A map of medieval trade networks
Incoming from Michael Jennings: This is very nice. It certainly is. Make the picture as big-picture as you like, or whichever smaller pictures you want to look at as small and detailed as you like.
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Swiss cat ladders
An amusing book. Not a book I’d buy, but a book I am glad to learn about: Switzerland-based graphic designer and writer Brigitte Schuster chronicles the unique phenomenon of outdoor cat ladders in her...
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Ferraris – well lit
On the same night (but later, when it had got dark) that I photoed this rather artistic roof clutter, I also photoed these rather more self-consciously artistic works of art: Photography is light. If...
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The Great Realignment is now up and running
I don’t mean the thing itself, although something along those lines definitely is happening. I mean the blog of that name. Earlier this month, I noted that The Great Realignment …: … was there to be...
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A little shipspotting
A little bit of spotting I mean. The ship itself was rather big. Remember this map, showing where I went walking from Maze Hill station to YOU ARE HERE, and then went north to the Dome: The original...
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A bridge in Serbia with an office and a hotel on it
Dezeen reports on this new bridge, to be built in Serbia: Every time a bridge like this gets proposed (or even built), with architecture on it, however bland and boring it is, I rejoice that the day...
View ArticleTom Holland on the state of democracy in Britain now
This from Tom Holland: Those who speak of the death of British democracy seem to me to have it exactly wrong. Everything that is happening is happening because we, as a country, are testing existential...
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An “electoral pact” is going to happen whether Boris agrees to it in public...
Steve Baker MP says that he struggles to see how Brexit can win the next general election, if Boris doesn’t do a deal with the Brexit Party: I, on the other hand, think that I can see exactly how...
View ArticleStephen Davies on the eflorescences that were stopped and on the eflorescence...
I continue to struggle to find ways of communicating my enthusiasm for Stephen Davies’s new book, The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity. But I now think I know one of the reasons...
View ArticleBad Bach
Here are two enticing paragraphs from a book which is coming out next month, entitled Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia: I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t...
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Big Ben is having its scaffolding removed
Here’s a photo I took from just upstream of the Blackfriars Station entrance. It is of one of the many weird alignments you get, from the fact that the River Thames is not straight, but full of twists...
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Poppies and tablets
Five years ago, to mark the centenary of the outbreak outbreak of World War 1, poppies surrounded the Tower of London Like many others I photoed the poppies, and I photoed a few of those photoing the...
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A new Zaha Hadid Architects railway station in Tallin
The perversely lower-case lettered throughout designboom reports that “zaha hadid architects” have won a competition to build a railway station in “tallin”, which will look like this: At the top of all...
View ArticleEgg-like ice balls are piled up on a beach in Hailuoto
Which is in Finland. Reported a few days ago by CNN, as they tweet here. With a photo. I’ve had a complicated day.
View ArticleAn architectural contrast
I am fond of writing from time to time, about how people with important jobs to do who spend too much time fretting about mere architecture are liable to take their eyes off the ball. What are we...
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Early election news
First, this: Conservatives by anything from a comfortable to a cataclysmic (for Labour) majority. Well, thank goodness for that. Soon after that, the first Portillo-esque moment happened, when a place...
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A selection of 2019 newspaper headlines
I find that newspaper headlines, photoed in such places as shops from which I purchase other goods but not newspapers, can make pleasingly evocative souvenirs, as time goes by. Things that loomed large...
View ArticlePrivate Kissinger
Here is one of many fascinating little details from Snow & Steel by Peter Caddick-Adams (pp. 662-663), which is about the Battle of the Bulge: [T]he town of Krefeld, a port lying on the west bank...
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