Category: Blog

Oxford Brutalism

Oxford – Saturday 15 February 2025

A couple of posts ago I noted that I’m going to ‘practise’ being on my own before I spend solo time in Delhi as we make our individual journeys home from New Zealand. Eleanor and I fly to Auckland on 5 March and spend a week there before we’re joined by a London friend, Paula. The three of us will road trip down New Zealand to Dunedin, where we then separate. I fly to Brisbane for a night to see my family before going to Delhi. Eleanor and Paula spend a few more days in New Zealand then go to Sydney and Tokyo. I have 10 days on my own; and most of that will be spent somewhere that is different to the London I call home. Very different indeed.

I’ve not done the solo travel thing in a while and know I’m going to find aspects of life in Delhi challenging. I want to avoid finding aspects of being on own challenging while I contend with the challenges of Delhi. If I can manage the things I can control then I will be better positioned to manage the things I can’t. That is the theory anyway. Understanding more of what I feel I can control has been an objective of the last few weeks.

To help this I decided to taking a night away by myself and I chose Oxford. It’s not too far from London, it’s always busy with students, their visiting families and other tourists, and it has a good mix of historic architecture with a tiny bit of mid-century concrete mixed in. Other than its cold right now in the UK and Delhi will be hot, I’m going to find the Oxford experience will be just like Delhi, right?

I travelled up on Friday and though it was quite cold the sun was shining and it was a nice day to walk around semi-aimlessly taking photos of buildings of various ages. 

Overall, it was a successful couple of days and I enjoyed myself and learned a more about how I react to being by myself and working with crowds and busy tourist venues. I will cover more of the two days in the next post, along with photos of the ‘proper’ Oxford. Today, I’m going to share photos of the limited number of 60s and 70s brutalist buildings to be found amongst the ‘old shit’.

Hilda Besse Building, aka the Common Room and Dining Hall at St. Antony’s College, was the most visually interesting of the brutalist buildings I wanted to see. A number of the concrete buildings, and seemingly a third of Oxford were surrounded by scaffold. A full refurbishment of Hilda was completed in 2021, and thankfully the building has remained true to John Partridge’s original 1971 design. The interior is supposed to be lovely, but like everywhere these days you need a pass to get through the security barriers. I love the window frames and have not seen the like before. They look so much like wartime bunkers I expected to see gun barrels poking out of them.

Just around the corner is the Denys Wilkinson Building, the astrophysics department of Oxford University. Its neighbour, the Thom Building, is being renovated and there was scaffold all over the place and a number of the paths around the building were blocked which was frustrating. I’m learning to accept that not everything is going to go to plan when I travel, so this was good. I also was trying to memorise directions between places, a ‘skill’ I feel I’m losing as I’ve become reliant on my phone to always be there to give me directions. This worked well so was I pleased to find I can do it with little effort, and getting slightly misplaced is often part of the enjoyment.

The Philip Dawson design Nuclear Physics Building first opened in the late 60s and was renamed The Denys Wilkinson Building in 2001 to honour the famous physicist, (and no, I don’t know physicists, famous or otherwise; being interested in brutalist architecture teaches you many things). The fan building houses a Van de Graff Generator.

I know nothing about the Oxford Centre for Innovation building other than where it is, and that it was difficult to photograph as it’s partly wrapped around Oxford Castle Mound and the castle butts up against the back of it.

It was raining on Saturday, and windy, cold and quite unpleasant, so after photographing the innovation Centre I took myself to the Ashmolean Museum, stopping for an excellent coffee in the most unfriendly and pretentious café I’ve been to, and I’m unfriendly and pretentious so have some expertise in this field!

I arrived at the Ashmolean soon after it opened and it was nice and quiet. I had a look around most of the galleries; there is a lot of pottery, something I have very limited interest in. I was seeking out galleries that housed North Indian and South East Asian collections as I’m still fascinated by the complex ancient history of these places as well as the religions that were so key to the buildings and art that were created hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.  I was momentarily distracted in the Egyptian collection and this magnificent relief on the side of the tomb of Nubian King Taharqa who died in 664BC, he is believed to have been the last black pharaoh of Egypt. The detail is stunning!

The Indian and Asian galleries were interesting, with some lovely Buddhist and Hindi artefacts. I was especially interested in this beautiful 16th bronze of Saint Tirumankai Alvar which is soon to be returned to it’s home in the Tamil Nadu region of India. While it’s not know whether this statue was stolen, it also can’t be proved that it wasn’t so the museum is returning it. Much as I like to see these lovely objects in UK museums they should be returned to their traditional homes.

As the weather hadn’t improved while I was in the museum. I caught the train back home to London where Eleanor and went to a fantastic restaurant in Stoke Newington to not celebrate Valentines Day.

The next post will be all about the Hogwartsean, Disneyesque Oxford we all know and love.

A walk in the park

Wanstead – Saturday 08 February 2025

Every great adventure starts with a train journey. Though, it’s fair to say today’s adventure wasn’t great, and neither was it that adventurous, but it did start with a train journey. All 15 minutes of it.

For the past few months, I’ve had some discomfort/mild pain in my groin. I thought it might be a hernia so my doctor referred me for a scan at the Loxford Polyclinic in Barking, 15 minutes along the Suffragette Line from home followed by a 10 minute walk from the station. There are an awful lot of signs advising that the reception area I was sent to (1b) didn’t have a receptionist; this didn’t stop every person who arrived after me asking if there was a receptionist on today. I did get seen quite quickly.

I wanted to make this visit a little more enjoyable and “adventurous” so mapped out a walk home via the large heath/common area that I just lump into the generic name of Wanstead Flats, though there are official names for all the chunks of open land that is carved up by busy edge of London roads. One of those bit is Wanstead Flats, I just have no idea where is starts or ends.

I was expecting a grey old day but I wasn’t expecting to walk for 90 minutes with cold drizzly rain as my constant companion. However, the rain and very low cloud kept the people away and muted the noise of the traffic to a dull hum. It also blanketed any buildings on the flats’ edges making the walk feel endless and isolating and I really enjoyed the solitude. I walked without headphones and just ‘was’. It was nice. Cold, wet, but nice. My working week just seems so full of noise and I’m starting to appreciate quiet when I can get it, and this means listening to less music than normal. I’m finding this change quite liberating. Music has been with me for decades, and is critical to my wellbeing and I’m not giving it up, just slowly releasing it as a crutch, and allowing myself time in my own head has it’s own rewards. 

Other than getting some miles into my legs before we go to New Zealand in four weeks (less three days; and I’m very excited), I’ve been wanting to photograph some garage doors that back onto a dirt path on the edge of the health for quite some time. I know that ‘garage doors on the edge of a heath’ is quite a ‘Phil’ thing to want to photograph, but I’m interested in these luminal spaces where human-made things butt up against natural things. Admittedly, the heath is hardly natural, particularly at this particular point as it’s just football fields, but you (hopefully) get what I mean.

On Thursday I bought myself a new 27mm lens for the Fujifilm xt2 camera I use and wanted to test it out before we go on holiday. It’s a very small lens and makes the camera a little less obvious, something I wanted for when I go to Delhi where I hope to try some street style photography.

Many of these garage doors are blocked by scrub, some are graffitied and some are pristine and obviously used. It’s also kinda weird that these garages back onto parkland that is part of Epping Forest, I’ve no idea how that happened.

I started the nicer second half of the walk just inside the A406, the dreaded North Circular road that slices through a large portion of northern London and is just a constant traffic jam. I’d just walked from Barking to Ilford so it was a relief to not be walking on the pavement of a busy road. I entered the ‘flats’ at the end of Forest View Rd, and it must be the most southern point of Epping Forest. There is not much forest at this point.

I walked past Alexandra Lake before cutting around a couple of football pitches with kids’ matches going on before I headed north west towards the ‘garages’.

I kept local landmarks Fred Wigg and John Walsh Towers as an earthly North Star as I walked. I’m trying to plan walks before I leave home so I rely less on the maps app on my phone. I feel like my memory is waning rapidly as I just rely on technology too much another thing I want to practise before I go away; though I suspect mobile phone theft is less endemic in Delhi than it is in London.

The heath is a mix of football pitches; mostly unused today, and small patches of bramble and scrub, with the occasional clump of trees tossed in for good measure. It’s criss-crossed by roads though both the heath and roads were quiet today.

It took about 40 minutes of weaving and wandering to get to the ‘garages’, and to be honest I was a little surprised I found them, my vague plan had worked!  I’ve only ever walked to them from the other end and then taken a sort of random path back towards home. I’d never approached from this angle before so it was a confidence boost to know that my brain hasn’t fully atrophied with constant mobile phone use.

The new lens was perfect for these conditions; a narrowish tree and scrub lined path between fields and houses, the low, dull sky and drizzle needed a crisp and ‘fast’ lens and I’m happy with the results. The weather suited the subject material as well. This is a not-quite grotty bit of east London edgeland, it shouldn’t be photographed under a warm blue sky. Today’s conditions were perfect.

Fred and John stayed as my marker beacons as I cut across the deserted football pitches back towards a warm and dry home. It’s hard to believe it’s only 1pm.

When I woke up this morning I’d intended on making a full day of today, Eleanor is out with friends and I’d wanted to get a really long walk in, but after two hours out I was cold and my trousers and boots were wet from the long grass so I went home, put music on, edited photos and wrote this instead. No regrets, I’d had a good day, and not just because I bought chips from Leytonstone’s best chippie on the way home

St Leonards for the day, yay

St Leonards/Bexhill – Sunday 26 January 2025

It was with some nervousness that I asked Eleanor if she wanted to do a weekend away in St Leonards, I knew she would be up for it, but I wasn’t sure if I was. I haven’t visited since I rented out my flat in April 2023 as I like St Leonards and miss having somewhere to go when I occasionally want to escape London and not pay £100 a night for the pleasure. I love my flat but I think I’m going to sell it when we come back from New Zealand in April. I want to find somewhere a little bit cheaper to make the mortgage more affordable, and I’d like somewhere not on the third floor. My knees aren’t getting better with age.

In the end we agreed it was the right thing to do and here we are a few weeks later, on a train heading back to London from Bexhill as the rain pours and the wind howls outside. We did have a nice time though.

Yesterday was the twelfth anniversary of our first date so it was just the weekend to go away, except that there are no trains running to St Leonards this weekend (the usual ‘engineering works’) and as it was a special weekend for us we wanted to somewhere nicer to stay than was on offer in St Leonards or Hastings. I booked a nice boutique hotel in nearby Bexhill, there is a direct, albeit much slower train, from London Victoria to Bexhill, and at least the service was running. Though the idea of cleaning windows is something that has not, apparently, occurred to Southern Rail.

Miraculously, yesterday was a glorious sunny and still day, seemingly the first of the year; and lordy it has been a looooooooong slow leaden sky start to 2025. We arrived in Bexhill at mid-day and were fortunate to be able to check into our room early and dump bags before taking lunch in a local pub.

The walk from Bexhill to St Leonards is one we’ve done many times and I’m sure I would’ve written about it in the past. It’s mostly a nice walk, especially on a sunny and still day, though the railway yards and commercial buildings that line the inland side for a section of the path aren’t exactly attractive. Luckily there is always the sea to look at.

I’d arranged to collect some mail from the flat, and snuck in and out without seeing any of the neighbours, and without taking a photo of the place. There are enough on here as it is.

We walked though Bottle Alley, one of St Leonards architectural highlights, to Hastings, then turned back to St Leonards as we were meeting the neighbours I didn’t want to avoid for a pre-dinner drink. It was fun, as was dinner where we unexpectedly ran into some other friends and ended up staying out to midnight.

Sunday was slow, which suited us fine. The weather turned overnight and it was incredibly windy. Windy enough to change the train booking to an earlier one, which worked out well as heavy rained arrived soon after we started the journey back to London. Between breakfast and the train we walked west from Bexhill towards Cooden Beach. I like this walk, it’s so different to the eastbound walk to St Leonards which is much more open, this way we pass the back gardens of the large houses that follow the coast and a strange array of beach ‘huts’. It’s very WW2 bunker and there is so much concrete and brick and so little wood and grass, it’s like these beach huts and houses are still fending off the Hun, 80 years after the war ended. It’s mad and I love it.

Back in Bexhill we stopped for coffee in De la Warr Pavilion with it’s magnificent curving concrete staircase before catching the train back to London.

I had missed St Leonards and it was lovely to spend a day there, and yes I loved it and now I can’t wait to come back. x

Five photography exhibitions

London – Friday 17 January 2025

With the trip to New Zealand and India now only a few weeks away, I’m doing a bit of practice, but what for I’m less certain of. My world has become quite cocooned since Covid and the eight days I will spend in India will be the longest I’ve been away by myself since a solo trip to New Zealand in 2018.

Eleanor will hate me saying it aloud, but I have become quite dependent on her for company and emotional support over the past few years. She has been encouraging me to get out more, do things and meet people and I have bursts of enthusiasm on occasion, but there is a way to go yet. I’m capable of entertaining myself, but eight days away is a long time, so I want to practice independence at least.

Eleanor is away in Bristol visiting one of her sons for the weekend and I have time at home so I plan on getting to some photo exhibitions today and then finding a pub to sit in to read my book over a pint and some food. Practise eating with only a book for company. Not wanting to be seen eating alone is definitely a ‘thing’, and it is a ‘thing’ I’m uncomfortable about. I don’t like being noticed, and of course the stupid thing is other diners/drinkers don’t really care, if they notice at all. It took a while, but I got comfortable with solo life when I travelled all those years ago so I should be able to do it for eight days, and practise makes perfect, apparently.

I also need to get some leg miles as there is a lot I want to see in Delhi and Chandigarh. I nailed the leg miles today with over 15km of walking done, the most for quite a few weeks, though I was getting a bit leggy by the end. I aim to get another 10-12kms done tomorrow and a few more on Sunday if I can. The final thing I wanted to practice today was just walking slowly, without headphones in and just enjoying the moment while it exists, good or bad. I need to stop needlessly rushing everywhere. This final thing will take some work I think.

I had a good go at practicing all of those things today. I got to five photography exhibitions across three different London galleries. All of them were different and all of them were brilliant in their individual way. Some of the images were quite sad, a small number were disturbing and an even smaller number were humorous. There was a decent balance of colour and monochrome.

I was inspired to visit all these galleries by a recent Substack post from fellow New Zealander, and Lynfield College alumni, Garth Cartwright, though he was not in my year.

My first stop was the Saatchi Gallery and ‘As We Rise: Photos from the Black Atlantic’. The images come from the Canadian Wedge Collection and showcases work from black artists from Canada, the US, UK, the Caribbean and Africa. The space is gorgeous, large, light and airy and I was surprised to find myself largely alone in the galleries. Friday afternoon is obviously a good time to go for peaceful and solitary contemplation.

I followed this with another show in the Saatchi, ‘Adaption’ a collection of work from Russian/American photographer Anastasia Samoylova. These were the most ‘fun’ images of the day, with a mix of reportage and some interesting photo collages mostly taken around Florida. As with ‘As we rise’ I was almost the only person viewing in the vast rooms the work was hung in.

I walked 50 minutes through Belgravia and Mayfair, two very expensive parts of London, neither of which I know well, to Goodman’s Gallery, for a major exhibition of work by Earnest Cole; ‘House of Bondage’. A collection of monochrome photos taken in 1960 of impoverished black communities in South Africa. Most of these images provided the content for a 1967 book of the same name. The images were heartbreakingly beautiful, with my ‘favourite’ being a lesson in a school where girls learn to scrub floors on their hands and knees. The images are beautifully lit and printed and Earnest who grew up in this community obviously had a lot of love for his home, hard as it was.

There is some irony with these images being hung in a very expensive Mayfair gallery, admittedly it is a South African gallery and primarily hosts work from that country. Other than the staff, who mostly ignored me, I was the only person there.

It was a short hop over Regents Street to The Photographers Gallery for the final two exhibitions. The first by Letizia Battaglia; ‘Life, Love and Death in Sicily’, a collection of reportage images showing the impact the Sicilian mafia had in the 70s and 80s across the state. Like House of Bondage, these were powerful, often brutal pieces of documentary making. Letiza was not afraid to use her skills as a photographer and her position with the daily paper to show how these criminal organisations were destroying community and family. There were many images of the victims of mafia shootings and the their shocked and bereaved families.


Finally, also at Photographers, I saw the photo collage works of the late fashion and art photographer Deborah Turbeville, which were beautiful and a more joyous way to end my viewing day. I particularly liked that some of her works were deliberately out of focus, giving a ghostly ethereal quality which a style I enjoy. Technical perfection can be dull.


I had a small slice of delicious pizza and a glass of wine in a Soho cafe, which was bustling and busy and a little noisy and I should have stayed for a second and attempted the book reading thing, but it was uncomfortable – intentionally I think, to stop people lurking at tables.  I spent some time trying to find a pub that looked welcoming to a solo traveller and found one, but the wine was pish and again the seat was awful. I didn’t stay long and meandered to the station for a tube ride home.

I bought myself a new winter coat in the New Year sales to replace three I’d given to a local charity shop as winter set in. This new coat has pockets big enough to take a medium sized paperback as well as glasses and a phone. This meant I could ditch the bag I’d been carrying all day with a camera I didn’t use (all these photos were taken in my phone) and go to a local pub for dinner with nothing to worry about. Those extra large pockets weren’t planned but they are a proper bonus.

We’re off to St Leonards for a night next week and then I’m planning on a night away in Oxford around the middle of February to do a ‘two days in Delhi’ trial run, taking in ancient and brutalist buildings and the odd museum. 

A walk from Canary Wharf to Liverpool St Station

London – Saturday 28 December 2024

With the March trip to New Zealand and Delhi largely booked and rapidly approaching, and with the largess of Christmas just gone and two New Year feasts pending, we’ve decided we need to return to the good habit of getting out for a walk when we can. It will be good to walk off some of the food and wine (and gin and brandy and the occasional Old Fashioned) and get some walking miles back in the legs before we go on holiday. I don’t like to say I’ve been lazy since we were in Berlin, but, to be honest to myself, I have.

At just over 15km the walk today wasn’t huge, but it was a good start and with aching knees and hips I’m not really convinced I could do much more than 25km in a day anymore; not without some practice anyway. Other than a couple of frustrations, it was a nice walk. Eleanor and I do walking together well.

I’d completed the bulk of this walk before, though hadn’t realised it was just over 10 years ago until I checked back through some old posts to find what I’d thought back then. I had a good time then as well, though it was a lot warmer than today.

I will get the two frustrations out of the way early; both of which I firmly lay at the door of ‘the authorities’. One should be nice and easy to resolve, but I’m sure it isn’t as it requires a bunch of people from different organisations agreeing with each other,  and I know that just isn’t going to happen any time soon.

The walk we did is a section of the well established 298km ‘Thames Path’, so you would think that being a part of a well established route that there would be consistent and constant signage. I can say that there is reasonably constant signage, it’s not brilliant but there is at least some. I can also say it is not consistent at all; I counted six different types of sign in the section we walked. That is ridiculous and confusing.

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Constant and clear signs should be THE bare minimum for something like the Thames Path. My favourite sign was this one, that just points at a blocked off building site. Which leads me to frustration two…

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Bits of public London are slowly disappearing under private management, and as more construction happens around the city, more public access is disappearing or being restricted as the image above shows. Who knows how long that building site has been blocking access to the path or for how much longer, I have no idea.

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That this city is being gifted to developers to do what they will in the name of progress (and council tax) is just so unfair on those of us who live, and the visitors who come to spend time and money, here. There are just too many places that are either completely closed or that come with so many restrictions (no photography being a favourite). That this is acceptable will mean that we can just expect more and all of a sudden the public will be squeezed out and the nice places will be the domain of only those can afford it.

Another classic example is this closed gate.

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We came across it from the riverside where the path beyond was blocked by an old rivers edge warehouse, at first we thought it was locked and would have to back track to get back to the road, though fortunately it was just closed and we could get out. There should be clear rules insisting that gates on the path should be open to send a clear message that the way is open and all are welcome.  To be fair, at low tide you can walk along the riverbank and there are a few access ways down to the river.

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I accept that there are parts of the Thames Path closed to the public due to the small number of Victorian era warehouses that line the riverside, albeit they’re all blocks of flats now. What I am unhappy about is new construction being allowed to get away with blocking access; either by building right on the river’s edge or by failing to leave open gates on the section of public path they were ‘forced’ to create as part of their permission.

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Even with both those moans, and as I said before, I enjoyed the walk; it was a still and cold day, with a nice bit of low cloud and there weren’t too many people about until we got closer to the city. It was quiet on both the footpath and the road which allowed for a leisurely pace and quiet conversation.

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We stopped for a nice pint in one of London’s oldest pubs, ‘The Prospect of Whitby’, which for some reason I was too scared to ask about in case I didn’t like the answer, had a noose hanging from a gibbet over the river.

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Not taking the opportunity go for a wee after the pint while we were still in the pub was either a bad mistake or a work of genius as we were forced to stop for another drink at St Katherine’s Dock. This time we added a burger to each of our drink orders and stayed inside for a warming and revitalising lunch (and wee) before partly walking them both off when we walked to Liverpool Street station to get the tube back home.

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The Imaginary Institution of India

Barbican – Friday 21 December 2024

After a sustained period of talking, followed by an equally long period of procrastination and then a short period of faff I’ve finally booked flights back to New Zealand in March 2025, stopping for eight days in Delhi and Chandigarh on the return to London. I will be away a month, which is all I can really take as annual leave. Eleanor is coming with me to New Zealand, where a London friend will join us for a few days before I go to India and they return to London via Sydney and Tokyo. With today being the shortest day of year and constant grey skies, drizzling rain and cold it is properly nice to have something to look forward to.

Ever since the aborted trip to India in 2016 I’ve been determined to go back and see some more of that fabulous, maddening country. When starting to think about this trip I’d planned on spending some time in Delhi before heading south-west, returning to the state of Rajasthan to visit some of the historic towns I didn’t get to in 2016. However, I recently discovered the town of Chandigarh in the Punjab to the north of Delhi. Chandigarh was planned in the 50s as a new town to replace Delhi as India’s capital city and move the country on from British rule after independence in 1947. Renowned French architect le Corbusier was engaged to draft a plan for the entire town and the delivery of that plan was eventually entrusted to English and Indian architects (more on this when I visit). It didn’t become the capital, much as Prime Minister Nehru wanted it to, but it is, apparently, a wonderful modernist town and I’m very much looking forward to visiting.

Conveniently, soon after I decided on Chandigarh as a place to visit, the V&A Museum had a small, though perfectly formed, exhibition – ‘Tropical Modernism’, which addressed the idea behind the building of Chandigarh and the city of Accra in Ghana and the importance of modernist architecture to the story of both India and Ghana’s independence from Britain. I bought the book.

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The Barbican is currently holding an exhibition of Indian art from 1977-1998, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’ which I went to visit today, a non-working Friday. I took the camera with the intention of doing a walk around the Barbican estate before my 3:00 o’clock booking at the gallery. It was drizzly and cold out and I wasn’t in the photography mood so after a desultory and largely uninspired wander I had a glass of wine while I waited instead.

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I enjoyed the exhibition, particularly the photographic works, though some of the paintings were fabulous, with my favourite being the second piece you see when you walk in. The space is fabulous, it’s my first visit to the Barbican Gallery, so wasn’t sure what to expect from the venue; I will be going back.

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Gieve Patel – Two men with a hand cart.

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Gulammohammed Sheikh – Speechless City (my favourite).

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The exhibition documents one of the many periods of upheaval in Indian history, between 1977 and 1998, a period of massive social change in the country with a burgeoning middle class and rapid urbanisation as rural incomes dropped and people flooded into the cities. Heightened awareness of social issues and demands for fairness and equal rights for women and the LGBTQ+ community are out in the open and these were captured in the art of the time and well represented here. I loved the photos on show, particularly a series from Delhi in the 1970s of members of the artistic community. It isn’t how I saw India in those days. One of the things I love about art and travel is having my perceptions challenged and changed.

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It was also a time of political unrest (again) with violent clashes between Muslim and Hindu communities in the north of the country and the unlawful killing of political activists including Safdar Hashmi in 1989, painted by the artist M. F. Husain, who had to flee the country in 2006 after threats on his life.

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Ending on that happy note and with a date with Eleanor and some friends ahead I left the Barbican and walked the hour to Soho where we had a quick early dinner before going to see comedian Stewart Lee in Leicester Square, something that is becoming an enjoyable annual event.

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It was a lovely day and evening out and something I should do more of, more often.

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Brutal day out, Southampton edition

Southampton – Saturday 16 November 2024

Another weekend and another Brutal Day Out away day; this time to see the delights of Southampton, a small port city on the coast two hours south of London.

Looking at travel options for this trip created a bit of me grumbling to Eleanor about cost and faff and that I couldn’t believe it was two hours to Southampton from Waterloo which meant leaving home at 7:30 to get there for 11am. She tolerated this for a while before coming up with the suggestion I contact her ex-husband to see if I could stay with him and his partner on the Isle of Wight on the Friday and then take a quick ferry trip across the Solent to Southampton in the morning. This seemed like a very good, if rather leftfield option and after a couple of exchanged messages it was all arranged.

I left work a little early to avoid the worst of the Friday rush hour and was I rewarded with a nice sunset out of the train window. The train terminates at Portsmouth where I caught the ferry for the 22-minute journey to Ryde on the Isle of Wight. It was millpond calm, though even at 5:00pm it was too dark for photos. Autumn.

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Andy, Eleanor’s ex, met me off the ferry with the car and took me back to the house he shares with his new partner where we had dinner before slipping out to the pub for a few pints of local ale and loads of music chat. It was a very nice evening.

Sadly, the ferry from Cowes to Southampton doesn’t run at the same regularity as the Tube does from Leytonstone, so I ended up having to get up quite early anyway, but with a beer headache to contend with as well. After a light breakfast Andy drove me to the ferry terminal and I made another smooth journey across the Solent, this time to Southampton.

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The brutal day out was OK, my least favourite so far; there were a couple of the usual gang there which was nice, but more newbies and the group dynamic was a bit off. There was one interesting building to photograph, the Wyndham Court housing estate, but I wasn’t feeling it and while I got some OK images there was nothing I was completely wowed by.

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Next to Wyndham Court, and over the road from the train station are Greenville and Portcullis House, unlike the Wyndham Court these are office blocks, though mostly empty and I think they were due for demolition at some stage. Portcullis House (I think) is temporarily being used by the British Transport Police and we were told quite clearly that taking photos near their office was to be discouraged. We did as we were told.

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We took a general walk around the city centre with our local guide, there were a few other buildings to look at, but none of them were particularly interesting and I got a bored, and then we went for a swift pint in a very busy Wetherspoons before I grabbed a mid-afternoon train back to London.

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Hopefully next time will be back to being fun again.

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 7th 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.