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Remember the old joke about the man waking up in New York one day to find that all the building work had been finished? I think it’s happening here in London. With the Diamond Jubilee next week and the Olympics approaching, it seems the scaffolding is coming down all over the city, revealing buildings that have [...] Whenever I return to England everything looks so small compared to other countries – OK, I haven’y flown into Heathrow from Lichenstein but I am always surprised by the low light and the small houses. There may well be tinier buildings – I’m always surprised by the kiosks and bars that get squeezed in between [...] You may have noticed that very bright colours are in at the moment. Gone is the sterile white and grey and glass and concrete of the past few years, and everything now looks like a rainbow is being sick over it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Improved lighting techniques are changing night skylines all [...] Many years ago, when I wrote a thriller called ‘Roofworld’, one of the side effects of that novel was to create an army of readers who sent me shots of things they’d seen looking up at the tops of neglected buildings. Recently, I stumbled across the work of Paul M, a young Australian photographer who [...] Drummonds was always a quirky place. This private bank has been at 49 Charing Cross since 1760. It used to incorporate a military bank, but was acquired by the Royal Bank Of Scotland in 1924. Right until the 1970s, anyone entering the Admiralty Arch branch would have found themselves in a Victorian hall with a [...] Here’s something you probably won’t have seen before (I had to stand on a cafe table to get the shot). The Crossrail project has meant the demolition of entire city blocks in central London, and it’s amazing how quickly one forgets what was there before. It’s not so much the building as where it is; [...] Forgive these shots, taken on the hoof with my phone, but they illustrate the power of lighting, something I was thinking about as I tromped back from the studio, where I’d been ensconced with The Big Star (all to be revealed in July) and watched the low but fierce winter sun spotlight buildings I had [...] More on those books below – ‘London As It Might Have Been’ is an in-depth look at all of the palaces, towers, mausoleums, archways and vast ridiculous constructions architects have planned for the city over the centuries – and there have been a lot of them, idealistic, breathtaking and plain wrong. It’s a fun book [...] When I was a kid, the whole of London was black. Soot from the war had not been removed, so fifteen or so years later it remained. Add the low level of street lighting then, and you had an atmospheric, if rather sinister, city. While I hate vast impersonal glass blocks, there have been improvements, [...] |
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