london – Where is Phil now?

Lawn Road Flats – AKA The Isokon

London – Saturday 7 June 2025

The Isokon has been on my to-visit list for a while now, ever since I passed it on a walk in July 2023, and my memory of that walk has it much further in the past than just two years; thankfully I wrote a blog! Time is dilating, or expanding. Something like that.

Anyway, I had time to kill today and with the first heavy and persistent rain forecast in what feels like weeks (it’s that time dilatey/expandy thing again) I procrastinated for a while before heading out the door with a raincoat in my bag and fingers crossed I could get there and back without getting too wet. With great fortune the rain arrived just as I walked up the path to my front door. It was proper heavy too.

The Isokon flats are in Hampstead, on the other side on North London to where we live in Leytonstone. If the weather had been better I had planned on doing a longer walk, but even the 14,000 steps I did had me half crippled an hour after I got home. My hips are giving me quite a bit of gip lately, I’m trying to stretch them out after walks and each evening, but not much is working. It’s a bit (lot) frustrating as I like walking.

The Isokon flats were completed in 1934, designed by Wells Coates as Britain’s first modernist apartment building. The concrete block looks almost brutalist now, but was revolutionary then – minimal living spaces with built-in furniture, shared facilities, communal kitchen. It was very European, in both design and its concept of communal living and stood out in what was still a very conservative London. It was the first building domestic building in the UK to be made out of reinforced concrete. There is a lovely little free museum that is open for a few hours each summer weekend.

What makes it more fascinating though are the people who lived there. When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, the building became a refuge for fleeing intellectuals. Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, lived there. So did Marcel Breuer, Henry Moore, and even Agatha Christie for a time.

During the war it housed refugees and became a centre of anti-Nazi activity. The building declined post-war but was beautifully restored in the 2000s. It’s now Grade I listed, finally getting the recognition it deserves as one of Britain’s most important modernist buildings, and it’s beautiful. I love the steps 🙂

The ground floor restaurant, the Isobar, was extraordinary meeting place where refugee designers and architects mixed with British intellectuals. It was also a hub of socialist and communist activity with Austrian Arnold Deutsch once a resident. Deutsch was a key Russian spy who was in part responsible for recruiting the ‘Cambridge Five’- Philby, Blunt, Maclean, Burgess and Cairncross.

As well as work on the design of the building Jack Pritchard also designed the revolutionary furniture to fill the apartments. Made from very modern plywood these pieces are fantastic with the highlight for me the Bauhaus Movement’s Marcel Breuer designed ‘long chair’ and the ‘Penguin Donkey’, a storage unit for Penguin paperbacks.

The building reminds me a bit of Marine Court in St Leonards, marine Court was finished in 1938 and is considerably larger than the Isokon. I’m trying to sell my flat with an aim to buy a flat in Marine Court and go mortgage free.

The vision for a community in a building that drove the design of Isokon is one I would like to take with me to Marine Court; with regular shared meals ‘an eating club’ as it was in the Isokon, taken in a common area in the building. Who know what will happen when I don’t have to work anymore.

As I mentioned in the last post, the first one after I said I was taking a break, I had mostly written this before I decided to finish posting, so here it is almost two months after I visited.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life

London – Sunday 1 June 2025

Having only recently announced I wasn’t going to write any more posts, I feel a little embarrassed to be posting so soon. In my defence I wrote this the day after the walk, and well before the self imposed end. I also mostly finished writing a post about a visit to London’s ‘Isokon’ building, so that may also appear. I’m still stuck on Delhi though.

It’s a rare day when friends or family come to London from New Zealand. Long gone are the halcyon days when we were young and free of mortgages and houses and children and family, friends or ourselves were in good, robust health. Travel is hard and expensive. It was just so nice to have far away friends visit.

M and B are visiting London for a few days as M has a conference to attend, they both lived here, like I did in the 80s, but not exactly at the same time as I was here, though we did cross paths, I think. M visited us a few years back and we did a great Sunday London walk through some of my favourite parts of the inner city, if you can ever define London’s inner city. M wanted to do another Sunday walk on this visit so Eleanor and I arranged to meet them at a café near Holborn tube station. Which of course, it being a Sunday, meant the café was closed.

Other than closed cafés and pubs Sunday is my favourite city walking day, it’s just so much quieter than other days, especially in the morning; a quiet walk is a good walk. We were blessed with the weather; it was neither hot nor cold, perfect for knocking off a 12km walk.

Eleanor and I had been up until 1am, so were in need of the coffee we expected to find at our meeting point, fortunately there was an open café not too far away and the coffee and almond croissant were both welcome and enjoyable. Suitably refreshed we set off on what I hoped would be the interesting walk I’d planned in my head.

Our first stop was Sir John Soane Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I stumbled on it a few years ago when my son was first here, loved it and have been planning on a revisit ever since. Having visitors was the perfect excuse. The ‘house’ is actually three houses that Sir John joined together to house not just himself and his family, but also the vast collection of ‘stuff’ he had accumulated through his and others travels. He was an architect and his collection of art, sculpture, furniture and architectural models reflect his wide curiosity and interest in things historic and beautiful. It is rammed with stuff, a lot of which are plaster casts of original works left in the countries they belong in. I took a lot of photos.

Like me, he also loved ruins, and I find it strange that 200 years ago that some of the ruins I see now were ruins back then; though of course some of those places have been ruins for hundreds of years.

The house was left as a museum when he died in 1837 and is pretty much as it was back then. He was a very well known, and powerful figure; he managed to get a law passed in parliament before he died the “Sir John Soane’s House Museum Act 1833” to prevent his possessions being inherited by his son, who he hated. Not many civilians get a law passed to support their pet grievance. As much as he disliked his son, he was besotted by his wife who died quite young. We had a great chat with one of the volunteers working there who talked about some of the images of his wife that adorned the walls.

It’s an absolute wonder of a museum and we spent a good hour there. I was glad everyone liked it as it sort of set the tone for the rest of the walk.

I took us on a fairly meandering path through Lincoln’s Inn Fields park, where the plane trees destroyed my sinuses, even though I take antihistamine tablets and use a spray; they are lovely trees, but evil.

I digress, I took us on a meandering path through the park then down to Fleet St, and then back up into the old London alleys that link the major roads and are always deserted. I wanted to walk past Dr Johnson’s house and the famous saying that heads this post. Though it was open, we didn’t go in. Not much was going to top Sir John’s pad.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. A sentiment I heartily agree with, which explains why I live here and not New Zealand.

While I had an overall plan for the walk there were a few sections where I had no specific route in mind, so we took in a bit of Farringdon then up to St Barts hospital and the scene of a few gruesome 14^th century executions, such as William Wallace (you need to look him up yourself if you don’t know who is. Think Mel Gibson with a blue face, actually don’t, ignore that prick). We stopped in the Barbican, my favourite place in London for a brief visit and a light lunch.

It was a straight run north from the Barbican to a short section of the Regents Canal, before it disappeared into the Islington Tunnel.

We sort of followed the canal over ground before joining it again when it reappeared back from the gloom. I take most visitors to London on a walk along the canals, they’re a bit of London that not too many people, even Londoners, appreciate. Though the paths have got much busier over the years, they are still a great way to connect interesting bits of the city, avoiding traffic filled, stinking, roads.

We followed the canal to Kings Cross where we stopped for a well earned and refreshing drink (beer) at the fabulous Spiritland.

We were now almost on the last leg of the walk, with the final stop at St Pancras Old Church and the ‘Hardy Tree’, which I discovered was no longer there. Reading about it as I wrote this, I found that it had blown down in 2022. In 1866 the writer, Thomas Hardy worked for the railways moving gravestones around St Pancras Cemetery as some of it had been purchased to build a new train station. Hardy supposedly stacked gravestones around a tree in a section of the cemetery that was to remain in use. This image is from when I visited in 2016.

Sadly, it’s now just a sad looking collection of headstones buried among a dense clump of bramble and weeds. Apparently a new tree has been planted, though I imagine I will not get to see it in its full glory. At least the stones are still there.

We walked back towards the British Museum as M and B were staying nearby and said our goodbyes, then Eleanor and I headed back to Holborn for the tube back home.

It was a great day out. The walk was a success. it was fab spending some time with M and B. I love showing visitors, and myself, bits of London that are slightly off the beaten track.

Five photography exhibitions

London – Friday 17 January 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A walk from Canary Wharf to Liverpool St Station

London – Saturday 28 December 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another classic example is this closed gate.

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

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

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

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

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

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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!

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.

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.

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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

The Barbican

Saturday 6 January 2024 – Barbican, London

Happy New Year!

Another year has ended and a fresh one has begun; maybe this one will be better than the last, or maybe it will be worse, who knows? Not me. There’s an extra day this year so that could be the impetus for something positive happening; like an election in May for instance, and after 14 years we can have a more caring government in the UK.

Anyway, to be more positive; I’ve booked or planned quite a few activities for 2024 and already had two booked for January (A brutal day out and a first visit to Glasgow) before I last minute booked a two hour guided tour of the Barbican for Eleanor and I. I love the Barbican. It’s close to, if not the, top of the list of my favourite places in London. I love the architecture, the design and the build of the theatre and art centre, that its clean and tidy, that the cafes and bars are decent, albeit not cheap, and that there is no hassle from security for photographers. The last point being the most important.

The tour started at 3:00pm and there were about a dozen ‘tourists’, our guide was the best I’ve ever experienced. Knowledgeable, interesting and engaging; but not over the top, if you know what I mean. I really enjoyed the walk and learned a few things, most of which I’ve already forgotten. To be fair this isn’t supposed to be an architecture blog, though I guess it must feel like that sometimes; and yes the next post is also going to be loaded with photos of buildings made of concrete. I seem to have turned into a city-scape photographer. Roll on more travel in 2024.

We started the tour with a brief history of the estate and an introduction to the architects who designed the complex, a lot more of its interesting history was shared as we walked and the guide had some great photos from the past. The most interesting part of the introduction was the choice of materials used to surface the buildings. The original design called for white marble tiles, but the architects managed to dissuade the council who own the estate that concrete was the way to go; in polluted rainy 1950/60s London marble was not going to stay white and unstained for very long.

In a short passage behind a locked door was a concrete ‘sample board’; a long wall of different styles of concrete panels. This was used to influence the chosen ‘skin’ for all the buildings. We also learned that the concrete panels were cast on site then hand battered and drilled to provide the textured surface we see today. It was horrifically expensive in man hours and extremely damaging to the health of the men that did the battering and drilling.

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As the tour was quite late in the day, and it’s winter in London, daylight disappeared quite soon after we started. I took a few photos as we went, but ended up shooting so slowly it was hard to retain any focus. Having said that I have taken loads of photos here in the past, and am sure I will do so again so I wasn’t too concerned. I would quite like to come back for a night shoot, but suspect those friendly security folk will take a different view if tripods were involved. I’m going to add it to the list of possible shoots to do with my brutalist photography buddies.

So here are a small number of Barbican photos. The first camera outing of the year; there will be a few I hope. I’m planning on replacing my camera this year as I’m sick of lugging an old Canon 5d around with me. I love it as a camera, but it’s heavy and big and it’s time to downsize.