IanVisits…

Yesterday, I made my long planned return trip to the incredible All Saints Church in central London for a photo session with my tripod. I had been there before, but the lighting is so dark that it is not possible to take photos without long exposures - and that needed the tripod. After checking with the Church that was alright - I went back and spent about an hour there.

I had to wait a while as just after I set up my kit a lady walked in and started praying - and in small Churches I feel a bit uncomfortable taking photos while people are using the building for its official task. I am just a visitor after all. Amusingly, as soon as she had finished, she walked over to the Altar area, pulled out her mobile phone and took a photo of it. And there was I sitting behind her being polite and waiting for her to finish!

Anyhow, the Church is just to the north of Oxford Street, behind the HMV store (Google Map link), and I originally found it when killing time waiting for a friend to meet me for coffee and I saw the spire poking out behind Oxford Street, so went to have a look. There has been a chapel on the spot as it happens since the 1760’s, and a Tractarian congregation which was using the chapel agreed to allow a Church to be built by the Ecclesiological Society. Construction was started in 1841.

The Ecclesiological Society was a group who wanted to revive historically authentic Anglican worship through architecture - and boy do they hit the spot with this building!

As it stands today, the interior is very, very dirty and doesn’t reflect the vibrant colours of its construction. However, that really does add to its atmosphere which is quite dark and gloomy, but importantly - without being oppressive. The selective use of lighting really works well to highlight important aspects of the Church and leaves the rest in atmospheric shadows.

There is a restoration project underway at the moment, and it will be quite a sight when fully cleaned and preserved.

Photos on my Flickr account as usual. I did a lot of HDR photos, as the Church is so dark that normal photos wouldn’t show any of the detail - so the Church looks brightly lit - but I assure you it is a lot darker in reality. Indeed, I saw more detail in the photos than I noticed when I was there in person. I also took a load of photos of the exterior some months ago, so didn’t take any on this visit. Annoyingly, I now can’t find those earlier photos - so will go back in a week or so to take a few exterior shots. Damn.

There is a short history of the Church on their website - and they sell a quite informative guide for £2 inside the Church itself.

I have been there on two Saturdays at roughly the same time - and both times the Organist was playing/practicing - so if you are planning a visit, try going at about 1pm just in case this is a regular occurance.

An empty gothic church with the organ thundering down the aisles is quite amazing :)

A long time ago, London was lit by gas lamps - but with the advent of electricity the use of gas for lighting streets fell out of favour. However, there are still parts of London which are still lit to this very day by gas lamps.

There is quite a good cluster of them around The Strand and I spent a short while taking a few photos of them.

Most interesting though is a solitary gas lamp on a narrow street called Carting Lane, which is right next to the Savoy Theatre. The lane has a sewer running under it down to the river, and the original gas lamps here (and in many other parts of London) were powered by sewer gases - mainly methane from the sewerage below. Carting Lane was given the nickname of “Farting Lane”, which is probably mainly due to the linguistic joke. However, the sewer here predominantly dealt with waste from the Savoy Hotel, and as the rich dined here I would not be surprised if the sewer gases in this short road were unusually pungent!

As an aside, the Savoy Theatre was the world’s first building to be completely lit by the then modern form of electric lighting - so you have odd confluence of history going on here.

A couple of other locations that I have noticed gas lighting still in use are in St James Park by the bridge over the lake and around Buckingham Palace - including inside the Mews.

I am not entirely sure why gas lighting is still used, as it would not be a considerable amount of effort to switch to electric lighting, and most of the lamps are not noticeable for being gas lit, so it can’t really be a touristy thing.

You can see the photos on my Flickr account

One hundred years ago, a huge explosion was heard in Wembley, Nth London - by the site of the modern day soccer stadium. It wasn’t an accident though, but a the final death throws of an ill-fated attempt to give London its very own “Eiffel Tower”.

A bit of history then. The Chairman of London’s Metropolitan Railway, Sir Edward Watkin MP proposed the building of a huge tower at Wembley to rival that of the Eiffel Tower and would have been over 1200 feet tall some 300 feet taller than the Paris version. He even tried to get Gustave Eiffel to design his version - although the Frenchman declined the offer.

His motivation was not solely national pride, as the railway company was expanding its network into the lightly populated North London, and he felt the tower would become a landmark and tourist attraction, attracting not just day trippers on his railway, but also making it easier to sell housing on the land the company owned in the area.

Work on the new tower began in 1891 in a park, but when the park opened in 1894 the tower had reached a height of only 47 metres (155 feet), due to unstable foundations. By the end of the year - the money for the tower had run out, and it was left there, like an unstable stump for the next decade until it was demolished so that the metal could be reused for the war effort. The tower did open to the public though, as they put an observation platform at the top and there were cafes and shops at the foot of the tower. In a way, it did become sort of a tourist attraction, if not in the way that the founder had expected.

In 1907, the concrete foundations were finally demolished in a controlled explosion so that the land could be reused. Part of the foundation survived though, and was uncovered during the recent redevelopment of the Wembley Stadium. To give you an idea of the scale of the foundations - they lie directly underneath most of the football pitch.

Due to its incomplete status, the part built tower became known as Watkins Folly.

Image from Brent Council Archives

Local area map showing the location of the tower

On the last day of 1999, Tony Blair opened the London Eye on the South Bank.

But, just over 104 years earlier, another great Ferris wheel was opened in London – The Great Wheel

This was a 300ft tall wheel, which compares quite favourably with the 440ft diameter of the London Eye frankly considering that it was built a hundred years earlier.

Unlike the Eye though, it was not that popular and closed just 12 years later, in 1906 due to lack of customers.

http://www.photolondon.org.uk/whole_gallery/gnmr_wheel.htm

In the 1950’s it was (apparently) almost impossible to sit on a train in the UK without sitting next to someone puffing away on a cigarette (or pipe in first class), so it may come as some surprise to realize that one of the earliest bastions of anti-smoking was in fact the railway companies.

In June 1865, the General Manager of the Great Western Railway (GWR) issued an order banning smoking on all company properties - including on its trains. This was not a popular decision though, as a lot of people considered smoking to be a healthy activity.

Indeed, according to Punch Magazine, in 1868 Robert Smith addressed the Social Science Congress on the ‘evils produced by the non-consumption of smoke’, and suggests that railway companies could solve this problem by establishing ’smoking carriages’.

Responding to public pressure, the UK Parliament passed a law (Railway Regulation Bill) in October 1868 which forced the railway companies to provide a number of designated smoking carriages on all journeys. The GWR still tried to ban smoking on platforms and would only provide the absolute minimum number of smoking carriages as required by law, and in the worst positions (typically one right behind the engine and another at the very end of the train).

However, over time the general public smoked in increasing numbers until the idea of a smoking carriage simply ceased to be valid as all carriages were for smokers, and indeed - trains started to designate some carriages as “special” - for non-smokers. But then, slowly the tide turned and eventually we had fewer and fewer smoking carriages until we returned back to the way things were in the 1870s - just without the reliability on the railway - and just one or two carriages permitted smoking.

Parliament passed a law a couple of years ago to make smoking in train carriages illegal - a complete reversal of the situation in the 1860’s when Parliament had legislated to force companies to allow smoking.