Greenwich Naval College July 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London , add a commentThe Naval College Buildings at Greenwich
Viewed from Island Gardens at the tip of the Isle of Dogs across the river, because the DLR train service to Cutty Sark was suffering from delays on Sunday. The buildings were designed by Sir Christopher Wren just as he was limbering up to build an even bigger dome on top of St Paul’s Cathederal.
The aim of our trip was to enjoy an evening cruise but that was cancelled too, never mind. Another surprise was to see a giant ferris wheel next to where the Cutty Sark is meant to be.
Captured on canvas - I’m in a painting from Bastille Day June 6, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, London, cider , 2commentsThursday is the weekend
Yesterday was a Thursday but I decided to declare it a weekend day and take a day off since it the weather looked very promising. We went for a pleasant canalside walk, explored Islington’s Chapel Market, visited the canal museum and had a smashing lunch at the Charles Lamb inn.
Bastille Day
I first discovered that particular pub on Bastille Day least year, July 14th when a celebration of the French holiday was organised in conjunction with the review site Trusted Places and sponsorship from Ricard. So this is where the painting comes into it. The event made a colourful street scene with petanque being played in the road outside the pub, an accordian player and an artist painting with oil colours. So yesterday after ordering my smoked trout with beetroot and horseradish I notice a painting of that very scene hanging up on the wall inside the pub. “Ah that’s the painting we watched being half finished on Bastille day. Wait a minute, that’s me !” How did I know it was me? Well I was still wearing the same jacket. So here it is:
Nick Botting
The artist is a renowned portrait painter, local to Islington, Nick Botting who once painted a portrait of Ian Botham and has been one of the Artists at Kew.
Linda dug out her photos from the event last year, which show the painting at an earlier stage, before the man in the beige jacket was added.
That photo in Here Comes Everybody May 8, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Flickr, London , 2commentsThanks to Frankie for first noticing it and Shirlyearly for tracking the page down for me in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Here Comes Everybody
Please do not inform children of the explosions
This is the picture referred to in the book, and it came in for a lot of attention on the day itself, July 7th 2005.
The book relates directly to the topic we’ve been discussing in the “End of Organisations” debate, and there’s also a blog by Clay Shirky which recently published an insightful article about the cognitive surplus caused by forty years of watching crap TV, which I can relate to. It’s called Gin, Television and Social Surplus although the permalink reveals a subtitle “looking for the mouse”.
Bank Holiday Weekend - 10 things to do in London May 5, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : London, UK , 3commentsIt’s a May Day bank holiday weekend here in the whole of the UK, so a lot of people who do ‘jobs’ will be looking to make the most of the time off work. Trips away to the countryside, coast and abroad such as short Paris breaks are popular, as is staying at home and doing DIY, house hunting, gardening etc. Here in the capital, there ought to be lots of alternative opportunities but sometimes it’s hard to get inspired so I’m going to start up a list. I’ll edit this later to add more things, and will of course be very grateful for any suggestions contributed by readers.
So here’s a list of at least 10 possible things to do in London on a Bank Holiday.
Art
There are plenty of art galleries and sculpture installations to see in London, both permament displays and visiting exhibitions. Tate modern is a favourite but there are many other less well known gems.
Parks
If you ever take a flight on the London Eye, you’ll be surprised to see how green a city London is, with lots of parks and open spaces. Hampsted Heath and Kenwood House offer long walks amongst wildlife and more art. Primrose Hill is another location in the north of the city, with a fantastic view back over central London and an opportunity to enjoy Sunday lunch with live Jazz music at The Princess of Wales pub.
The river
The Tate to Tate fast catamaran is the quickest way to get a feel for what a longer boat trip on the river Thames might be like, with a return trip on the boat from Westminster to Hampton Court taking up the best part of a day out. By night the riversides between Tower bridge and London Bridge and the Southbank are all worth exploring.
Greenwich
You can also depart from Greenwich with river trips into Central London or out to the Thames flood barrier. Back in Greenwich there are some fine walks up the hill, in the park or along the river bank. There’s also the National Maritime Museum, the grounds of the Naval College and a good selection of noodle bars and vietnamese restaurants.
Pubs
Choose one of the great pubs in the London Cider Pub Guide. You can always drink beer if you haven’t yet learned to appreciate real cider and perry.
Eat
London has the best selection of international cuisine in the World and traditional british cuisine is becoming popular again too. Two of my favourites are Japanese Habibi Sushi and South Indian (Masala Dosa)
Football
Important local derby football matches are often played on bank holidays, but May is in the off season apart from the FA cup and FA trophy finals at Wembley.
Banger Racing
Banger Racing is a cheap and cheeful form of motor sport which makes for a great family day out and there are often special events for bank holiday mondays eg at Wimbledon.
Theatre
For top West End musicals or new fringe plays in theatre pubs, the full range is available in London and the suburbs. Some of the stars are on holiday this week which means last minute theatre tickets might be available for otherwise sold out shows. If you’re visiting though, it’s better really to have booked one of the best value theatre breaks in London.
Kew Gardens
Big enough to find solitude on a busy day, Kew Gardens is an all year round spectacle with the plantlife taking centre stage even when temporary art installations and photography exhibitions are first class. Visit the new alpine house now that it’s been populated with tiny wonders subsisting in cracks on the tufa rock.
Internet
Catch up on email from the Apple store, Regent Street or use your own laptop in the city with free wifi hotspots. Alternatively, stay at home and get the best out of your home broadband connection by using it all day long.
Camden Lock
If it’s trendy goth clothing and techno punk disco ware that’s important then Camden Lock market is where all the young continentals go to grab the latest London scene paraphanalia. There’s also a good selection of street food stalls and a great walk along the canal to Little Venice.
Things to beware of on Bank Holidays
Public transport may be limited to a Sunday service, or worse because of planned engineering works in the London area. Check alternative routes such as the London Overground.
Some places will be more crowded than usual, while others are closed on a Bank Holiday.
Habibi Sushi - new Sushi bar in London April 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : food and drink, video, London , 2comments
I spotted a brand new sushi bar called Habibi Sushi which only opened last week, so we went back a couple of days later for lunch. The location is great, in the narrow Artillary Passage just a short walk from Liverpool Street station, fork left at the Seven Stars in the direction of Brick Lane or Spitalfields, so very handy for having a bite on the way home, or maybe picking up a takeaway box which looked great. Conveyor belt Sushi bars are great fun, and the original “Moshi Moshi” inside Liverpool Street station itself seems to have gone downhill a bit recently, so some competition in the local area is most welcome.
The food was very good, with some unusual variations on the usual sushi dishes, and about the right proportions of raw fish and cooked meat dishes. The only slight niggle I would have is with the stools which swivel in all directions including up, down and side to side. That might help fit everything in to a narrow shop, but it does make sitting down and staying on a bit of an effort after a while!
From their website at www.habibisushi.co.uk you can download pdfs for either the eat-in or takeaway menus, which is handy if you want to memorise the colour coding dish scheme for pricing conveyor belt choices.
Verdict: Well worth a try if in the vicinity or even making a special trip to visit. I hope Habibi Sushi keeps up the good standard and stays in business for years to come.
Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube? April 9, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social objects, Flickr, video, London , 3comments
Video uploading to Flickr went live earlier today so it’s a big topic of conversation, especially the inevitable comparison with youTube the leader in the field.
My first reaction was delight to discover that the flickr video upload and sharing is totally integrated into the photo sharing community aspect of flick that made it so successful. Videos appear in the photostream alongside stills, and can be community tagged, commented on, sent to sets and groups, and blogged using “blog this” which is fantastic. The quality of the video and audio is superior too, with up to 150MB file sizes acceptable for a 90 second video. Why the 90 second limit? Well this is to avoid the problem of being used as a file download service for copied music videos, TV clips and films etc and to encourage home made movie clips from digital cameras, phones etc. So Flickr can avoid the enormous copyright problem that google inherited when they bought youTube.
“long photos”
Central to Flickr’s philosophy for introducing video is the concept of the “long photo” which kind of fits in with the use of digital still cameras that have the capacity to take video clips. This service is for genuine user generated video, short clips about everyday life, surroundings, little art videos and so on. Not so much about long videos of talking heads recorded straight from webcams saying “um” and “ah” a lot either.
London Video group
Flickr groups by default can accept both pictures and video but I thought it might be useful to have a group for London Video that focusses on video only, still linked to the London photo group, London Flickr meetups. I’ve invited some flickr contacts from London and from the social media cafe as well, but anybody interested in video is welcome to join and upload anything vaguely London related.All in all, it’s going to be very interesting to see how creative people use the opportunity that Flickr video is offering.
To give an idea, here’s Billy’s bacon video from Flickr, embedded on this wordPress blog.
I know, you can already do all that with youTube but I feel there are some significant advantages with the Flickr Video implementation, aren’t there?
Eurostar sponsors crowdsourcing February 22, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : ebbsfleet, crowdsource, London , 5commentsEurostar sponsors crowdsourcing
Readers of this blog may be aware of the unique football club Ebbsfleet United in Kent. The website “Myfootballclub.com” mobilised 28,000 online football fans to chip in £35 each and make a successful bid to buy a 75% controlling interest in the club. So its the first football club in the world ever to be owned by an online community. Some say it’s the first business in the world ever to be taken over by an online community (do you know better?)
Myfootballclub: http://www.myfootballclub.co.uk/
Eurostar
Now Eurostar is a well known and prestigious brand who were already sponsoring Ebbsfleet international football club, since it helps to publicise the new Ebbsfleet International railway station which is part of the high speed rail route from St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel. Eurostar’s reaction to the takeover is to embrace the change and piggyback onto the extra interest in the club, which generates free publicity for Ebbsfleet and everybody associated with it. They’ve also taken out some full page newspaper advertisements congratulating the new owners of the club - and naming each of us individually.
“Congratulations to the new owners of Ebbsfleet United”
One further step which showed that somebody at Eurostar does actually ‘get’ the whole crowdsourcing social media thing is that they submitted alternative versions of proposed advertisements to the online community at myfootballclub to be voted on. I voted for it too. The one which won was then sent for publication. It emphasises the fact that Ebbsfleet International is now really owned by 280,000 ordinary football fans whose names have been dumped (with individual permission) onto the pages of The Times.
Eurostar blog: http://fortomorrow.eurostar.com/
Crowdsourcing - what’s next?
So what’s next in line for being taken over by an online community? It would be trivial to buy a top quality racehorse, small syndicates have been doing that for years. What about a Formula 1 racing team? A national radio or TV station? How about setting up a website to accumulate enough people to buy a brewery, a supermarket chain or a bank? You can only buy one share each, so no individual gets control.
Social Media Café
On a smaller scale could we get a couple of thousand Social Media people in London to sign up to buy a little cafe together? Of course we could. Then we’d have somewhere to go that pays for itself, with free access for shareholders.
London social media cafe: http://londonsocialmediacafe.pbwiki.com/
Marilyn and Ella at Theatre Royal Stratford February 16, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : theatre, Music, London , 4comments
I’m really looking forward to going to the theatre tonight. We’re not going to the West End though, but to the Theatre Royal in Stratford. That’s Stratford, East London, home of the 2012 Olympics; nothing to do with Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. The show is called “Marilyn and Ella” and it’s about a famous meeting between Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe at a time of continuing racial segregation in the USA. Yes, it’s set in 1955, just a few years before I was born and when American society was run under a system similar to apartheid. So it’s a small, two woman production I think, but with a big subject plot and some big songs. The premiere was last night, so tonight, Saturday should be a big night too.
Theatre Royal
I suppose Theatre Royal, Stratford East is my local theatre, but I haven’t been for a few years. There used to be a series of excellent productions once a year which sometimes moved on to the West End such as “The Invisible Man” and “Zorro” but I think the moving force behind these died, and the raison d’etre for local theatre has moved more towards serving the perceived needs of the local community, a community which arguably doesn’t really exist except from a political or funding point of view. But the playwright is Bonnie Greer, an accomplished writer and whose performance on TV the other night in Question Time I think it was, well she just outshone everyone else on the panel.
Bonnie Greer
For the Sunday Herald in August 2006 Bonnie Greer said “I wrote this basically because the information has been suppressed, and if you don’t control the information, it controls you. That’s certainly true in the case of Marilyn Monroe, who was a victim of information control even after her death. She was the biggest movie star in the world and she made this kind of stand for Ella Fitzgerald. People at the time didn’t understand it, so they glossed over it, and now not many even know about it. Which means that it has never really been celebrated.”
Interestingly, this musical stage play began life on Radio 4 as “Marilyn And Ella Backstage At The Mocambo” and then at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006 as “Ella Meet Marilyn.” The play has been competely re-written for the 2008 production, and if it has been crafted skillfuly for Theatre Royal Stratford then there’s every chance of a West End transfer in due course.
Celebrity
So part of my anticipation is to see if the question of the emancipation of the excluded black people as a whole class is brought up or glossed over through focussing on forging a pathway for the very few to rise up to become celebrities, leaving the masses behind them. The Marilyn Munroe icon has become a symbol of celebrity itself, so there are some interesting mixed messages inherent in the subject matter. The part of Ella Fitzgerald is played by Nicola Hughes who has been in Porgy and Bess and Chicago and Wendy Morgan from A Street Car Named Desire and The Bill is cast in the role of Marilyn Monroe. So that’s two very brave women to go on stage and play those huge stars.
Songs
I’m also going to enjoy the chance to hear some great songs performed live on stage.
Someone To Watch Over Me; My Funny Valentine; Baby, It’s Cold Outside
Wonderful old classics with which I am familiar not from the Jazz legends themselves but from the great covers sung by Mari Wilson in the nineteen eighties.
They Can’t Take That Away From Me - Lady Is a Tramp - Bewitched. Bothered and Bewildered - Every time We Say Goodbye - Just Two Little Girls From Little Rock - The Man That Got Away - Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend
Also some new songs by musical director Warren Wills.
http://theatreroyallondon.com/
London social media development February 14, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : social media, social objects, London, cider , add a commentIt was Wednesday evening so I went along to the Coach and Horses in Greek St, Soho to take part in an early user testing session for i-together’s new twitter and google maps mashup project. The usability test was run by Ofer Deshe of Flow Interactive who introduced himself as coming from a background in cognitive psychology, using techniques borrowed from ethnographical anthropology, so being chosen as the user to be observed was something of a privilege. I was sat in front of a laptop running a web service with no explanation or guidance, asked simply to explore and try to make sense of it. Well I just hope my slightly flummoxed attempts at navigation and comments provided some useful data.
Afterwards we had some wide ranging conceptual discussions which touched on ideas about public identity and personal security, activities or events as social objects, the natural development of some online communities into face-to-face meetups and much more. There’s still a fair amount of work to be done on the prototype service, both in explaining the concepts and making a winning user interface, but if anyone can do it then Luke, Benjie and Jof are in position to succeed with support from the vibrant and friendly London social media development community.
The Coach and Horses is also the venue for Social Media Café on Friday, and I was happily able to use the free wifi to update the cider wiki to mention the Westons Old Rosie currently on tap.
Platform Art February 2, 2008
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Art, London , 1 comment so farAt Gloucester Road tube station there is one whole platform that isn’t currently used by passenger services. Rather than being a ghost platform though, it’s in use as an exhibition area for a piece of platform art called “Life is a laugh” by Brian Griffiths.
I can’t tell whether it’s a celebration or a mockery of retro computer games such as Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog but the whole point seems to be to make a pun on the overused word “platform”. I asked one of the staff if theer was any more information and he disappeared into the ticket office for ten minutes then came back with a leaflet. Unfortunately the leaflet contained no clues for me, just a rambling stream of consciousness type piece of prose covering all pages. Well, it brightened up my morning journey and gave me something to think about.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
