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 …read more

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New plans have been announced for Battersea Power Station – one of the capital’s biggest and most shockingly neglected building sites.
This must be the third set of plans for the property, at least, and I’m amazed that in the current economic climate such a grandiose set of plans is being touted. It will cost at least £4bn (that’s about $8m US) and won’t be completed till 2020.
The plans envisage the creation of a huge glass and steel chimney which will dwarf the power station alongside. That just seems to me a massive piece of vandalism. The power station is a …read more

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If I need a bit of peace and quiet, I’ll sometimes head to Battersea Park. It’s a great place for all kinds of fun – but it also possesses something quite unusual, a Buddhist pagoda.
The pagoda was built in 1985, and donated to the city by the Japanese Buddhist order, Nipponzan Myohoji, which had a monastery close to the park. (They had already built a pagoda in Milton Keynes, where they had first settled.)
Four gilded Buddhas watch from their niches on the four faces of the pagoda. Each one holds his hands in a different ‘mudra’, with a …read more

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