Once the site of a gas-works, the Becton Alps is perhaps London’s most inappropriately named geographical feature; For starters there is only one of ‘em and you can cycle to the top in less than five minutes. Instead of a layer of glacial permafrost, the Beckton Alps are covered with scraggy grass and litter from the bored teenagers who use it as a place to hang out and ingest skag.
The slope was opened by the “People’s Princess” (check the middle photo), and remained open from 1989 to 2001. Many of my friends used to go there, so it must have been a fun place to attract so many people. The slope closed in order to make way for a new indoor slope with the promise of all-year skiing on real snow.
This was once a popular dry ski-slope. Today it is a derelict slag-heap overlooking a retail park.
Of course, the new ski-slope never got built. Beckton is governed by notoriously inept Newham Council. The contractors employed to build the new slope quickly found themselves in financial difficulty and the project was suspended. Allegedly, all involved feared competition from a nearby (Milton Keynes) snow-slope, after nobody from East London likes skiing or snow-boarding.
The land is still owned and mis-managed by Newham who officialy claim that the project is going ahead, but at an unspecified time in the future.
If you want to see this for yourself you will have to climb the Alps!
So it is currently a wasteland, overlooking some of London’s most dreary shopping areas, but fortunately full of unintentional art like these corroding steel piles. I have no idea if they are supposed to be holding something up, or perhaps they have been placed there by an aincient skiing tribe to ward off evil spirits.
This image featuring the face of George Bush II with the ears of Mickey Mouse was found on the pavement between Belsize Park and Hampstead tube stations, not far from the Royal-Free hospital. I get the impression that the author of this image dislikes the Disney Corporation, and the President of the USA, which narrows him or her down to anywhere in Europe, Asia or South America. There are reports of these images appearing elsewhere in the Camden area.
While notionally allied to one another (Disney Corporation have provided a great deal of funding to the president’s brother), The juxtaposition of these icons is done in a way that neither would enjoy, despite having similar values. I doubt that a joining of Castrol and Cadburys would yield the same response.
The caption reads “Disney War”, as if to say under the bush presidency warfare is now a form of entertainment to be marketed and delivered in handy sound-bites by big-media. At least that is what I think I am supposed to think - the best protest art can be interpreted in whatever way you like; for example the artist might be suggesting that Bush is a mouse-like coward for not persecuting his recent battles with enough vigour… that wee timorous beastie.
At the risk of pedantry, it is also worth noting that the character depicted here appears to have both human and mouse ears. It’s unsual in any kind of chimeric creature for major anatomical features to be duplicated, so let us more safely assume that the president is wearing a “Mousketeer” hat: The naff outfits worn by the child-presenters of Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club.
This year I plan to vote Lib Dem. I expect that they will gain a few seats at the expense of the Conservative and Labour parties. In my own constituancy of Harringey, Lib Dem, former MEP Lynne Featherstone is battling Barbara Roche, a very experienced Labour MP. The local Liberal party seem more up-beat than I can ever remember, and I think they might have a chance of taking Harringey from Labour.
I am quite happy with Barbara as an MP. She answered all of my letters promptly, often going to extrordinary lengths to pry a response from reluctant departments. Mrs Roche has an excellent liberal voting record, and seems like the sort of person who could be trusted to represent Harringey. So why have I decided to vote Liberal this election?
- A positive campaign; I find the arguments between the Labour and Conservative parties so annoying, particularly the way that each side knowingly mis-represents the opinions of the other. For the little the Lib-Dems have said, they have mainly discussed their own policies rather than attack straw-man arguments.
- Honesty about taxes; Of course taxes will have to go up if we want every child to have the opportunity of a free university education. The Conservative and Labour parties have meerly said that some forms of taxation will not go up, but been unwilling to say plainly that they too will want to put up taxes.
- ID Cards; The lib-dems have promised to abandon what I consider to be the single greatest threat to liberty - not terrorists, but the pervasive surveilance culture. Labours obsession with ID Cards seems to be like an unhealthy seige mentality. The conservative party seem to support ID Cards, because they are afraid to appear to be ’soft on terrorism’, when niether side has convincingly demonstrated that ID cards will address any of their purported goals.
- Anti War; The lib-dems consistently opposed war in Iraq, even before it was widely known that the government’s ‘WMD’ allegations were entirely bogus. While it might be too late to extract British troops from Iraq, they were correct to point out that the UK should not have got involved with this trumped-up conflict.
- Racism; Unlike the conservative party, the Lib-Dems have acknowledged that the nation benefits from immigrants. The conservative policy of enforcing fixed limits on immigration is ludicrous given our nation’s industrial skills shortage.
Now as long as the dems dont ruin things with some awful, trite campaign posters or stupid political broadcasts, then they can count on my vote…
Lock Keepers Cottage, Old Ford Lock. I once gazed at this building through the bleary eyes of a teenager late for school. I went without food, because The Big Breakfast was all the sustinance that I needed.
This is the house where Evans made his fame. How I loved his ginger-faced banter. For Rosalind, Tarbuck and Ball this building was a font of creativity. Vaughn set the standards, and the tears of laughter did flow. Alas those tears have long-since dried.
Those once rosy bricks are now stained with the black pessimism of the grimy east-end. The sound of laughter resounds no more. Dog-walkers bussle on in an embarrased silence. There are no gurning children, celebrity chefs or pop-stars; the great and the poor are are excluded by mesh and razor-wire.
Oh, would that the languid waters rise up and wash away this misery!
In April of 1999 (Almost exactly a year before I left Ogilvy Advertising Group), I was invited by the then chief-creative of the London office to speak at a training project organised by the South African branch of the company. My subject was one I knew almost nothing about, however that was substantially more than most people claiming expertise at the time: “Viral Marketing”
These days, almost nobody uses the term Viral Marketing, as it is the sort of trendy corporate nonsense that reminds us of how wrong we all were at the high-point of the dot-com boom. The phrase been stricken from the lexicon of credible business in favour of more sober plain language, however the central idea is a simple truth: It is better for a message to charm its way into offices and living rooms rather than to rely on the more costly, hypnotic brute force of repeated messages and big media.
I was never originally intended to be a speaker at this event; the person whose suite I ended up occupying was none other than the worldwide head of interactive. At the height of the dot-com boom his talents were judged to be more profitably used elsewhere. The opportunity fell to me because everybody else considered themselves too important or too busy and of course thanks to the generosity of the creative director who nominated me.
Continue reading ‘Return to Lanzerac Manor’
I should also mention that my last cinema excursion was the