June 19th - June 25th 2006
Sunday Parking
Saturday Ariel
Friday Silvertown
Thursday Nice hair
Wednesday Canary Wharf
Tuesday Pie-faced
Monday Barbican
Sunday 25th June
I've always had a soft spot for the Docklands Light Railway, not least because its name so perfectly encapsulates its tinker-toy design philosophy: essential to a system that has had to insinuate itself like a thread-worm into the arid urban backwoods east of Canary Wharf, bringing the dubious benefits of metropolitan wash'n'go transit to a forgotten population whose highest priority is to get to the nearest hyper-store on time to start stacking the shelves.
The station names are somehow perfect too. The geography of Central London commemorates the names of great statesmen or significant military victories; travel east of the Tower for Mudchute, Crossharbour, Pudding Mill Lane, West Silvertown.
And Pontoon Dock.
I've had my imaginary eye on the Thames Barrier for a while now. Even if you've never been there, you're probably seen dramatic pictures of the monolithic row of stainless steel cowls that span the river at Woolwich, armed and ready to raise their defences against a potentially disastrous tidal surge.
And thus it was that last Wednesday, sun beating down, I pulled on a pair of shorts and boarded the DLR, floating my elevated way over rubbish tips and scrapyards, past fried chicken shops and bankrupt tanning salons, eastward to Pontoon Dock.
The Thames Barrier proved to be a tremendous disappointment: the northernmost pavilion sits substantially offshore, across a waste of mud and seagulls, too far away to get a decent shot except with a long lens. (Subsequent research confirms that in order to get the glittering vista that features in publicity shots, you need to be on the south bank of the river. With a helicopter.)
But Pontoon Dock was pleasing, with a magnificent view north across the deserted spaces of Royal Victoria Dock where a vast liner-like floating hotel sits next to the even larger, grossly derelict, Spillers Millennium Mills. (Impossible to access, sadly - and God knows I tried.)
Even better, the new park to the south of the station ('the first riverside park to be built in London for over 50 years' - a dubious accolade) turned out to be a fascinating space.
In 1995 the LDDC started to spend £12.5 million reviving the 22-acre toxic brownfield site. Ten years later (and, like so much else in Docklands, still somewhat ahead of its public) there's a lovely new space, offering every element we've come to expect from a public park - gravelled allées, play spaces, refreshment pavilion, trees, flowers, grass - bravely re-imagined for a new century.
The flower garden is the best bit. Bowing to the area's maritime (fluvial?) history, the designers have carved out a long sunken trench, the Green Dock, providing a micro-climate for a mosaic of thin strips of hedge and flower bed, as different from the standard municipal horticulture as it's possible to imagine.
New, and surprisingly pleasant, high-density housing flanks the Thames Barrier Park to the east and the west. For the duration of my visit the air was filled with the scent of flowers (a phenomenon that I can't help but suspect owes less to nature than it does to Procter and Gamble's detergent factory a few miles downstream). And I think I saw no more than a dozen people for the hour or so I was there.
Recommended.
Saturday 24th June
For reasons that no doubt make tremendous sense on paper, and need not concern those of us that it actually affects, Tower Hamlets council have decided to renew our communal television aerials, such that a satellite feed for each block arrives through a single big dish rather than via the myriad smaller growths that have been stealthily colonising the estate for the last ten years.
Cue much random activity: scaffolding, ladders, bursts of muffled drilling several walls away, mysterious cables briefly swiping at one's windows, men in yellow vests shouting at each other.
I am, ultimately, paying for this - so I guess it should interest me slightly more than it does. But, noise nuisance aside, I can't really give a fuck: I don't do satellite (MTV? Nah. First-run second-rate movies? Nah. Sport? Oh please).
Aesthetically, it should be a bonus - if, and when, somebody gets round to taking down all the redundant Sky dishettes. But jaded aficionado of urban architecture that I am, I'm not holding my breath.
What did piss me off was a circular shoved through my door by the aerial contractors, demanding access to my property 'to install the necessary [sic] socket outlet on..' followed by a blank space in which somone had roughly scrawled 'Fri 23rd and Sat 24th June 2006'.
Good to know that it's this year, at least.
But for someone like me - whose ideal hours hours of daylight are spent either tucked up in bed, or out somewhere enjoying The Great British Summer - this kind of blanket edict is heart-sinkingly predictable: they will rap commandingly on my door at a moment precisely calculated to cause maximum dispruption to my sleep-biased schedule, requiring me to scramble into the first grubby clothes I can find before airily welcoming them into the dust-strewn boneyard that constitutes my home.
(I'm still smarting from the gas-meter reader whose immediate reaction on first sticking his nose into my personal airspace was to look alarmed and whimper, "Do you have a dog?")
In the event, this home-visit proved considerably more delightful than I expected, thanks entirely to Installer No. 1 - a fit, young, mixed-race lad with a shaven head, denim-cut-offs and white socks: perve's dream.
And did I mention that installing a new socket outlet involves an awful lot of bending down?
Installer No. 2 had his moments, too, in a white-bread kinda way, complaining about my next-door neighbour ("Why don't she just admit she's fifty and get over it?" ahem), pulling up his trouser leg to show me his motorcycle scar, and casually asking me to move my cumbersome book-laden storage unit a half-meter to the left. ("No dear, they're books - they weigh a bit more than dvds..")
So now I'm the proud possessor of a new aerial socket. God knows why.
(But I had the last laugh. Signing their paper work, I found a box requiring customer input as to the quality of the work, in which I carefully wrote: EXQUISITE.)
Friday 23rd June
Silvertown, Summer 2006
Thursday 22nd June
In fact, my attitude to the World Cup is perhaps best summed up by a text message I received earlier in the tournament, from an esteemed correspondent who may wish to remain anonymous:
The paraguay boys have nice hair! But theo is cute can't tell who is winning
Wednesday 21st June
Canary Wharf, Summer 2006
Tuesday 20th June
Of all the World-Cup-themed promotions I've been unable to avoid so far, my favourite - by which I mean that which makes me least want to throw up - is the one being run by the Square Pie Company who, for the duration, are making pies for each competing country.
A country's pie is on sale only on those days that that country is playing; the country that sells the most pies gets to be crowned 'pie world champion'.
(Their promotional material wisely eschews any 'who ate all the pies' references, though it does claim the concept 'will have pie fans everywhere practising their dribbling skills'.)
According to this cosmology, tomorrow will see Boeuf avec sauce d'archide et Fufu pitched against Lamb Kapama (and I know who I fancy); Cruzado are playing Callaloo as we speak.
And in the office sweepstake, I picked Pea and ham with sausage. Things could be worse.
Monday 19th June
Barbican, Summer 2006
......previous week
