Covent Garden and a Dance in Trafalgar Square

Amanda and I spent the day in London yesterday. The weather wasn't great, but we managed to walk through most of London, hitting all the important sights.

We stopped by Covent Garden, where they have flags up celebrating 180 years of Covent Garden.

At the moment London is also full of decorated elephants - decorated by groups and celebrities alike to raise awareness (and funds) to aid the Asian Elephant - close to extinction.

After the elephants are done being on display in London, you can bid on them, and that money goes to a charity involved with saving wild elephants. Similar to the whole cow thing we did in Calgary.

Afterwards we ended up in Trafalgar Square, where we came across the London Swing Dance festival!

A strange but lovely sight to see all sorts of people just dancing in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

And they were pretty good, too!

I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist

Yesterday I took part in a mass photo gathering for the campaign I'm a Photographer, Not a Terrorist. If you would like to read more about the issues and whatnot, visit their website.

Whatever you feel about the issue, it was a fun experience, and I've never seen so many photographers gathered in the same place, just enjoying taking pictures of each other. I'll post more photos later, but I thought it was about time that I graced you with another entry.

A Chilly Day Out

I spent a very chilly Tuesday in London this week, and that'll be it for days off in London until after Christmas I imagine. The plan was to take photos and aimlessly wander around, however, the weather turned quite chilly and my fingers got cold (yes, I know, boo hoo), so I decided to retreat indoors and do some Christmas shopping. I did snap a couple photos, and I hope you enjoy them.

They have finally put up the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree. It's just as... well... Charlie Brown-esque as last years tree, but that's okay.

The tree is donated to London every year from the people of Oslo for Britain's assistance in the war 1940-1945. So the fact that it's straggly isn't important, I guess.

I also stopped by the Natural History museum to see their ice skating rink, as well as a stop near Covent Garden to see their Christmas decorations and festive cheer.

That's it for Christmas cheer, folks. I still have some odd photos to post, and I promise I'll take Christmas photos, but until then, it's selling DVDs and asking customers if they have their rewards card. Bah humbug.

Hah, i'm just kidding. I like work when it's this busy. I really do.

Ghost Forest

I apologize in advance for the strange appearance of some of these photos - blogger is acting up it seems and so I'm having to host all my photos off-site at flickr and link them here. Hopefully there won't be any hiccups. (P.S. Who ever decided that "hiccup" should be spelt "hiccough" like it is here. What nonsense is that?!)

Either way, to the point. Welcome, dear reader, to my DAY OF FUN! Well, not so much day of fun as it was first day out of the house/into London since I started working. And man, was it overdue. Glad to get out, and on a lovely day like today, I couldn't exactly stay in, now could I? No. That's right. Good job.

Okay, we're in Trafalgar Square. And, as you may have noticed, it's full of trees. There is a reason for this, and you can read all about it here. Basically, if you're too lazy to click that link and read a bit, I'll sum it up for you now:

"Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana."

Ta-da! It's art. Art with trees. That were lugged here from Ghana. But, they are pretty sweet. And it's not every day you see huge-ass trees in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

The man in the middle is the new statue that has been placed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square. They are done with the one-person-every-hour thing for now and have put another exhibition on. This man in particular is Sir Keith Park, and you can read about him here.

Again, if you're too lazy, here's the basics:

"Sir Keith Rodney Park GCB, KBE, MC & Bar, DFC, RAF (15 June 1892 – 6 February 1975) was a New Zealand soldier, First World War flying ace and Second World War senior Royal Air Force commander. He was in tactical command during two of the most significant air battles in the European theatre in the Second World War, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Malta. The Germans called him "the Defender of London"

It was very cool to see all these huge trees and read about this particular project. I like how all the trees and their roots looked against the building in the square, and, of course, I could say something artsy and throw in words like "juxtaposition" and whatnot, but I won't. Just enjoy the pictures, will you?

Lest We Forget

In light of not being present at any Remembrance Day activities/ceremonies last week, I visited one of the memorials along the road between Parliament and Trafalgar Square. Snapped a couple photos of the sheer number of wreaths and letter left behind. So sad.

Old London vs. New London

So, yesterday I attended Transport for London's Depot Open Weekend, which was totally awesome! Two or three times a year the London Transport Museum opens their depot to the public. The depot is where they keep all the crap that doesn't fit into the museum. And man, do they ever hoard stuff. It's pleasing, though, to know that they are holding onto the stuff, rather than letting it fade away, especially since it's an impressive history.

But, I'll post those photos later. For now, here's what I've got for you today. They were selling stuff at the museum, and other than a couple signs (trust me, I could've bought WAAAY more than what I did), I also found some lovely old photos of London. So I thought I'd revisit my old/new theme and revisit the same places today and see how they've changed.

First up is Warren Street Tube Station:

I'm pleased that the tube building itself is still the same, as is the building behind it to the left. They have changed the signage and the road and such, as is expected, but I'm pleased.

Trafalgar Square now!

Pardon the ambulance. I will return in the future to snap a photo without the ambulance, but it had started to rain and I needed cover. Again, it's pretty amazing to see how little some of the buildings have changed.

Here's Piccadilly Circus. I didn't get here to take another photo since the rain didn't let up, but I will. I'm going to try some early morning to avoid the tourists, since this photo is quite empty.

I particularly love this one of Notting Hill Tube station. While the inside of the station doesn't look anything like this one, I'll still visit and get a photo of what it does now. We'll see how it looks.

And finally, this one. This one has nothing to do with tube stations or transportation or anything, as far as I can tell, but I really like it. I don't really know why, but it makes me smile. If you can't make it out, there's 4 men in there, and they seem to be having some sort of potato-sack race. I find it amusing that the one guy's hat seems to have been left behind mid-air.

I'd like to track down some more photos, so we'll see if I have any luck finding more interesting photos.

I'll post the photos that I took at the depot in the next day or so. In the meantime, enjoy London's history.

London's Open House Weekend

Today was the first day of the weekend-long London Open House Weekend. It's a weekend long celebration of all sorts of buildings in London, where you can enter many of the city's usually closed-off buildings for free and look around. I underestimated the queues in many of these places, so only got to see two buildings today.

But not before I stopped in Trafalgar Square to enjoy a rousing game of giant's chess!
It was created by a Spanish designer and it is the centre figure of the London Design Festival. The pieces are about 2m tall and are made of ceramic, so be careful!
My second stop was the Royal Courts of Justice, and I must say, I'm really glad I stopped by here. While the building is mildly interesting from the outside (looks like a lot of other old buildings here), the inside is remarkable.

The grand hall was just that, quite grand, and the rest of the building is full of narrow passageways, hidden court rooms, winding staircases and old fireplaces. I was only allowed to take pictures of the grand hall. I totally forgot that us regular folk are allowed to sit in on court proceedings, so I'm going to make a plan to do that. It'll probably be something boring like a parking ticket, but I'd like another opportunity to wander through the halls.

After that, I got the opportunity to climb to the top of the OXO Tower in London, which, from the outside, looks like this:

I'm glad I got there this morning an hour before the tower opened to get my name on the list, since they only did 6 tours of 16 people the whole day, and by the time I got there, they were already 3 tours booked. I think they underestimated the attention they got, but it was well worth it.

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, is a brief history of the OXO Tower:

The building was originally constructed as a power station for the Post Office, built towards the end of the 19th century. It was subsequently acquired by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, manufacturers of Oxo beef stock cubes, for conversion into a cold store.

The building was largely rebuilt to an Art Deco design by company architect Albert Moore between 1928 and 1929. Much of the original power station was demolished, but the river facing facade was retained and extended. Liebig wanted to include a tower featuring illuminated signs advertising the name of their product. When permission for the advertisements was refused, the tower was built with four sets of three vertically-aligned windows, each of which "coincidentally" happened to be in the shapes of a circle, a cross and a circle. Liebig and the building were eventually purchased by the Vestey Group.

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s there were several proposals to demolish the building and develop it and the adjacent Coin Street site, but these were met with strong local opposition and two planning inquiries were held. Although permission for redevelopment was granted, the support of the Greater London Council (GLC) finally resulted in the tower and adjoining land being sold to the GLC in 1984 for £2.7m — who sold the entire 13-acre (5.3 ha) site to the non-profit Coin Street Community Builders for just £750,000.

In the 1990s the tower was refurbished to a design by Liftschutz Davidson to include housing, a restaurant, shops and exhibition space."

The tower itself is not normally open to people - in fact, the woman who took us on the tour said that they've only opened it once before this event for some sort of ceremony.

The tower itself isn't really equipped for visitors - you enter the tower via the staff entrance of the restaurant on the 8th floor, then you climb 120 metal, wiggly, see-through steps up to the letters:
After which you can climb all the way to the top to get a view:
Now, I have to admit, I wasn't blown away from the view. It's London, I've seen a lot of London, we weren't actually that high up, and it's no different than the view from say, St. Paul's, or Tower Bridge, or the London Eye. I found the inside of the building much more interesting.
These were the stairs. Narrow, wiggly, and yes, see-through. All 120 of them. Quite possibly the most nerve-racking climb I've had, since you could see all the way back down.


And the inside was very industrial - we had to wear hard-hats (Health and Safety reasons, so we didn't bump our head and sue), and the building was filled with randomly strewn pipes and holes in the floor. Creepy and awesome.

It was well worth the visit, and I'm really glad I showed up early to get a spot - they were only open today and people were still showing up all day to see if there were spots. I have no idea if they will open this to the public one day for tours - that would probably require a fair amount of construction.

More to come tomorrow, and we'll see what buildings I can get into!

Eddie Izzard

Some of you know who Eddie Izzard is, some of you don't. If you don't, please go here and here and here and learn all about him. He's probably most famous for his YouTube video on the Star Wars Canteen.

He is a British comedian and he is currently (or has finished, now), run a huge amount around all of the United Kingdom in support of sport relief (the same people who did Comic Relief). Trafalgar Square was his last stop on his 51 day tour of the UK, and to day he has run over 1100 miles.
And here he is! He was trying for a personal best today, and unfortunately got lost just as he was getting into Trafalgar Square, so he missed out by 30 seconds or so. Still pretty amazing, though.
He was joking with the reporters after a moment to catch his breath. At one point he said: "Everyone says my legs look very good but I thought they looked quite good beforehand. I'm going to have a party somewhere that's dry and then I'm going to sleep for a week."

Poor guy. Didn't help that it poured rain all day, cleared up about a half an hour before he was due to finish then started pouring down rain (again!) as he arrived. Because it had cleared up and I was warm, I had (stupidly) taken off my raincoat... and then it started to just pour as Eddie Izzard was arriving, and I can't take pictures and put my coat on at the same time, so I ended up soaked. There are very few people who I would stand around and take pictures of while simultaneously getting soaking wet and cold, and apparently Eddie Izzard is one of them.

As a side, you can see ME! on the BBC website here. Wait until about halfway through the video and you see me in the background in the middle - I'm wearing a brown shirt. Ad you can see me flip up my bright orange camera rainjacket in the middle to take pictures. I feel like a dork. And famous! I might need a more professional rain cover to avoid drawing attention. Hahaha.

Here's a screen capture:

Edit: Oh man, I'm in more videos! Hahahahaha. Here. (As a side, I wish I had had my previously picked up negatives in my pocket... they make my pocket look funny...)

Here's another screen capture:

I hope these videos work for you. No point in standing around in the rain if I don't get to be famous, too! :P

I was fortunate to be standing where I was - when I showed up, I just found a place to stand, unknowingly being with all the reporters! No one asked me to move, and I'm assuming it's because I had a rather large camera. They were moving other folk away who were obviously just members of the public and making them stand at the bottom. The one time a large camera has paid off!
This guy was also here. His name is Richard Curtis. He is one of the founders of the Comic Relief and Sport Relief Charities. He is also a screenwriter, music producer, actor and film director, known primarily for romantic comedy films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill, The Boat That Rocked and Love Actually, as well as the hit sitcoms Blackadder, Mr. Bean and The Vicar of Dibley.

So a pretty important guy. But I didn't know it until people started to interview him. You can see him being interviewed here on the BBC (I'm not in this video because I'm standing just to the right of the reported. Rubbing shoulders (elbow?) with the famous people!).

So, yeah. Well worth the soaking wet pants that I had to walk home in. I guess nothing compared to running dozens of marathons and losing toenails (apparently), so I can't whine. Well done Mr. Izzard!