brutalist – Where is Phil now?

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.

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.

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.

Temple(s) of Love – brutalist Leeds

Saturday 14 September 2024 – Leeds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Brutalist London, part something

Saturday 29 July 2024 – London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The magnificent and recently refurbished Centrepoint Tower.

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

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

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

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

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 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

Brutal Day Out #7 – Bloomsbury

Sunday 14 January 2024 – Bloomsbury, London.

I’m going to claim all the credit for this most excellent Brutal Day Out photography walk. I posted on the group Instagram chat that I was going to go to Bloomsbury in central London to photograph the University College London’s two brutalist buildings; the School of Oriental and African Studies library and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. I said that if people wanted to join me that would be great, the group organisers then turned into an ‘official’ walk and it was given the number 7. This is not a paid group or walk so I wasn’t put out by this at all, though they did drop the Royal College of Physicians from my list to add three other buildings that made more geographic sense. This was no bad thing as I wouldn’t have visited the Standard and it was great.

However, I chose to do a side trip to the Royal College of Physicians before we met at Kings Cross station as it was only a 20 minute walk away on the edge of Regents Park. I’m glad I did as it’s quite a cool building.

A quick note for anyone stumbling across this post looking for useful information on the buildings I photographed. There isn’t any; useful information that is, there are photos though.

Royal College of Physicians, opened in 1964, designed by Denys Lasdun.

I’ve been meaning to come here to photograph this building for a while and visited it briefly a couple of evenings ago before meeting friends for a drink nearby. I rarely come to this part of London. On that visit I was hoping for some interesting external lighting, but it was too dark and the rain was heavy and the light was poor so a daytime visit seemed like the right thing to do, so I just went to the pub.

Back at Kings Cross I grabbed a coffee and met the rest of the 13 strong group, surprisingly most were on time and we didn’t have to wait long for the last straggler to turn up. Having people join from all over the shop, including two from Manchester, and with increasingly unreliable public transport, means patience is sometimes required.

Our first building was almost directly over the road, the lovely ex-Camden Council head office building, now the Standard Hotel. I really like this building, though have to actually go inside. If I did I would want to be able to use the lift.

The Standard Hotel, originally built in 1974 for Camden Council, fully remodelled as a hotel, opening again in 2019.

The Brunswick Centre, opened in 1972.

Mixed use residential and retail this estate was supposed to be bigger than it is but the developers couldn’t get all the land they wanted, which (familiar story) means they had to change the original plan of building a private estate and bring the council (Camden at the time) in to help out. It was subsequently opened as part private and part council housing, and remains that way now, which I think is a good thing, though it needs a lot of money spending on it by the look of it.

I was very lucky to be invited into the residential block by a resident who saw me walking around with my camera and told me there was a great view of London from the top floor. There was, but I was more interested in the lovely concrete angles.

Some of my walk mates got invited in to look at someone’s flat which I remain a bit jealous of, though apparently it wasn’t that interesting. I have visions of residents maintaining a flat like a museum of 1970s interiors, though of course reality isn’t like that. I’m going to back one quiet Sunday morning and take some photos of the street level window boxes outside some of the flats.

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Imperial Hotel, under renovation.
I found some fabulous old phones in the carpark. Always check the carpark is my policy.

University College London.
These buildings were quite difficult to photograph, or at least I found them to be. I took a few images but wasn’t really happy with the most of them. The buildings are big, and there isn’t a vast amount of space to get a decent angle to shoot that doesn’t end up making the building look really weird, and fixing in Lightroom wouldn’t really work either.

Charles Clore House, (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies), Denys Lasdun, 1976.

The Philips Building (SOAS Library), Denys Lasdun, 1973.

Denys Lasdun featured a lot today, amongst other things he also designed the fabulous brutalist parts of the University of East Anglia in Norwich and the National Theatre on London’s Southbank. He is my favourite of the English based ‘brutalist’ architects.

It was starting to get a bit cold and we had been on our feet for 4 half hours so it was time to nip to the pub for a refreshing pint or two. It was another very enjoyable day out. One of the photographers who has been on all the walks had brought along a child’s camera, which uses till receipt thermal paper for instant black and white printing. I subsequently bought this one for next time and I’m really looking forward to trying it out on some lovely concrete.

Toy Camera

Brutal Day Out – Bethnal Green

Saturday 25 November 2023 – Bethnal Green, London.

One month until Christmas, wow, where has this year gone? I’m sure I’ve said it on numerous occasions in the past but the older I get the quicker the years go by. Sadly the same can’t be said for working days and weeks, they drag interminably. It’s now Christmas Eve eve, Eleanor is at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium watching Spurs beat Everton 2-1 and I’m home in the warmth drinking a large gin and tonic, listening to The Stooges and finalising this post. A win-win for both of us.

This was the fourth Brutal Day Out walk I’ve attended and it was the biggest yet, with 13 walkers, which made the group too big. Organising photographers is like herding cats and I liked it best when there was only half a dozen of us. It’s cool that the original group still come as I like all of them (a rare thing), and there are always good folk in the extended group, but it does make it slow going.

These walks are a good opportunity to see parts of London that most would not normally visit; housing estates for instance; and these were the focus of the walk today. There are a lot of 1960/70 estates in east London. We ended up being invited inside two tower blocks and made our way into a third by following someone in. All three we visited had the most incredible staircases, these buildings may look a bit drab and square and concrete on the outside, but the interiors are quite beautiful, as beautiful as concrete and basic function can get anyway. The first block we entered we were invited by an elderly resident who saw us outside with our cameras and phones and said we had to come in and look at the stairs, and they were pretty cool.

We met outside Mile End tube station, it’s a lovely clear day but very cold, and there is a biting wind, I’m glad I wrapped up warm. The light is a little harsh for architecture photography, or at least my type of architecture photography, but it’s nice to be outside under a a clear sky, it feels like it’s been a long time. Once the group had assembled we crossed the road and walked to our first destination, the Lakeview Estate, opposite Victoria Park. I was surprised to find it was so close to Mile End station; it’s good to be reminded that walking is the best way to learn how a city hangs together.

None of the buildings we visited today were brutalist masterpieces, at least that was the case from the outside and the Lakeview Building typified that. These buildings see the birth of the age of modernism in building construction. Designed in 1958 by the pioneering modernist architect, Berthold Lubetkin, for the then Bethnal Green Council it is an early example of how simple design and construction can be made into something aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes you need to look past the ‘bit ugly tower block’ and look for the details. Lubetkin’s work features a lot on this walk today.

I particularly liked the way the sun came though the open passages between the stairwell and the flats; I may have been moaning about the harsh sun earlier, but the way it caught the steam rising from a gas boiler vent was a highlight for me.

Our next stop was the nearby Cranbrook Estate, another Lubetkin design, though this was a much large estate than Lakeview, comprising of six low rise towers and a series of small blocks making up 529 homes. It opened in 1963.

After walking around taking photos of exteriors we were regrouping outside Modling House when one of the residents arrived home.

She asked what we were doing and once we told her we were interested in architecture she invited us into the building to look at the stairs, ‘because they’re lovely’. They were, though I’m not happy with the photos I managed to get of them.

13 photographers milling about in a small space does make it difficult. I was also conscious that this place is home for lots of people and just because we were welcomed in by one resident didn’t make us welcome by all. We took up a lot of space in the lobby, which in itself was photo-worthy. I like the clean lines and uniformity of the lobby which are verging on ‘Wes Anderson’-ish. Lovely.

The next two stops were quick, single towers, fenced off, similar in style and both designed by Denys Landon. The first is Trevelyan House.

The second is Keeling House; very similar in design to Trevelyn House, but with added scaffold.

Sivill House on Columbia Rd was my favourite building of the day, it wasn’t overly interesting to look at from the side we arrived on, with just a 19 storey brick cliff face with windows, though the other side of the building with its curved stairwell exposed was much more interesting. Completed in 1962 it’s another fine Lubetkin designed construction.

As with Modeling House earlier in the day we were invited inside to have a look at the stairs by one of the residents, though the stairwell is completely different; a 19 storey tightly wound circular staircase that would make anyone dizzy running down.

At the behest of the resident we took the lift to the 19^th floor to take a look down the lift shaft and to take in the amazing view from the top. I would have liked to explore this building a bit more, it looks fun.

Our last stop was the least inspiring for me, or at least the exterior was. However, James Bryne had the maddest staircase I’ve ever seen. I tried to take a photo of it from below but it didn’t work very well, there seemed to be loads of interconnecting short stair cases crisscrossing all over the show. It looked very confusing from underneath. I just took a photo of the entrance instead. It was way less mind boggling. The architects really were into curvy concrete stairs in the 50 and 60s, and I like that a lot.

From James Byrne house most of us went to a pub near Liverpool Street Station, I had a swift pint and then caught the tube back home. It was a good day out and I took an awful lot of photos!

Clifton Cathedral

Sunday 12 November 2023 – Bristol.

Eleanor’s youngest son and his partner moved from London to Bristol at the end of summer, his partner had recently joined me as a civil servant, but in another government department, and in Cardiff. They had been thinking about moving there for a while, it’s a city they know well and life there is much cheaper than London. It’s a city I feel fondly about too. This was to be our first visit to their lovely, slightly mad flat in the very nice suburb of Totterdown, near one of the steepest residential streets in England. It is certainly very steep!

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We caught the train down after work on Friday and came back early Sunday afternoon. In what seems to be the norm these days the Sunday journey was the least enjoyable due to cancelled and delayed trains causing our train to be over busy. We were lucky and managed to get seats for both journeys.

After a leisurely breakfast on Saturday morning we visited Bristol’s most visited area, Clifton; and not for of its famous bridge, nor for the loads of small independent shops, though we did do both of those as well. We went because I wanted to take some photos of Clifton Cathedral; Bristol’s Brutalist masterpiece.

Consecrated in 1973, Clifton Cathedral is a magnificent construction with one of the most unusual and beautiful spires I’ve seen. Between 1962 and 1965 the Second Vatican Council met in Rome to discuss the place of the church in the modern world. It was decided that the church needed to be closer to the people it served and this decision played a key part in the brave design of this building with the 1000 strong congregation much closer to the high altar. Sadly the doors were locked and I was unable to look inside.

Built in the ‘brutalist’ style out of precast concrete the building is all harsh angles and sheer walls. Many assume the word ‘brutalist’ has its root in the English word ‘brutal’, and in many cases there is clear argument that some brutalist buildings are quite brutal. However, the origins of ‘brutalist’ goes back to 1950s, to the French architect le Corbusier and the phrase ‘beton brut’, which translates to ‘raw concrete’. The cathedral is certainly that. It was also really hard to photograph, especially in the savage light that morning.

After stopping for a much needed coffee in a Clifton arcade that was extremely busy we walked up to the famous swing bridge. I’ve been here on numerous occasions before and always like visiting, it’s a marvellous structure; and it looks lovely backed with the autumnal trees.

As the evening dark descended we walked down from the heights of Totterdown to Bristol waterfront to find somewhere to eat. I was really surprised at how busy it was, everywhere was packed and we even found it hard to find a bar with a free table.

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Though I was wrapped up, I wasn’t wrapped up well enough and was quite cold all night, definitely not wanting to be sitting outside over a drink. We wandered around town a bit eventually finding a small Chinese noodle house where we had one of the best Chinese meals I’ve had in a long time, and with the restaurant not being licensed it was cheap to.

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The next day we had a late breakfast at a local ‘greasy spoon’ café and then schlepped back to London on an overcrowded train. We’re looking forward to going back to see more of Bristol, and I’m keen to visit Stokes Croft and St Pauls and the places I stayed in when my daughter lived here 10 years ago.