Tales from Building Sights - Part 3
Sep. 21st, 2005 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanThe last lot, I promise:
Sunday morning may have dawned absolsutely glorious and brimming with skylarks and honey, but after staying up till 2:30am drinking wine, I was much too busy whimpering to notice (and yes, before![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
clarisinda points it out, that was no-one's fault but my own).
Among the more spectacularly stupid bits of planning of my life recently was arranging to be in White City by 10am, starting from Tulse Hill. Took rather longer than 24 minutes, I can assure you...
Still, after steadfastly refusing to look at my watch for most of the journey because I didn't want to know what it might tell me, I did make it to White City more of less of time. White City is a weird place - considering it started life as a sugar-spun architectural fantasia for the 1908 Anglo-French exhibition, it's current feeling of windswept dereliction is hard to bear - the nearby presence of both Willesden Junction goods yard and Wormwood Scrubs jail don't help either.
BBC Television Centre is of course a higly recognisable building - one of the icons of post-war British confidence, and a solid investment in what was at the time leading-edge technology. To go inside it was, of course, a great privelige.
The tour guide - a very definitely media type, with glasses and an earnest expression - led us into the central atrium, around which the building curves (it is the shape of a question-mark, which was intentional, believe it or not), then into the building itself. It feels, as is natural when you stop to consider it, like a school or a 1960's office inside, and the look of the old BBC of our childhoods (including those back-sloping numerals and the blocky logo) is still there. What was a factory of the future when it opened in 1960 is now a factory of the past, still managing in its product to define the present.
We visited an empty studio (Studio Six), which has apparently seen all manner of shows over the years - the lighting rig overhead, with over 300 separate loights available, was a theatre lighting technicians wet dream, and the high-tech buttons and levers around the walls begged to be played with. Apparently we had just missed Dick n Dom In Da Bungalow being filmed (I was, of course, crushed), and this was the studio from which Blue Peter was often broadcast - I restrained myself from asking if there was still the faintest whiff of elephant-dung on warm days...
From there we were whisked up to the observation deck of a full studio, and saw from above the grft behind the magic of Top of the Pops. Kanye west was below us, looking a complete dork while practising his dance moves, and I swear I caught a glimpse of maiah carey at one point too (but she wasn't throwing a tantrum, so I may have been wrong). Everything you have every been told about the tawdriness of television from behind the scenes is true, incidentally - the illusion halts with pinpoint accuracy at the end of the camera's reach...
The remaining stops were less exciting - the very 1960's entrance hall with the John Piper mural (if you ask me very nicely, I'll tell you about how they film the Lottery Jet-Set winners jumping into a limousine from that entrance hall within ten seconds of winning in a studio 400 metres away), and the news-gathering suite, which is all frantically chuntering computers and big satellite boards (the one you see in the background of the news, incidentally, is a fake - you can tell because there's no Coke-cans or pizza boxes).
Although I was feeling no less zonked by the time I left BBC at 11am, I was very glad to have had a glimpse of a buidling that plays such a large part in all our lives, and to see the reality behind the glamour for the briefest space.
My last open House stop, after dithering about whether I could be arsed, was the new City hall near Tower Bridge. In the end, I was most glad I made the effort.
The South Bank was in full jamboree mode, and I made it into the City hall after a short time queueing inside, and a rather longer time watching various dickwits fail the metal detector (the young woman who tried to carry a can of Pepsi through was a particularly persuasive argument for Unintelligent Design).
The first stop in the hall itself was up 9 storeys to "London's Living Room", a mjeeting-space with a balcony that runs round the outside of the circular building, and affords exceptional views of the city. While I was standing there, Tower Bridge obligingly opened - I had never seen it open up before, and I couldn't have picked a better place to watch it from. From nine storeys up, een the enormous children's choir singing "It Might As Wel;l rain Until September" was almaost forgivable).
From this high vantage, a spiral ramp ran down the entire height of the building, not unlike the Guggenmheim. As with all sets of stirs with very long treads, it proved strangely difficult to walk down in anything approaching a comfortable rhythm, but nonetheless the view upm, down, and across to the river was very fine. At the bottom of the stairs, once they had settled into a decreasing circle, was the Council Chamber, where Uncle Ken and his pals decide the fate of the capital - while you couldm't have called it exactly thrilling, it seemed a fine space to make decisions in, and as the centrepiece of an exceptional building, it should be at least modetately inspiring.
The last surprise the builsding had was at the very bottom, next to the wexit, where some genius had come up with the idea of an aerial view of the whiole of London, printed on the floor about 25 foot square - detailed enough that with a bit of detective work, you could locate your house, school place of work or whatever. To see the whole of the city, spread out to exact scale and in the one place, was stunning, and a simply brilliant conceit. Needless to say, it was crawling with people (including me) tracking down their own little patches of it.
So there you have it. two days, eight buildings, and a whole lot of architecture. Open House weekend is a wonderful thing, and recommend it to everyone as a chance to see some truly fascinating corners of our common past, present and future.
Sunday morning may have dawned absolsutely glorious and brimming with skylarks and honey, but after staying up till 2:30am drinking wine, I was much too busy whimpering to notice (and yes, before
clarisinda points it out, that was no-one's fault but my own).Among the more spectacularly stupid bits of planning of my life recently was arranging to be in White City by 10am, starting from Tulse Hill. Took rather longer than 24 minutes, I can assure you...
Still, after steadfastly refusing to look at my watch for most of the journey because I didn't want to know what it might tell me, I did make it to White City more of less of time. White City is a weird place - considering it started life as a sugar-spun architectural fantasia for the 1908 Anglo-French exhibition, it's current feeling of windswept dereliction is hard to bear - the nearby presence of both Willesden Junction goods yard and Wormwood Scrubs jail don't help either.
BBC Television Centre is of course a higly recognisable building - one of the icons of post-war British confidence, and a solid investment in what was at the time leading-edge technology. To go inside it was, of course, a great privelige.
The tour guide - a very definitely media type, with glasses and an earnest expression - led us into the central atrium, around which the building curves (it is the shape of a question-mark, which was intentional, believe it or not), then into the building itself. It feels, as is natural when you stop to consider it, like a school or a 1960's office inside, and the look of the old BBC of our childhoods (including those back-sloping numerals and the blocky logo) is still there. What was a factory of the future when it opened in 1960 is now a factory of the past, still managing in its product to define the present.
We visited an empty studio (Studio Six), which has apparently seen all manner of shows over the years - the lighting rig overhead, with over 300 separate loights available, was a theatre lighting technicians wet dream, and the high-tech buttons and levers around the walls begged to be played with. Apparently we had just missed Dick n Dom In Da Bungalow being filmed (I was, of course, crushed), and this was the studio from which Blue Peter was often broadcast - I restrained myself from asking if there was still the faintest whiff of elephant-dung on warm days...
From there we were whisked up to the observation deck of a full studio, and saw from above the grft behind the magic of Top of the Pops. Kanye west was below us, looking a complete dork while practising his dance moves, and I swear I caught a glimpse of maiah carey at one point too (but she wasn't throwing a tantrum, so I may have been wrong). Everything you have every been told about the tawdriness of television from behind the scenes is true, incidentally - the illusion halts with pinpoint accuracy at the end of the camera's reach...
The remaining stops were less exciting - the very 1960's entrance hall with the John Piper mural (if you ask me very nicely, I'll tell you about how they film the Lottery Jet-Set winners jumping into a limousine from that entrance hall within ten seconds of winning in a studio 400 metres away), and the news-gathering suite, which is all frantically chuntering computers and big satellite boards (the one you see in the background of the news, incidentally, is a fake - you can tell because there's no Coke-cans or pizza boxes).
Although I was feeling no less zonked by the time I left BBC at 11am, I was very glad to have had a glimpse of a buidling that plays such a large part in all our lives, and to see the reality behind the glamour for the briefest space.
My last open House stop, after dithering about whether I could be arsed, was the new City hall near Tower Bridge. In the end, I was most glad I made the effort.
The South Bank was in full jamboree mode, and I made it into the City hall after a short time queueing inside, and a rather longer time watching various dickwits fail the metal detector (the young woman who tried to carry a can of Pepsi through was a particularly persuasive argument for Unintelligent Design).
The first stop in the hall itself was up 9 storeys to "London's Living Room", a mjeeting-space with a balcony that runs round the outside of the circular building, and affords exceptional views of the city. While I was standing there, Tower Bridge obligingly opened - I had never seen it open up before, and I couldn't have picked a better place to watch it from. From nine storeys up, een the enormous children's choir singing "It Might As Wel;l rain Until September" was almaost forgivable).
From this high vantage, a spiral ramp ran down the entire height of the building, not unlike the Guggenmheim. As with all sets of stirs with very long treads, it proved strangely difficult to walk down in anything approaching a comfortable rhythm, but nonetheless the view upm, down, and across to the river was very fine. At the bottom of the stairs, once they had settled into a decreasing circle, was the Council Chamber, where Uncle Ken and his pals decide the fate of the capital - while you couldm't have called it exactly thrilling, it seemed a fine space to make decisions in, and as the centrepiece of an exceptional building, it should be at least modetately inspiring.
The last surprise the builsding had was at the very bottom, next to the wexit, where some genius had come up with the idea of an aerial view of the whiole of London, printed on the floor about 25 foot square - detailed enough that with a bit of detective work, you could locate your house, school place of work or whatever. To see the whole of the city, spread out to exact scale and in the one place, was stunning, and a simply brilliant conceit. Needless to say, it was crawling with people (including me) tracking down their own little patches of it.
So there you have it. two days, eight buildings, and a whole lot of architecture. Open House weekend is a wonderful thing, and recommend it to everyone as a chance to see some truly fascinating corners of our common past, present and future.
