A seemingly rare victory for old London against the developers occurred this week, when a planning committee voted not to allow British Land’s plans for Norton Folgate. I didn’t write about it at the time as, well, if I wrote about every building under threat here we’d never cover anything else. It gets depressing. If you don’t know it, Norton Folgate is a small area on the edge of Spitalfields that you pass if you get the bus from Liverpool Street to Shoreditch. You know, on one of your big hipster nights out at the cereal cafe or what-have-you. If you want to know more of the ins and outs of the case then here’s a good summary. Or just stare at this gif I made:

(more…)

Catalan interiors porn

“It’s really just a boring house inside,” said the concierge in our hotel when we asked him to book us tickets to see Gaudi’s Casa Mila in Barcelona last week. To be fair I don’t think he felt that the architecture itself was boring – it’s a curving Art Nouveau beauty with a courtyard at its centre […]

Save the Royal Vauxhall Taverna

Oh, oh, the things I’ve seen. I’ve been going to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern pretty much since I came to London in 2007. If you’re not familiar, it’s a lone pub standing by the arches in Vauxhall, built on the site of the Pleasure Gardens which stood there for 200 years, offering Londoners leisure, pleasure, […]

Outdoor cooking on a feminist stove

It was my birthday recently, and inspired by a couple of lovely chairs Jill had just bought, I went off to Brixton Market to spend some of my birthday money on a Senegalese rug. Obvs. Lots of the African homewares shops in the market sell these bright plastic rugs, but Malika had the best selection, […]

A nice spot for a seance

Who are these indomitable-looking ladies in fur? And what are they up to? Looks to me like they might be channeling messages from the other side. There’s ectoplasm in the air. They are in fact having a seance, in one of the strangest, most mysterious places I’ve visited in a while. The picture was taken […]