share more from those very enjoyable four days. And yes, I’m thinking about the next visit!

Temple(s) of Love – brutalist Leeds

Saturday 14 September 2024 – Leeds

This was my first Brutal Day Out group trip outside of London and I‘d been looking forward to it for weeks. The group has made a few visits to other cities and towns but I’ve always been busy with other things and not been able to attend. With group members from across the UK it’s important to share the cost of transport and not be so London focused, plus there’s a lot to see outside of the capital and it’s a good reason to visit places I would otherwise have no need to go to.

Also… I’ve wanted to visit Leeds and this was a very good reason to do so. It’s the spiritual home of 80s ‘goth’. The mid to late 80s saw Leeds deliver some fantastic goth bands like The Rose of Avalanche, March Violets, Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry and the kings of the genre – The Sisters of Mercy.

Heartland is an early (and favourite) song from Sisters of Mercy, the B side of the magnificent ‘Temple of Love’ 12 inch single and it popped up on my playlist as the train passed through England’s (semi) rural heartland. I gratefully accepted this as a sign that it was going to be a good day. The weather was certainly playing its part.

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Ten of us met outside Leeds station, five made it up from London, returning the favour to those who frequently travel down from Yorkshire. I’d met most of the group before and it was, as always, good to catch up with this likeable bunch.

Our first stop was Bank House, this and the next building I photographed are brutalist in design, but both had been clad in something other than lovely grey concrete, textured or not, so didn’t particularly wow me. I do like things raw.

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The Ex-Yorkshire Bank Building, vacant and soon to be demolished so more student flats can be built. It’s an Ok building, I hate the glossy cladding, but like the design and the lovely harsh angles. It’s a shame it has to be knocked down for more flats. I mean, the centre of Leeds is hardly attractive, with a weird hodge-podge of building styles from the last three of four centuries. Design planning doesn’t seem to have been a priority for the council, not that there is any unusual in that.

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I love a good car park and Woodhouse Lane on second look is very much a good one. It was all a bit ‘meh’ from the main road, but once round the side and discovering the ramp down from the upper parking decks it was much more exciting.

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I (we) loved the overhanging beams that appeared to have no purpose other than being in some way decorative. One of the group, Kasia, snapped a great picture of me taking the photo below. I seemed to have spent a lot of the day getting in the way of others photos. I guess it was my turn.

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Kasia, has been to India and Berlin and gave me some interesting tips on brutalist and modernist buildings; she is extremely well travelled and I had a little travel envy. I also spoke to Britta about Berlin and she had some good ideas too. They both knew the LP Café Exil, which I listened to a lot leading up to and when we were in Berlin in July. The bonkers brutalist building on the sleeve still stands in Berlin and is on my list of places to visit when we return in a couple of weeks, something I’m looking forward to immensely. A second trip to India is planned for April 2025 and I’m well into thinking about that trip already, in fact it dominates the late night non-sleeping hours at the moment.

The School of Engineering building and a couple of brutalist day outers

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I stupidly didn’t note the name of this completely mad, but interesting stairwell to a rather bland student accommodation block. We had no idea what the top bit is for.

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Then we were onto the main campus of the University of Leeds and a couple of very cool buildings, starting with the huge and imposing Worsley Building.

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I love this reflection from the roadside turning mirror, also capturing a couple of fellow concrete geeks.

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Britta, who was the main organiser and guide for this walk, had clearly saved the best to last, and man was it good. At first glance the Roger Stevens Building looks like it’s more modern than its 60s construction, maybe it’s the paint, maybe it’s the ‘piping’ up the side, either or it looks so futuristic, but under that paint it’s just lovely 60s solid concrete.

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I was a little unexcited when it first came into view, and I wandered away from the group to have a look round the side and found the long and wide staircase, with these fantastic curved cut-outs, one side allowing light to pass across the stairs and through the windows on the other, I loved them. They were the architectural highlight of the day.

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The rest of the building is equally interesting. I’m a huge fan of elevated walkways, and they’re one of the reasons I love London’s Barbican. Designing places specifically for humans rather than vehicles was such a key component of mid-century future design thinking in my view, countering the argument that these concrete monoliths were sterile and void of humanity. Anyway, this is a lovely building and together with Worsley make for a very interesting part of the university campus.

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The walk drew to a close with that most dramatic of buildings so some of us went off for a couple of pints before heading back to the station and, for me, the return to London. It was a good day.

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The Avebury Stones

Sunday 21 July 2024 – Avebury

I’ve a loose interest in standing stones and the other ancient sites that are scattered all over the UK. The standing stones are easier to be fascinated in than say, Iron Age forts, as there is actually something to see, and in the case of Avebury, and unlike Stonehenge, something you can touch as well.

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As I mentioned in the Stonehenge post I love it that even with all our modern smarts we don’t fully understand what the stones were for and why they are where they are. Just this week it was revealed that the huge alter stone in Stonehenge actually came from 500 miles away in the north east of Scotland (I will walk 500 miles etc, etc) rather than from the far closer, but still a long way, Welsh coast, as had been previously thought.

These stones have been here for 5000 years, why then are they still so mysterious? It’s that mystery that attracts me and many thousands of others to these places. When facts are missing, myths fill the gaps, and where myths exists there is room for all sorts of weird, wonderful and often magical stories. I mean, I even posted a piece of weird fiction I wrote back in June 2021 – The Barrow. While this is not set around standing stones it is set close to here, and barrows are very much a feature of this landscape. Sadly, due to the unsupportive nature of the map I was using in the rental car I didn’t make it to any of the barrows.

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Unlike Stonehenge, Avebury is free to access, though the official car park is not cheap and is definitely aimed at people like me who haven’t done a huge amount of research. There are other places to park not too far away if you know where to go.

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Firstly I should describe what a henge is, as it has nothing to do with stones. A henge is a circular or oval enclosure made of earth banks and ditches. A henge encloses a sacred space and they date back to the Neolithic period; from 4000 – 5000 years ago.

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Avebury is the largest known henge in Britain, and it cuts through the small and gentile village of the same name. I liked it. I liked it because though it’s a sacred site and one of international importance, and a key component of the local economy, there are sheep wandering around the stones. The area is treated with reverence and respect, but also practically and likely as it would have been thousands of years ago.

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As you can see from this short film made by Derek Jarman in 1971 as he walked towards the circles a large number of the stones were still lying where they had fallen over the hundreds of years since they were first erected. A programme to re-erect the stones began in 1931 when the land was bought by Alexander Keiler, the heir to the Keiler marmalade fortune.

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It is quite a special place to visit.

Glastonbury town

Saturday 20 July 2024 – Glastonbury

Glastonbury is a weird town, and yes it is a town, not just some middleclass version of a music festival. It’s an old town, a very old town, with ties back to King Arthur and the weird and magical time he lived in, and then even back further than that. It is very pre-Christian and pagan and attracts a lot of interest from local and overseas visitors who want to walk this ancient and spiritual land, and then buy the book, a t-shirt, some beads and maybe a cup.

With this in mind driving into the town is a bit disconcerting as there a lot of 60s and 70s housing estates. It’s a weird town but very typical of these large rural towns with no train connection to anywhere else. It feels isolated in so many ways. I’m not sure I liked it, though I didn’t dislike it. Not all the town was that modern, there are some very old parts and some lovely and not so lovely buildings.

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It’s very hippy and woo-woo and other than a small CO-OP supermarket all the other shops around the high street sell ‘hippy shit’ or do soul readings or some such thing. You can tell I’m a cynic, but each to their own. I’m learning to be a better person. There was an old Stik street-art work that hadn’t been vandalised which was cool.

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I’m here Wrong Speed Fest, for a small music festival of bands associated with the Wrong Speed Records label, it’s taking place in the back room of the King Arthur pub, which turned out to be a five minute walk from where I’m staying on Friday and Saturday night. I may post some photos from the gig, I certainly took enough. I’ve shared a bunch on my Instagram if you are interested.

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The show didn’t start until 1:00 pm on Saturday so I used the time to visit the highlights of the town; namely the world-famous Tor and an abbey ruin. I was up early but had to wait until 9:00 to get breakfast, though the chips were some of the best I’ve ever had and were well worth the wait.

The Tor (a high craggy hill) is about a kilometre from town and from the direction I approached it, pretty much straight up. It was quite warm and humid under the cloud but significantly cooler than yesterday, thankfully. That was brutal.

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It’s said that deep beneath Glastonbury Tor lies a cave that is the entrance into the fairy realm, I’m not 100% sure I believe that, but I’m sure some who come here do. Today I was more interested in what was on top of the hill. The 14^th century tower is all the remains of the Church of St Michael which collapsed in an earthquake. The tower has a grisly past with the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey being hung, drawn and quartered here in 1539 when Thomas Cromwell, under the orders of King Henry VIII, suppressed and destroyed all the monasteries and abbeys in England.

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The view over Somerset was lovely.

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It’s a popular spot and there were a lot of people walking up as I walked back down a much easier path.

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I’m a sucker for a ruined abbey, or a ruined anything to be fair, and Glastonbury has a very good ruined abbey; thanks to that suppression of the monasteries back in 1539.

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The abbey was founded in the 8th century and enlarged in the 10th. It was destroyed by a major fire in 1184, but subsequently rebuilt and by the 14th century was one of the richest and most powerful monasteries in England.

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Renovations after the great fire of 1184 to a grave being discovered that local people said was that of the famous King Arthur and his wife Queen Guinevere. No-one dispelled the rumour and though it has never been proven it’s a good story and one that improved the popularity of the abbey from then until now. It was getting quite busy as I left, as was the whole of Glastonbury town.

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I loved the abbey and spent a good hour wandering around and touching the old stones. Every ancient site I visit I’m in awe of the craftsmanship and skill of the people who designed and built these magnificent buildings with the most rudimentary of tools and technology.

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I’m glad I came to Glastonbury, I’ve been wanting to visit for a while, but I’m not sure if I want to come back. I didn’t find it an especially welcoming place, though as I said above I’m cynical of all the spiritual stuff that has taken over the town, so maybe my body language made people not welcoming, anyway the gig was friendly and welcoming which was the main thing and overall I had a good time.

Stonehenge

Friday 19 July 2024 – Stonehenge

Other than the odd trip to my flat before I rented it in April 2023 (Thanks to Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss fucking up the UK economy and therefore my mortgage repayments) this is the first time I’ve been away for a solo weekend since Covid. I think. If only I had blog I could look back on.

I’m on my way to Glastonbury for a music festival, but not ‘Glasto’ if you know what I mean, I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I’m here for Wrong Speed Record Fest; a small local record label that releases records by some of the noisy psychedelic rock bands that I like. I’m fairly certain I will do a post of band photos, but will see how they work out. I’ve not used the Fuji camera at a gig before.

I’ve hired a car for this trip so have taken the opportunity to stop at Stonehenge on the way. I’ve driven past it a few a times but have never stopped, though I’ve been meaning too. Entry is not cheap, but it’s one of those places you almost HAVE to see at some stage in your life.

It’s brutally hot, when I arrived at Stonehenge the temperature gauge on the almost new car I’m driving tells me it is 34 degrees. The hottest day of the year so far and I’m not really prepared for it.

It’s a good test though. I’m planning on spending a few days in India early next year on the way back to New Zealand to see family and friends. I’ve kind of forgotten how to travel, be on my own and enjoy the moment. I’m too used to being around Eleanor all the time and I really need to break that habit before I spend 10-14 days in India by myself. I don’t want to mope my way around.

Today was also a good test of walking a couple of kilometres in brutal heat, under a strong sun with almost no shade to see a world renowned ancient ruin. Something I plan to do a lot of India and exactly what I did when I travelled all those years ago. The walk to Stonehenge from the entry gate was just like many of those I did in SE Asia, though it’s far less humid than those walks were.

The car park was almost full and there were quite a few tour buses as well, I had visions of there being thousands of people around the site, but it wasn’t really like that. Once through the gate, I’d wisely pre-booked so avoided the big day ticket queue, you can either walk or catch a free bus to the stones, which are about a kilometre away. Like many others I chose to walk rather queue for the limited number of spaces on the buses. It was a pretty dull, though very hot, walk alongside the private road the buses use. It does spread the visitors out though, which I guess is the intent.

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Visitors are separated from the stones by a few yards and a small knee high rope, this prevents people from touching and damaging the stones as well as affording everyone a decent view. It worked well; but… one idiot jumped the fence and went running towards the stones. She was stopped by a security guard and a yelling match ensued, apparently God had told her it was her right to be able to touch the stones. The security staff were unbelievers and they were still at it when I left the site 30 minutes later.

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The stones are impressive; they have been standing for potentially 5000 years and we really don’t know exactly what they were for or symbolised. I really like that there is still some mystery to these ancient places. Mysteries leave space for myth and legend and weird stories to bloom. It is my view that these are as important as anything else in recording and understanding our history. Not everything needs to be certain.

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Once I’d circuited the stones I walked back to the café via a path through the fields and under a small grove of trees. I’d seen a small number of people using this path on the way in and it was much nicer than walking on the baking tarmac.

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Back at the café I bought myself a cold drink and took a seat in the shade to cool down before heading back on the road for the hour long drive to my final destination, Glastonbury.

It’s absolutely worth visiting Stonehenge, as I said at the start it’s a ‘must see’ if you’re visiting southern England.

Brutalist London, part something

Saturday 29 July 2024 – London

I’m starting to lose track of how many Brutal Day Outs I’ve attended over the last couple of years; but it must be seven or eight at a guess. While some of them are semi-organised by Britta and/or Stefeno and are run as planned walks, today’s little adventure was a casual get together arranged by me via a brutalist architecture Instagram group I belong to. I wanted to take a walk around some of the brutalist or modernist buildings in central London I’ve not photographed before and it turned out seven others wanted to do so as well. Nice. I like these people and it’s always nice to hang out with people you like.

We met at St James Park Station which is conveniently and directly over the road from the Ministry of Justice building in Petty France. This building is up there as my favourite brutalist building in London. It’s a concrete monolith with some lovely, yet large scale detail and for obvious reasons it was known by some as ‘The Lubyanka’. The building was completed in 1976 and I love it.

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Obviously we can’t pop inside for a quick look around, and even if I managed to get myself invited into a meeting in one of those lovely first floor rooms, as a civil servant I know photography is not allowed on government premises. Grrr….

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Some of the lesser lights didn’t make it out of the ‘reel’ of photographs I took on the day, so sorry St Vincent’s House, my photos didn’t do you justice.

It wasn’t on my original list of things to visit, but we’re democratic and one of the group works in this University of Westminster building, so we did a walk by, tempted by being advised there was a very nice coffee shop over the road. It was very nice.

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Behind the university is the, now sadly closed, Tower Tavern, which looks much better than I managed to capture in this photo. I hope it gets to re-open soon as I would like to see inside.

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Given its prominence on the London skyline I’ve not walked to the BT/Post Office Tower before and it’s never intentionally been in a photo I’ve taken either. A situation that had to change one day, and that day was today. When it was completed in 1964 it was the tallest building in London and remained that until 1980 when the NatWest Tower surpassed it.

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In February 2024 BT sold the tower to the MCR Hotels who are going to make into some sort of luxury hotel; with hopefully a decent and public bar in the viewing platform. BT still use the tower for its communications systems so it’s still a working building.

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I was hungry and thirsty at this point so stopped for a quick lunch which meant I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would’ve liked at the St Giles Hotel as it’s quite a cool building. Opening in 1977 it is a proper Breton brut brute of a building and I will come back here for a better explore one day and hope there is a nice period bar inside for a swift drink. Peaking out behind it was our next stop, CentrePoint.

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The magnificent and recently refurbished Centrepoint Tower.

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The equally magnificent Space House in Holborn. Annoyingly there is still scaffold around the base so we couldn’t get as close as I would have liked, and nor could I take a shot straight up the side of the building, which seems to have become a recent habit.

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The final stop of a fairly exhausting five hours of walking, photographing and chatting was the Macadam Building. Built on a WW2 bombsite in 1975 as part of the Kings College campus, for its relatively small size it’s quite a statement building. Squatting there all rough and raw amongst the supposedly ‘prettier’ 19th century buildings that survived the Luftwaffe bombing. I’m going to say it isn’t a handsome building, but I’m glad it is there all the same and it would be a shame if the rumours are true and it’s to be demolished for something else.

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There were a few buildings that we passed that were just too boring to photograph, and some of my photographs were just to boring to edit and upload, but I’m very happy with what photos I took today. I’m very much enjoying the Fujifilm XT2 camera I bought earlier in the year and one day I will be able to afford to upgrade to the XT5, but that will be a way off.

I’ve been experimenting in the editing tool I use, Lightroom, with making photos look a bit like they were shot on an old film camera. I like these images, but let me know your thoughts!

Vigeland Sculpture Park

Friday 15 to Monday 18 – Oslo, Norway

This is the final post from our fantastic 10-day holiday. I enjoyed every day we were away (even Gothenburg) and still think about it constantly a month later. We’ve already booked a follow up visit to Berlin in early October and I can’t wait to go back and explore more.

The holiday was a reversed version of a similar plan cancelled due to Covid in the summer of 2020 and so was well over due. Eleanor’s sister visited Oslo around 1980 and on return shared photos and stories from a slightly bonkers park with loads of statues of naked people, and Eleanor has wanted to go there ever since. The park was the inspiration for visiting to Oslo, so it had to be number one on the list of places to visit in this lovely friendly city.

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The park certainly lived up to expectation. It is bonkers mad and utterly, fantastically beautiful. I loved it.

Vigeland Sculpture Park can be found inside the larger Frogner Park near the centre of Oslo. It contains over 200 life size sculptures from Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland. The granite, bronze and iron sculptures were completed in 1949, and took over 40 years to carve. The works were made by a team of sculptures working to Vigeland’s vision and detailed design. Sadly, Vigeland died before his park, and vision were completed.

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The detail in the granite work is just perfect, I took a lot of photos, by my standards at least, but could easily have taken a more. If we were to come back to Oslo I would aim for a more evenly overcast day to visit Vigeland.

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There are three major works that incorporate the individual statues; the Bridge, the Fountain and the Monolith. My photos of the Fountain were a bit rubbish sadly so I’ve not included any (next time!)

The Bridge, is as advertised, a bridge and it includes a number of slightly larger than life bronzes.

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In my view the masterpiece, the 17 metre tall granite Monolith.

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Monolith was started in 1929 and carved onsite from a single piece of granite that in itself was carved from a mountainside especially for the project in 1922. It took 3 three stonemasons 14 years to create this beautiful object. Monolith was officially opened in 1943, but sadly Vigeland passed away shortly before the opening.

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Below are a number of the images I took from the Monolith, which was by no means all of the, I’ve started with my favourite piece from a collection of favourite pieces, the expressions are just so wonderful.

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