Can anyone spot the flaw in advice to use paper maps not smartphones to navigate the Notting Hill Carnival?
How on earth do you read a paper map? Without a blue dot showing exactly where I am and what direction I’m going, how can I possibly be expected to…
I mean first of all you have to get the map the right way up. Then work out where you are on it. Then work out where you want to go. Then confirm that you’re going the right way, all while somehow keeping the map the same way up as when you started. This is the sort of sustained brainpower that my generation has long since outsourced to technology, so that we can concentrate on more important matters. Like finding links to gorgeous vintage maps of 1901 Notting Hill to coo over but never use.
No blame to the Met Police for trying to prevent theft by advising Notting Hill carnival goers to keep their phones in their pockets this weekend. Here’s the map they’ve produced. I’m just damned if I know how to use it.
22 Aug 2012
Do we need to talk about North London's drinking problem?
Islington council may charge bars to stay open after midnight, the BBC reports. This may lead to more expensive drinks in the wee hours, as venues pass on the cost to drinkers. Not that you’ll notice anyway, until the next morning when you find the receipt for that impulsive last round in the bottom of your wallet where you thought a £20 note would be.
According to the council, the money raised from charges would go towards policing and clean up costs. The council says:
“…it has a “very serious late-night drinking problem” with crime, disorder and mess on its streets.”
Councillor Paul Convery went on:
“We went through a phase where we thought, as a borough, that the late night economy was a good thing. We’re now coming to the conclusion that it’s got some very high costs and real problems associated with it”.
And to think that only three weeks ago we were asking whether East London needed an intervention about its drinking problem. The whole city is at it. Shame on us all.
Can you disagree with this policy? It’s surely right for clean up costs to be transferred to the heavily boozed. Getting pissed until 4am is a perfectly reasonable way to pass an evening, but that doesn’t mean it has to be cheap.
BBC London – Islington bars face late-night drinking levy
Snipe – Do we need to talk about East London’s drinking problem?
Snipe – All posts about the demon booze
20 Aug 2012
Speculation, not scrutiny, as the "will Boris become PM?" pieces keep flying off the zipwire
In the last week alone you’ve been able to read:
Steve Richards in the Independent and Jacqui Smith at Progress saying no he won’t be PM.
His biographer Sonia Purnell at the Guardian saying he definitely shouldn’t be.
Peter Kellner of YouGov running through some polling numbers at the Huffington Post which appear to show that voters are similarly sanguine about the Mayor’s charms:
“Only 36% of voters think Boris is well suited to being Prime Minister. Cameron beats him easily, with a score of 46%. Among Tory voters the gulf is even greater: Cameron 90%, Boris 61%.”
And Phillip Collins in the Times (paywalled, but excerpted at their tumblr site) delivering the best line of all:
“Boris Johnson is a clown who happens to run a major world city. We like Mr Johnson as Mayor of London (those of us who do) because his power is limited. If London had its own defence budget we might be more wary. The best way to expose Mr Johnson’s credentials would be to devolve more power. Then the electorate would react the way that most children do when they see a clown. It’s not funny. It’s scary.”
The Mayoralty needs more power, if only so big media stop speculating on what the incumbent might do next, and start scrutinising what he’s doing right now.
06 Aug 2012
Yuck! Foie gras breakfast on offer at London's first 24/7 restaurant
London has its first ever 24/7 restaurant, the Duck and Waffle, atop Heron Tower on Bishopsgate. One of its most heavily trailed dishes is an apposite metaphor for everything that’s wrong with everything.
“Breakfast for city workers from 6am to 11am will include Foie Gras ‘All Day Breakfast’” [Via Hot Dinners]
The following is evidently considered to be a plausible, indeed a desirable start to the day for a London city worker:
Wake up. Climb tower. Eat grotesquely fattened bird liver. Go to work.
Remarkable.
See also:
The London Eye Olympic happiness index illustrates everything that’s wrong with everything
The secret shame of London’s fried chicken shops
Follow Mike
Twitter: @Mikpollitt
Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com
02 Aug 2012
Will a new Holiday Inn really "ruin the feel" of Brixton?
A debate is underway over whether turning an empty Woolworths building into a Holiday Inn would spoil Brixton’s character.
Brixton Blog has the news story that plans have been approved by Lambeth council, and pictures of the designs. The planning application is here.
The petition against makes the following case:
“Coldharbour Lane is a mecca of small independent shops and restaurants. It has not yet succumbed to the high street giants like Starbucks and Costa that have invaded Brixton town centre over the past few years. What makes Brixton great is the independent businesses. If Holiday Inn move to Coldharbour Lane, this is the start of the end of this beautiful vibrant and individual street. “
And here’s a discussion forum on urban75 with a sample comment from gabi which makes a lot of sense:
“Can’t quite see the problem with this other than the lack of consultation. Can’t see who’s going to lose out here.”
Don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to argue with finding a use for an empty building. Getting more people and more money into an area, and some use out of its empty buildings, must surely be a good thing. Mustn’t it?
01 Aug 2012
Do we need to talk about East London's drinking problem?
Margot Huysman, writing for tech blog Kernel Mag, has a common problem. She’s in East London and she keeps getting pissed.
“Since I arrived on the start-up scene, my liver hasn’t had a moment of rest. Networking events, after-work cocktails, office parties… you name it, I’ve been invited to it – and got riotously drunk at it, along with everyone else. But why is London’s Silicon Roundabout so completely fuelled by alcohol?”
Her answer:
“But more than just taking the edge off work, alcohol is there to take the edge off, end of. It’s easy to forget, but the tech scene is populated by smart… nerds… And, just as you may have thought at university that alcohol would take the edge off approaching your crush, or simply help you to interact more fluently with a group of new people, the tech scene turns enthusiastically to alcohol as social lubricant.”
But this isn’t solely a nerd thing. Hard as it is to believe, attractive and articulate people get drunk too.
Do we need an intervention here? Does the constant peer pressure to join in the drinking get you down, creating inside you an empty pit of self-loathing which, with poetic inevitability, you turn to alcohol to fill?
Or should we just relax, order another round and enjoy the ride?
Kernel Mag – Why is East London so goddam booz?y
See also:
Wanted in London, a football pub for the connoisseur
The five best places in London to drink alone
The best pub names in London ever
01 Aug 2012
History: Meet the "impudent urchins" who held 1930s London together
A time when letters and telegrams were the most efficient means of communication will be hard for your Tweet-addled brain to imagine. But technology giveth as it taketh away, and you don’t have to imagine this primitive era because you can read about it in Peter Bethoud’s post about 1930s messenger boys. Peter’s source is the contemporary journalist James A Jones.
“All day long the messengers of London pass through the streets. They are the links which hold together the affairs of the capital. They are the bearers of urgent tidings. They carry, quite impartially, love letters and secret treaties, theatre tickets and telegrams that are the tidings of death.”
And yet they were just boys for all that. One of them got in trouble and explained himself like this:
“Master Smith called me a woodenhead, so I poured hot tar over his dinner and punched him on the nose.”
The post contains at least 10 other details which are as evocative of the time and of the lives these boys lived. There are also original illustrations.
Discovering London – Remarkable Lives of London Messengers in the 1930s
30 Jul 2012
It's Olympics "stop whingeing" day. Are you on board?
There’s been a lot of whingeing going round just lately. A lot of lily-livered guff about how the Olympics are a corporate monstrosity run by paranoid control freaks who have corrupted and polluted a once noble and pure ideal.
That sort of stuff was all very well last week, but today the Games open and the whingeing is supposed to stop.
For inspiration, here’s the Mayor not whingeing to great rhetorical effect:
This is the thing:
A mass gathering of humanity is occurring in the middle of our city, one that will bring people together and create a warm though possibly illusory glow of mutual understanding. That is an interesting and exciting event, and it’s just about to start. Yay.
Does that make the whinges invalid? No. They are entirely valid.
The Olympics is both a wonderful gathering of humanity and a corporate and authoritarian monstrosity at the same time. This contradiction can be reconciled. The key is to cultivate an attitude of passionate ambivalence:
Passionately embrace and enjoy the glow of communal human experience, and the running, splashing, and dangling exploits of the planet’s finest human specimens.
Passionately critique and undermine the branding, restricting and controlling attempts of the planet’s most overbearing corporate lackeys.
So happy “sort of stop whingeing day” to you all!
Links:
Snipe – Five paranoid authority freakouts that could spoil the Olympics
Snipe – The London Eye Olympic happiness index illustrates everything that’s wrong with everything
Pindar – Olympian 8, For Alcimedon of Aegina who won the Boys’ Wrestling in 460 BC
27 Jul 2012
Are you new, foreign, or too posh for public transport? Take Slate's Olympians or Tube Stops quiz!
From a wag at Slate called Michael Sloan comes a tricky quiz for London outsiders.
Is Dagenham Heathway a talented but flighty 400m hurdler?
Is Alexander Parsonage an atttractive little commuter outpost in zone 6 of the Metropolitan Line?
25 Jul 2012
Interviewed: Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting on their Olympic pedalo film Swandown
Why?
Director Andrew Kötting and his co-star Iain Sinclair explain themselves below. In the process they discuss swan sex, the Olympics, and Mayor Johnson’s plan for an estuary airport.
The whole interview carries a swan-sized SPOILER ALERT.
Snipe: How do you explain this swan pedalo journey?
Iain Sinclair: [It came from] Andrew’s practice of deepwater swimming, my practice of urban wandering in edgelands, and how these two worlds coincide…we fixated on the idea of taking the swan and doing this trip…The amazing thing was that it became a film. It would have been a project anyway because it’s something we both really wanted to do.
Snipe: The swan is central to it…
Iain Sinclair: The swan is central. It’s a perfect symbol and it was also a very absurd reality.
Andrew Kötting: It was through happenstance that it was a swan. If it had been a badger on swan lake in Hastings I don’t think the two of us would have been quite so keen. And it’s also ridiculous. Edith [the name they gave their craft] has taken on a life of her own.
Iain Sinclair: The swan might now have a home in Hackney…someone wants her on the Mill Pool at Three Mills Island.
Snipe: She’s become a star.
Andrew Kötting: She’s a star.
Snipe: I saw swans mating recently on Regent’s canal, have you ever seen that?
Andrew Kötting: We have indeed.
Iain Sinclair: Have we?
Andrew Kötting: We have.
Snipe: It’s a very violent act.
Iain Sinclair: They are violent animals. They attacked our smaller swan decoy [a miniature swan pedalo, Edith’s familar, which they called Sitwell]
Andrew Kötting: On one of our walks. They took its head off.
Snipe: Swan on swan?
Andrew Kötting: Swan on swan action.
Iain Sinclair: They would puff themselves up enormously. One of my favourite moments [in the film] is the dead swan. There’s an elderly woman in cycling gear standing beside the river and this dead swan lying beside her and she doesn’t even notice it.
Iain Sinclair: Ironically sInce the city’s been so much a territory I’ve [dealt] with for years, at the point we arrive I have to leave. Andrew becomes the voice of the city and he goes through territory I see every single day of my life.
Andrew Kötting: Not to have him there [at the end]…there was this sense of yearning. Loneliness.
Snipe: It’s a sad ending.
Andrew Kötting: Sorrowful. Melancholic.
Iain Sinclair: [Swandown] also links with a film which has just been released by the BFI called Wonderful London which is a documentation of a journey through Limehouse basin in the 1920s – they relate so beautifully. From the working canal to this other space as it is now.
Snipe: The swan pedalo is a symbol that the canal has become a leisure space…the industry is not there…
Andrew Kötting: They’ve removed so many of the inhabitants, the indigenos…[the film’s] about drift…
Iain Sinclair: …and memory.
Andrew Kötting: It’s not meant to be prosiac, it’s not meant to be a lecture, it’s not an essay in anything…it’s an impression. You have to be in the landscape to experience this.
Snipe: It’s not a prosaic film but issues intrude, the Olympics is one.
Iain Sinclair: A big issue for me. Part of my wanting to do it, my insistence that it was done before the Olympics…I saw it as a counter act to the huge overweaning invasion of the territory.
Snipe: In the film you use the word enclosure.
Iain Sinclair: The enclosure of territory that meant so much to me…where I’d worked when I started out doing labouring jobs, where I’d roamed…through this edgeland which was a mixture of grunge pastoral and recovering industrial…that was enclosed and gone, and bringing a swan there for me was an act of transformation…to redeem this landscape from the invasion. I had this vision of lots of swans appearing, other people were going to get swans, and and the whole brown poisoned river being covered with white swans drifiting in…
Snipe: We’ve been covering the idea of the Estuary airport recently…
Iain Sinclair: Yes I’m horrified by that.
Snipe: There’s a moment when you’re in the estuary, at the Isle of Grain…
Iain Sinclair: Yes, that feels like the last free space, the last wilderness, because this other area has been eaten away…there’s nothing left but the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey. If you whack an airport in there…
Andrew Kötting: It could work perfectly because the London Stone could demarcate where the arrival terminal is. In 20 years time that will be an atrium, and plastic trees.
Iain Sinclair: In Ghost Milk, which I wrote with the Olympics hanging over me, one of the big things I wanted to do was to get to the London Stone because it’s the marker where the tidal Thames starts. But you can’t get to it by land because it’s all on military land. I spent four days trying to get in and I finally did it on a kayak, so going there again on the pedalo was like a salute to beating the enclosure.
Andrew Kötting: Iain read from his book Down River as we passed the London Stone…it was elegiac…but occasionally the wordsmithery would get a little bit too much so I would just climb overboard.
Snipe: Swandown also works as a buddy road trip movie.
Iain Sinclair: [laughing] Apparently so.
Andrew Kötting: A gay love story.
Iain Sinclair: The feet washing scene is very funny. It does have a false and real sense of being moving at the end because I’ve gone, and I took the story away with me.
Snipe: That felt like a classic plot point – the breaking up – and you were going to come back and you never did. It reminded me…I don’t know if either of you have seen the film Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carrey, they travel across America in a dog-shaped van…
Andrew Kötting: And you were reminded of that?
Snipe: I couldn’t stop thinking…
Iain Sinclair: Well that was the other title we could have chosen.
Andrew Kötting: Clever and Dumber.
Swandown is on show at the following cinemas:
ICA, 20-22 July
Curzon Soho, 20-26 July
hmvcurzon Wimbledon, 28-29 July
The Aubin Shoreditch, 5 August
There’s also an installation at Dilston Grove, Bermondsey, until 29 July.
20 Jul 2012
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
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- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Peter Bayley has worked for 50 years as a cinema projectionist in East Finchley
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- An interview with Desiree Akhavan
- Summer Camp: Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
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