Is this tarmac-surrounded statue the most endangered Victorian architecture in London?

The Victorian Society thinks so. It has named Holborn Circus, and the statue of Prince Albert at its centre, in its list of the UK’s 10 most endangered buildings 2012.

The society says:

“Holborn Circus, meeting point of six highways, was designed by engineer William Haywood in 1867 as a commanding and visually striking junction. The highways all terminate at the same point – a statue of Prince Albert. This device gives the termination of Holborn Viaduct its visual focus. The City of London now intends to obliterate the Victorian plan by moving the statue off to the side and blocking one of the roads. This will result in a vast area of tarmac without focus.”

With the statue already adrift on a vast tarmac ocean, you could argue that any focus old Albert used to enjoy has already been lost. But it gets worse. A planning appraisal for the proposed new junction blames him for causing accidents:

“Holborn Circus is the worst personal injury accident hotspot in the City…The statue blocks sight-lines for road users, causing confusion and accidents particularly for the more vulnerable road user. Holborn Circus has an average of 7.6 personal injury accidents per annum over the last 3 years, compared to an annual average of 3.0 for junctions across the City and 2.9 for Camden.”

A tough call for practically-minded history lovers.

Image – Google Streetview

Snipe Likes: Eighteen by SHINIES

What is it about certain chords, played in a particular order, through loud, overdriven guitars that raises the skin and tugs at the heartstrings? This track from Manchester’s SHINIES – the flipside to recent single Ennui – is perfect guitar pop, custom built to soundtrack the misadventures of Jägerbomb splattered teens. Catch SHINIES at the Old Blue Last, Nov 23.

18 Oct 2012

Dead fish in London's river Lea caused by pollution after a storm

Artists impression of a fatberg on the 4th plinth

London home owners, private renters and social renters 1961-2011

Lilo Evans and Tristan Stocks in the Mikado

Chart showing how Londoners get to work across inner and outer London

Chart showing how Londoners get to work by mode, 2011 data

Chart showing how the way Londoners get to work is changing over time

Map of empty homes or second homes in London

London borough population changes 2011-2012

Map of red kite sightings in London, May 2014

Artists impression of the "Teardrop", as seen from Ridley Rd, Dalston

Poster against Chatsworth Rd market in London

Tim Cresswell's poetry collection Soil, published by Penned in the Margins

Insight into the labourers waiting every day for work, outside Seven Sisters Wickes

Sorana Stanescu in the New Statesman has a fascinating long read about construction workers, many of them economic migrants from Eastern Europe, who gather each morning outside Wickes in Seven Sisters looking for work.

“The men gather in the shadow of the Wickes hardware store, looking out for the odd jobs that keep them in the UK and for the police that periodically moves them along…With no offices or agencies supporting them, the day labourers crowd the pavement and advertise their trade through their attire – grubby tracksuits spattered with paint and plaster. When potential clients pull up, they haggle over rates and hitch rides. When the police show up, they run…Most of the men outside Wickes said they expected to earn around £50 (€60) a day.”

If you live and work in London but weren’t born here (and I fall into that category), then you’re an economic migrant too. That’s something worth thinking about.

Sorana Stanescu at The New Statesman – Cheap, and far from free: The migrant army building Britain

18 Oct 2012

City Skills: The best places in London to pretend you're in a film

Sometimes you might find yourself wandering alone through this city, with only your imagination between you and the abyss. At such a time, pretending that you are in a film is a fine way of preventing your brain from tormenting you with recollections of your many personal failures, character flaws, and abandoned loves. Done subtly, no one need even know about the fantastic scenarios secretly playing out behind your miserable facial exterior. It’s an urban survival mechanism, and a useful skill to learn.

Here are some likely places to indulge in such fancies:

Place: Your local market
Film Genre: Romcom
Plot, thus: You’re alone and single, single and alone, on a sunny Sunday morning. With no lover to share the delights of the day, you head to the nearest food market to ease your despair. A lingering squeeze on an aubergine is the closest you’‘ll be getting to physical intimacy today. As your hand dallies on the luscious purple skin, the texture suddenly changes. You’re stroking the hand of a handsome stranger. They too like to come and absent-mindedly stroke the aubergine; it helps them get over a messy break up. You must be made for one another. But is that aubergine big enough for the both of you?

Humorous vegetable-based misunderstandings ensue.

Place: A windy tube escalator
Film Genre: Spy thriller
Plot, thus: The next train leaves in two minutes time. Miss it, and the whole town is gonna blow. You have the code in your pocket and some heavies on your tale. The wind whips your hair into a frenzy as manic as your heart. The clock ticks down. But just when you think you’ve made it, you see a gormless tourist standing before you on the escalator ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE…

Can you save the city before it’s too late?

Place: The British Library, British Museum, Tate, etc.
Film Genre: An elegaic arthouse short
Plot, thus: There’s a painting/historical object which no one truly understands but you. You like to visit the museum/gallery and sit in front of it for hours, contemplating its mystic power. One day, a handsome stranger sits next to you, and wordlessly contemplates the same piece. Nothing is said. The object’s power holds you both. The next day you return, as does the stranger. And the next day, and the next. Neither of you speaks, but through the object you connect. This is a love too pure for words. One day the stranger does not appear. They are gone for ever.

Only the object remains as a witness to your departed silent love. FIN.

Place: An independent bookshop
Film Genre: A winsome indie love story
Plot, thus: You go in looking for Ibsen. A handsome stranger is after some Proust. Your shared commitment to paying over-the-odds for books you could get cheaper on Amazon is rewarded with longing glances through the shelving and an immeasurable feeling of joint superiority. An irksomely protracted courtship unfolds in the bookshop’s basement room, in which smug literary references are mistaken for jokes. One day, just as you’re really falling for each other, the bookshop goes out of business. You only bought one book there between you, so it’s partly your fault.

So do you really love each other? Or was it just about the bookshop all along?

Place: You’re friend’s flat/house
Film Genre: Gross out comedy/Bromance/etc
Plot, thus: You and your mates sit around on the sofa all night watching TV, drinking beer/wine, making 90s references and moaning about the opposite sex. Everybody thinks it’s hilarious, so you don’t really need a plot at all. At the end of the night you are violently sick into a humorous household receptacle.

When are you going to do something constructive with your life you worthless slacker?

Previous City Skills:
The best public places in London to have a sleep
The best places in London to drink alone
The best places in London to break up with someone

18 Oct 2012

Seventeen fire stations to be closed across London

Seventeen fire stations are to be closed across London under secret proposals seen by The Scoop.

Members of the London Fire Authority leaked the plans after the Mayor refused to release them at today’s Mayor’s Question Time.

Under the proposals Acton, Bow, Belsize, Clapham, Clerkenwell, Downham, Islington, Kensington, Kingsland, Knightsbridge, New Cross, Peckham, Silvertown, Southwark, Westminster, Whitechapel and Woolwich fire stations would all close.

Last year Woolwich fire station was visited by fire minister Bob Neill who praised firefighters there for their work during the riots.

Under the plans a further four stations would lose a fire engine and nine others would gain them. Overall 17 fire engines would be taken out of action across London and around 600 jobs would go.

The mayor has told the brigade to save £65 million from their budget over the next two years. Every London firefighter has been told to consider voluntary redundancy.

A spokesperson for the London Fire Brigade Union warned that the service was being “decimated”:

“These proposals present the biggest threat to the London Fire Brigade since the days of the Luftwaffe and would lead to the decimation of fire cover in London. The stations under threat of closure have stood proudly for generations, protecting local residents from bombs, fire and terrorism, yet Boris Johnson is about to hammer a ‘For Sale’ sign on to their front doors.”

Boris Johnson said at Mayor’s Questions today that average fire response times would not drop below six minutes under his plans.

He insisted that “what matters to us is that response times must be kept low.”

The full proposals are due to be announced next month.

17 Oct 2012

Numbers by Victoria Hume

One day last week an e-mail popped up in our collective inbox with two words in the subject line that made us smile instantly: ‘Victoria Hume’. You may remember earlier in the year we posted a – and we use this word too much, but it really is appropriate in this case, even though it sounds kind of gross – ‘gushing’ piece about her track Sorry. Since then it’s been all quiet on the Hume front, but we’re pleased to say she’s back with a new single entitled Numbers, streaming below. Catch her at the Betsey Trotwood, November 30.

17 Oct 2012

Listing the symptons of London's 1665 plague, in the language of a contemporary doctor

FIRST, The manifest Signs of Infection

Horror
Vomiting
Delirium
Dizziness
Head-ach
Stupefaction.

SECONDLY, The Appearances after Infection

Fever
Watching
Palpitation of the Heart
Bleeding at Nose
a great Heat about the Precordia.

THE Signs more peculiar to a Pestilence, are those Pustules which the common People call:

Blains
Buboes
Carbuncles
Spots
and those Marks called Tokens.

The pestilential Poison might be shook…out of the Nerves into the Muscles, and there cause:

Tention
Trembling
Vellication
Yawning
Stretching
and all those other Concomitants of putrid and malignant Fevers.

Taken from the Loimologia of Nathaniel Hodges.

Boris Johnson defends accident and emergency closures

Boris Johnson today defended plans to close four accident and emergency units across London, accusing his opponents of leaping on a bandwagon over the issue.

The mayor claimed that “the changes that are being made are clinically justified” and insisted that “the impact of the closures is not going to be adverse.”

When Boris first stood for mayor in 2008 he campaigned heavily against A+E closures claiming that they “could mean the difference between life and death.”

He also opposed the closure of Chase Farm hospital A+E when Labour were still in power.

However, he has dramatically changed his position since the general election, and now supports plans to reduce accident and emergency units in London.

The mayor was today interrupted by a heckler who attacked Boris for not speaking out against the closures, saying that: “children are going to die in this city and you are going to be responsible.”

He accused his opponents of trying to exploit the issue:

“I accept that local politicians are entitled to leap on passing bandwagons and whip up public [anger]. This is the stuff of politics. People are perfectly entitled to incite members of the public to come and accuse politicians of killing children.”

Labour Assembly Member Doctor Onkar Sahota replied that “this is not a bandwagon. People’s lives depend on it.”

The Mayor told Sahota that he had not personally responded to the public consultation about the closures.

17 Oct 2012

VIDEO: Steve Coogan remembers "an incident with a pigeon" at soon-to-be-demolished Acton swimming baths

“In 1979, no one died. In 1980, some one died. In 1981, no one died. In 1982, there was the incident with a pigeon.”

I used to quote this clip, from The Day Today, endlessly. Now it looks like Acton swimming baths, where the scene was filmed, is to be bulldozed and replaced by a leisure and community complex. Some local campaigners are not happy with the loss of a 100-year old listed building, but Acton W3 reports that English Heritage support the new development as doing more good than harm. They say:

“Unfortunately, it is not possible to accommodate fully accessible services to the necessary standards within the ‘skin’ of the building. ‘Therefore, we have come to the conclusion that the substantial heritage benefits associated with refurbishing and re-using the vacant and deteriorating grade II listed Acton Town Hall (the most significant element of the town hall/baths complex), along with the genuine public benefits of providing a new leisure facility at this location, would outweigh the harm that would be caused to the character of the conservation area by the loss of the baths.”

And so commotions in the rafters will cease for ever. The rafters will be gone.

17 Oct 2012

Snipe Likes: An Blonds

I’ve never quite understood the fetish for cassette releases – vinyl, yes – but cassettes … in 2012 … really? It’s like having a penchant for scratchy primary school toilet paper. Disdain for the format however does little to colour the nigh on perfection of the five pop gems offered up by An Blonds on their debut EP, An Invitation to Love, out now on Twisted Tape Recordings. The Seattle-born, UK based Standlee brothers (Nathan and Ryan, formerly of Team Waterpolo and Slow Motion Shoes, now living in London and Manchester respectively) greedily indulge their love of Elliot Smith and French chill-out kings Air here; the endearingly soft El Mudo serves as an amalgamation of both those influences, prompting all sorts of ‘if only’ collaboration fantasies. Download An Invitation to Love here.

16 Oct 2012

London Weather

9°

clear sky

Snipe Highlights

Some popular articles from past years