I’ve got a photo-essay up at Samizdata about One New Change, which maybe should have had a more compelling and informative title than “One New Change”.  Something like: “The roof of One New Change and what you can see from it”.

When on my way to One New Change, walking there from Lower Marsh (i.e. from this shop), I took many other photos, including the ones that follow of bridges.  The sky was especially photogenic that day, which was about one week ago.  The weather then was generally horrible, but that afternoon seemed like a break in it, and so it proved.

First, a favourite London footbridge (one of many favourite London footbridges), the one that helps to take travellers from Waterloo railway station to Waterloo East railway station:

I love the adhoc-ness of it.  I bet when they first put that up, they didn’t think it would still be there however many decades it is later.

Next, one of London’s great out-in-the-open dramas, namely those mysterious columns that used to support an earlier version of Blackfriars railway bridge, and have been there ever since, just standing there, doing nothing but look mysterious.  The drama being: what will happen to them?  Obviously something.  But what?  When?  ( Will I live to see it?)

There is now much activity on and next to these columns, because, as already noted here, they are rebuilding Blackfriars railway station on the revised and still busy version of Blackfriars railway bridge, all the way across, with entrances on both sides of the river:

But, are they only using the columns to help them build stuff on the old bridge?  Will anything permanent be placed on the columns?  Little walkways across to Blackfriars road bridge?  A couple of little shopping places?  Or will they just be left there, again.  Like I say, they ought to make something of these things.  It’s the kind of thing that architects and designers happen, just now, to be doing really well.  So, do it, I say.

Next, how the new Blackfriars railway station is looking, with me looking back into the afternoon sun, which makes it all seem rather foreboding and funereal:

The big metal thing in the foreground is because this was taken from the Millennium Footbridge, the one that joins Tate Modern to St Paul’s.

Finally, from the same spot but looking the other way, down river, which totally cheers up the lighting because now the afternoon sun is behind me, a
classic Shard shot, complete with a couple more classic London bridges, Southwark, and in the distance, Tower:

Between Southwark Bridge and Tower Bridge, there is another London bridge, namely London Bridge.  But you can’t see much of that.

As I say at the end of my Samizdata piece, I think the Shard now looks great.  I think it is the best London Big Thing of the last few years, edging both the Gherkin and the Wheel into also rans.  I also think it may be the best thing that Renzo Piano has ever done, judging by what I have seen of his other stuff.

By the way, I would have liked rather more than just the one somewhat-beside-the-point comment that it has attracted so far, on that Samizdata piece about One New Change.  Vain and selfish and silly I know, but there you go.  So if anyone reading this cares to oblige with something pertinent, there, I would be most obliged.

It’s been a while since I’ve featured a viaduct here.  Time to correct that:

It’s Glenfinnan Viaduct.  The picture of it above, taken by Jason Hawkes, is one of these.

More aerial photos by Hawkes here.

I here at BrianMicklethwaitDotCom do love a good bridge, and here is a bridge with a difference:

It’s the Rainbow Bridge next to Lake Powell in Utah, USA.  The difference from regular bridges being that nobody built it.  It just happened.  It is very big.  Bigger, I suspect than it looks in the many, many photos that have been taken of it, on account of the clear air making everything in those parts look nearer and hence smaller than it really is.

I learned of it because Stephen Fry went to visit it, in the course of making his TV series about America.

Indeed.  Rootling through my photo-archives, I came across this from June of this year:

It’s the addition of vegetation that I particularly like.  Neither the scaffolding nor the vegetation is trying to look good.  Both do, I think.

For ages now I have been wondering how exactly to blog some more about the big and rather beautiful footbridge that goes north south across the Royal Victoria Dock.  Well, here are a couple of pictures of this bridge, taken by me from the north side of the Dock, looking back towards the Docklands Towers, the Dome, and central(er) London generally.

This picture is probably better from the artistic expression point of view:

But this next one shows how the bridge works much better, because it includes the two lumpy towers that pedestrians must go up and down at each end when they use the bridge:

The walkway doesn’t just carrying on walking, so to speak, the way it does with the best urban footbridges.  Instead it sits above the urban fabric, disembodied, separate.  And rather inconvenient.  (But, a great place to take photos from.)

On the right there you can just see the edge of the gigantic ExCeL building.

My friend Gus, who is a structural engineer who specialises in bridges (and who knows about every bridge recently constructed anywhere), recently told me that this bridge began life as a transporter bridge.  That is to say, there was originally going to be a mobile platform, hanging down from the top deck, moving people and things across at ground level, so to speak, while still allowing tall boats to go through underneath.  That makes sense.  It does look a lot like a transporter bridge, but without the transport bit and hence able to be more thin and elegant.

I really like it.

Like I said (see immediately below), a good photo-trip yields many treasures.  From the purely artistic impression point of view, one of my favourite snaps that I took last Sunday was this:

That’s the underneath of our final railway bridge before we got to where Old Oak Lane crosses the canal, and we went north along it to the station, and home.

Things I like about it:

No graffiti.  They would have if they could have, because there is graffiti everywhere else in the near vicinity, including all over that same bridge, except on that wall.

I used my good camera, the Panasonic G1.  Cumbersome normally, but good if the day is dedicated to photography and nothing else.  Lots of brick detail, and lots of near-evening shadows.

Even the best cameras have a problem with lots of sky on a bright day, either turning the sky white or the stuff below it black.  But here the bridge blots out almost all the whiteness, apart from a tiny bit top right. 

And even that little bit is nice, because look at the contrast between how even the brightly lit bank looks for real, and how the sky looks - bright blue - when reflected in the water.  One of the nicest light effects is when the sky is bright white, but is also reflected in something like water or windows, and it suddenly turns blue and fills up with clouds.

Finally, it’s not quite your usual pretty photo.  There were gasholders nearby as well, and the photos of them came out predictably well too.  But everyone knows about the photographic joys of gasholders.

A successful photo-expedition yields about a dozen potential blog postings.  Here is another, derived from the excellent canalside walk I went on last Sunday with Goddaughter One, already mentioned here.

Our itinerary was basically Camden to Willesden, but we took a quite big detour to visit Paddington Basin.  We turned left, in other words, at Little Venice, before going back up to Little Venice and on west.

A particular bonus of the Paddington detour was that I finally got to see the famous Thomas Heatherwick rolling bridge, in the flesh.  Not actually rolling, you understand, but one does like to see these things close up.

However, as Goddaughter One warned me before we got there, although this is a most delightful thing, it is a bit of an indulgence.  It enables you to avoid a tiny detour, rather than get anywhere that you otherwise could not get to.

Here is one of my photos of it:

But click on that, and you see the truer picture.  Okay, that doesn’t prove it, because there might be more water to the bottom left or the bottom right.  But add this unlovely photo to the mix …

… and you get the full picture.  It’s a tiny little inlet, not a canal or anything, and I also wonder how much actual water traffic ever goes under it.  How often, that is to say, do they have to roll it up?

Not that I’m complaining.  I think it is a wondrous object.

Indeed:

Photoed by me last Sunday, beside the Grand Union Canal.

The photo I took just before that one looked like this:

And the one just after, like this:

I know, I obviously take a lot of photos, and most of them are very ordinary.  I photograph signposts to tell me where I was at any particular time, and other snaps just aren’t very distinguished.  The marginal cost of digital photography is zero.  All of which is true, but none of which is my point here.  My point is: look at the graffiti.  Even the sign that the guy who lost his keys stuck his little sign on is covered in graffiti.  This is not the kind of area where you would expect anyone to be ringing up a stranger to return his keys.

I and Goddaughter One saw a lot of graffiti last Sunday.  For me, thinking about our expedition now, this was the one depressing thing about an otherwise perfect day.

In one of my favourite recently discovered spots in London, on the south side of the River beyond the Thames Barrier, is a truly strange modern footbridge, done in the structure-as-decoration style so characteristic of our time.  The location of this bridge is at the north end, the end that stops at the river, of Antelope Road, London SE18, and then a few yards to the west.

Here it is from the west:

And here is the photo I took, looking back east, from on top of this bridge, very similar to this photo (which was of course taken the same evening), but from up some steps:

And here is the bridge, seen from the other side:

No, I don’t know what happened to the pink sky.  Sorry.

The strange thing about this bridge is why it exists, as in: I don’t know why it exists.  The barrier it goes over is a brick wall.  Why did They not just knock a hole in the wall, add some steps on the eastern side of the gap to deal with the slight height difference, and leave it at that?

It’s now rare for me to find a picture of a stylish new bridge that I haven’t ever seen before.  Here is one:

That’s the nicest snap I’ve been able to find of the Seafarers Bridge in Melbourne.  Other good pix of it here together with explanatory verbiage.

Here at BM.com, we now particularly like Melbourne.

For some time now I have had a couple of nice bridge pictures clogging up my desktop, and I want to dump them here, note them, say how nice they are, and then forget about them.

First there is this very recent bridge, for a high speed railway:

And this one:

...which is an aqueduct.

I like a lot of things about both these bridges.

I like how plain concrete works in sun drenched places, the way it doesn’t in merely drenched places like the one I live in.  I went to the south of France a few years back, and suddenly, concrete modernism was an evolved tradition rather than a totalitarian horror show imposed by people getting even with the human race for having been bullied by it at school, or whatever it was.

I like how both bridges are gun barrel straight, one because the trains are travelling as fast as airplanes and would crash if the bridge was not gun barrel straight, and the other because it is for transporting water, and that can’t work if the bridge goes up and down even a bit.

I like how they could build the train bridge during the dry season.  How convenient.  Just the one dry season, I trust.

And I especially like the aqueduct, which was built in 1939, for its unselfconscious functionality.  If only all modernism worked so well.

The train bridge is “all rights reserved”, so if there’s a complaint it may have to disappear from here.

Came across this photo, here, having been sent there to read something else that I’ve forgotten about.  Let’s backtrack and see.  Yes, apparently I was reading this, for some bizarre reason or other.  Plus, rootling through these photos also got me paying some attention to aqueducts.  So anyway, the photo (slightly flattened):

A chance for the New York Post to get in a dig at the Israelis for being horrid to the Palestinians:

The fishermen go out every morning hoping that they will be allowed to go out to sea, but Israeli navy forces rarely allow them to leave the shallow waters.

Because after all, under no circumstances whatsoever could “fishermen” possibly be doubling up as anything else.

So, also a chance for me to link back to a posting here about how my attitude to Israel is one of unconditional positive regard.

But putting all that to one side, nice photo.

Yes, yesterday’s posting got me thinking (again): bridges, and here’s another classic:

This photo was taken in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1905, which is when this bridge was built.  Or maybe that should be “made” This thing seems too elegant to have been merely “built”.  “Built” makes it sound more like Tower Bridge or some such more earthbound construction.

In 1929 they got rid of the moving platform and replaced it with an entire road that went up and down.

This is one of the places that the modern movement in architecture came from.  The architects looked at things like this and said: why can’t our forms follow function as beautifully as that?  Why can’t we shake off the past, like those lucky engineers are doing?

Only those spikes look to be a bit on the merely decorative side, but maybe even they have a function too.  Yes.  Take a closer look and it definitely looks like they’re there for a reason.  Lightning conductors perhaps?

More antique Duluth engineering strangeness from the great Shorpy here.

Indeed:

Hungerford bridge is not a bridge in the small Wiltshire market town of Hungerford.  Rather is it the railway bridge that takes the trains across the river Thames out of Charing Cross railway station in the heart of London.  Some of which you probably guessed, what with the Wheel being so clearly visible.  On either side of Hungerford Bridge there are those two new footbridges, held up by cables hanging from spikes, with the spikes looking like they now also hold up Hungerford Bridge, but not actually doing that.

I’ve walked under that bridge, along the south bank past the Royal Festival Hall towards the Wheel, many dozens of times, but have never noticed that particular shot before.

I like the colours, all blacks and greys, of the bridge, and that dreary grey sky.  Taken yesterday afternoon.

Went browsing through Flickr, looking for bridges, which I’ve not done for a while, and I quickly found my way to this.  Here’s a slice of that picture, taken in October 2007:

It looks to have been taken at that lovely, misty time of the (guess) evening.  (I tried sharpening it, but this spoilt the atmosphere.) It’s the “Bay Bridge”, together with a new and much duller one being built alongside it.  I don’t know which bay it is.  Anyone?  I assume it’s in the USA somewhere.

The new Flickr interface is taking a bit of getting used to.  Why can’t everything stay as it is?  Well, not everything.  Just the Flickr interface.