Early on a Friday morning, London’s Brick Lane bustles with Bangladeshis heading to prayers at the local mosque. The women wear brightly coloured saris and the men don long pastel robes, looking striking as they stride along this worn English street.
A few hours later, they are gone and the feel of the street has completely changed. Now it is busy with hipsters with slicked over retro haircuts and skinny jeans. Like the stars of alternative music videos, people lounge on benches outside cafes dragging at roll ups and drinking cans of beer.
These are just two of the many different scenes that are staged every day on Brick Lane. The long, narrow London road gained its name because it was used to transport bricks from the outskirts of the city to building projects in the centre. It now sits hemmed in between some of London’s poorest neighborhoods and the sleek skyscrapers of the City, London’s financial district, from which it couldn’t be more different.
For me, Brick Lane epitomizes that mingling of different cultures and rich multilayered history that make London so special. Other cities claim to be very multicultural, but the way London mixes tastes and traditions feels different. Hong Kong has residents who hail from different countries — but they remain somewhat segregated. In London, a huge variety of people knock up against each other every day.
London’s development has also been distinctive. Instead of new buildings occupying greenfield sites, or replacing old ones outright, you get developments that build upon what’s beneath. History piles on top of history, like layers of fallen leaves. Brick Lane has witnessed a particularly impressive number of these strata. As the artists Gilbert and George, who live just off the street, once said, Brick Lane has been (and seen) “everything”.
In 1999, American biologist J. Michael Fay set out on a project to map and survey the vegetation of Africa’s entire Congo River basin. Heavily promoted by National Geographic as “The Megatransect,” Fay’s feat involved 455 days of walking across 3,200 miles of largely untamed territory. Biologists had actually been using the term “transect” to describe such surveys since the late 19th century, but Fay’s epic-scale journey brought it widespread public recognition. In 2004 and 2005, he and Geographic extended the brand by conducting a “Megaflyover” of Africa, taking photos every 20 seconds during a 60,000 mile plus journey in a small bush plane.
Legendary as the natural surveys of explorer-biologists like Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt are, expeditions like theirs — and Fay’s — are increasingly rare now that most of “the field” has been crossed and recrossed. Geographers have turned their attention toward changes, rather than gaps, in maps of the earth’s surface — particularly those with less than natural causes. So it’s unsurprising that they have become fixated on the sites of the most intense human population growth and activity — cities. By 2008, urban centers contained, for the first time, over half the world’s people.
This week’s photo was taken with an iPhone by Matthew Burlem in the London underground. The Polaroid effect comes from running the image through the iPhone’s Polarize app.
Every week, we feature striking images from our Urbanphoto group on Flickr. Want to see your photos here? Join the group.
Three years ago, people were still complaining that photo-sharing websites like Flickr were home mostly to “thousands of pieces of shit” — few good photos, endless amounts of clichéd snapshots that nobody really wants to see.
Since then, of course, Flickr has proven its worth by attracting plenty of good, serious photographers, and inspiring many more to improve their work and learn more about photography. It has also become something unexpected: a window into the past. Recently, a number of organizations, including Library of Congress, NASA and the Ville de Montréal, have put portions of their photo archives on the website, taking advantage of its user-friendly format and ready-made connection to social networks.
Private individuals have followed their lead, giving old film photos new life. One such photographer is Nick DeWolf, a American engineer who lived in Philadelphia, Boston and later Colorado, and who never left home without a camera. For decades, starting in the 1950s, he documented almost everywhere he went. After DeWolf’s death in 2006, his son-in-law began putting his photos online.
There are now more than 43,000 images in DeWolf’s Flickr photostream, with 20 more added each day. Among these are scenes of everyday 1950s, 60s and 70s life in cities like New York, Boston and Hong Kong, shot with the passion, curiosity and loose focus of an amateur.
It’s right next to the City of London, but the Brick Lane area is everything the financial district is not. It has long been one of the poorest districts of London, notorious for its crime and council housing. It also has an artistic atmosphere and abundant street art that contrasts with the sterile corporate landscape next door.
Impromptu art and graffiti and are everywhere here. There’s pictures filling recessed doorways, stretching across gates, tucked into corners high up on rooftops. They bring new vibrancy to derelict buildings and to the grimy, rundown walls. Lurking amongst all this art, anonymous and legendary at the same time, are works by some of the world’s best know graffiti artists. Banksy, D*Face and Ben Eine all have pieces scattered around the walls here.
This slideshow is an attempt to show what it is like to wander around the area, continually being surprised by new pieces of art that you haven’t noticed before. The soundtrack’s by that ever nostalgic UK beat boy DJ Format.
In the omphalos of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, Chicago
The contemporary art world can be a fickle place. Less than a decade ago, Damien Hirst somehow managed to earn an overnight fortune by preserving a dead shark in a fish tank. That was before a host of personal troubles — and the ongoing recession’s damper on the market for ostentatious art. These days, Hirst’s star is falling — fast. But at least one international art sensation of the last decade, sober sculptor Anish Kapoor, is still rapidly on the rise.
Born into Bombay’s community of former Baghdad Jews and educated in Israel and Britain, Kapoor has always been a consummate cosmopolitan, but he’ll have a truly unique place on the world stage all to himself in 2012, when his wild design (co-conceived with Cecil Balmond) for a centerpiece to the London Olympics — a 115 meter high tower, complete with a sort of pretzeloid roller coaster frame that looks even more mad than the games’ controversial logo — is likely to be lingered over by the cameras of broadcasters around the globe.
If Kapoor’s Olympic piece is a coup — it’s already touted as a future landmark on par with the Eiffel Tower — it may cement his everlasting fame. But as a practitioner of urban art, the work he’s left behind to date — more intimate, intricate, and people-friendly — may yet prove more valuable. Warmly embraced wherever it’s been exhibited, Kapoor’s outdoor oeuvre has represented a rare popular success for conceptual sculpture — reflecting, and unavoidably engaging with — the surrounding city, even if that isn’t quite what the artist originally intended.
Bulbous black taxis and double-decker buses might supply London’s most recognizable transport iconography, but Britain, where the railroad was born, has long been a nation defined by trains. A look at two videos of London’s rail station at rush hour confirms the country’s undying regard for rail. The crowds pulsating through Waterloo Station in 1970 were at the mercy of the antiquated, almost Steampunk-styled signal equipment featured in the first video, a British Transport Film fished up from the archives of the British Film Institute last year, but if they were at all aware of this, it didn’t stop them from swarming the station in droves (though, being British, they also manage to organize the chaos into an occasional orderly queue).
Not even the materialism of the Thatcher years, their emphasis on homeownership, nor subsequent real estate booms, all of which promoted car ownership and the expansion of the London’s suburban commuter belt along the motorways radiating from the city, could seriously challenge British railways’ importance. Still less hemorrhage resulted from the 1993-7 privatization of the UK rail system, achieved, in the eyes of many, for no practical purpose and with disastrous results; in fact, traffic since privatization has actually increased, even as public impressions of the railways’ reliability and safety have declined. More passengers were carried in 2006 than in any year since 1957.
When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.
The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.
In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.
We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.
There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.
Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).
To earn their hackney license, London’s taxi drivers must all famously master “The Knowledge,” a vast compilation of raw data about the best routes through the city’s streets. The memorization process takes an average of 34 months to study — and 12 attempts to pass. That means it’s a safe bet few licensed London cabbies are ever lost, and — since they’re also immune from central London’s congestion charge or from restrictions on private vehicles in places like busy Oxford Street — the patterns driven by the city’s trademark black cabs probably reflect the overall distribution of street traffic in the British capital better than any other proxy.
Part of the BBC’s visually absorbing Britain from Above series, which also includes this mesmerizing time-lapse of Britain’s busiest rail station, the video above examines the patterns tread by London’s taxis over the course of a day by combining GPS data about their location with satellite imagery of the city, telling the story of Londoners’ movements by tracing their routes in light.
It’s fun to see Jean-Paul Riopelle, now considered to have been of Canada’s foremost artists, described as a “young abstract painter” in Les Canadiens errants, a 1956 National Film Board documentary. He describes the open atmosphere of Paris as being particularly conducive to the creation of art. Implicitly, of course, he is referring to the atmosphere back home in Quebec, which was decidedly hostile to any sort of innovative thinking. In 1948, when Riopelle joined fifteen other artists and intellectuals in publishing the Refus global, a manifesto against the conservative Quebec establishment of the era, he was essentially chased out of town. He moved to Paris in 1949 and he continued to split his time between France and Canada until the 1990s.
Canada has always been a country of immigrants but what isn’t as widely known is that it has been, for just as long, a country of emigrants. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, immigration and a high birth rate were the only things preventing Canada from losing population as hundreds of thousands of people left for better economic prospects in the United States. Throughout its history, many of its luminaries have found it more worthwhile to live abroad — Mordecai Richler in London, Leonard Cohen in Greece, Mavis Gallant and Anne Hébert in Paris, just to name a few. Even today, an estimated two million Canadians live outside of Canada.
What interests me about this is how the expatriate experience has informed the Canadian identity. Unfortunately, the film above doesn’t really offer much in that regard, dwelling mainly on the surface of why such talented people decided to leave Canada for Paris and London. Unlike immigrants, who leave their countries to join family abroad or to pursue better educational or economic opportunities elsewhere, expats tend to come from positions of relative privilege. For them, moving abroad is a lifestyle choice more than anything else. That has been my experience in Hong Kong, at least, and from what what I can glean in Les Canadiens errants, it was true in 1950s Europe, too.
This summer the National Gallery in London has brought the fine art to the public, by lining the streets of West End with reproductions of some of its paintings. The campaign is clearly a comment on street art culture — and of course a way to draw people to the gallery. It also raises interesting questions about the importance of authenticity and context.
Mile End underground station. Photo by Nicobobinus
There are at least three Mile Ends around the world: one in Montreal, one in London and one in Adelaide. All three share some intriguing similarities. As their name would suggest, they are all located fairly close to the centre of their respective cities: Montreal’s Mile End is about three miles north of Place d’Armes, London’s is nearly four miles east of Charing Cross and Adelaide’s is about two miles west of Victoria Square. But what else do they share? Is there some secret Mile End connection between two former colonies and Mother England?
Maybe. Each one began life as a suburb only to evolve into a decidedly inner-city sort of neighbourhood. Each is culturally diverse. Most importantly, though, each of these neighbourhoods were named for perfectly logical local reasons—but it seems clear that their names are all directly related.
To understand the origin of Mile End, you must first turn to the British capital, home to what is, undeniably, the ur-Mile End. Here, the neighbourhood took its name at least seven centuries ago from a milestone marking the spot one mile east of Aldgate, the eastern entrance into the walled City of London. In 1381, this area played host to a peasant’s revolt. Four hundred years later, at the end of the eighteenth century, it had become the Mile End New Town, a bona fide suburb of Georgian London.
The Spitalfields Market, just east of the City of London on Commercial Street, has existed in one form or another since 1638. The existing market hall was built in 1887 but a new extension, airily contemporary in contrast to the brick-and-iron heaviness of the old hall, recently opened. Apparently, the annex replaces part of an outdoor trading area, the rest of which has been given over to a complex of Norman Foster-designed office buildings. It also reduced the market’s overall number of trading stalls in favour of new permanent retail spaces that appear to have been leased largely to chain eateries.
Already, the Spitalfields Market serves a diminished role—its wholesale fruit and vegetable business moved to a new East London market in 1991—and the twin forces of gentrification and development pressure could conceivably turn it into something akin to Boston’s Quincy Market, which is to say a pale imitation of an actual public market. Still, the Spitalfields Market remains just that. For the time being, at least, it is a hive of daily activity as nearby residents shop for groceries, office workers line up for cheap lunches and tourists and gawkers like me stand back, watching it all.
blog: why a single death caused NYers to panic over an essential form of transport that seems risky but isn't-elevators http://t.co/Tj1iYWIdabout 3 hours agofrom web
facebook as hausmann? web browsing as flânerie? analogizing the web-and its changes-to urban landscape of 19th c paris http://t.co/ncEwGZMWabout 10 hours agofrom web
after 200yrs of pollution, buenos aires finally cleaning river-cum-open sewer bordering some of its most famous hoods http://t.co/YAx8XWOXabout 13 hours agofrom web
