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 rather like those histories of everyday things – ‘Latitude’, the story of spice, the history of salt. Exhibitions of locks and keys from the middle ages, or the furniture exhibitions at the Geffrye Museum, fascinate me.

So an exhibition of desks is a must! As a writer I spend most of each day at one, and it isn’t beautiful.

When I daydream, I imagine myself sitting at a fine Louis XIV desk with curvy gilt legs, or a lovely Restoration bureau…

“8 Desks” is a bit more modern but equally stylish. Jean Prouvé and Jean Royère’s almost minimalist, strikingly modern desks represent the practical, functional side of the modern style. (We’ve already seen Jean Prouvé’s architecture in London recently – here’s another chance to catch up with this intriguing designer.) Mass production techniques enabled the French designers to create cheap, useful furniture while still achieving beauty, albeit a rather austere beauty. Metal and formica create slick, shiny surfaces and defined, geometrical shapes.

If you don’t go for modernist, though, you can have your desks more curvy, and if you don’t like formica, wood provides a warmer, less clinical feel. George Nakashima, for instance, seems to have been influenced by arts-and-crafts style or perhaps the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This American designer creates a more sensual work, using the feel and look of natural wood. Charlotte Perriand, too, uses wood and traditional joinery techniques to make desks you want to caress rather than abuse.

Would you ever have believed a desk could be so interesting?

If your answer is ‘no’ and I haven’t managed to convince you, forget it.

But if you’re a design nerd, or a furniture nerd, or you’d just like to see something a bit unusual, go and take a look at these desks when the exhibition opens up in January.

When: 15 Janury – 14 March 2009, 10-6 Mon-Fri and 11-1 Saturdays

Where: Sebastian + Barquet London, 19 Bruton Place, W1

How much: free

Photo credit: Jean Prouvé,“Standard” Desk and Chair, 1943

Courtesy Sebastian + Barquet London

Post from: The London Traveler

Actually, it’s a lot more fun than it sounds. First of all, the setting is lovely. Just a few minutes by bus from Liverpool Street, the museum is set back from the road, with a fine garden in front. Mature trees provide shade, and a herb garden scatters its scent.

The museum is housed in a fine set of eighteenth century brick almshouses. Go inside (entrance is free), and you’ll find a set of rooms, each one designed in the style of a particular period – Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian, even 1960s. It’s like taking a journey in a TARDIS as you flick rapidly through the centuries.

If you’re a connoisseur or an antiques collector or an artist, it’s a treasure house. There are some really marvellous works here – my favourite is the cabinet made for John Evelyn, a seventeenth century writer. It’s sobersides Puritan black on the outside – but open it up and there’s a resplendent red interior. When you know that Evelyn was a royalist who went abroad to avoid being drawn into the Civil War, you realise that this piece of furniture is similarly evasive – a nice piece of misdirection.

The Geffrye Museum is a nice size, too – you can see it in a lunchtime, unlike the British Museum which has been known to swallow tourists whole! And if you happen to be peckish, it has a nice little restaurant.

Just one warning – the museum is closed on Mondays. The rest of the week, it’s open 10-5.

Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road, E2 – 149 or 242 bus from Liverpool Street .

Post from: The London Traveler