London, capital city of the UK and England, home of the West End Theatre and 2012 Olympics
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Here’s the mid May time capsule including photos from the Kew temporary garden outside the British museum, goslings at Alexandra Lake, Wanstead Flats and the London Orbit Tower.
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There’s a bloody great helicopter Warship moored in the Thames at Greenwich!
When I surfaced at Greenwich on Thursday, there were two remarkable ships on view. The newly reburbished and reopened Cutty Sark is looking great now, with all the scaffolding and stuff gone, so you can see the glass building that surrounds the bottom half of the hull as it should be seen. With a slight lengthwise curve to the roof, the old ship has an impression of movement, more like she’s back sailing on the water than when it was just sunk in a darkened concrete hole of a dry dock.
Lynx helicopter
And out on the river Thames itself, before embarking the motor cruiser to see the Cable Car Crossing and the Thames Barrier, the scene is dominated by an enormous grey warship. From the waterside, the shape of HMS Ocean is disorientating. The superstructure is asymetrical, and the main hull looks like it’s been sliced lengthways, revealing two big holes at the side. Seeing the platform jutting out on the port side, it looks a bit like a traditional aircraft carrier, but it isn’t. It’s a helicopter ship, carrying eight Lynx helicopters there to patrol the no fly zone during the London 2012 Olympics.
HMS Ocean at Greenwich
According to information I looked up later, there are both Army and Navy Lynx helicopters onboard, as well as serving as a base for anti terrorist units during the period of the Games. Greenwich is used to seeing large Navy ships moored in the Thames, such as HMS Illustrious last year.
Combined Operations badge
You can see the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy building from the train between Manor Park and Ilford, on the mainline from Liverpool Street Station to Shenfield, or intercity to Ipswich and Norwich. I saw the earthworks when it was being built, but didn’t know what it was at the time. Now there’s an enormous black shed over the site, with large red lettering which reads “Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy” The words are so big I couldn’t even fit them into one photograph with my camera set to widescreen!
So what is do they do there exactly? Well, pretty much what it says on the tin, but what they omit to say in the title is that it’s all linked to the Crossrail project.
The establishment of a Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) is central to Crossrail’s delivery plans and its legacy to the industry.
What is TUCA?
The Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) is a purpose-built training facility that supports the key skills required to work in tunnel excavation, underground construction and infrastructure.
By building and establishing TUCA, Crossrail is contributing to the development of new qualifications and Health and Safety standards across the industry.
Crossrail is working with industry, professional bodies and other organisations with a requirement for skilled underground workers, to ensure that the facilities and training at TUCA are aligned with the needs of the industry.
from http://www.crossrail.co.uk/delivering/skills-employment/tuca/#.T55h6sRYuco
Crossrail itself is the huge engineering project to build a new underground east west railway line underneath London, connecting Heathrow and Paddington through to the City and Docklands, and out through Manor Park and Ilford to Shenfield. Its the beginning of an extra deeper, faster layer to the London undergound system which should really have begun in the 1970s like the RER in Paris. The first trains running on part of Crossrail are due in 2018 with a full through service sketched in to commence in December 2019.
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via posterous
The Routemaster bus will be back on the streets of London from Monday 27th Feb 2012. Londoners’ favourite bus – the only one you can hop on and off ( except this one has doors) – has been redesigned by British designer Thomas Heatherwick.
New Routemaster Bus in the rain
Thomas Heatherwick (born 17 February 1970) is an English designer known for innovative use of engineering and materials in public monuments and sculptures. He heads Heatherwick Studio, a design and architecture studio, which he founded in 1994.
By incorporating an open platform at its rear, the bus reinstates one of the much-loved features of the 1950s Routemaster which offered a ‘hop-on hop-off’ service. The new design will also have three doors and two staircases, making it quicker and easier for passengers to board.
I went to WordPress London meetup number #7 last night, hosted by Headshift at their office near Shad Thames, along the south bank of the Thames, east of Tower Bridge. Nice to have something on the East side for once, although south of the river, I wouldn’t normally mention the general location but for Londoners, having different travel options is essential and I was pleased to be able to exit the Transport For London system at a zone 2 tube station, Bermondsey.
WordPress London is not really a mainly social gathering like some of the bloggers meetups, it’s a business learning event and last night there were three sections, each packed with fast moving presentations full of detail, actionable insights and deeply understood data.
First up, a round up of news from the world of WordPress from Chris Adams of Headshift with a peek at the new drag and drop file upload interface for WordPress 3.3, out very soon. There was also a heads up for the ManageWP service launched this month, a service which I use myself and would also heartily recommend for anybody who maintains more than one self-hosted WordPress installation, in fact it’s brilliant if you have dozens or more.
WordPress London Meetup
Then David Bain delivered a comprehensive briefing about SEO for WordPress, including an outline of a hub and spoke structure for content based on using pages for the main parts of a site, supported by posts All based around keyword targeting, which, while possibly on it’s way to becoming somewhat old-school, is after all what search engine optimisation is all about. One or two plugin tips to be followed up there.
Finally, Keith Devon a WordPress developer explained how and why to use WordPress Custom Post Types. Custom post types are not types of posts at all, but other types of content alongside of posts or pages. The example given was that of a real estate property rental site, for which the element “Property” needed to be a thing of itself, with it’s own display template in the theme, neither a post nor a page but with it’s own “add Property” section within the dashboard. This gave me some great ideas for how I might have designed one or two of my existing sites much better had the concept been around a few years ago. Keith showed us how to implement custom post types by dropping in chunks of code into functions.php “because it’s easier” but discussion from the audience suggests that using specialised plugins for the purpose may be the way to go if you want to be able to keep your site up to date with new software releases.
Time for some brief discussions and an optional visit to a Samuel Smiths pub afterwards, so I walked back along the south bank and over London Bridge back to dry land.
Hashtag: #WPLDN
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/chris.d.adams/wpldn-monthly-new…
Video: http://youtu.be/gdGOvoDmRSc
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/13pillars/the-3-ps-of-wordpress…
Video: http://youtu.be/rAeqcP0CHLk
Slides, video and write-up: http://keithdevon.com/2011/tuts/custom-post-types/
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Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
