Rainbow

Dave spotted this rainbow yesterday from our balcony. I couldn't take a photo of the whole thing, but it arced all the way across the sky. We've got another one tonight in almost the same place. We found it funny that came down right on that ugly '60s high rise.

More rioting last night and tonight in London. There's nothing happening in our neighborhood, but the persistence of the unrest is pretty scary!

Riots

We woke this morning, after a perfectly peaceful and uneventful night's sleep, to the news that rioting broke out in the northern London neighborhood of Tottenham last night. It's very strange to turn on the news and see that something so eventful happened nearby, while we were completely unaware.

The rioting grew out of a protest in front of a police station, prompted by the police shooting of an armed man on Thursday. The man fired back at police, and apparently hit one officer, before being shot himself. People in the largely minority community are upset and apparently there's a long history of mistrust in the police.

With last night's protest as a launching point, gangs of youths then smashed and looted stores on the main street through Tottenham and at a nearby mall, and set several large buildings ablaze. It's just like any number of similar situations in the U.S. -- like Rodney King, on a smaller scale.

I've never understood looting as an expression of anger, because the only people it hurts are other defenseless residents of the community. In this case, I suspect the perpetrators were really just plain old thieves, taking advantage of the protest to burn and pillage. People have been burned out of their homes, and according to the news the authorities fear there could be more violence tonight.

Tottenham is about ten miles from us by car, so it's nowhere nearby, and in fact we couldn't see any smoke or other evidence of the unrest from our windows.

I was surprised by these developments. Dave and I have marveled at the relative lack of violent crime in news coverage here. These riots are a reminder that London faces some of the same underlying tensions as cities back home.

(Photo: The only photo I've taken that alludes to any criminal activity. Love those meerkats!)

Sloane Square

I took another long walk today, from our flat in Notting Hill across Kensington and Chelsea, all the way down to the Thames. I wanted to walk through Sloane Square, which I know from Morrissey's unforgettable song "Hairdresser on Fire":

Oh, here is London
Home of the brash, outrageous and free
You are repressed
But you're remarkably dressed
Is it real?
And you're always busy
Really busy
Busy, busy
Oh, hairdresser on fire
All around Sloane Square

It's basically a little paved park in the midst of an extremely posh shopping district. At least now I can say I've seen it. Strange how pop culture informs so many of my decisions about what to visit in London. (I also popped into Harvey Nichols today, because that's where Patsy and Edwina from "Absolutely Fabulous" often go to lunch -- "Harvey Nicks." I found a cool t-shirt for £180, which I certainly did NOT buy.)



I shot these photos along the way. London is awash in flowers now, and in fact today Dave and I went out and got some gardening supplies and reconfigured the plants on our balcony. (The landlords left us some, and I made Dave keep most of them, on the grounds that they're still alive and I can't bring myself to kill them!) Dave also repotted the herbs in our kitchen, which are now lined up in our sunny window. We're officially growing our own food! Ha!

British Museum

Dave and I went to the British Museum today. I love the fact that it's free, just like the Smithsonian, and the array of objects is incredible. I saw the Rosetta Stone, a moai statue from Easter Island, an assortment of Roman, Viking, Frankish and other objects and coins from antiquity, and the artifacts from the ship burial at Sutton Hoo. The Rosetta Stone was especially neat to see -- much larger and blacker than I expected it to be.

Dave then shuttled home and I walked back, winding across the northern side of Hyde Park. I stopped in some charity shops, picked up a used Bill Bryson book for £3, and then picked up some live herbs for our kitchen windowsill. A couple of hours later I got to our doorstep. There is nothing, nothing, nothing better than getting out and walking around on a beautiful sunny day.

I noted on the New York Times website that the U.S. may be sliding into a recession again. This is one day after an article about the continually growing market for luxury goods, from Tiffany, Louis Vuitton and the like. Hmmmm...could it be that the rich are getting richer while the middle classes struggle? Attention global leaders: Your economic policies are ruinous, exacerbating the growing gulf between haves and have-nots! Down that path there be monsters!

(Photo: Rooftops at dusk, Notting Hill.)

Gram Parsons

I'm reading "Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music," by David N. Meyer. I picked it up at a discount bookshop off Charing Cross Road soon after coming to London, when I knew I would soon need reading material.

I'm not particularly a Gram Parsons fan. Parsons, a composer, singer and guitarist, is usually credited with helping to blend country into rock music in the late 1960s as a member of The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers. I have never liked country -- in fact it brings up a sort of instinctive revulsion in me, a product, I suppose, of growing up around and feeling threatened by redneck southern culture. About the only country I can stand is Patsy Cline.

But I'm bound to Parsons by a common link -- Winter Haven. It's the Florida town where I lived and worked in the late 1980s, and it's where Parsons spent his later childhood and his formative years in the early 1960s as a young musician. The newspaper where I used to work often treated Parsons as a hometown hero, following every posthumous twist and turn in his career. (Parsons, addled by substance abuse and addiction, died in 1973.)

A few years ago I bought one Parsons album, "Another Side of This Life," a collection of homemade recordings he made in Winter Haven in the mid-'60s. They're folky and don't suffer from the "twang" that makes so much country unbearable. I still have a couple of the tracks on my iTunes.

The book is a good read, if a little too comprehensive for someone like me who's not a Parsons fanatic. Its most salient message, I think, is how horrible substance abuse and addiction can be. Parsons came from a home that was rife with addictions and he was unable -- or unwilling -- to escape the same trap in his own life. I'm up to the early '70s in the book, a period when Parsons -- despite obvious talents and an association with some of the most powerful rock musicians in the business, including the Rolling Stones -- is relentlessly destroying his own career.

I'm learning a lot, too, about country and country-rock from that period -- the personalities and the influences. Pretty interesting stuff, but all I can think is, "Thank god I never did any hard drugs!"

(Photo: Portobello Road, a few days ago.)

Foxes

Surely the fox is one of the best-known symbols of England, with its legendary national appetite for "The Hunt." Perhaps that's why someone has stenciled foxes all over northwest London. I've found several of them so far.

The photo at top was taken on Pembridge Road near Notting Hill Gate, a few blocks from where we live. Then there's this one, rather worn, from St. John's Wood:


And this one, on Hereford Road near Leinster Square:


And finally, this one, from Portobello Road, just a few doors down from our flat:



I'm not the only one keeping an eye on these critters. Londonist, a London news website, has even assembled a map of all the foxes. The map was put together in February, so I'm guessing the foxes must date from early this year.

London's Ugliest Building?

The other day I was walking from Maida Vale into Notting Hill, near a branch of the Grand Union Canal, when I crossed paths with this lovely edifice. I thought, "Man, that is an ugly building."

I realized when I got home that Dave and I can actually see this building from the bedroom window of our new flat. At a distance, it doesn't look quite so horrible. (And admittedly, neither our building nor those of our neighbors would win an architecture prize.)

In this photo from our window, you can see it in the background on the right:


I was curious about this building, so I did some Googling. I started by searching "ugliest building in London" in Google images, and sure enough, it popped up. (Along with Strata Tower, aka the "electric razor," which was officially named London's ugliest building of recent vintage.)


My Googling led me to this blog, where the writers concur that this concrete monstrosity is, in fact, the ugliest building in the city. They also provided some more info -- namely, that the building is officially known as Trellick Tower.


According to Wikipedia, Trellick Tower is a 1972 structure designed by Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger in the Brutalist style. It has a very similar sibling known as Balfron Tower, also by Goldfinger, in East London.

It's easy to see Goldfinger's Hungarian roots in these structures. They definitely have a Soviet-puppet-state aesthetic.

I don't dislike Brutalism as a rule, and sometimes that raw concrete look really works. But this isn't one of those cases, in my opinion. What's with that detached elevator shaft, connected to the main structure every few floors? Isn't that awfully inconvenient for residents?


Apparently Trellick Tower -- a government housing project -- had a bad reputation as a dangerous place soon after it was completed. But security was improved and now some of the apartments are privately owned. I found a listing online for one 21st floor, two-bedroom unit that's priced at £450,000! (That's about $720,000.)

I walked around the base of the building to take these photos, though, and it's not what I would call gentrified. There's quite a bit of graffiti (pretty good graffiti!) and although the neighborhood doesn't seem at all unsafe, it could fairly be described as a bit down-at-heel.

But the building has some local significance and is apparently a well-known landmark. It has made its way into popular culture, on TV and in movies, and was featured in a song by the band Blur. It's also depicted in a nearby mural along the canal:


I hope whoever lives there enjoys it. I, for one, would rather regard it from a distance.