Monthly Archives: June 2013

The Post Office Tower: now you see it…

Posted on June 24, 2013 | 6 comments

Now you don’t…

This stamp of the Post Office Tower from 1965 is superb, even if it misses out the Post Office Tower itself due to a printing error (thanks to @stampmagazine for the image).

In fact, that seems kind of appropriate as the Post Office Tower was deliberately left off Ordnance Survey maps for decades because it was deemed to be an official secret and therefore of such great military importance nobody was allowed to know where it was even though it had become one of the most recognisable buildings in Britain pretty much as soon as it was opened by Tony Benn (who narrates this brief history of the tower).

It even appeared in an episode of Dr Who in 1966.

And in 1966, its revolving restaurant featured in one of Look At Life‘s fabulous films. Here are two pages from the menu, taken from the excellent Butlins Memories website.

The Post Office Tower was bombed in 1971 (often attributed to Irish nationalists but more likely the work of the Angry Brigade) and even survived an attack by a giant kitten in the 1970s.

It’s still very popular. Here’s a film by somebody who collects memorabilia about the tower.

Rob Webb has scanned some pages from the original souvenir brochure on his website and James Ward has a nice selection of postcards featuring the Post Office Tower on his blog. I like this one.

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Posted in Architecture, Film, History, London, Maps, Photography, Street furniture

Tagged Butlins, Dr Who, film, James Ward, Kitten, London, Look At Life, Menu, Ordnance Survey, Post Office Tower, revolving restaurant, stamps, The Goodies, Tony Benn

Guns and strippers: in the crypt at Kensal Green Cemetery

Posted on June 13, 2013 | Leave a comment

Photographer Sean Smith has an exhibition in the crypt of the Dissenters Chapel in Kensal Green. It’s an evocative location, with Smith’s dramatic, very beautiful but often gruesome or unsettling photographs blown up large, brightly lit and placed at the end of dark, dank corridors like profane altarpieces.

His photographs come from all over the world – one of the earliest and most compelling shows a bloodied miner in South Yorkshire from the 1984 strike lying on the floor next to a police riot shield – and there are also pictures from Beirut, Virginia, Albania and Southampton as well as three from London, reproduced below. Take the chance to check them out for yourself – and to have nose around the crypt – before the exhibition closes on June 26.

Raymond Revuebar, Soho, 1989

Boys with guns, Southall, late 1980s

Ruby Venezuela, Madam JoJo’s, Soho, 1989

Opium pipes in London

Posted on June 2, 2013 | 2 comments

brochure; pamphlet - Opium Smoking Parlour

In 1899, Earl’s Court offered interested Londoners the chance to pay 6d to see a Hong Kong ‘opium smoking parlour’, filled with ‘living Chinaman’ and ‘true to every detail’. This reflected an ongoing fascination for the Chinese habit of smoking opium – a habit that had been partly encouraged by the British East India Company and then condemned by British missionaries – and merrily ignored the fact the British themselves had been consuming opium for decades.

The Chinese tradition of smoking looked and felt very different though, and that’s partly because it was so deeply ingrained into society, a ritual to be enjoyed alongside tea and nicotine with a rich material culture, lavish paraphernalia and its own customs, traditions and symbolic meaning. This is explored in an extraordinary exhibition of Chinese opium pipes at Maggs Bros bookshop in Berkeley Square, which I have written about for the Independent on Sunday.

It features a unique collection of 19th-century Chinese pipes and related material that demonstrate the full complexity of the Chinese relationship with opium, as can be seen in some of the following images – and these barely scratch the surface of the incredible collection that can be seen at Berkeley Square from June 5 to the end of July.