Generally, what captivates me most about old found photos and documentary footage is that sense of looking at ghosts. Watching this film of London in 1926, I experience the reverse: of being myself a ghost from the future visiting people from the past. It happens as the camera rolls along Petticoat Lane, from 4 minutes […]
On the Greenwich Bestiary we chuckle at John Reardon’s Monument to a Dead Parrot. It’s a bird (a cockatoo, to be precise) with a marvellous story that I won’t go into now – you’ll have to come on the walk! Lately, it has put me in mind of Trafalgar Square. Partly, that’s because of the […]
Another find from Greenwich market: a curious snapshot of nineteenth century London where Nelson’s column looms over the Tower and factories nestle beneath St Paul’s. It’s a city on the move, powered by horses, sails and steam. I am naturally drawn to the chimneys and funnels, painting the sky with their smoky plumes. Come to […]
On the Chimneys & Tunnels walk we visit the launch ramp of SS Great Eastern, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s massive iron sailing steam ship. Faced with a rather sad row of wooden sleepers in a quiet backwater of the Isle of Dogs, it’s hard to imagine the astonishing spectacle of the boat’s construction there in the […]
I’ve often wondered how London’s deep tunnels were built in the years between Marc Brunel’s early nineteenth century heroics and today’s monster tunnel boring machines (see Into the void). At what point did men wielding picks disappear from the front line? Not before 1948 it seems, according to Marie Neurath, author and illustrator of the post-war […]
Out on the Greenwich Peninsula once again, this time in the biting cold (see On the edge). My purpose today: all things animal. I’m researching a Thames Bestiary walk that I’ll be leading later in the year. It’s one of a series of riverside trails organised by Viewfinder Gallery. More details coming soon…
Deep sea diving with my zoom lens this morning, waiting for the autumn light to shine on the puffer fish (last week’s Big Discovery). No joy. It seems the earth may now be tilted too far away from the sun. Strangely consoling, then, when this lone magpie flew into the frame: a black-and-white vision of […]
By the Thames at East Tilbury. Sixty years of London lies here, dumped since the 1930s and now buried beneath the marshes. Dislodged glass and china fragments collect on the beach while container ship pass silently by.
