Monument

202 feet tall. 311 steps. No lift. And a brilliant view from the top. That's the monument to the great fire of London, the tallest isolated stone column in the world.

I managed the climb all in one go, which left me a wheezing wreck at the top. The spiral staircase gets narrower as you climb, so descenders huddle politely against the wall as the puffing climbers squeeze past. You find youurself on a square veranda with a 360 degree view of the city, albeit inside a mesh safety cage. This replaced a victorian arrray of iron bars erected in the mid 19th century to prevent the poor from putting an end to the misery of their existence. The bars would have been easier to take photographs through.

What you see from the top is - everything. The city sprawls to the horizon, below and sometimes above you. The monumental wall of 20 Fenchurch Street looms, leans towards you, as the Gherkin and Tower 42 peer over its shoulders. Meanwhile golden weathercocks atop the ancient Wren and Hawksmoor churches, for hundreds of years the tallest things around themselves, glint amidst the grey concrete and glass.

The bizarre jumble of old and new buildings sums up, for me, my fascination for London. Other big cities try for order, with straight roads and wide boulevards. Or they preserve the old, separate it from the new. Whereas London just shoves it all together in a mad tangle. And, somehow it works. There's history lurking in every corner. Pretty much every significant player in English history has walked down the very same streets you're walking down. Suck on that, New York.

The People of the Abyss - the opposite of Downton Abbey

If you look out of the college's back windows you will see some renovated buildings. They look all cheerful now, with gilded weathervane and sandblasted brickwork. But once upon a time, not that long ago, this was a prison. And the people confined therein were guilty of being poor. This was Stockport workhouse.

Yoe see the poor in places like India today - people living on the streets, scratching a living as best they can. Well, it was worse here. Being poor was seen as god's punishment. A comforting philosophy for those who weren't poor, to be sure; we still get it today from the tory party - bedroom tax, anyone?

Jack London was a successful american author. You may have read 'The Call of the Wild' or 'White Fang' at school. These were adventure stories set in the Alaskan wilderness. But in 1902 London set out to explore another wilderness, the east end of London. He disguised himself as a poor man and sampledu the life of hunger and deprivation that was the fate of most of the population in those good old days

.I've ben reading this book for months and I'm still only two thirds through it. It's not that it's heavy going, or even boring. It is just unremittingly horrible. Read it and see what the good old days were really like, then thank the moon and the stars that you live now and not then.

No - one was allowed to sleep on the streets, for one thing. Oh you could sit on a pavement all night, and thousands did; but go to sleep and a copper would move you on. Keep on doing it and you'd be gaoled - and unlike now, no - one went to the hellish victorian gaols if they could possibly avoid it. So the homeless were expected to look for work whilst having little food and no sleep. So they signed themselves into the casual ward of the workhouse just for a night's rest. Except you were in for two nights, because you were expected to do a day's labour for your foul food and verminous bed. And if you had any money at all, you weren't allowed in.

Workhouses didn't disappear until the advent of the welfare state in 1948. They were rebranded a couple of times, but even on the eve of the second world war there were almost 100,000 people living in them. So when you see the bunch of posh, rich sociopaths in the government attempting to dismantle the welfare state by stealth, read this book and consider what the alternative used to be.

Where to begin?

The main vein running through David's lecture was that there's a lot of competition out there. Apparently this country churns out nearly 20% of the total number of graphic designers required EVERY year. That's a lot of us who are going to end up doing something else. So...
I need a unique selling point.

The country is full of mac monkeys and adobe apes. The far east is full of the same - I recently read that there are over 400 design schools in China - and they come much cheaper  And all of them are more adept with the software than I'm ever going to be. Plus I'll be fifty - five by the time I graduate. Despite the best efforts of the age discrimination legislation, there's no way I'll walk into a job unless it's with someone I know. The malleable twentysomething will be hired every time. I've always assumed that I'm going to be freeelance or independant. So I've got to make myself different. Original, even.
That's why I'm drawn to the linocut. Making images in my own way, unlike anyone else. And my compulsion to crowbar a joke into any and every situation will come in handy.

The phrase 'Simplicity of Communication' made my ears prick up. I like simplicity. It's easier than complicated, for one thing. I'm drawn to the 'Smack 'em between the eyes' approach - grab their attention at the first glance. That's why I went with the 'leaves' image for the allotment poster, though I changed the original phrase 'These need sweeping up' to a more cuddly 'Don't worry, you won't have to sweep them up'.
I'm reading 'London Calling - a countercultural history of London since 1945'.Theres a pertinent quote about Charles Saatchi's art collecting: "Saatchi was an advertising man, and he liked his art to have immediate impact, and if possible also to have a pun attached - rather like an ad". Which is exactly how I like work to come out.
So perhaps advertising will be my forte. The cunning puppetmaster, convincing eskimos that what they really, really need is more snow - now there's interesting work.

Branding also appeals. The current orthodoxy is that the brand is everything about the company, not just the logo. So easy to say, so hard to do. And easy to lose.
A brand is like a tree - it grows huge on a diet of trust. And then the tree is chopped down and the trust is harvested. Look at Martin Lewis's moneysavingexpert website. That was trusted as an honest voice. Then he sold it to moneysupermarket for &87 million quid. Why do they want it, do you think? To milk its reputation for trustworthinness.
Innocent smoothies made much of their green, co - operative, charitable image - and they were hammered when their drinks were served with McObesity meals (check it out here). And now they've sold out to Coca - Cola. Who will probably milk the brand for all it's worth.
 Mind you, that shows the brand's power, not to mention it's value.
And as a designer, why should I care about the ethics, if the job puts food on my table? Do BaE employees worry about the people killed by the weapons that they make?
Anyway, I'm not sure that ethics matter as much as some people think. Primark are weeping crocodile tears about those folk in Bangladesh who were killed working in that deathtrap of a factory, but I bet their customers are still there next week.