Simon Bradshaw

I've discovered a fresh bit of amazing London architecture: the Royal College of Physicians building next to Regent's Park.



I was there Friday afternoon and Saturday morning for a legal event (Chancery Bar Association winter conference) and was immediately impressed by the building. Its style seemed familiar and I wasn't at all surprised to find that it was by Denys Lasdun, architect of the Royal National Theatre and Keeling House (the latter being familiar to me via purplecthulhu).

Even more interestingly the RCP was about to open its exhibition on John Dee, so I was able to get a sneak peek.



I'll definitely be going back soon, both to see the full Dee exhibition and to further admire Lasdun's architecture.

A wonderful blog post by Robert Roger Ebert looking back on his times liviing on Jermyn Street (also proof that you can have a sensible and intelligent set of blog comments, even in this day and age.) Prompted by news of the closure of 22 Jermyn Street, the eccentric hotel he regularly stayed in, now being demolished for yet another 2012 regeneration project.

Jermyn St is in the heart of one of those parts of London I am very fond of. St James, and its surrounds, is a little microcosm of how I used to imagine London was when I was small, all ornate little specialist shops. It's a shame to hear of more redevelopment; I suspect the external shells will remain, but it's not just outward appearances that make a locale.

It was a nice crisp morning as I took the DLR in today, so rather than endure the central line crush I decided to walk to Holborn from Bank. On the way I passed a rather striking building site at Cheapside... ( pictures inside )

Pictures taken with my iPhone, uploaded to Dropbox, and then edited online via Picnik before posting to LiveJournal. Cloud computing for the win!

Does anyone have any experience of or even reliable anecdotes about car clubs?

I can't remember exactly how long it is that I've been going to the Great British Beer Festival; I think vicarage dragged me along some time in the mid-90s at which point I promptly joined CAMRA and have been going fairly regularly ever since. The key lesson I soon learned is to go during the afternoon rather than the evening, unless queues ten-deep at the beer stands are your thing. So yesterday I pitched up at about half-one, obtained a glass and a programme (450 beers!) and started sampling. Pretty soon I ran into ms_cataclysm's R, together with mutual friend R from pub quizzing; the afternoon also featured the newly-arrived-in-London cairmen and B, plus pogodragon and barking_watcher who we ran into a little later. Oh, and Paul T was stewarding.

I ended up trying some seven different beers (my tasting notes got a bit fragmentary towards the end). I didn't set out to drink mainly porters and stouts, but I do like dark beer and there were so many on offer it was hard to avoid trying them. I'd have to pick the ever-reliable Spectrum Brewery's Black Buffle as the pick of the bunch, but special mentions should go to Highland's Dark Munro and, from the US stand, Martha's Exchange Smoked Porter. As a porter it was relatively light-coloured (dark ruby more than deep brown) but the taste was superb.

Scariest sight of the afternoon: the EU Pork Scratchings Mountain:



There was some discussion as to whether Real Ale and Pork Scratchings constitute a balanced diet, or if they just counteract each other's effects. Further research is indicated.

Is anyone interested in this 2-hour walking tour of the Liveries and Guilds of London, 11-1 on Sunday 28th June?

"The City Livery Companies date back to before the Norman Conquest and are still a vital part of the City of London today. Discover the history of the liveries which once regulated the trade, set the wages and standards as well as weights and measures, in the area we know as the Square Mile"

Cost is £8 and you need to book in advance on 020 7001 9844. (Yes, it looks like the website says 'Saturday 28th', I would book by the morning of Saturday 27th to be on the safe side.

Yes, just look at this map:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/emails/worksandclosures/Map_A4_28FEB-1MAR.pdf

It's OPERATION ISOLATE EAST LONDON again!

Heaven help me should I, say, want to get over to South Kensington for Picocon...

Some of my pictures from the trip bugshaw organised to last weekend's open day at Battersea Power Station.



Full set here.

Do click through to look at the large versions - the scale of the subject almost demands it. I'll post a separate bunch later of some cranes on site that would have been worth the trip to photograph on their own.

Saturday was quite a productive day for photography - as well as the flypast and the Docklands motor show, I got a few nice pictures walking through the City. We discussed architectural photography on our photographic course last week, so I thought I'd try some.

( Rogers v Foster )

Today was Art Appreciation, as bugshaw and I headed off to the Hayward Gallery to catch the end of the Antony Gormley exhibition. And yes, art definitely was appreciated - we both thoroughly enjoyed it.

Blind Light, the title piece, is just as amazing as everyone says. A glass box, about ten metres square, filled with very, very dense fog. Inside, you are in a little white-out world of your own, until people loom out of the haze in front of you, or a barely-perceptible darkening heralds your arrival at one of the walls. There was quite a queue to get in, as entry was limited to 25 at a time. This sounds like a lot, but in hindsight it contributed to the disorientation as you couldn't move more than a metre or two without having to avoid another visitor fumbling slowly around. I found that I rapidly lost any sense of scale of the installation: one minute I could be in a very small space, as the random walk of avoiding people kept on bringing me back into walls; a few moments later I could be in a vast, unknowable void. After perhaps five minutes - I also lost all track of time - I felt my way along the wall to the exit and emerged (somewhat moist with condensation) to the clear air outside.

Space Station was also very impressive, but in a very different way. Photos don't to justice to the sheer size and scale of the thing; according to the notes, it weighs 27 tonnes and it jolly well looks like it. Close up, it does indeed give you the feel of flying around some vast science-fictional structure; only from the upper gallery does the overall shape, that of a fetally-curled body, become apparent. I am overcome with the urge to make a 1/10 scale Lego version.

What really tickled my fancy though was a gallery of various of Gormley's space-filling human forms. Varied in their execution, they mostly feature a human form at their heart, some more easily distinguishable than others. After a little while I could discern a vague taxonomy of technique, and I began to suspect that Gormley was applying some form of algorithm to produce at least the initial idea of each sculpture.

Freefall, for instance, seems to follow the plan of taking a 3D mesh model of a body, and then projecting a fixed-length rod normal to each node of the mesh, then forming a new mesh with the outer ends. The effect is to have a body embedded in a sort of 'personal space' delineated volume, with a pleasing radial effect. Static I is a sparser implementation of the same idea.

Drift II and Ferment, by contrast, are much more like assemblages of bubbles, with the process used to derive them from the human form less obvious. Indeed, close up there is no embedded body to see, with torso, head and limbs only becoming apparent from further away. And the Quantum Cloud sculptures seemed oddly familiar, until I remembered work I'd seen on radio antennas designed via genetic algorithms (this page, near bottom).

Outside, the Hayward Gallery's roof spaces allowed us to spot the rooftop statues of Event Horizon. Apparently there are 31 of them; I'm not sure if we saw them all. Or maybe we saw 30, but someone blinked...

EDIT Thinking back, something many of the exhibits did for me was to distort my sense of scale, either making me feel very large or very small. I've experienced the latter before, notably in the spectacular The Weather Project at the Tate Modern a few years ago. But feeling big was odd.