Tag Archives: London

tD

Bedlam and the Mysterious Air Loom

Air Loom machine

During my college years I was fortunate enough to spend time as a volunteer in a Victorian era psychiatric hospital in the United Kingdom. Fortunate in two ways: that I was able to make some small, yet positive difference to the lives of some of the patients; and, fortunate enough to live on the outside.

Despite the good and professional intentions of the many caring staff the hospital itself — to remain nameless — was a dreary embodiment of many a nightmarish horror flick. The building had dark, endless corridors; small, leaky windows; creaky doors, many with locks exclusively on the outside, and even creakier plumbing; spare cell-like rooms for patients; treatment rooms with passive restraints on chairs and beds. Most locals still called it “____ lunatic asylum”.

All of this leads me to the fascinating and tragic story of James Tilly Matthews, a rebellious (and somewhat paranoid) peace activist who was confined to London’s infamous Bedlam asylum in 1797. He was incarcerated for believing he was being coerced and brainwashed by a mysterious governmental mind control machine known as the “Air Loom”.

Subsequent inquiries pronounced Matthews thoroughly sane, but the British government kept him institutionalized anyway because of his verbal threats against officials and then king, George III. In effect, this made Matthews a political prisoner — precisely that which he had always steadfastly maintained.

Ironically, George III’s well-documented, recurrent and serious mental illness had no adverse effect on his own reign as monarch from 1760-1820. Interestingly enough, Bedlam was the popular name for the Bethlem Royal Hospital, sometimes known as St Mary Bethlehem Hospital.

The word “Bedlam”, of course, later came to be a synonym for confusion and chaos.

Read the entire story of James Tilly Matthews and his nemesis, apothecary and discredited lay-psychiatrist, John Haslam, at Public Domain Review.

Image: Detail from the lower portion of James Tilly Matthews’ illustration of the Air Loom featured in John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness (1810). Courtesy: Public Domain Review / Wellcome Library, London. Public Domain.

tD

Zhoosh the Riah

Growing up in London of the 60s and 70s (yes, I’m that old, really), I had a rich exposure to the pig latin of teenagers and the cockney rhyming slang of adults. Rhyming slang provided a gorgeously poetic and subversive way of conversing with like-minded souls and hiding meaning from any outsiders.

I still have a soft spot for its words and phrases:

I don’t adam and eve it — believe
You’re always getting into barney rubble — trouble
I made another cadbury’s flake — mistake
Switch off the custard and jelly — telly (television)
I lost my dog and bone again — phone
My plates of meat are sore — feet
How are the dustbin lids? — kids
Drive down the frog and toad — road
I crashed my jam-jar — car
Use your loaf (short for loaf of bread) — head
Close your north and south when you’re eating — mouth
Rabbit (short for rabbit and pork) is cheap — talk
That was a great cup of rosie (short for Rosy Lee) — tea
Meet you at the rub-a-dub — pub
I’m short of sausage and mash — cash
How’s the trouble and strife? — wife

Rhyming slang like other cryptolectic languages is slowly dying out. Sadly, rich dialects and phrases from our subcultures are now increasingly subsumed by homogeneous corporate-speak.

So, it’s heart-warming to find this recent article reminding us of the forbidden corners of language by columnist Gary Nunn.

From the Guardian:

There are between 6,500 and 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Include argots – the characteristic language of a particular group – and that number climbs ginormously.

Ginormous itself is argot, the portmanteau of gigantic and enormous to form a new blended word. It’s also hyperbole: gigantic is no longer deemed huge enough, so we blend and expand.

Groups of people form their own private lexicons because coded language is exclusive, exciting and defiant. Part of it is finding your community: the mystique of being in the “in group” carried over from school; the private joke you have to be in on to find funny. You find your tribe by mimicking the peculiarities of their diction. It creates a sense of belonging, expertise and solidarity.

But it can go beyond that. The coded nature of argot (from the French for slang) can be deliberately subversive because that particular group rejects the status quo, which they find unsatisfactory, unacceptable or oppressive. It can also help conceal criminal activity or frowned-upon behaviour, making it a cryptolect – a secretive language used to confuse and exclude others and affirm the character of a marginalised subculture.

For all those reasons, argot is my favourite part of language: it sits in the forbidden corners, between the gaps, underneath the rigidity of all the rules of grammar. It’s where creativity bubbles and thrives, shrouded by an enigmatic cloak of linguistic abandon.

Often, adopters of argot have common enemies to defy or hide from: traditional conservative society; the law; the police. Defying the authority and perceived supremacy of the dominant forces in society is empowering and essential to avoid detection. It’s why drug dealers and users employ female personification in their trade to euphemise and conceal. So having a dinner party with Tina, Gina and Molly would be less civilised than it sounds: you’d be taking, respectively, crystal meth, GHB and MDMA. Similarly, the patois used in hip-hop was originally used to defy the same enemies, the argot defined by clever puns, rapid rhyming couplets, blink-and-you-miss-it wordplay and don’t-give-a-toss attitude set to an insistent beat.

Youth slang is one of the most consistently refreshing of argots. The yoof want to feel cool, exclusive, quirky and not speak in the same manner as their ’rents, which is why they’ll say things like “Nek minnit I had mahoosive FOMO” – a combination of Jamaican patois hybrid, portmanteau, acronym and drama.

As fresh as argot can feel, it can also become redundant, incumbent or mainstream. Cockney rhyming slang, for example, is a casualty of sweeping gentrification. Some of it has become mainstream – we all know what “apples and pears” means. But it retains its linguistic creativity: one’s Aris means “arse”; an abbreviation of Aristotle, which rhymes with bottle-and-glass. Genius.

Read the entire story here.

Environs, Idea Soup

MondayMap: House Prices via London Tube

London-Tube-house-prices

While I no longer live in London, I grew up there and still have a special affection for the city. I’m even attached to its famed Tube map (subway for my US readers). So I found this rendition rather fascinating — a map of average house prices at and around each tube station. No surprise: house prices on and inside the Central Line (red) are the highest, with the lowest hovering around £500,000 (roughly $710,000). Read more about this map here.

Map courtesy of eMoov with data provided by Zoopla.

 

Idea Soup

Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

Gunpowder_Plot_conspirators

I was born and came of age in London. So I have vivid, if somewhat mixed, memories of the 5th of November. We kids variously called it Guy Fawkes Day and Bonfire Night. We’d spend our pocket money (allowance) that week on fireworks rather than sweets (candy). We’d set off our fireworks and huddle around bonfires on the evening of the 5th. Naughtier kids would post (mail) fireworks in their neighbors’ letterboxes (mail boxes) and empty milk bottles.

Now that I live in the US I still have difficulty in explaining this strange and uniquely British celebration to Americans. So, here’s another attempt. Though I’ve since given up trying to explain the once common refrain — “Penny for the Guy!”– heard from children on street corners during the week leading up to the 5th of November [you will need to figure this out for yourself].

We celebrate it because Guy Fawkes once tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Oops, wrong! We celebrate it because on this day in 1605 the Gunpowder Plot planned by Mr.Fawkes and his Roman Catholic co-conspirators was successfully foiled. Correct!

From the Telegraph:

What is Bonfire Night?

Bonfire Night commemorates the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in November 1605 by a gang of Roman Catholic activists led by Warwickshire-born Robert Catesby.

When Protestant King James I began his reign, English Catholics had hoped that the persecution felt for over 45 years under his predecessor Queen Elizabeth would finally end, but this didn’t transpire so the Gunpowder Plot conspirators resolved to assassinate the King and his ministers by blowing up the Palace of Westminster during the state opening of Parliament.

Guy (Guido) Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, having rented out a house closed to the Houses of Parliament, managed to smuggle 36 barrels of gunpowder into a cellar of the House of Lords – enough to completely destroy the building. (Physicists from the Institute of Physics later calculated that the 2,500kg of gunpowder beneath Parliament would have obliterated an area 500 metres from the centre of the explosion).

The plot began to unravel when an anonymous letter was sent to the William Parker, the 4th Baron Monteagle, warning him not to avoid the House of Lords.

The letter (which could well have been sent by Lord Monteagle’s brother-in-law Francis Tresham), was made public and this led to a search of Westminster Palace in the early hours of November 5.

Explosive expert Fawkes, who had been left in the cellars to set off the fuse, was subsequently caught when a group of guards checked the cellars at the last moment.

Fawkes was arrested, sent to the Tower of London and tortured until he gave up the names of his fellow plotters and Lord Monteagle was rewarded with 500 pounds and 200 pounds worth of lands, for his service in protecting the crown.

Read the entire article here.

Image: A contemporary engraving of eight of the thirteen conspirators, by Crispijn van de Passe. Fawkes is third from the right. Public Domain.

Environs

Another London Bridge

nep-bridge-008

I don’t live in London. But having been born and raised there I still have a particular affinity for this great city. So, when the London Borough of Wandsworth recently published submissions for a new bridge of the River Thames I had to survey the designs. Over 70 teams submitted ideas since the process was opened to competition in December 2014.  The bridge will eventually span the river between Nine Elms and Pimlico.

Please check out the official designs here. Some are quite extraordinary.

Image: Scheme 008. Courtesy of Nine Elms to Pimlico (NEP) Bridge Competition, London Borough of Wandsworth.

 

Environs

SkyCycling

London-skycycle

Famed architect Norman Foster has a brilliant and restless mind. So, he’s not content to stop imagining, even with some of the world’s most innovative and recognizable architectural designs to his credit — 30 St. Mary Axe (London’s “gherkin” or pickle skyscraper), Hearst Tower, and the Millau Viaduct.

Foster is also an avid cyclist, which leads to his re-imagining of the lowly bicycle lane as a more lofty construct. Two hundred miles or so of raised bicycle lanes suspended above London, running mostly above railway lines, the SkyCycle. What a gorgeous idea.

From the Guardian:

Gliding through the air on a bike might so far be confined to the fantasy realms of singing nannies and aliens in baskets, but riding over rooftops could one day form part of your regular commute to work, if Norman Foster has his way.

Unveiled this week, in an appropriately light-headed vision for the holiday season, SkyCycle proposes a network of elevated bike paths hoisted aloft above railway lines, allowing you to zip through town blissfully liberated from the roads.

The project, which has the backing of Network Rail and Transport for London, would see over 220km of car-free routes installed above London’s suburban rail network, suspended on pylons above the tracks and accessed at over 200 entrance points. At up to 15 metres wide, each of the ten routes would accommodate 12,000 cyclists per hour and improve journey times by up to 29 minutes, according to the designers.

Lord Foster, who says that cycling is one of his great passions, describes the plan as “a lateral approach to finding space in a congested city.”

“By using the corridors above the suburban railways,” he said, “we could create a world-class network of safe, car-free cycle routes that are ideally located for commuters.”

Developed by landscape practice Exterior Architecture, with Foster and Partners and Space Syntax, the proposed network would cover a catchment area of six million people, half of whom live and work within 10 minutes of an entrance. But its ambitions stretch beyond London alone.

“The dream is that you could wake up in Paris and cycle to the Gare du Nord,” says Sam Martin of Exterior Architecture. “Then get the train to Stratford, and cycle straight into central London in minutes, without worrying about trucks and buses.”

Developed over the last two years, the initial idea came from the student project of one of Martin’s employees, Oli Clark, who proposed a network of elevated cycle routes weaving in and around Battersea power station. “It was a hobby in the office for a while,” says Martin. “Then we arranged a meeting at City Hall with the deputy mayor of transport – and bumped into Boris in the lift.”

Bumping into Boris has been the fateful beginning for some of the mayor’s other adventures in novelty infrastructure, including Anish Kapoor’s Orbit tower, apparently forged in a chance meeting with Lakshmi Mittal in the cloakrooms at Davos. Other encounters have resulted in cycle “superhighways” (which many blame for the recent increase in accidents) and a £60 million cable car that doesn’t really go anywhere. But could SkyCycle be different?

“It’s about having an eye on the future,” says Martin. “If London keeps growing and spreading itself out, with people forced to commute increasingly longer distances, then in 20 years it’s just going to be a ghetto for people in suits. After rail fare increases this week, a greater percentage of people’s income is being taken up with transport. There has to be another way to allow everyone access to the centre, and stop this doughnut effect.”

After meeting with Network Rail last year, the design team has focused on a 6.5km trial route from Stratford to Liverpool Street Station, following the path of the overground line, a stretch they estimate would cost around £220 million. Working with Roger Ridsdill-Smith, Foster’s head of structural engineering, responsible for the Millennium Bridge, they have developed what Martin describes as “a system akin to a tunnel-boring machine, but happening above ground”.

“It’s no different to the electrification of the lines west of Paddington,” he says. “It would involve a series of pylons installed along the outside edge of the tracks, from which a deck would project out. Trains could still run while the cycle decks were being installed.”

As for access, the proposal would see the installation of vertical hydraulic platforms next to existing railway stations, as well as ramps that took advantage of the raised topography around viaducts and cuttings. “It wouldn’t be completely seamless in terms of the cycling experience,” Martin admits. “But it could be a place for Boris Bike docking stations, to avoid people having to get their own equipment up there.” He says the structure could also be a source of energy creation, supporting solar panels and rain water collection.

The rail network has long been seen as a key to opening up cycle networks, given the amount of available land alongside rail lines, but no proposal has yet suggested launching cyclists into the air.

Read the entire article here.

Image: How the proposed SkyCycle tracks could look. Courtesy of Foster and Partners / Guardian.

Environs

The AbFab Garden Bridge

London-garden-bridge

Should it come to fruition, London’s answer to Lower Manhattan’s High Line promises to be a delightful walker’s paradise and another visitor magnet. The Garden Bridge is a new pedestrian walkway across the River Thames designed with nature in mind, and planted throughout with trees, shrubs and wildflowers. Interestingly, the idea for the design came from British national treasure, actress Joanna Lumley.

From Slate:

British designer Thomas Heatherwick has a knack for reinventing iconic designs. See, for example, his modern take on a midcentury double-decker bus or his 2012 Olympic cauldron, made of 204 copper petals representing participating nations. Heatherwick is also known for whimsical inventions like his 2004 rolling bridge, which curls up on itself to let boats pass beneath it.

The latest proposal from Heatherwick, the man that mentor Terence Conran branded a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, is a nature-inspired walkway across the Thames: The Garden Bridge.

Oddly, the idea for the design came from Absolutely Fabulous actress Joanna Lumley, who approached Heatherwick years ago. The bridge would be a new structure across the river intended to help improve pedestrian life by connecting North and South London with a planted garden path landscaped by U.K. designer and horticulturalist Dan Pearson. It would be filled with indigenous river edge trees, shrubs, and wildflowers and include benches and walkways of varying widths to create both intimate and more expansive spaces along the walkway. If built, the bridge would be an obvious crowdpleaser as a public green space, lookout point, and tourist destination. In London it would be a rare new jewel in the crown of a city already famed for its gardens.

Why is the idea of a slow garden path through a bustling urban landscape so appealing? Perhaps it’s because, like a vertical garden, such greenways inject our concrete metropolises with a stylized dose of the natural world we destroyed to build them. (Even if the inevitable crowds might detract from the imagined experience.)

Or perhaps it has something to do with biologist Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, described in Charles Montgomery’s new book Happy City as the notion that “humans are hardwired to find particular scenes of nature calming and restorative.” Montgomery also discusses a theory by biologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan that explains how negotiating busy city streets demands draining “voluntary attention,” whereas “involuntary attention, the kind we give to nature, is effortless, like a daydream or a song washing through your brain. You might not even realize you are paying attention and yet you may be restored and transformed by the act.”

Is this London’s answer to NYC’s High Line, itself inspired by Paris’ Promenade plantée? (Although those projects were built on the ruins of abandoned railway tracks, the parallels are clear.) Earlier this week, the Financial Times noted that the initiative has been “seen by many as the capital’s answer to New York’s much-praised High Line,” adding that “the project appealed to the rivalry between New York and London.”

While the proposed Garden Bridge has the informal support of Mayor Boris Johnson, it would be built using mostly private funding (and board trustees have rejected the idea of selling naming rights to corporate sponsors). Half of that money has already been raised, through private donations and a recent injection of cash from the government, notes The Independent, which reported on Wednesday that Transport for London, the city’s transit authority, has pledged 30 million pounds in support of the project.

Until Dec. 20, the public can visit the website of the Garden Bridge Trust that has been set up to welcome suggestions and thoughts on the plan, which if built could be open to the public in late 2017. In the meantime, this Garden Bridge video narrated by Lumley offers a sneak peek.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge would provide a leisurely garden path across the Thames River. Courtesy Arup.

 

Environs, Idea Soup

Millionaires are So Yesterday

Not far from London’s beautiful Hampstead Heath lies The Bishops Avenue. From the 1930s until the mid-1970s this mile-long street became the archetypal symbol for new wealth; the nouveau riche millionaires made this the most sought after — and well-known — address for residential property in the nation (of course “old money” still preferred its stately mansions and castles). But since then, The Bishops Avenue has changed, with many properties now in the hands of billionaires, hedge fund investors and oil rich plutocrats.

From the Telegraph:

You can tell when a property is out of your price bracket if the estate agent’s particulars come not on a sheet of A4 but are presented in a 50-page hardback coffee-table book, with a separate section for the staff quarters.

Other giveaway signs, in case you were in any doubt, are the fact the lift is leather-lined, there are 62 internal CCTV cameras, a private cinema, an indoor swimming pool, sauna, steam room, and a series of dressing rooms – “for both summer and winter”, the estate agent informs me – which are larger than many central London flats.

But then any property on The Bishops Avenue in north London is out of most people’s price bracket – such as number 62, otherwise known as Jersey House, which is on the market for £38 million. I am being shown around by Grant Alexson, from Knight Frank estate agents, both of us in our socks to ensure that we do not grubby the miles of carpets or marble floors in the bathrooms (all of which have televisions set into the walls).

My hopes of picking up a knock-down bargain had been raised after the news this week that one property on The Bishops Avenue, Dryades, had been repossessed. The owners, the family of the former Pakistan privatisation minister Waqar Ahmed Khan, were unable to settle a row with their lender, Deutsche Bank.

It is not the only property in the hands of the receivers on this mile-long stretch. One was tied up in a Lehman Brothers property portfolio and remains boarded up. Meanwhile, the Saudi royal family, which bought 10 properties during the First Gulf War as boltholes in case Saddam Hussein invaded, has offloaded the entire package for a reported £80 million in recent weeks. And the most expensive property on the market, Heath Hall, had £35 million knocked off the asking price (taking it down to a mere £65 million).

This has all thrown the spotlight once again on this strange road, which has been nicknamed “Millionaires’ Row” since the 1930s – when a million meant something. Now, it is called “Billionaires’ Row”. It was designed, from its earliest days, to be home to the very wealthy. One of the first inhabitants was George Sainsbury, son of the supermarket founder; another was William Lyle, who used his sugar fortune to build a vast mansion in the Arts and Crafts style. Stars such as Gracie Fields also lived here.

But between the wars, the road became the butt of Music Hall comedians who joked about it being full of “des-reses” for the nouveaux riches such as Billy Butlin. Evelyn Waugh, the master of social nuance, made sure his swaggering newspaper baron Lord Copper of Scoop resided here. It was the 1970s, however, that saw the road vault from being home to millionaires to a pleasure ground for international plutocrats, who used their shipping or oil wealth to snap up properties, knock them down and build monstrous mansions in “Hollywood Tudor” style. Worse were the pastiches of Classical temples, the most notorious of which was built by the Turkish industrialist Halis Toprak, who decided the bath big enough to fit 20 people was not enough of a statement. So he slapped “Toprak Mansion” on the portico (causing locals to dub it “Top Whack Mansion”). It was sold a couple of years ago to the Kazakhstani billionairess Horelma Peramam, who renamed it Royal Mansion.

Perhaps the most famous of recent inhabitants was Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate, and for a long time Britain’s richest man. But he sold Summer Palace, for £38 million in 2011 to move to the much grander Kensington Palace Gardens, in the heart of London. The cast list became even more varied with the arrival of Salman Rushdie who hid behind bullet-proof glass and tycoon Asil Nadir, whose address is now HM Belmarsh Prison.

Of course, you can be hard-pressed to discover who owns these properties or how much anyone paid. These are not run-of-the-mill transactions between families moving home. Official Land Registry records reveal a complex web of deals between offshore companies. Miss Peramam holds Royal Mansion in the name of Hartwood Resources Company, registered in the British Virgin Islands, and the records suggest she paid closer to £40 million than the £50 million reported.

Alexson says the complexity of the deals are not just about avoiding stamp duty (which is now at 7 per cent for properties over £2 million). “Discretion first, tax second,” he argues. “Look, some of the Middle Eastern families own £500 billion. Stamp duty is not an issue for them.” Still, new tax rules this year, which increase stamp duty to 15 per cent if the property is bought through an offshore vehicle, have had an effect, according to Alexson, who says that the last five houses he sold have been bought by an individual, not a company.

But there is little sign of these individuals on the road itself. Walking down the main stretch of the Avenue from the beautiful Hampstead Heath to the booming A1, which bisects the road, more than 10 of these 39 houses are either boarded up or in a state of severe disrepair. Behind the high gates and walls, moss and weeds climb over the balustrades. Many others are clearly uninhabited, except for a crew of builders and a security guard. (Barnet council defends all the building work it has sanctioned, with Alexson pointing out that the new developments are invariably rectifying the worst atrocities of the 1980s.)

Read the entire article here.

Image: Toprak Mansion (now known as Royal Mansion), The Bishops Avenue. Courtesy of Daily Mail.

tD

Documentary Filmmaker or Smartphone Voyeur?

Yesterday’s murderous atrocity on a busy street in Woolwich, South East London has shocked many proud and stoic Londoners to the core. For two reasons. First, that a heinous act such as this can continue to be wrought by one human against another in honor of misguided and barbaric politics and under the guise of distorted religious fanaticism. Second, that many witnesses at close range recorded the unfolding scene on their smartphones for later dissemination via social media, but did nothing to prevent the ensuing carnage or to aid the victim and those few who did run to help.

Our thoughts go to the family and friends of the victim. Words cannot express the sadness.

To the perpetrators: you and your ideas will be consigned to the trash heap of history. To the voyeurs: you are complicit through your inaction; it would have been wiser to have used your smartphones as projectiles or to call the authorities, rather than to watch and record and tweet the bloodshed. You should be troubled and ashamed.

Environs

Your Life Expectancy Mapped

Your life expectancy mapped, that is, if you live in London, U.K. So, take the iconic London tube (subway) map, then overlay it with figures for average life expectancy. Voila, you get to see how your neighbors on the Piccadilly Line fair in their longevity compared with say, you, who happen to live near a Central Line station. It turns out that in some cases adjacent areas — as depicted by nearby but different subway stations — show an astounding gap of more than 20 years in projected life span.

So, what is at work? And, more importantly, should you move to Bond Street where the average life expectancy is 96 years, versus only 79 in Kennington, South London?

[div class=attrib]From the Atlantic:[end-div]

Last year’s dystopian action flick In Time has Justin Timberlake playing a street rat who suddenly comes into a great deal of money — only the currency isn’t cash, it’s time. Hours and minutes of Timberlake’s life that can be traded just like dollars and cents in our world. Moving from poor districts to rich ones, and vice versa, requires Timberlake to pay a toll, each time shaving off a portion of his life savings.

Literally paying with your life just to get around town seems like — you guessed it — pure science fiction. It’s absolute baloney to think that driving or taking a crosstown bus could result in a shorter life (unless you count this). But a project by University College London researchers called Lives on the Line echoes something similar with a map that plots local differences in life expectancy based on the nearest Tube stop.

The trends are largely unsurprising, and correlate mostly with wealth. Britons living in the ritzier West London tend to have longer expected lifespans compared to those who live in the east or the south. Those residing near the Oxford Circus Tube stop have it the easiest, with an average life expectancy of 96 years. Going into less wealthy neighborhoods in south and east London, life expectancy begins to drop — though it still hovers in the respectable range of 78-79.

Meanwhile, differences in life expectancy between even adjacent stations can be stark. Britons living near Pimlico are predicted to live six years longer than those just across the Thames near Vauxhall. There’s about a two-decade difference between those living in central London compared to those near some stations on the Docklands Light Railway, according to the BBC. Similarly, moving from Tottenham Court Road to Holborn will also shave six years off the Londoner’s average life expectancy.

Michael Marmot, a UCL professor who wasn’t involved in the project, put the numbers in international perspective.

“The difference between Hackney and the West End,” Marmot told the BBC, “is the same as the difference between England and Guatemala in terms of life expectancy.”

[div class=atrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Atlantic / MappingLondon.co.uk.[end-div]

Art, Idea Soup

London’s Telephone Box

London’s bright red telephone boxes (booths for our readers in the United States) are as iconic and recognizable as the Queen or Big Ben looming over the Houses of Parliament. Once as ubiquitous as the distinctive London Bobby’s (police officer) helmet, many of these red iron chambers have now been replaced by mobile phones. As a result BT has taken to auctioning some of its telephone boxes for a very good cause — ChildLine’s 25th anniversary. Though not before each is painted or re-imagined by an artist or designer. Check out our five favorites below, and see all of BT’s colorful “Artboxes”, here.

Accessorize

Proud of their London heritage, the ArtBox sports Accessorize’s trademark Union Jack design – customized and embellished in true Accessorize fashion.

 

 

 

Big Ben BT ArtBox

When Mandii first came to London from New Zealand, one of the first sights she wanted to see was Big Ben.

 

 

 

Peekaboo

Take a look and see what you find.

Evoking memories of the childhood game, hide and seek ‘Peekaboo’ invites you to consider issues of loneliness and neglect, and the role of the ‘finder’, which can be attributed to ChildLine.

 

 

Slip

A phonebox troubled by a landslide. Just incredible.

 

 

 

 

Londontotem

Loving the block colours and character designs. Their jolly spirit is infection, I mean, just look at their faces! The PhoneBox is like a mini street ornament in London isn’t it? A proper little totem pole in its own right!

 

 

 

[div class=attrib]Read more about BT’s Artbox project after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Images courtesy of BT.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Saucepan Lids No Longer Understand Cockney

You may not “adam and eve it”, but it seems that fewer and fewer Londoners now take to their “jam jars” for a drive down the “frog and toad” to their neighborhood “rub a dub dub”.

[div class=attrib]From the Daily Telegraph:[end-div]

The slang is dying out amid London’s diverse, multi-cultural society, new research has revealed.

A study of 2,000 adults, including half from the capital, found the world famous East End lingo which has been mimicked and mocked for decades is on the wane.

The survey, commissioned by The Museum of London, revealed almost 80 per cent of Londoners do not understand phrases such as ‘donkey’s ears’ – slang for years.

Other examples of rhyming slang which baffled participants included ‘mother hubbard’, which means cupboard, and ‘bacon and eggs’ which means legs.

Significantly, Londoners’ own knowledge of the jargon is now almost as bad as those who live outside of the capital.

Yesterday, Alex Werner, head of history collections at the Museum of London, said: “For many people, Cockney rhyming slang is intrinsic to the identity of London.

“However this research suggests that the Cockney dialect itself may not be enjoying the same level of popularity.

“The origins of Cockney slang reflects the diverse, immigrant community of London’s East End in the 19th century so perhaps it’s no surprise that other forms of slang are taking over as the cultural influences on the city change.”

The term ‘cokenay’ was used in The Reeve’s Tale, the third story in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, to describe a child who was “tenderly brought up” and “effeminate”.

By the early 16th century the reference was commonly used as a derogatory term to describe town-dwellers. Later still, it was used to indicate those born specifically within earshot of the ringing of Bow-bell at St Mary-le-Bow church in east London.

Research by The Museum of London found that just 20 per cent of the 2,000 people questioned knew that ‘rabbit and pork’ meant talk.

It also emerged that very few of those polled understood the meaning of tommy tucker (supper), watch the custard and jelly (telly) or spend time with the teapot lids (kids).

Instead, the report found that most Londoners now have a grasp of just a couple of Cockney phrases such as tea leaf (thief), and apples and pears (stairs).

The most-used cockney slang was found to be the phrase ‘porky pies’ with 13 per cent of those questioned still using it. One in 10 used the term ‘cream crackered’.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Tesco UK.[end-div]

Environs

London’s Other River

You will have heard of the River Thames, the famous swathe of grey that cuts a watery path through London.  You may even have heard of several of London’s prominent canals, such as the Grand Union Canal and Regent’s Canal. But, you probably will not have heard of the mysterious River Fleet that meanders through eerie tunnels beneath the city.

The Fleet and its Victorian tunnels are available for exploration, but are not for the faint of heart or sensitive of nose.

For more stunning subterranean images follow the full article here.

[div class=attrib]Images courtesy of Environmental Grafitti.[end-div]