Colourful Dinner

  Stir fry last night. Healthy AND photogenic.

Shopping Arcades

  Before the Trafford Centre, we had the arcade. Forget the shops, just admire the ironwork and glass.

Cool Beer Ads

   Saw these nice beer posters in a pub in Leeds.

 

This is my favourite. I'll have one of those!

Art Deco window frames

   My partner's daughter has just moved into a 1920/30's flat in Didsbury. Art Deco a-go-go!

    What I really love about these buildings are the metal window and door frames. Very elegant.

  

   There's another type of metal window frame from that period that I love even more. Some houses with bay windows had curved panes of glass at the ends.

 

   See how the windows curve in towards the front door?

   A bloke who lived in one told me that the owners of the newly-built houses were given a form with a catalogue number. Should they break one of the curved panes, they had to contact Pilkingtons glass at St. Helens, who would then make them a new pane. Of course this cost about twenty times the price of a normal flat one. These windows have all but disappeared now, victims of the double-glazing salesman. But the road in Bramall where I took these shots has four houses still hanging on to them. Some people are prepared to sacrifice comfort for style. Hats off to them, I say.

John Byrne

   Last night I watched 'What artists do all day?'. It's well worth a look. The star this week was John Byrne, a scottish artist I'd never heard of until then. He's a very industrious chap, putting in 12 to 15 hours a day painting, or at his other job of theatre set designer. He also wrote 'Tutti Frutti', a rather good tv drama from 1987 that set light to the careers of Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson.
  
    The odd thing about him, though, is that a lot of his output is made up of portraits of himself.


   Why on earth would he do that? And why are people queueing up to buy them?

    Then I had a go myself.

    Number one in a series of five million. Any buyers?

Aubrey Beardsley

 

 
    Now this fellow knew how to wind the victorians up.
    Wierd sexual images in stark black and white were Beardsley's forte. He was heavily influenced by japanese woodcuts and Toulouse-Lautrec's poster art. In his turn he influenced the art nouveau movement.
    I'm fascinated by the white/black contrast. Maybe it's a consequence of being slightly colourblind. It's what draws be to printmaking.
    Aubrey Beardsley died in 1898, only 26 yers old, with most of his work in the last six years. In his last year he got religion and ordered his publisher to destroy his more salacious works. So he may well have churned out decades of dull work had he lived longer. Thankfully the publisher ignored his demands.
 

IKEA

  I've always been very suspicious of men who like shopping. Shops, to me, are places men are driven to by necessity, or are dragged to by their partners. I love IKEA, though. The stuff is displayed in a n interesting way. It's usually well designed - I walk along thinking 'Wow!'. It has amusing names, like 'Snott', 'Minj' or 'Arsse'. And all the stuff I've bought has been pretty tough. Most people bitching about IKEA furniture don't seem to have grasped the fact that you're not supposed to dismantle flatpack furniture.

  Even the steelwork looks nice...

  And check out this light. It's about three feet across. Reminds me of the 'Exploding Tableware' light in the design section of Manchester Art Gallery. Fantastic.

They didn't think it through

 This is 24 Fenchurch Street, aka the walkie-talkie building, from the Monument in London. Another in the long list of architectural eyesores inflicted on the british public
     Architects being what they are, the design meeting probably went like this:
     "What do you think of this one, then?"
     "Well, it's pig-ugly, and everyone will hate it".
     "Great! Let's build it at once!"
  But this building isn't just painful to look at. It has the power to inflict actual damage on its surroundings. Yesterday this story came out:
    

'walkie talkie' scyscraper melts jaguar car parts

 

Yep, the concave glass wall is reflecting destructively powerful rays down onto the street below. A journalist has even managed to fry an egg in it.

 I wonder if this possibility was pooh-poohed at the design meeting, along with all the other qualms about its looming disproportionate bulk overshadowing the Tower of London?

   

York railway museum

 If you like gleaming metalwork, this is the place for you. York Railway Museum is a nostalgia wonderland.

 I was nine when steam disappeared but, despite being taken to watch the trains at Clayton Bridge crossing by my mother, I have only the dimmest memories of it. But I love a steam loco, and probably for the same reason millions of others do. They are the nearest thing mechanical to a living being. You can see the bits moving as they pass. They give the appearance of breathing. And from what old engine drivers have told me, they are all different. Locos of the same class can have wildly different temperaments - some more powerful, willing or faster than others - for no obvious mechanical reason.
 
  When I visited the museum was gearing up for a reunion. Gresley A4 Pacific Mallard and her five remaining sisters were to be assembled together later in the summer. Mallard still holds the world speed record for steam, 126mph, set in 1938. Unlike most of the 1930's streamlined trains, where the cowlings were just for show, the A4's streamlining was windtunnel-tested and integral to the loco's construction. They are beautiful things, looking, like the E-type Jag, as though they are moving even when stood still.

 

There were these three inside and one other peering through the doors, waiting to be reunited with her siblings.  I also saw something that did bring back memories:

 

This was the trainset that trainee signalmen practised on. It lived at Victoria Station when I worked there.