I like car wreckers and scrap metal dealers and large recycling operations. I like landfill sites. I like waste transfer stations and telephone exchanges. I like water plants and pumping sheds. I like electricity substations and high tension lines and the land beneath them. I like railway yards and freight terminals. I like the weeds […]

10 items from London Transport’s lost and found.

The typewriter is a mechanical tabulator, a character assasinator, a syntagmatic manipulator. It arranges textual space as a Cartesian plane, each letter occupying a unique position on the two-dimensional grid. It’s a machine for a linear, ordered world. It standardises writing, hammering out the personal flourishes and curlicues into mass-produced typeface. Rows and columns, ragged […]

I first heard about Beijing’s pyjama culture back in May when I read this post about the work of National Geographic photographer Justin Guarigilia. Take a look, Guarigilia captures some great examples of this trend. The article helped me make sense of what I’d seen in Cambodia a couple of years ago — the marked […]

The piano had been sitting there gathering dust — it was ‘on loan’ for several years while its previous owner made up his mind what he wanted to do with it, and now it’s become a permanent fixture. So I started taking lessons. Currently I’m working on “Gymnopédie No. 1” by Erik Satie. It’s a […]