Sitting on the upper deck of a No. 73 bus from Oxford Street to Victoria, the traffic ground to a standstill outside Selfridges. It was the first day of the heatwave and – listening to my iPhone – I idly snapped a shot of the bus stop opposite ready to have a good moan on Instagram. Zooming in afterwards, I discovered this lovely couple caught embracing in the lower right corner of the frame… Their obvious tenderness was very very sweet…
Reblogged from Stoked On Science on Tumblr:
Leaving the lab late at night, I always find the light blue glow that the UV lamp sheds on the inside of the biosafety hood especially beautiful. Although, if I were some tiny bacteria that happened to land inside that hood, I doubt I’d feel very nostalgic about my mutating genome.
Pic: taken with Instagram
A team of chuggers with collecting boxes emerging from the tube onto Oxford Street ready to take up their stations for yesterday evening’s rush hour.
Urban Dictionary‘s top definition of “chugger” is scathing:
Paid “charity” street worker (read: student) who has been trained to believe they are improving peoples’ lives by conning Joe Public out of their money for this week’s Good Cause. Usually an agency worker – where the agency takes a hefty cut of the hourly rate the charity in question has paid for – while at the same time selling on details of those foolish enough to actually stop and sign up to said Good Cause. If you really want to support a charity, do it through their website, not a chugger.
Wikipedia is more balanced:
Paid street fundraisers are sometimes known as chuggers because usually fundraising is viewed as aggressive or invasive – a portmanteau of “charity” and “mugger”. It became popular after negative articles appeared in several British newspapers*. However, those in the charity sector see street fundraising as an invaluable method of raising brand awareness, and recruiting younger donors under the age of 35 who are “like gold-dust for a charity because they will give over a longer lifetime.”
*the term first appeared in print in the free London newspaper Metro in its SAY WHAT [New Words Around Town] column by Keith Barker-Main on 26 June 2002.
Centre Point is another iconic London landmark and was the subject of a long-running property scandal in the the mid-1960s.
According to Wikipedia London County Council bent its own rules to allow a developer called Harry Hyams to build this unusually tall office block (32 floors) in the heart of the West End. In return Hyams agreed to provide a new road junction underneath it, which the council itself couldn’t afford to build.
With property prices rising Hyams made so much profit from it simply standing empty that he had no need to let it out as office space – and for many years the vacant building towered over the skyline as a symbol of capitalist greed. Perhaps it’s appropriate that when he did finally allow the building to be used in 1980, it became the headquarters of the Confederation Of British Industry.
Pic taken with Instagram
Looking South on Cornwall Road, London SE1 8TW from outside Konditor & Cook‘s Waterloo bakery.
Pic taken with Instagram
Under the railway bridge at Waterloo East looking North up Cornwall Street. Foreground: Konditor and Cook bakery.
Pic taken with Instagram
Spotted another Morris 1000 – this time a saloon parked on Whittlesey Street – an original Victorian London terrace that survived the wartime bombing of nearby Waterloo Station intact.
Pic taken with Instagram
The small joys of middle aged life: when a Christmas present is exactly what you wanted. In this case new fleece-lined moccasins – warm indoor footwear for these chilly early mornings…
The Royal Glasgow Concert Hall sits at the eastern end of Sauchiehall Street at its junction with Buchanan Street. Snapped this inspiring view from its front steps as dusk was falling over the city yesterday evening…
View from cab window on the way in to the Regent Street Apple Store this morning. The optical drive on my desktop iMac needs to be replaced. Using it as a daily workhorse, you don’t miss your CD burner till it chews up your disks and refuses to spit ’em out again.
Sandstone clocktower of Big Ben looking a light golden brown in the thin winter sunlight. Note bronze statue of David Lloyd George in lower RH corner…
Taken with Instagram
Anxious looking tourists sit down on the Northern Line tube at Waterloo, hoping they’re on the right train. They got out again at Leicester Square looking pleased and relieved…
City Of Westminster traffic warden writing a parking ticket for a City Of Westminster street cleaner’s handcart. Only doing my job…
Click image to zoom in…
Hamburg Autumn 2010 - rain clouds across the inner Alster, snapped on iPhone 3GS.
Snapshots from the driver’s seat in stationary traffic at various points across London this afternoon, after dropping my wife at Liverpool Street station for a night away in Norfolk.
Click here to view the full slideshow on Flickr…
Came across this gorgeous canalside view just outside a canteen when I was doing a job near Kensal Rise last Autumn… Since the smoking ban, the outdoor areas around cafes and workplaces seem to have become an awful lot nicer.
Went to the local Medical Centre to get a prescription review – of which more in a future post – and glanced over a bridge on my way back to the car park. A scrawny and bedraggled heron was standing a few feet below me in the inch-deep waters of the River Wandle, looking morose and bored. It can’t be much of a life, being a heron in London.
Car broke down on my way across London last Monday. Had to pull into the nearest garage to get a new fanbelt and alternator fitted, which left me with a couple of hours to kill in Haringey, a part of town I first visited as a young man in 1973.
One Wetherspoons pub and one tiny run-down internet cafe later, I wandered back down Turnpike Lane to the garage to pick up the car. Got out the phone and snapped some garish offerings in a couple of shop windows along the way… 
