A nice little video on The Times website takes us through Westminster tube station and explains some of the engineering wizardry that was needed to create the structure.

Okay, it’s a two minute video so it doesn’t go into nearly enough nerdy detail for me. If you want a more leisurely approach, there are some super pictures on the Metro-bits website.

And there is a marvellous article in the London Review of Books which analyses the architecture of each of the Jubilee Line stations – all built for the Jubilee line extension which was a Millennium project – as well as referring to the myth of Orpheus, Charon the ferryman of the dead, urban regeneration, and the classic Underground work of Pick and Holden (designer of marvellous suburban stations in fine modernist style).

Of course  the best thing you can do is buy a ticket and get on the Jubilee line yourself… maybe that’s a project for me, next time I have a spare day to spend!

Picture credit: Michael Underhill on 

Some

Post from: The London Traveler

I’m a big Ian McKellen fan. And his Richard III is, to my mind, one of the great Shakespearian performances.

But it’s also a wonderful guide to early 20th century building in London – the great days of Art Deco.

And what I think McKellen got absolutely right was the political ambivalence of this architecture. Take a good look at Shell  Mex House in the picture above – doesn’t it look just a bit like something by Albert Speer? The assertiveness of this architecture, its super-human scale, make it just that little bit totalitarian.

And certainly, when these buildings were put up, they were completely out of kilter with the fabric of little old London. They shocked.

In the film, we do see some earlier buildings too. Richard’s private cinema  is in fact the medieval great hall of Eltham Palace; and the Queen and her family take breakfast in what is really the undercroft of Lincoln’s Inn.

But it’s Art Deco that really stamps its style on the movie.  The old Pearl Assurance building, now the Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel, is more classical in style, but the Senate House of the University of London is full-on Art Dec. And it has a real Fascist background that makes its use in the film almost ironic – Oswald Moseley apparently planned to hold his Parliament here when he took power, and it’s said Hitler intended to do the same.

Other shots include Bankside Power  Station (aka Tate Modern), County Hall (the old one, not Ken’s curvaceous little number), St Pancras (a nod to the Victorian Gothic), and Horticultural Hall, Westminster – another striking piece of Art Deco design.

And the film ends with one of London’s great icons – Battersea Power Station providing the shell-trashed backdrop to a thoroughly modern war scene.

Even if you’re not normally the kind of person who’s into tracking down film locations, if you have the slightest interest in early 20c architecture in London, this film is well worth  seeing.

As usual, I got my info from Tony Reeves’ book Movie London.

Photo credit – Dave Mackay on Flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

Every summer sees a new pavilion built at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. This summer sees a work by Frank Gehry, architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

The pavilion is made half of wood, half of timber. Though it rests on four giant steel supports, it’s the wood and glass you notice – the organic weight of the one, the transparency of the other.

Gehry apparently based the design on military catapults drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, and there’s something quite spiky about the way the wooden struts bristle down the back of the pavilion.

But there’s also something rather interestingly random about the way the elements are arranged, like a giant game of spillikins. It seems as if Gehy has just thrown the wooden beams up in the air – it’s a miracle they stay up at all. It’s all tilt and slide and twist and skew, a fantastic game being played with the architectural elements.

It should be fun.

When: July 20 to October 19

Where: Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens

Photo of the pavilion under construction by Peter Guthrie on flickr

Post from: The London Traveler