I took this photo a couple of days ago:
Plaque commemorating those who lost their lives in the Lewisham Train Disaster, 4th December 1957
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Tag: London (Page 12 of 15)
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I managed to get down to the Cenotaph last Tuesday for the Armistice Day ceremony. However, I did not manage to post any kind of tribute on the blog. Better late than never, here are a few thoughts.
Whitehall runs through Westminster on a North-South axis, with Parliament Square and the Palace of Westminster immediately to the South. Since its a road in the Northern Hemisphere, this means that during a mid-morning in November, the sun will be low in the sky behind the Victoria Tower. Tuesday was crisp and clear, and as Big Ben struck eleven o’clock last Tuesday, the sun peaked out from behind some lingering cloudes and streamed down Westminster. North of the Cenotaph, we onlookers raised our hands to our heads, to sheild our eyes from the glare. An unwitting, yet entirely fitting, civilian salute to the dead.
Onlookers at the ceremony to mark the 90th Anniversary of the end of the Great War 1914-18. 11th November 2008
For me, I always find the moment when music breaks the silence to be the most moving. Bag-pipes, so often derided as a nuisance on the Edinburgh Royal Mile, find their niche at these sombre moments. A brass band, a Welsh male voice choir, and a poem by Siegfreid Sassoon, Have You Forgotten Yet?
That word, that “yet”, challenges us. Sassoon knows that we will forget, eventually, and the men who died at The Somme and elsewhere will eventually be known to us only as nameless fodder, much like the thousands who died at Waterloo. Too far back in history to be properly human. But no Seigfried, not yet, not while three men who fought in that war still roll down Whitehall in their chairs.
Who do we forget first? Those young unmarried men without descendants, that’s who. It is a crass, Darwinian truth that, for the most part, we are a nation descended from the survivors of war, not the fallen. Its telling that the two poppies I planted in the Westminster Abbey Garden of Remembrance, I planted not for grandfathers, but for two distant uncles: 2nd. Lt. Roland Ingle, who I’ve written about before, and Flt. Lt. Reginald Rimmer, blown up over Burwash, East Sussex, during the Battle of Britain, 1940.
You silly, silly young men! Positively eager to go-over-the-top. Stubbornly climbing back into the cock-pit. Zealous, brave, and long dead by the time you were my age: Thank you.
Tributes in the Garden of Remembrance, Westminster Abbey, London. 11.11.2008. Photo by yrstrly
The rooftops of houses behind Waterloo East rail station, Southwark London.
What did I tell ya? There’s the whole world at your feet. And who gets to see it but the birds, the stars and the chimney sweeps.
‘Bert’ (as played by Dick Van Dyke), Mary Poppins, 1964.
These Southwark Terraces are perhaps not as salubrious as 17 Cherry Tree Lane, but their rooftops are a perfect example of the secret world of London that Bert loves, the one above the rooftops.
A favourite part of my journey into London each morning, is that portion between London Bridge and Waterloo East station. Nowhere is the labyrinthian qualities of the city demonstrated better than in that mile long stretch of rail. The train snakes in between the buildings, above the workshops and Borough Market, and you get to look out onto a little piece of that chimney sweep world that is inaccessible from street level. It would be perfect for Parkour.
Its also a journey which perfectly illustrates how London is a human, organic city (this is something I’ve alluded to before):
I am entertained the thought of one set of people building something; then some other people extending it in a different archtectural style; and yet some more people knocking half the walls to reuse the space for something else. These mutated forms are what humanity has created as a collective, over centuries.
This is of course impossible in Second Life, which has no ruin value. Via MK, I read that buildings in Second Life are being abandoned but do not decay, or worse, are being deleted wholesale without a trace. A fundamental problem with the virtual world is that it doesn’t age like normal cities. And what sort of city doesn’t have a history?
A couple of weeks ago at the Labour Party Conference, Gordon Brown pledged to “enshrine in law Labour’s pledge to end child poverty” although the specifics were hazy. The Campaign to End Child Poverty staged a march in central London yesterday, urging the government to spend more on eradicating child poverty.
The campaigners said that next year’s budget is the last opportunity for the Government to invest to ensure it hit its target of halving child poverty by 2010 – A crucial waypoint en route to complete eradication by 2020. However, the campaigners (and likely Gordon Brown too) may be suffering from short-term thinking, a target mentality that makes the longer fight against poverty harder to win. In an article published on Comment is Free earlier this year, my colleague Ian Mulheirn makes the case for scrapping the 2010 target, in favour of a renewed focus on the 2020 goal. While the 2010 goal can be solved by another £3bn in tax credits (the policy the campaigners are marching for), the 2020 goal will be solved by more long-term measures, such as increased, targeted spending on education:
Further spending in pursuit of the 2010 target would divert precious resources into tackling the symptoms of child poverty while neglecting its underlying causes. …
…the 2010 and 2020 poverty targets now represent distinct visions of how to tackle child poverty. As money becomes scarcer, they are increasingly becoming opposing visions. It is clear that the provision of real equality of opportunity, represented by the 2020 target, rather than the palliative of tax credits, should now be the priority.
More oldy-worldy design relics. This one reminds me both of the Boston Globe Graphics, and the bomb shelter stencil.
Its a sign for weight limits over the bridge at Blackheath Station. It is not surprising that such a relic has been preserved. Blackheath seems rather gentrified, a little oasis of posh between Lewisham and Greenwhich. The DVD rental shop looks like an antique store.