Blog – Page 6 – Where is Phil now?

Berlin to Olso, via Stockholm and Gothenburg

The night before we flew to Berlin I went to a gallery opening for a friend’s exhibition of brutalist photos and ended up staying longer and drinking a lot more beer than I expected when I left home after my day’s work. Stupidly, I went straight to bed when I got home and subsequently had a terrible sleep. As I lay in bed I thought of a great opening paragraph for this first holiday post, but of course I remembered none of it as I started typing this on my phone on the flight across the channel, then over what I think is Belgium and across former West and East Germany to Berlin.

I’ve decided to break with twelve and a half years of posting habit and not write daily posts for the ten days we are away; travelling by train from Berlin to Stockholm to Gothenburg and finally, to Oslo. Visiting three countries and completely traversing a fourth, Denmark, while we ‘slept’ on the overnight train. I will see how it all works out over the next few days. I’ve a log of photos to review and my laptop is barely coping with the much larger image sizes from the XT2 camera; which I’m very much enjoying using. It’s slow progress.

I was both excited and pensive about this trip. Excited for all the obvious reasons, but pensive as we travelled with friends and before we left home I’d know idea how this would work. We’ve holidayed with friends on numerous occasions in the past, though this was the first time we’ve ‘travelled’ with anyone. There is a different dynamic with moving around places to that spent in a single city or town where there is room for some ‘me’ time, and I like my me time.

The trip started rather frantically, Eleanor and I had decided to use public transport, as we always do, to get to London City Airport for the flight to Berlin. In between checking that all services were running and us arriving at Leytonstone Station 10 minutes later, the entire Central Line had shut down due to signal failure. Luckily we are who we are and had left home with loads of time to spare so we decided to get the bus to Stratford where we would change to the DLR (Docklands Light Railway), as we would if we had caught the Central Line. Once on the bus and slowly under way due to heavy traffic I discovered I had left my phone at home! I jumped off at the next stop and managed to get a taxi to take me home and then on the station. Eleanor remained on the bus, sticking to the original plan and in the end I beat her to the airport. I’m happy to say we got there with plenty of time before boarding and it was the only hitch in the holiday.

Now we are back in London I can say that the holiday was a great success, there were no issues with travelling with others and the trip was mostly a complete joy and I would happily go back to Berlin, Stockholm and Oslo to see more.

This post is a quick summary of the ten days away and buys me some time to edit down a load of photos and write up my notes.

Berlin

Needless to say I totally loved Berlin (I know I love every place I visit, but this was beyond all those other loves!) We saw a lot, but barely scraped the surface of things to see and experience. A lot of the time was spent in the old ‘East’ where our lovely hotel was based and we barely had to time to visit the old ‘West’.

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Berlin is a me sort of town, it has a rich and recent history, particularly the period from the rise of fascism, through the Second World War, the cold war, the tearing down of the Wall and then unification. It also has a fantastic music history and is a liberal and relaxed city. I really felt at home there and can’t wait to go back; especially to do some brutalist building photography .

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We took an ‘underground history’ tour, which looked at some of the ingenious methods East Germans took to escape to the West. Photography was only allowed in a couple of places which was annoying but also good as I spent more time listening to the history and stories about some of those who did, or didn’t, escape.

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The Wall features a lot in the photos I took and in the history of the city.

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The Stasi (East German Secret Police) Museum. The museum is in the old Stasi headquarters. As the end of the communist East German state was becoming more and more obvious the people basically stormed the building to prevent the secret police destroying the massive number of files they had on citizens. Parts of the building are now a museum.

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The amazing Teufelsberg – a favourite part of the entire trip and probably worthy of its own post.

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David Bowie

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I had to try a curry wurst (sausage), the supposed ‘dish of Berlin’ for lunch, and I believe it is in the rules to accompany it with a cold beer. It was very nice! We also had dinner at Cookies Cream, a fantastic Michelin starred vegan restaurant and another holiday highlight.

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Stockholm

We took a 16 hour sleeper train from Berlin to Stockholm in Sweden. The train left Berlin just after 9pm and arrived in Malmo, Sweden around 7am the following day, passing through Denmark over night. We crossed ‘The Bridge’ between Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmo for those familiar with Scandi-noir TV. The sleeper carriage was right at the back of the train as far as Malmo, when further carriages were added on the end. I enjoyed standing at the back looking at the world pass rapidly by.

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The Swedish, and subsequently, the Norwegian countryside is quite beautiful, with lots of water and pine forests and we pass very few large towns, it is quite rugged and a bit dark. I can see why there are some many dark stories made in this part of the country.

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We arrived in Stockholm mid-afternoon and took a local train to our hotel in Hornstull on one of the many islands that make up the city. Like Berlin we mainly used our feet to get around, occasionally catching local trains when we got tired or in the case of Stockholm when it poured with rain – and pour it did…

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I particularly enjoyed Gamla Stan, the old town, and visited it twice, both times in the rain. Rain on cobbles down a narrow alley is one of my favourite things to photograph.

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We also visited the modern art museum which was interesting, and at times disturbing, especially the works of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. I won’t spoil the surprise with this piece ‘Him’ in case anyone is visiting the gallery.

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Gothenburg

Gothenburg was a town I’ve wanted to visit for a while and one I made sure was on the itinerary for this trip, but sadly/annoyingly it was my least favourite place. Maybe it was because we only had 24 hours and we stayed in a hotel right on top of the station; though the hotel was good and wasn’t the problem. I’m more used to staying in the inner suburbs rather than a city centre and being in a more relaxed environment. More on that in the Gothenburg post later.

My Gothenburg highlight was Fiskbar 17 where we went for dinner. It’s a small restaurant with only a few dishes on the menu. All four of us had the same thing, the fish of the day, which was lovely, as were the cocktails we preceded dinner with and the music that was playing the background.

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As we did in every place we visited we did a lot of walking and I took a few photos, but it wasn’t particularly photographic, or at least I wasn’t feeling it. I did find a nice brutalist building, though it looks like it’s being clad in something colourful, and there was a decent fort as well.

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Oslo

I enjoyed the four hour train ride from Gothenburg across the border into Norway, there was some stunning scenery out of the window, though I didn’t get many opportunities to take photos as the train got quite busy the closer it got to the final destination. The forests were suitably dark, and I would be quite interested in exploring a bit of the Nordic countryside.

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I really liked to Oslo, second favourite to Berlin on this trip, and like Berlin (and Stockholm I guess) we only skimmed the surface of the city. As everyone knows it’s expensive, but with the pound having a good exchange rate against the Norwegian Kroner it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Oslo felt like a young city, a bit like Berlin and most of the people we met in hospitality were very friendly, and naturally everyone spoke very good English. It had a vibe I really liked.

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We took a 90 minute tour of the fjord which was interesting, though the highlight was meeting a NZ brother and sister who we spent the entire trip talking to. That was fun.

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The highlight of Oslo, and possibly the whole trip was Vigeland Sculpture Park. It has merited its own post later on. Vigeland was a Norwegian sculpture who designed the 212 pieces in the park. I would say as individual works they would be OK, but as whole, they are wonderful. The facial expressions are just so wonderfully human and beautiful. My absolute favourite sculpture is the second one, with the two old people. Just stunning.

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We also visited the Munch Museum, a gallery containing thousands of the works of Norway’s most well known artist – Edvard Munch. I didn’t get that close to ‘The Scream’, his most famous work, but really enjoyed the gallery.

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The weather wasn’t great in Oslo, but we did get to walk a lot and on the Sunday night we walked to one of Oslo’s hip inner suburbs, Grunerlokka and ate in a large food hall. GrunerLokka is somewhere I would like to back to; there seems to be a decent music scene in Oslo as well which I would like to check out next time.

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All too soon it was time to head to the airport for the flight back to London and the end of 10 busy and fun days. I didn’t want it to end.

Tilbury walk.

Friday 25 May 2024 – Tilbury, Thurrock, Essex.

I have fairly strong feelings about this part of Essex, in fact I have the same feelings for pretty much all of Essex to be honest. They’re not positive feelings and they’re based on ‘vibes’ as the young folk say, rather than fully researched fact. Let’s just say I never thought I could live in Essex’s southern Thurrock region and after today’s walk that thought was made certain; mind you I did enjoy being out and about and it was a decent walk.

I’m trying to make proper use of my nine day fortnight so, with a seemingly rare Friday with no rain in the forecast I decided to catch the train to Tilbury Town, then walk past Tilbury Fort, along the side of the Thames Estuary to Coalhouse Fort then up to East Tilbury Station and back home. It’s not a huge walk, but I only had half a day and I felt like going somewhere different.

I arrived in Tilbury Town just before 13:00, crossing over the railway track via the over bridge with a full-on nasal assault from the rubbish dump that the road I’m going to follow for a bit runs alongside. I’d hoped to be able to pick up something to eat by the station but all the shops were closed. I only had a couple of hours of walking ahead of me and let’s face it a few hours sans food isn’t going to be a bad thing.

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I’d originally thought about catching the ferry across the Thames from Gravesend in Kent, but disappointingly the ferry had permanently closed in April. The ferry would’ve made for a nice round trip rather than the there and back journey I did, plus it docked almost on the fort’s doorstep which meant I would’ve avoided the dump.

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The walk to Tilbury Fort took about 30 minutes, with half of it down this hideous stretch of busy road mainly being used by large lorries scurrying to and from one of the ports. It was noisy, smelly and generally unpleasant. Welcome to Thurrock.

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There were a few things I wanted to check out on the walk, one of which was the memorial to the Windrush generation on display at the building and wharf where the first migrants from the Caribbean arrived onto English soil in the 50s and 60s; naturally it was closed. I discovered when I got home that the memorial gallery closed at the same time as the ferry.

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I chose not to go into the fort as there didn’t seem to be a lot to see inside and there was a charge to enter and I’m trying to keep my spending down (he says the day after buying a new pair of Doc Martens shoes). The English Coastal Path runs past the entrance and I was planning on following this for the four half kilometres to Coalhouse Fort, the next fort along; heading east towards the mouth of the river.

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Tilbury Fort is one of the finest surviving examples of 17th-century military engineering in England. Built on the site of a smaller Tudor fort, it was designed to defend the river Thames passage to London against enemy ships, though it was never tested in battle. The fort was decommissioned at the end of the First World War.

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Forhe first half of the walk I was following the estuary wall, starting on the inside of the wall, then crossing over some steps to the water side a few hundred metres in.

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Luckily the tide was not in as there was a lot of rubbish and bits of drift wood on the wrong side of the path proving the messages at the start of the path that this area is subjected to a lot of water at high tide. I enjoyed the walk along the wall, preferring the rougher outside of the wall section with its graffiti and weeds and rubbish and feeling of isolation.

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I like these unloved edgeland places between the lived and unlived environments, especially those on the fringes of a big city like London. I like that they are most likely very safe places, but there is just that small hint of danger to keep the outsider on their toes, especially walking alone and on the wet side of a two metre high concrete wall. Every couple of hundred metres there were escape steps over the wall. I climbed up this set and peered over into a wet and weedy wasteland. I think my side was nicer.

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Just before the end of the wall section I came across a young woman painting years on a blacked out section of wall. There were thousands of them. 5050 to be precise. The piece is titled ‘100 years of irretrievable losses’ and commemorates the birth and death years of a tiny number of those who have died in war over the last 100 years.

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I saw three other walkers the entire time I was out, and other than the artist no other person between the forts.

For some reason the wall ended and the path made its way through an area of scrubland, I guess it had risen just enough to not be at risk of flooding, though there was nothing but weeds to flood. The path got quite narrow in some places and at times I was walking with my hands raised over my head to avoid my bare arms touching the reaching thorns and nettles. Warm as I was I was glad I was wearing long trousers.

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I got to thinking about the ‘rewilding movement’ and this mad view that if you let nature take over you will end up with fields of lovely wild flowers interspersed with small woods of oak, elm, beech and ghostly silver birch. That lovely postcard view of a world that only existsin the minds of fantasists. Reality shows that proper rewilded spaces are just a sea of weed and twisted ivy, bramble nettle, long grass and no chance of any tree self-seeding. Rewilded spaces are wild spaces. I’m not saying they’re not pretty in their own way, but no one is going to wildly romping through this stuff to find a site for a spring picnic or an off-piste ‘snuggle’

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I passed a site where they were either taking dirt from the land and dropping it into the river, perhaps to improve flood protection, or were taking silt from the river and dumping it in land. Impossible to tell as there was no-one about. I guess it could have been an extension of what looked to be a buried rubbish dump; though there was no smell to give that away.

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For some reason the path took a turn inland and the concrete was replaced by a mown grass strip between a wasteland and a low-lying wetland. At the end of the wetland the path looped back again towards the river, passing wheat fields, one of which had a small number of red poppies growing in it.

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Soon after I arrived at Coalhouse I asked a walker I’d nodded to earlier in the day if there was a route to the fort along the estuary and he said there was, weird. The inland route I took was the signposted one. I had wondered how he had gotten there before me as last time I saw him he was going in the opposite direction.

Coalhouse Fort is sadly closed to the public, from the outside it looked a lot more interesting than Tilbury. It looked like a proper blockhouse made to withstand the heaviest barrage. Built in the 1860s as the last in a string of defensive forts protecting the Thames and London from river born attack, its construction was marred by the swampy ground it was being built on and by the time it was finished it had been made largely obsolete with the development of better artillery pieces.

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The fort was manned and used by the military until 1949 when it was decommissioned and fell into disrepair. The council bought it and in 1985 a volunteer group was formed to restore the fort, though lack of funding and interest saw the group disbanded in 2020. The grounds surrounding the fort are maintained as a park, and if the café is anything to go by it’s quite popular.

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There was a café in the grounds and to my surprise it was open at 3pm on Friday and it was quite busy. I got myself some lunch and more water, it was hot out and I was getting hungry. While eating lunch I checked the times of trains back to London from East Tilbury station and discovered it was a 36 minute walk to the station, there was a train in 39 minutes and the next was over 40 minutes after. I took a power walk around the outside of the fort and then even faster one to the station, making it with three minutes to spare.

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I enjoyed the walk to the fort, it had all the things I expected and the weather was really nice. The walk through East Tilbury to the station was not quite as enjoyable, it’s not a place I could live. An edgeland town; not of the city and not of the country.

I like edgeland places, but edgeland towns are not for me.

Berlin dreaming

Wednesday 15 May 2024 – Leytonstone, London.

11 years ago today I arrived back in London after a month in Sri Lanka, a few days on a yacht theoretically scuba diving off the east coast of Malaysia* and finally a couple of weeks ‘back home’ in New Zealand. I’d left New Zealand late in December 2011 with the intention of travelling the world for a maximum of two years. However, I met London native Eleanor in Jan 2013, and decided that my trip wasn’t going to be a one-way return to Auckland after all so I came back to London instead. I’m still happy here.

Anyway, this quick post is about Berlin, our next holiday destination, and I’m very excited about it, I guess I wouldn’t be writing about an event before it happens for the first time if I wasn’t. We’ve been talking about Berlin as a holiday destination for a while, and though it wasn’t in the final plan for our Covid aborted holiday in 2020, it was part of our original thinking. The June 2020 plan had us flying to Olso and making our way to Amsterdam via various train journeys where we would meet up with a group of London friends to celebrate Deborah turning 60. In three and a bit weeks time we are flying to Berlin and then wending our way to Oslo via various train journeys, including a 16hour sleeper from Berlin to Stockholm. We are doing this with Deborah and her husband John, it sort of makes up for the much missed holiday from four years ago. I’m really looking forward to the sleeper, it will be the longest single journey I’ve done and I love trains.

I’ve been to Berlin once since I’ve been living in the UK and that was in 2016 for a work trip where I didn’t really see much of the city outside of the hotel the conference was in. It remains one of the cities I’m most fascinated by; primarily for its music and culture, none of which I experienced in 2016.

I spent a few days there in November 1987, back when the ‘wall’ was still up and the city was divided east from west and the western part was completely cut off from the rest of West Germany. We crossed over to East Berlin for the allowed day trip, crossing via the (in)famous Checkpoint Charlie.

Oct 1987 Border Crossing Berlin

We had to change 25 west marks (the German currency pre-euro) to east marks to cross the border, and we couldn’t change what we had left unspent back into west marks on our return. There was nothing much to spend money on in the east, so roadside wurst (sausage) sellers were a popular choice with western tourists, and I assume, East Berliners. I don’t recall if they were good or not, but I remember we ate a lot while ‘over there’ as it was cheaper than eating in the west, and we had money to use.

Oct 1987 Wurst seller East Berlin

I don’t have many photos left from those days, these images are scans of photos from an album I have from the 8 weeks I spent travelling around Europe. Selling and moving house and country means I have fewer possessions than I used to and photos and negatives are one of the many things that were ‘downsized’.

Oct 1987 The Wall and East Berlin

I enjoyed Berlin, it was one of the highlights of that trip, though we didn’t have much money and were sleeping in a tent on the outskirts of the city and someone did try to bottle me one night… Something I’m hoping will never be repeated.

This is a rare photo of me from those days and one I quite like. It’s pleasing to note that my primarily black based fashion choice hasn’t changed, unlike my hair colour.

Oct 1987 Tiergarten West Berlin

As I said earlier, I’m excited about the trip, I’m hoping my slightly romantic view of Berlin is not left lying faded in the dust. I’m expecting to see a city with an edge, and I will be disappointed if its blunted. I need to make sure I get out and walk around and check out some of the fringe parts of the city, like Teufelsberg, if I need to hunt some edge down.

I guess with three weeks to go it’s time to start planning some sightseeing.

A bittersweet walk in the forest

Saturday 27 April 2024 – Epping Forest.

Today was my first walk in Epping Forest proper since December 2022, and as I used to go at least monthly when I was living in Walthamstow prior to the 2019 move to St Leonards, that is quite a remarkable break. Yes, I’ve really gotten into much more urban walking and photography in the past couple of years, but I love(d) the forest so this still felt like a madly long break.

It was to be a bittersweet return…

The morning started well. The wait for the train from Leytonstone to Loughton was under a minute, I had allowed for 10-12, and it wasn’t raining as heavily as expected, but for almost May it was flipping cold. I picked up a coffee in Loughton for the walk from the town centre to the forest and it wasn’t as bad as the coffee I last bought from the same café.

The late spring forest is my next favourite to mid-autumn forest. I like that there is still some winter colour and that there is still plenty of air between the trees. It’s too busy in full summer for me. The low grey cloud provided the perfect flat light as well as dulling any sound. The light rain meant the forest was quiet. it was almost perfect.

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The plan was to walk from Loughton station to home in Leytonstone, walking almost entirely on unsealed paths and under the cover of trees through Epping Forest and the smaller subsidiary wooded areas through Chingford, Higham Park and Walthamstow. At the least the walk was just under 13kms in length, but I knew that once in forest I would be wandering all over the place and walking another 3 or 4 kms was more than likely.

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I was determined that this would be a walk and not a prolonged photography session, but yeah, who was I kidding. The camera first came out soon after I entered the forest at Earls Path Pond and it really only went back in my bag when the rain was too hard. Needless to say I was enjoying myself. I have taken loads of photos here and at Strawberry Pond in the past and will do so again in the future.

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I crossed over Epping Forest Road and spent some time bumbling about the Long Hills area of the forest, meandering down the smaller muddier tracks, taking photos here and there, changing direction when something caught my eye; though generally heading in the direction of the Hunting Lodge, where I was planning on stopping for (expensive) coffee and lunch.

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I came across a spot where the forest pixies (volunteers) had been clearing bramble and holly and removing crowded saplings and dead and dying trees to allow clearer growth. I found a nice circle of blue bells amongst the stacked felled wood. While one can fantasize over wild forest and whether Epping should just be allowed to go feral and return to its ‘natural’ state without the interference of humans, I just don’t think it would work. This forest has been attended to by humans for centuries, it was protected royal hunting ground and animals foraged here, keeping the undergrowth down. It was also a source of wood for the communities that surrounded it and plenty of ancient pollarded trees remain. If it was let go it would just be a tangled mess of that bramble and holly and almost impenetrable.

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The only place I don’t use my headphones when I’m alone is in the forest, and not for any personal safety thing, I want to enjoy the experience of being somewhere I’m not compelled to drown out the noise of the city. As I was walking I was thinking about how calm I was; I’m not one to overly promote the nature-bathing thing, and I won’t say I could feel life’s stresses leaving my body as I walked in relative peace, but it wasn’t far off that. When I go into the office I’m bombarded with noise from the moment I arrive at the station in the morning to when I leave it again and he end of the working day to walk the six minutes home. My day is surrounded by people who make a lot of noise, from those who talk loudly into their phone on the tube to drown out the rattle and screech of the trains to the constant (often inane) babble of people in the office. I have long realised I’m negatively affected by the constant noise. I need to walk in peace a lot more.

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I was walking along feeling good, taking photos, enjoying feeling unstressed when I came to one of the many path intersections. Not being entirely sure where I was I reached into my pocket for my phone so I could find myself, and….. my phone wasn’t there. Queue much frantic searching of pockets and bag, then pockets and bag again and then the rapid realisation I had lost my phone somewhere ‘back there’, back where I had meandered aimlessly for at least 30 minutes. There was no point in going back and trying to find it. Luckily one of the few other walkers was nearby so I checked I was choosing the right path to get me back to Chingford, and the station, then home.

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Other than ruining what was an enjoyable time, the most annoying thing was my phone was only two months old and it was my cost to replace it. Which, as I had time left in my day due to the early start, I managed to do.

I will try the walk again in a few weeks.

The bluebells of Chalet Wood (2024 edition)

Friday 12 April 2024 – Wanstead Park, London.

After significant procrastination I finally bought myself a new camera. I say ‘new’ but what I really mean is I bought myself another camera. I love the Canon 5d Mk2 and I’ve used Canon cameras since 1984 when I bought my first SLR; a Canon AE1. I’m comfortable with how they work and how they feel in my hands, but I’m tired of the size and weight of the 5d and want something smaller and lighter. I used Panasonic Lumix camera when I travelled in Asia and Sri Lanka all those years ago and still have a working GF1 and GX1, they’re both getting on now, but that isn’t why I don’t use them. I just don’t like how they feel.

After a ton of research and talking to people I trust I committed last weekend and bought a second hand Fujifilm TX2 and a 18-55 ‘kit’ lens, both online. Today was the first outing and I’m happy I made the right choice. Once I sell all the other camera gear I will buy a better lens, or maybe two, but then sell the kit lens. I’m trying to declutter a bit so getting rid of a load of camera stuff will be the bonus on top of hopefully paying for the XT2 with what I make.

In a burst of unusual timeliness we had the time and inclination to walk the 40 minutes to Chalet Wood in Wanstead Park while the bluebells were at peak bloom. Visiting is an annual event but we often only remember to go when we see photos on social media and by then the blooms are fading. While they are never disappointing they are not as beautiful as they could be if we went at the right time.

With Eleanor not working on Friday and me now doing a nine-day fortnight, being able to visit the bluebells on a less busy week day was a real bonus. It was a lovely walk and the bluebells were magnificent. The fields are not vast, but are so much bigger and better than what the camera reveals, so I absolutely recommend a visit, but maybe wait for peak bloom next year.

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Chalet Wood is one of a dwindling number of large scale bluebell fields anywhere near London. They only bloom for a few weeks in mid-spring and are only found in ancient forest sites; and there are not many of those left in the UK sadly.

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Carparks, glorious carparks

Saturday 06 April 2024 – Uxbridge, west London.

The final instalment of this ‘unofficial’ brutal day out photo walk was finding the unexpectedly wonderful Grainges and Cedars car parks; one on either side of The Pavilion shopping centre in Uxbridge.

I couldn’t find anything on the internets on the history of these car parks, though the shopping centre opened in 1973 so I guess the car parks are of a similar vintage. The twin circular approaches of the Grainges are a symphony in concrete and were a bit of an expected bonus, if there is such a thing. They were much better than I/we expected and there was a fair bit of enthused cooing over them.

They are just car parks after all so I’m not going to bang on about them too much, so will let the photos do the talking.

Grainges

Cedars

As a small bonus to the bonus there was a really nice BT building in between, annoyingly the entrance was fenced off so we couldn’t get right up close. I loved the scalloped windows.

It was a full on day and very enjoyable. I really enjoy hanging out with this group of concrete building photographer/enthusiasts and am looking forward to the next outing; to exciting Croydon, in a couple of weeks.

My next post will not feature concrete in any shape of form and will definitively be more colourful!

Brutalist Brunel University

Saturday 06 April 2024 – Uxbridge, west London.

Uxbridge station was a surprise modernist bonus; and what a lovely station; so much better than the old, grimy and grim station at Leytonstone where I live. It would be fun to have 30 mins here without passengers wandering past wondering why five people were pointing cameras.

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Uxbridge was really busy, lots of shops and seemingly well frequented by shoppers and pedestrians, it’s too suburban and not my sort of place, but it was good to see a busy shopping area. We popped round the corner from the station to catch a bus for the 10 minute ride out to Brunel University. There nice building over the road from the bus stop was an additional treat to be had while we waited for the bus.

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The main reason for coming all the way out west was to have a look at the university’s lecture centre which is a proper brutalist masterpiece. Designed by John Heywood, the centre opened in 1971. Apparently it has had been undergoing maintenance recently so we timed it well, avoiding any lingering scaffold or hoardings. It really is a beauty; small yet perfectly formed. It, along with a couple of other Brunel buildings, particularly Tower D, feature in Stanley Kubrick’s ultra-violent dystopian ‘A Clockwork Orange’ film.

I quite liked this sculpture by Philip Whitten to celebrate the Shoreditch College’s golden jubilee in 1969.

After cooing over some lovely concrete and resting with a refreshing coffee and snack from a conveniently open student café we walked around the rest of the small campus and took a few photos of some of the other 1960s constructed buildings, including Tower D. There was a lot more of interest than we expected, which made for some very happy photographers of 60s and 70s concrete. Probably worth a proper Brutal Day Out and some stage.

Next, back to Uxbridge and carparks…

Brutalist Harrow

Saturday 06 April 2024 – Harrow, west London.

It’s been quite a while since I schlepped out to far west London, it’s definitely not been in the last five years at least and to be fair I’d no need to go there, until today. It wasn’t really a need either, I wanted to get out of the house, and visiting Uxbridge to take photographs of the John Heywood designed lecture theatre at Brunel University that features, among other Brunel buildings, in Kubrick’s dystopian masterpiece ‘A Clockwork Orange’ seemed like a good thing to do. I popped a question on the brutalist architecture Instagram group I belong to to see if anyone was interested in coming along as well and five of us took the hour long journey out west. There will be more on Brunel in the next post as I ended up taking too many photos to fit nicely into one.

As we were travelling all that way out we decided to take in the Harrow Civic Centre and a ‘nice’ concrete underpass in Harrow-on-the-Hill, both of which make up the photos in this post.

Disappointingly, and unknown to us when we left London, Harrow Civic Centre is being demolished to make way for some new developments and the downsize of the council’s office space. The entire building was surrounded by slightly too high to photograph over hoardings. Opened in 1973 the imposing concrete building apparently has a ceramic mural on the first floor comprising of 1000 photos of Harrow. I imagine it would have been really impressive and it hope it doesn’t get destroyed when the building is knocked down.

Most of the photos I took are of the top half of the building and I had a slight obsession with the security cameras.

I understand why some of these ‘older’ buildings need to be replaced, I imagine they are costly to retrofit to modern needs, are not cheap to maintain or heat and cool, but I can bet the main reason it’s coming down is people think it’s ugly. I suspect what ever gets built to replace will be even uglier.

Moving on from the centre of Harrow we walked to nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill to get the train to Uxbridge; and to take a few photos of an underpass. I suspect people think we’re odd. We stopped to take some photos on the way… Architecturally this part of west London is very different to the part of east London I live in. There are similarities of course, both are quite clearly suburban England, but to the local they look and I suspect, feel, quite different.

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We also had the unexpected bonus of a carpark behind the shopping centre with a really fine orbital ramp, one that was very different to the carpark we visit in Uxbridge later in the day.

We stopped for the obligatory group photo in the underpass before walking to the station. I don’t know much about the underpass, or even what the road system is that passes overhead, but it’s quite nice is seemingly well patrolled as there was none of that commingled stench of weed and piss that you would imagine for such a place.

The band

Beer

Monday 25 March – Beer, Devon.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve driven a car and God knows how many since I last drove a manual gear shift. I have to say I didn’t particularly enjoy the time on the road over last two days, though at least the rental car was easy to drive and comfortable and the journey to and back from Devon was without incident.

Gill, Eleanor’s only sibling and older sister moved to America with her now late and ex husband, Jack, in the mid-eighties. Jack passed away at the end of last year and the family wanted to bring his ashes back to the UK to be scattered in the sea off Devon. Gill, her three adult children and Jack’s new wife and some friends had come to the UK from all over the US to gather together for a Sunday evening meal with Jack’s English family in a pub in Beer; a small fishing village miles from nowhere in rural coastal Devon, not far from where Jack grew up. Dinner was followed by a brief ash scattering ceremony on the beach below the pub.

Holding the event in Beer meant I had to drive as Eleanor has never learned and public transport was going to be difficult if not impossible on a Sunday. We also took Eleanor’s son and their partner as they also don’t drive.

I collected the rental car on Saturday afternoon and we left for Devon at 10:00 on Sunday morning. Living in North East London and heading south west meant traversing the city. The M25 London orbital motorway was partly closed for road works, annoyingly in the direction we wanted to travel, so we had to resort to using the A406, the infamous London North Circular; my least favourite road in London. Naturally there was an accident somewhere and the sat nav sent us and loads of other cars down a string of now jammed residential side streets. This is why I hate driving. It took 90 minutes to clear London and finally get on the open road. At least it wasn’t raining.

To be fair it wasn’t a terrible drive, there was expected traffic as we passed Stonehenge, but I’m never going to complain about driving slowly past such a remarkable place. We arrived in Beer just before 3, in time to check into our room in the pub where the meal was being held and get a quick stroll on the beach before the 4 o’clock gathering.

Beer is small, but bigger than I recalled from the last time I passed through here in 2012; to be fair to me at the time I was over halfway through the 56km coastal run I did for my 50 birthday and wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the shape and size of each town I passed through.

We were staying in the Anchor Inn, right on the sea front and had a room overlooking the sea which was fabulous; the view, the room was average.

We ditched out bags and nipped out for a stroll on the beach before meeting Eleanor’s family. Like Hastings, Beer is a working fishing beach, though significantly smaller than Hastings, which has the largest beach launched fishing fleet in Europe; I think, its definitely the largest in England!

After the walk and a sneaky Devon ice cream in the sun we joined the large family group in the bar of the hotel for an early meal and some beer, t would be rude not to drink beer in Beer. I enjoyed meeting and spending some time with Eleanor’s wider family who we don’t see often at all. Maybe a trip to America in the near future is on the cards?

Fed and watered (beered in my case) we all went down to the beach as the evening descended to toast Jack’s life and for the family to scatter his ashes into the sea. I didn’t know Jack, so after raising a glass to his memory I stood back and let his family and friends say their farewell.

As predicted the wind increased in the middle of the night and with it came the rain. The bed was quite small and with the noisy weather battering the sea front window on the other side of the room I had a relatively sleepless night.

It was still raining when we left in the morning and the rain stayed with us for the first hour of driving. It wasn’t fun, but at least we didn’t hit any real traffic on the way back to London and made it back in reasonable time.

I’m not going to rush to drive again, but will have to rent a car to head back to the south west for a tiny music festival I’m attending in Glastonbury in July; but not ‘that’ music festival.

Caledonian Sleeper to Glasgow

Saturday 20 January 2024 – Glasgow, Scotland.

‘We’re Mogwai, from Glasgow, Scotland’ is the first thing that pops into my head whenever I think about Scotland’s second city. Mogwai have been a favourite band for many years and I’m fairly certain that Stuart Braithwaite, the band ‘leader’, says this at every gig. I’ve not visited Glasgow before and I’ve not been on the Caledonian Sleeper train either, so when it was announced there would be a heavy January discount on London Euston to Scotland journeys I booked us a cabin.

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With so much disruption with Sunday trains and with Eleanor not working on a Friday we’ve mostly taken to moving our weekend forward a day and travelling out after work on a Thursday and back on Saturday. Not having to contemplate Sunday trains is relieves a little bit of stress.

The sleeper train leaves Euston at 23:45 though you can access your cabin from 22:30, so we boarded soon after arriving at the station, had a quick nosey around our tiny cabin then popped out for a glass of wine in one of the lounge carriages until we were well under way. It’s a most civilised way to travel.

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We sat in the lounge for an hour or so as we slowly moved through north London, before speeding up as we left the capital. We headed to bed soon after, not expecting much sleep; and little sleep is what we had. I had forgotten the noise and motion on a sleeper train. The bed was small, but not uncomfortable and my night, while largely sleepless wasn’t too bad. I enjoyed the experience of journeying as I ‘slept’ and arriving in a new city is always exciting.

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We had an alarm set for 6:45 but it wasn’t needed, and though we had a shower in our cabin we chose to not chance get everything wet and went and had breakfast and coffee in the lounge instead; it was included in the price and it was better than OK; this was a train after all and were not travelling first class.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Glasgow. The view from the outside, especially from as far as New Zealand was never rosy; grime, crime, the collapse of industry, the Gorballs; and other housing estates, heroin, poverty, alcoholism, domestic and gang violence. You get the picture, and it wasn’t a pretty one. Things changed significantly over the last few years after massive investment in the city and improvement to housing, job opportunities and the types of jobs on offer. However, we’re in the midst of a cost of living crisis and fringe cities that are recovering often see the first stages of decline. I hadn’t fully formed expectations when we arrived.

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It was raining when we stepped out of the station into the dark of 7:20 am winter Scotland. I wasn’t surprised, and almost welcomed the gloom, though the rain was heavier than expected or I wanted. We stopped for coffee in a Café Nero directly opposite the station exit and waited until the worst of the rain had passed before walking the 20 minutes to our hotel. here was an unexpected hill. I don’t know why, but I had I thought Glasgow was flat. There was a light covering of ice covered snow on the ground in some places which made walking up the short but steep hill a bit tentative.

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I don’t often shout out to businesses, that isn’t the purpose of this blog, but there are always exceptions and it’s my blog so I can do what I want. We arrived at Hotel Dakota about 8am, seven hours before check in, but our room was ready and available so they invited us to check in and make use of the room, which we very gratefully accepted. In my experience this is rare, usually you can dump a bag in a storage room and be sent off until check-in time. We got to have a wee nap and a very hot shower in before heading out later in the morning; when things were actually open.

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We walked about 17 kilometres today, from one side of the city centre to the other starting with a walk down a fairly non-descript main road in, at times. quite heavy windblown rain to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, fortunately the rain didn’t last long and the rest of the day was reasonably dry.

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Kelvingrove Gallery and Museum

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The gallery and museum were OK, I don’t think we were really in the mood for a lot of history, though we did read a little about the architectural and design history of the city and were inspired to go to the Willow Tea Room later in the day. The park was really nice, especially with the pre-grey slush remains of a light dusting of snow.

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The tea room was designed by renown Glaswegian architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and is his last surviving tea room. It originally opened in 1903 and has recently been returned to its former glory. It’s lovely inside, though sadly, none of my photos worked. We stopped in for a glass of wine and the largest of scones and just enjoyed being somewhere so nice. The section of Sauchiehall Street where the tea room resides is pretty grim mind.

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Sauchiehall Street stretches from the large and tidy houses of Kelvingrove; a lot were funded by those involved in the slave trade, through to the centre of the city and a newish John Lewis dominated shopping mall. Both ends of the street are quite nice, but the middle is a bit faded and jaded if you know what I mean. The Sauchiehall Street highlight for me was the beautiful Beresford Tower, absolutely gorgeous.

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I had to pass through George Square because Mogwai have a track called ‘George Square Thatcher Death Party’ named after hundreds of Glaswegians partied in the square on the news of the death of UK ex prime minister Margaret Thatcher. I can’t possibly comment on the appropriateness of celebrating Thatcher’s death in such an exuberant way, and then writing a song to celebrate the celebration.

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In front of the museum of modern art is a statue of the Duke of Wellington that is internationally known for pretty much always having a traffic cone, or two or three, on his head, this has been the case since the 1980s and apparently it inspired Banksy. It’s a work of modern art.

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We were flagging by the time we got into the gallery, so had a quick meander round a couple of floors before deciding we’d had enough and took a slow walk back to the hotel. We particularly liked that the museum had the same Ikea chairs that I have in my flat.

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We had dinner at a really nice vegetarian restaurant back in Kelvingrove and after a wee dram in the hotel bar collapsed into bed for a well deserved sleep, as I said earlier we’d walked 17kms today.

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Saturday morning was wet and cold and we had a lunch time train back to London. We took a late, leisurely and ludicrously expensive breakfast in the hotel before leaving. Thankfully it was nice. We walked back to the station via the River Clyde, something we failed to do yesterday, given how massively important the river is to Glasgow’s history. We also passed the only brutalist building I’ve seen in Glasgow, and it was surrounded by fences so this was a close I got.

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The train journey back to London was OK, it’s five hours and it wasn’t the sleeper so it wasn’t as ‘luxurious’ as the journey north. I enjoyed the trip, the sleeper was something I’ve wanted to do for a while and I’m glad I’ve knocked it off the list, and it was a good experience too.

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