notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

The Rise And Fall Of London Wall

First things first: for anyone who ends up here hoping for archeology, I’m not talking about the Roman wall, or the medieval one built almost entirely along the same path. No, I’m talking about the post-war development along the (new) road of the same name, just south of the Barbican.

The Blitz during the second world war hit Cripplegate hard, and there wasn’t much left beyond the street plan. As such, the area was a prime candidate for redevelopment, and the far south of the site was made into a dual carriageway, called Route 11 in the plans drawn up soon after the war, but named London Wall once it was constructed.

By 1960 the road was complete, and commercial development was stirring. As the excellent Post War Buildings site notes, as with the later Barbican development, the influence of modernists was strong:

The roadway ‘Route 11’was central to the expression of the ‘Martin-Mealand’ scheme as built. Six towers of identical proportion, sit at equal distance from one another at 45 degrees to the street on a raised pedestrian deck with lower slab blocks at right angles. It was a monumental scheme and owed much to Le Corbusier’s 1933 ‘La Ville Radieuse’ in its geometric vision. It was characterised by generous public spaces and the complete segregation of traffic and pedestrian flows of circulation.

Constructed between 1955 and 1977, the scheme - influenced by cities such as Stockholm, which already had podium-based towers and segregated walkways - must have been a real change from some of the heavy, masonry-based, soot-blackened buildings that surrounded it in the City.

When Michelangelo Antonioni wanted to show Thomas, the photographer played by David Hemmings, in modernist surroundings in the 1966 film Blowup, he had him drive eastbound down London Wall, with those new towers flanking either side of the road, and the pedestrian bridges clearly visible (along with a sign highlighting the newness of the dual carriageway). Within another ten years, the scheme would finally be complete, with the Museum of London sitting where the “car park” sign is in the photograph, and the last of the podium towers - Bastion Tower - rising above it. Another few years would see the completion of the Barbican, joined at the hip - well, high level walkways - to London Wall and hence the City south of it.

What should have been a plan and an area the city was proud of, though, turned sour. Unlike the Barbican to the north, which rapidly found a niche as a spot for city living, the London Wall towers were never quite loved the same way. Before they could age enough to get listed, the buildings - as has happened more recently to Mondial House, 20 Fenchurch Street, and Drapers Gardens - fell out of commercial favour. Built in an age before pervasive air conditioning and computing, they didn’t survive long when deregulation hit.

City Tower was refurbished (along with a recladding in blue glass) as early as 1986, but the biggest blow was in 1988, when demolition started on Lee House, the nearest of the towers in the image above. It was replaced by Alban Gate, a postmodern structure that retained the highwalks from the original scheme, but little else. In spanning the road, it blocked the sightlines that were one of the best features of the 1950s plan, and it also took up far more of the floor plan than the tower it replaced - another massive change between the earlier plans and the more commercially focussed post-1990 developments.

Within the last ten years, all but one of the original towers along the road itself have either been reclad, demolished, or are due to be replaced within years. The one holdout is Bastion Tower - now known simply as 140 London Wall - at the far eastern end, above the Museum.

As Post War Buildings notes when talking about the doomed St Alphage House,

The plans mimic the pattern of development elsewhere on London Wall, where cladding, reconstruction and decking over has been advancing for years. The emerging architectural arrangement has destroyed forever the architectural unity of the scheme and produced a series of graceless structures all competing for attention.

I’m sure the new buildings make a lot more financial sense than the old ones did, and that plenty of people are making money from them (the execrable Alban Gate was the second most valuable asset owned by Simon Halabi when his property empire collapsed). However, I very much regret never getting the chance to properly see the muted, but coherent, scheme as built. In a way, I see its casual destruction as more shocking than the loss of some of London’s Georgian and Victorian terraces. After all, there are plenty that remain, but London Wall was the only place of its kind in the city, and I mourn its passing.

Tumblr battles the Pink Robots

staff:

As we previewed a bit in the past week, we’ve been hard at work updating Tumblr’s policies, rewriting the three primary legal and policy documents that underlie your use of Tumblr: our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Community Guidelines (formerly “Content Policy”).

You can preview the new documents with the links above. And starting today, we’ll be making all policy revisions historically viewable (and diff-able) on GitHub!

If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a note.

From the Community Guidelines:

Mass Registration and Automation. Don’t register accounts or post content automatically, systematically, or programmatically.

Once upon a time, Tumblr allowed you to populate a blog from RSS: that’s how craneporn is meant to work. Does this guideline mean that writing a third-party service to translate or aggregate content would be allowed, or is the word “post” in there a misnomer?

I’m also interested in mass-moving posts from ffffound to Tumblr, and again, that’s programmatic, systematic posting, and hence against the new guidelines. I accept that might not be what the site’s owners think it’s for, but to me, it seems like a valid use case.

Ah well. Perhaps I shouldn’t be doing any of this on someone else’s platform anyway. (That Git history of revisions, though: nice idea.)

In Praise Of: Exquisite Tweets

It’s rare to come across a web service you use every day, and rarer still to come across two or three in one year from a single author. However, James Wheare managed that for me last year. Both IRCCloud (with RJ) and TwitShift are now part of my daily life. However, it’s a third, Exquisite Tweets, that I’m going to be writing about.

Everyone knows that Twitter is, even though arguably not well designed for conversations, somewhere that they end up happening. It’s also very focussed on the now, so what happens when you want to refer back to that enlightening discussion on the very ephemerality of the service itself? It’s an obvious enough problem that there are lots of websites attempting to solve it.

Some, like Aaron’s Twitter Viewer, are very minimal. Some are full-blown startups. My favourite, Exquisite Tweets, is somewhere in the middle. It has a public front page of the most recent conversations, and a personal archive page (although I’ve used the service enough that mine apparently makes the server cry a little). The display of a thread uses the background of an account, making changes in voice very easy to spot, and it inlines media (which is a matter of taste, but I think I prefer it).

More importantly to me, though, is that it offers lots of ways to load and curate the conversation. Starting with a single post’s ID, it will try to do the right thing, using Twitter’s API to look forward and backwards for the thread. However, if it can’t (perhaps someone dropped the all-important in-reply-to metadata), you can go to the bottom of the page and “merge conversations” or just “add a tweet”.

ET handles privacy properly. If you authorise your account, it will include posts you can see (handy for me, since I’m a private user, and so are many of the people I follow)*, but it knows to keep them from public view. If there’s someone who made a joke that detracts from the point (or vice versa), there’s a [x] next to each post, so you can quickly drop it. The URL contains hashed IDs, so you can share it, or use the star at the top to preserve it, giving it a permanent ID and URL and making it available in your collection.

All of this is before you even go to the search page, where you can curate posts from a single user (good for the likes of James Bridle’s soliloquies) or a general search (for recording the reactions to a conference talk, for example), both of which use a nice highlighting mechanism to build the thread. There are also pages that I’ve only just noticed for creating a conversation from your timeline or mentions.

The end result is a service that I use perhaps not every day, but every time there’s a noteworthy thread on Twitter that I want to preserve. It’s easy for me to curate with, nicely designed, and it correctly handles privacy. What more can you ask for? If you ever want to refer to a thread, or save it for later, I strongly recommend you give it a look.

* At one point Wheare was working on a feature that enabled the poster to make individual entries in a thread public, but unfortunately it never quite made the cut. Ah well.

In Our Past Light Cone

The singularity has already happened.

Oscar Thoughts

I put some thoughts about the Oscar nominations into a reply to Joshua Nguyen, but here are some more.

• Hugo and The Artist lead the Oscar nominations by count. I suppose that proves that films about film go down well with people who make films.
• … either that, or they like nostalgia about the time when cinema was the new, revolutionary artform.
• Only one Best Picture nominee is set entirely in the present day (The Descendants).
• My Week With Marilyn gets some reasonably well deserved Actor / Actress nods.
• The Tree of Life should get the Cinematography award.
• Cars 2 is the first Pixar film not to be nominated for Best Animated since the award started in 2001.
• Music (Original Song) only has two nominees? Huh. At least there’s no Randy Newman.
• Sound Editing for Drive would be nice.
• Margin Call deserved a little more than Original Screenplay, but that it got that is far better than nothing.

An Oscar Reply

joshuanguyen:

matthew:

Seriously, though, last year was a parade of remarkable films; that’s not something you would conclude from these nominations.

War Horse???? It’s ET with a horse. Horse runs home.

Midnight in Paris? It’s a postcard extended to two hours.

Moneyball? A baseball movie where the audience’s attention span is the only meaningful antagonist.

Tree of Life: There’s a reason why the best movies tell stories. Visual poetry that’s more than two hours needs to be serialized.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Schtick.

What a disappointing year for film-making.  

What about the stuff that didn’t get nominated? More along the lines of Tree of Life as beautiful, heartbreaking films - but ones with more of a narrative - there are Melancholia and Norwegian Wood (although I don’t know if the latter counts for 2011, and it may fall into the Foreign Film ghetto anyway). Drive was a little flawed but definitely interesting and well made. Charlize Theron was unfairly overlooked for Best Leading Actress for Young Adult (although I accept it probably didn’t deserve a Best Film nomination), and although Gary Oldman represents Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the nominations for him and for Best Adapted Screenplay are far from enough recognition for that picture.

Perhaps it’s not so much a disappointing year for films as a(nother) case where you shouldn’t trust the MPAA to be your guide in what to see.

(via joshuanguyen)

On PJ Harvey

Ben Ward:

I remember bemusement when I first heard a live recording of ‘Let England Shake’, complete with “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” refrain; it was not endearing. But when the album arrived, the abrupt, cheery opening melody quickly slides away to expose something more integuing and broody. ‘Let England Shake’ is the most coherent album of the year, and probably of a number of years before too. Musically and thematically, it’s wonderful throughout. It stands apart from PJ Harvey’s other work too. Frustratingly, I’ve missed her touring the album, but I find it difficult to imagine it mixed in with anything else from her extensive career. The record has a high peak, ‘On Battleship Hill’, the incredible ‘England’ through to the final soaring refrain of ‘In The Dark Places’ is a really wonderful set.

I was lucky enough to get a last-minute ticket to PJ Harvey’s show in the Warfield, San Francisco, in April.

It was a fantastic concert, partly because she pretty much only played music from the album. The material is so thematically linked that most of the other songs wouldn’t have fit, and the solution was simply not to play many.

April was a hard month for me. I was really hitting the first of a couple of bad patches last year, this one centred on a real feeling of homesickness. Despite hardly being a depiction of the best of the nation, Let England Shake really helped remind me of London and the countryside. Seeing the concert was some sort of cathartic, I think.

(NPR has a recording of part of the concert, if you’d like to listen.)

An Express year

bibliophylax:

“Winter is coming.”

• BRITAIN FACES AN EARLY BIG FREEZE (Sep 20)
• -20°C TO HIT US IN WEEKS (Oct 8)
• BRITAIN FACES A MINI ‘ICE AGE’ (Oct 10)
• ARCTIC BLAST TO BRING SNOW (Oct 15)
• BIG FREEZE WILL KILL THOUSANDS (Oct 20)
• ARMY PUT ON SNOW ALERT (Oct 30)
• BIG SIBERIAN FREEZE TO HIT BRITAIN (Nov 2)
• BRITAIN FACES KILLER ARCTIC BLAST (Dec 8)
• IT’S A WHITE CHRISTMAS! (Dec 17)

An excerpt from a fantastic, terrifying glimpse into the world of the Daily Express (“like the Daily Mail but cheaper”) from Ned Morrell. As George Monbiot noted this week, the newspapers like making weather predictions, but they don’t often get called out when they’re wrong. (Christmas Day 2011 was mild in most of the UK.)

Euphemistic

A non-exhaustive list in a vague genteel to rude order of names for, well:

• powder room
• the littlest room
• restroom
• bathroom
• wc
• commode
• lavatory
• outhouse
• throne
• potty
• toilet
• latrine
• bog
• crapper
• shitter

First inspired while noting the different terms used by Neal Stephenson in Reamde, and finally posted after reading an Economist article about euphemisms.

On Parliamentary Camera Antics

iamdanw:

“As Hoyer railed against them for failing to help working Americans, footage from C-SPAN went silent, then cut away. Moments later, C-SPAN took to the Internet to explain that it wasn’t their doing, but someone working for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).”

Boehner’s office cuts off C-SPAN cameras as GOP takes verbal beating | The Raw Story - I’m not sure I fully understand the american system of politics, but this is basically a member of the opposition party turning BBC Parliament off?

No. The Speaker of the House is the leader of the biggest party in the lower house of Congress, so perhaps the best equivalent would be the Tory Chief Whip leading the entire parliamentary party out and getting the cameras switched off. (It’s that or the Prime Minister, but the US doesn’t have anything like the conflation of powers that the British do, so I decided to avoid that. It’s also a reminder of how different the systems are.)

UK Parliamentary coverage would presumably come under the Speaker’s remit, and he’s non-political, so it’s pretty unlikely in the UK (although I dare say he can and could get cameras switched off).