Today being the BMdotcom day for cats, and now also for other creatures, here is another creature, in this case a chicken, in an advert:

And here, photoed by me recently, outside the Old Vic theatre, is one of these excellent machines referred to in the advert, in action:

You can surely see what I did there, and I assure you that it was no fluke.  I waited for it to say 8.  I also have 9 and 7, because I wanted to make quite sure.  I have been photoing these excellent machines for quite a while now.

The 8build website.  They’re doing some work on the Old Vic.

On the left in the distance, nearing completion, One Blackfriars.  I find liking this Thing a bit of an effort, but I’ll get there.  I always do with such Things.  According to that (Wikipedia), One Blackfriars is nicknamed “The Vase”.  I smell, although I have no evidence for this, an attempt at preemptive nicknaming, by the people who built this Thing.  “We’ll call it The Vase, to stop London calling it something worse.” That’s what happened with The Shard, after all.  And that name stuck.

I tried to make the title of this “8”, but apparently a number with no letters is not allowed.

About a week ago or less, I found myself in the vicinity of The Wheel.  The light was very good, with lots of sunshine and lots of lurid looking clouds.  So, I took photos.

Below are a clutch of The Wheel related photos.  My opinion of how to photo The Wheel is that you should combine The Wheel with other things.  Like graphic designs featuring The Wheel which are in the vicinity of The Wheel.  It’s the old modified cliché routine.

In this photo clutch, however, I do include one very old school photo of The Wheel.  It’s the photo I took of a postcard (1.2), which features The Wheel.  And look what the postcard calls The Wheel.  It calls it The Wheel: “The Wheel”.  None of this “London Eye” nonsense.  Do large numbers of people in other parts of the world call The Wheel The Wheel?  I do hope so.  And I hope that this habit conquers London.

The next four photos, after the postcard (1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3) are all of The Wheel reflected in a tourist crap shop.  And then 3.1 is of The Wheel reflected in a place, next door, that sells sandwiches.

I like how I totally lined up the circular blue logo with The Wheel reflection, in 2.3.  Could I also have done something similar with the circular things in 2.1 and 2.2, in the latter case an actual picture of The Wheel.  I rather think that I tried, but couldn’t do that.  But, memo to self, return to this enticing spot, on a nice day, and see what I can do.

This is what I like about taking photos in London, rather than in some foreign spot that I am only going to be in once.  If, upon reflection back home, I suspect that I might have been able to do some of the photos better, I can, in London, go back to try to do this.

Then being five and a half years ago, with a sunset behind it and some birds in front of it:

The structure in the foreground there is …:

… which is on the other side of the River from me, across Vauxhall Bridge Road and turn ride along the path next to the River.

Right now, Battersea Power Station is in a rather different state, which you can actually see rather well in that famous view from Ebury Bridge Road, looking out over the railway lines that leave Victoria to go south over the River:

The whole area, in it and around it, is being turned into apartments.  They’re even going to have their own new tube station, at the far end of a new bit of the Northern Line.

On the same day I took this photo (and all the other photos mentioned in that posting (most especially these ones)), I also took these photos of what is happening in and around the Power Station:

The first one there was taken from Battersea Park railway station, the other two shots from nearer to all the building.  That fake-up of how it will look tells you ... how it will look.  If you are a helicopter traveller.

What’s happening in Battersea is the one great exception to the otherwise inexorable drift of London’s centre of gravity eastwards.

Here via here (Ephemeraren’t?).

My favourite (scroll down here) is this one, a Buddha under construction in Thailand:

Sculpture that’s of something.  Scaffolding.  A magnificent crane.

Excellent.

I finally arrive at the official designated purpose of my Tottenham expedition back in November, which was to check out progress on the new stadium.

Here is what this was looking like.  Lots of cranes.  Lots of scaffolding.  And big signs on the perimeter fence celebrating glorious moments in Spurs history:

2.1, in pleasing contrast to the masculinities of football and construction, a girly bus goes by.

3.2 features how the new stadium will look from above.

It will be entertaining to return in a couple of years time, to see how it all ends up looking.

In this report, you can see more pictures of progress, viewed from above.

At present Spurs seem to be doing rather well.  Today, they drew with Man City, having been two goals adrift, which was a result, and they are in second place in the Premiership.

I had been expecting them to be doing rather badly just now, what with this new custom built headquarters being now under construction.

Today, after being knackered yesterday, I had a quiet day, but just before it got dark, I visited my roof, and took photos.  As you can see from a couple of clocks in the pictures (this one (1.1) and this one (3.1)), it was just after half past three, and already it was starting to get dark:

My official purpose was to find out what stage the new US Embassy has got to (1.3).  But I also like 1.2 and 2.1, because they feature bright lights, looking almost as bright in my photos as they did for real.  3.3 features a view of the next door tower block that I hadn’t noticed before, flanked rather pleasingly by chimneys.

The sky (2.2) was also looking good, it being vapour trail weather.

The first of my two trips earlier this week to Tottenham was on Monday, and, as soon as I stepped beyond the front door that I share with my neighbours, the weather put me in very a good mood.  It was exactly as had been prophesied, namely: perfect.  Sky, fifty shades of blue, depending on what else you put next to it, thus:

All of these photos involve scaffolding, which is a thing I love, along with cranes.  (Also bridges.) Scaffolding says that Men Are Working, building a better future for us all.  Scaffolding says that Men With Money think that here, there is more money to be made, selling or renting new or newly refurbished places.  Cranes say the same.  (Bridges say: here are two places worth connecting.)

On a day such as Monday was, scaffolding can look especially fine, because Monday was the kind of day when just about anything was looking fine.

1.1 is of some home improvement going on as seen from just outside my front door.  1.2 and 2.1 are both of the building going on across my courtyard, where they are turning a posh office into posh flats.  And 2.2 is of some scaffolding to be seen in Vauxhall Bridge Road.  (Although there seems to be disagreement between the sign in my photo and the only relevant website I could find, concerning what number to ring to get Superior Access Scaffolding.)

Lovely.

And all of this before I had even arrived at Pimlico Tube.  It was an auspicious start.  The rest of the day did not disappoint.

A few days ago, the weather was gorgeous, in the early morning.  Forewarned by a typically omniscient short-term weather forecast, I got up early and went up to the roof of my block of flats.  I particularly wanted to photo the progress of the building work opposite, and more distantly, the progress of the new US Embassy over towards Battersea, which happens to be very visible from this spot.  But I also photoed roof clutter, near and far:

1.1 That building, on the far side of Victoria Street from me, used to be New Scotland Yard, but the Metropolitan Police are moving (to a building right next to the original Scotland Yard), and it seems that one of London’s finer roof clutter clusters will soon be no more, to be replaced by these new towers.  Blog and learn. 

1.2 Some of the scaffolding opposite, mingling with aerials, and with an older kind of aerial for tuning in to messages from the heavens, otherwise known as a church spire.

2.1 Clutter at its most cluttered close up.  Is that stuff in the foreground maybe something to do with mobile phones?  In the distance, Battersea Power Sation, with one of its chimneys yet to be completely reconstructed.

2.2 Me photoing a satellite dish, and my shadow photoing the shadow of the satellite dish.

Tomorrow’s weather is also due to be gorgeous.

I’ve been photoing the Pavlova Statue outside Victoria Station for a long time.  On the left here is how she was looking, on a particularly sunny day ten years ago:

But look at the state of her now, as shown on the right.  I got quite a shock, I can tell you, when I came upon her about a fortnight ago, looking like this.

The Victoria Palace Theatre is being refurbished.

This scaffolding is recent.  I photoed it today:

That’s Waterloo, the new bit, the bit where the Eurostar trains used to arrive and depart, into that big New Thing that looks like a big, elongated greenhouse.  And what I think we observe here is the start of getting those Eurostar platforms-that-were back into business.  Not before time.

Here is an Evening Standard piece from March, when this refurbishment was announced.  From that, a visual of what the new concourse area will look like:

Memo to self.  I’ll take a look inside Waterloo, Real Soon Now, to see how this is looking from there.  Although I doubt there will be much to see.  But, maybe that raised-up shopping mall will make it easier to see what’s happening.

More about the revamp in a later ES piece, from July, here.

I collect footbridges.  (Well, photos of.) Footbridges famous.  Footbridges not so famous.  Footbridges not even built.

Recently I came upon another for the collection:

This is a footbridge at the back of the Strand Palace Hotel.  I could find nothing about this footbridge on the www, but luckily I had already taken the precaution of asking someone local, just after I had taken my photos.  This local was entering an office in the same street with the air of doing this regularly, and who therefore seemed like someone who might know.  And he did.  What about that bridge? - I asked him.

Yes, he said.  That used to be the bridge that conveyed the servants from the Strand Palace Hotel, on the left in the above photo, to the servants quarters, which is what the dwellings on the right in my photo, behind the scaffolding, used to be.  These servants quarters had, quite a while back, been turned into mere quarters, for regular people to live in.  So, the bridge then got blocked off at the right hand end as we here look at it.  But, the bridge continued to be used by the Strand Palace Hotel as an elongated cupboard.  These old servants quarters are now being turned into luxury flats, which is why the scaffolding.  But the bridge stays.

That the original purpose of the bridge was to convey servants, as opposed to people, is presumably why the bridge has no windows.  Wouldn’t want to see servants going to and fro, would we.  Fair dos, actually.  A hotel of this sort – this one being just across the Strand from the Savoy - is a lot like a theatre, and the point of a theatre is not to see all the backstage staff wandering hither and thither.  So, I do get it.  And I doubt the servants minded that there were no windows.  I bet they minded lots of other things, but not that.

I will now expand on the matter of the exact location of this obscure footbridge.  As you can see from the square to the right, it is in Exeter Street, London WC2.  I took other photos of this Exeter Street street sign, because I have a rule about photoing information about interesting things that I photo, as well as photoing the interesting thing itself, which is that I do.  Sometimes, as on the day I took this photo, I even follow this rule.  But I thought I’d try extricating a detail from the above photo, and see how I did.  I blew the original up to maximum size, and sliced out a rectangle, tall and thin, with the street name in it.  I then expanded (see the first sentence of this paragraph) what I had, sideways, lightened it, contrasted it, sharpened it, blah blah blah, and I think you will agree that the result is unambiguous.  My point here is (a): Exeter Street, WC2, and (b): that such photomanipulation is not merely now possible.  My point (b) is that it is now very easy.  Even I can do all of this photomanipulation, really quickly and confidently.

I can remember when the only people who could work this sort of magic were spooks in movies, and then a bit later, detectives on the television.

Talking of spookiness, I included the surveillance camera in that little detail.  In London, these things are now everywhere.  Because of my sideways expanding of the photo, this camera looks like it sticks out more than it really does.

I love all the paraphernalia, big and small, of London tourism.  And with my digital camera, and more to the point with my habit of having my digital camera with me and keeping a lookout for things to photo with it, I don’t have to buy any of it.  I can just photo it.

Today, for instance, from inside the laundrette that I have been frequenting lately, for my end of summer clothes washes, I spied this bus (I think there is only one such) going past.  This is one of London’s more diverting sights.  And I managed to get a zoom-snap of it before it got too far away:

Not bad, considering how gloomy the light was today.

Website here.

That back window is actually quite a good detail to focus on.  If you look a bit carefully (enlarge with a click), you can see that it is also the EMERGENCY EXIT.

In this case police cyclists, photoed by me in Waterloo Road last Tuesday, after I had descended from the top of the Tate Modern Extension:

I am not showing you this photo for artistic impression, strictly for its content.  At the time I just thought I was photoing police on bikes, which is about as common as police on horses.  But while I took the photo, I heard a voice next to me say something like: “There go the police, ignoring the red lights.” And they were, as is evidenced by the green light telling us pedestrians that we could cross.  At the time I also thought: did I get the green light?  Yes I did.  And I don’t think that the lady on the other side of the road is that impressed either.

Also, the policeman on the right is holding a mobile phone in his right hand, which is the kind of behaviour that the police are cracking down on when anyone else does it.

A few years back, cyclists behaved like the law didn’t apply to them, which presumably it didn’t, in the sense that nobody applied it to them.  Cyclists would grab all the rights and privileges of motorists and of pedestrians, switching from one to the other whenever they felt like it, doing such things as biking past you at speed, on the pavement.  But then, in London anyway, somebody did apply the law to them.  My experience is that cyclists now behave much better than they used to.

But these police cyclists don’t seem to have got that memo.

Yesterday - yesterday morning - I visited the top of the Tate Modern Extension again.  I went in the morning because I needed the light coming from the direction it comes from in the morning, for reasons that I may (although I promise nothing) explain at some future date in some future posting.  Also, the weather forecast forecast a lot of light yesterday.  It was right about this, because it is right about everything.

I took about seven hundred photos, of which I suppose about two hundred or so were each good enough to display here.  But which to show?  And to illustrate what opinion?  So many photos.  So many opinions.

After many minutes of failed deciding, I eventually decided on one almost at random.  This:

At the centre point of this photo is Centre Point, now kitted out in its revamp costume.  It doesn’t look like that normally, and soon it will (I presume) be back to looking as it always did.

Once again, we observe the Wembley Arch, this time supplying the backup visuals for a crane.

And the other notable sight here is Renzo Piano’s Other London Building, in the form of his multi-coloured office block, right next to Centre Point.  I’ve already mentioned this, here, and here.

I linked from the latter posting to this Evening Standard piece about this building, which includes this:

The material of the coloured walls is glazed ceramic, assembled out of thousands of individual pieces. This material will barely fade and is self-cleaning in the rain, so will look much the same as it does now for decades

Good to know.  This is the kind of thing that Renzo Piano tends to get right.

I also like the little orange box, presumably for getting revamping materials to all the parts of Centre Point that need it.

How soon before Centre Point itself bursts into colour?

Today I was in Croydon.  Not for long, but I was in Croydon.  While in Croydon I took photos.

Like this one, of No. 1 Croydon:

And like this one, of a buildlng which was being modified, but whose name I did not catch:

Why was I in Croydon?  I had my reason.  More tomorrow, or some day, or maybe never.  I promise nothing.