small ritual

party in the cathedral

for the second year gloucester 'fresh expression' feig held an event/party in gloucester cathedral the night before greenbelt. i couldn't make it last year because of work commitments, but the word was so good i was determined to go this year. plus i knew that the cathedral [one of my favourites] would be beautiful. and indeed the event was gorgeous. there will be movies of the labyrinth too, but i'm now at greenbelt and can't get the time/bandwidth.

this is my idea of how church should be - a party in a beautiful building. certainly it's how cathedrals should be used. these are places where one is normally a tourist among the crowds, or consciously on one's best behaviour. so to wander, wine in hand, through illuminated cloisters and arches with laughing friends and running children is heavenly.

see also here and here for more of this notion.

50

50 today. no cards because there's a postal strike in london today - there's about one a week at the moment, i don't know why. i spent over 6 hours on site in a meeting, or series of meetings rolled together, until the security guard on the building chucked us all out. it was too late to go back to the office, so i went to st pauls tube station to go home. i always seem to end up working late on my birthday due to some project crisis - i think it just reflects the timing of building projects which happen in the summer. it's always frantic in the run up to christmas, too, but that is usually design or drawing work that has to be closed out by christmas so that a new phase can begin in january [to go on site in spring, to hit crises in august, etc etc].

so i never have time or energy in august to fix up birthday celebrations. i know it's going to be derailed by work.

robes and concrete

on june 24th i was passing the guildhall on my way back to the office, and paused to photograph the brutalist wing which i've always liked. then i noticed the harry potter style dudes under the porch. moments later the lord mayor and his entourage arrived in three rolls royces. notices in the courtyard told me that this was for the annual election of sheriffs. i moved as close as i dared to take photos, and when they'd entered i turned my attention to the rolls royces.

from the website of the worshipful company of constructors:

There are two Sheriffs of the City of London. The Sheriffs are elected annually by the Liverymen of the Livery Companies, and it is a requirement for a Lord Mayor of the City of London to previously have served as a Sheriff. They are elected at the Midsummer Common Hall by the Liverymen by acclamation unless a ballot is demanded from the floor which takes place within 14 days.

The title of Sheriff, or "Shire Reeve", evolved during the Anglo-Saxon period of English history; the Reeve was the representative of the king in a city, town or shire, responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing the law. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, the City of London had Sheriffs, usually two at a time; the Sheriffs were the most important city officials and collected London's annual taxes on behalf of the royal exchequer; they also had judicial duties in the City's law courts. Until 1130, the sheriffs were directly appointed by the king; however, London gained a degree of self-government during the 12th century, including the right to choose its own Sheriff, a right which was affirmed in an 1141 charter by King Stephen.

In 1189, an annually elected mayor was introduced as chief magistrate for the City of London (along the lines of some European cities of the time such as Rouen and Liege); this change was reaffirmed by a charter granted by King John in 1215. As such, the Sheriffs were relegated to a less senior role in the running of the city, and became subordinate to the mayor. However, the mayor (later Lord Mayor of the City of London) generally served as sheriff before becoming mayor, and in 1385 the Common Council of London stipulated that every future Lord Mayor should "have previously been Sheriff so that he may be tried as to his governance and bounty before he attains to the Estate of Mayoralty"; this tradition continues to this day.

it's good to be working in the city again. i realise how much it's inspired the smallritual.org urban spirituality stuff, most obviously this.

london from the air

for the next few months i'm working on a project in cheapside opposite st mary le bow. as part of this i visited the client's current office high in tower 42, which is still for the moment the tallest building in central london. the views across london are stunning, and the photos can be pored over full size - not bad considering they were taken through windows.

mid-meeting, a peregrine falcon appeared outside the tower, wheeling alone in the sky at our level, looking down for prey - presumably pigeons.

teenage sketches find audience

this set of 1976 design sketches was never blogged or added to any flickr groups etc, and had very few views while it was near the top of my flickr stream. and then it started to rack up hundreds of views. turns out that things magazine had picked it up [7th paragraph down]. not sure how except that i linked to things magazine pelican project a long time ago on my delicious.

party on top of the gherkin

tonight i was at a drinks party in the 40/30 restaurant on top of the gherkin [check out the flythrough on their website]. the top of the building is a glass dome with probably the best views of central london right now. my photos here.

the interior was designed by one of my work colleagues at tp bennett. we take clients there to impress them, but i've never been included on these trips yet so i jumped at the chance to go.

prague

things about prague:

1. it is ridiculously beautiful, but much of the beauty is diffused across the urban scenery rather than being concentrated into set-pieces. this means that you want to photograph almost everything, and yet the thing that you have in your viewfinder isn't that special by itself. it's the accumulation of small beauties, street after street to wasteful profusion, that counts.

2. conversely, most of the set-piece beauties, like the charles bridge or old town square, are so crowded with tourists and souvenir-sellers that you can't get a decent shot. all the best photos of those places are in books, taken at dawn, taken ten years ago. when i was there, the old town square's best view had a giant screen set up with car advertising so that people could watch the euro 2008 football tournament. the charles bridge has roadworks and scaffolding at one end. much of the cathedral is covered in blue scaffolding [which my photos avoid, hence none of the apse].

3. so i kind of gave up on general photography of the obvious things, and yet i still came back with over 200 photos.

4. the cathedral is one of the most photogenic buildings i have ever encountered, externally at least. inside is disappointing - bald - by comparison, except for the tomb of john of nepomuk. i couldn't get anywhere near the tomb of st. wenceslaus because of the crowds.

5. signs in prague are quirky. symbols are subject to individual, rather whimsical, interpretation. the road-mender doesn't always have high heels, the zebra crossing man is sometimes short and dumpy not at all like michael jackson. in britain the signage system was created by graphic designers to be rational, legible and uniform, so the czech versions look charmingly amateur.

6. the tv tower is a great piece of communist futurism, although it was finished after the revolution. the inside is as functional as a bus shelter, but who's looking?

7. the metro is another great piece of communist futurism - at least the central mid-1970s stations. each station has a diferent colour combination. amazing what can be done if there is no advertising. note also the neat modernist graphics.

not bad for a weekend, i guess, especially when you throw in the drum'n'bass. here's a photo [taken by peter davis, top] of some of the junglists in the tv tower lift [top right is me]. lev [lower left] said it looked like "a future dub group - lunar moon kit four or something" so i added the caption. aiming for the cover of knowledge magazine.

paris

went to paris the week before last courtesy of clestra who were launching a new partition range at the T1 tower in la defense. we took the eurostar on thursday morning [champagne all round], lunch in the restaurant on top of the pompidou centre looking out across paris. then a walking tour of some of the newer parts of paris near the bibliotheque nationale. then to the very 'boutique' hotel kube - we made note of the ice bar for later. then the clestra party, and back to the ice bar for vodka. in the morning we took the eurostar back to st pancras again, and some of us went back to work.

where the action is

i found some more communist postcards today - by strange coincidence one of them is a picture of luzhniki stadium where today's champions league final is taking place.

the future of london from 1945

as depicted in the county of london plan. you can see it all coming - the huge clearances of city fabric, the tower blocks, the urban motorways. of course, after the depression and the war much of london was in a terrible state. many people had lost their homes, many lived in overcrowded conditions with poor sanitation. the war had shown what centralised planning could achieve, and people expected great things in peacetime. the affluent consumer society was not foreseen, so the only way you were going to get a bathroom was by government provision. industry was smoky and polluting, so it had to be separated from housing. open space and sunlight were a public health requirement in an age when slum children had rickets. so goodbye shoreditch, and all those other chaotic areas that we all love now.

it was a socialist vision. private enterprise had made a terrible mess, and only the state acting on behalf of ordinary people could muster the resources to clear it up. it was a modernist vision, rational and scientific, collectivist. people would all have the same, and all have enough, and be content with that. people would be decent and community-minded and not vandalise the common areas or attack you just because there was no-one around. nobody would be goaded into such actions by inequality, unemployment or family breakdown. the eventual architecture brought its own problems, but still these wartime visions pose uncomfortable questions about the kind of society we have become.