Did you know there is a windmill in Brixton? Just down Brixton Hill, at the back of Blenheim Gardens, and suprisingly near to The Windmill venue, it's just been restored.
There's a friends group of Brixton Windmill who put on a lovely festial and parade every May bank holiday.
There's something awesome about Holcroft Court, the big residential block that backs onto Dare towers. It's like for one block we're transported out of central London and into some pristine housing estate on the outskirts of Amsterdam.
Whilst it looks blandly singular in function from the outside, there's a huge central courtyard, a nursery, and an underground car park underpinning the bulky austerity. I imagine the whole building crouching down to be more inconspicuous; despite the bright grey and white it's completely in scale with the buildings and trees around it.
There's all kinds of random buildings in the area and there are more being built, dating from all over the last few centuries. I assume that this one sprang up not long after the war but it feels like a slightly younger utopian inner-city new town attempt, with all its integrated services and standardised panels.
For me it's this beauty and simplicity of function contrasted with its awkwardness in its surroundings that catch my imagination.
I've not been in London that long, nearly three years, but I still find suprise around every corner. Just looking up at any line of buildings along a London street is a weird encyclopedic experience where you can start to imagine the construction and developments of each one. Today this townhouse in Fitzrovia caught my eye - it's like it has been left since a forgotten time, more huckleberry finn and Hemingway than Dickens. I wonder if it's empty inside or if the owners have just closed the shutters for the day?
These must have been a hive of activity when they were first inhabited - the servants, the master of the house, the chimneys blazing, horses and carts clattering by to the nearby Fitzroy Square, the first underground line being built under the Euston Road...
This is interesting - the Royal Opera House have commissioned Hide&Seek studio to create a new app thing which has turned out to be a fun iPhone game.
It acts as a new digital revenue stream and potential audience-grower for the institution, which is doubtless dealing with all kinds of cuts and strains like the rest of the UK public culture sector.
Apart from being fiendishly hard, it's a really fun and surprisingly engaging way to explore behind the scenes of an opera production, and the payoffs from working through the levels can be quite funny, especially if you're as bad as me.
I'll be really interested to see if this does help ROH financially - the app is reasonably pricey, but I imagine their brake-even point will still require quite a few sales - but I'm even more interested to see what its effect on audiences and young career starters is.
Many years ago in biology class I almost decided I wanted to be an ecologist when I grew up, because of a fun worksheet we had to do where we had to find the best place to re-house some newts. We had to think about water flow, tree cover, sewage, other predators, all kinds of things. As a 13 year-old that was just about the level of encouragement I needed to plan my future. I wonder if moving sets around and working lighting rigs in The Show Must Go On will inspire more young people to get involved behind and in front of the stage, even if it is only 3.5 inches wide for the time being.
Photograph by Shawn Bush, from his book The Process of Meaning and Worth
I like old telephones. We have an old creamy yellow bakelite one from Bolton (Bolton 22875 to be exact) that I got when we had to get a phone line to have internet. If we didn't only ever use it to deal with touch-tone call centres it would be awesome.
Anyway I liked this photograph seen on Feature Shoot.
There have been some inspiring artists posted on Lost at E Minor recently - I've been meaning to post about each one, but then another one comes into my feed before I get to it. So I'm going to put three pieces into one post.
A similar appeal for me to that of Joshua Petker and Chloe Early - there's a violence/beauty captured through amazing colour that is very hard to resolve as I look at the work.
Not usually a style I get so excited about but I love how the muted tones are still incredibly expressive against the paper. A lot of the work seems to be interested with the relationship between people and animals, and despite the stillness of the images, there is a real sense of personality for me that I found captivating.
I think Anna Gwenllian would like these ones.
Aspire to Enquire is a bricolage of thoughts, observations and images collected by me, Tom Harle.
More often than not, posts will relate to the diagram above - concepts and means for communicating powerful ideas for good, to the real human people concerned.
The rest of the time it will just be pretty pictures.
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