Lime Green

So. Lime green then. What were they thinking?

Finsbury Savings Bank

Finsbury Savings Bank, Sekforde Street. It's claimed that Dickens banked here, but I've yet to verify this. Anyhow, I.N. notes it as an "Extraordinary overwrought building produced by a thoughtful man trying to will his way out of the nineteenth-century confusion of styles and finding that his brain became overheated in the process." The man concerned is Alfred Bartholomew, and, ultimately, Nairn gives him - and it - the thumbs-up, especially the embossed lettering (I like the compressed serlianas - two blind and one wholly opened up). Nice to be able to report a positive change where decline is the norm; in 1966 Nairn reports the building as a 'disaster' in Lime Green; things get a little better by Gasson's '80s revision, "pale grey and white with details (presumably the lettering) picked out in black", but as you see, in 2008 we're back to the cream stucco that Nairn urges. Good show.

Hungerford Lane

The purest sort of Nairn, his entry for Hungerford Lane, "Like meeting a person five hundred years old." The multiple recognition that "Nails you to a place" was somewhat diluted last time I walked Hungerford Lane in the spring of 2008, but it hardly matters now because you can no longer make the journey. The threefold relationship Nairn describes in 1966 is between the Lane, the Arches passage whaich traverses it, and the trains further above; this is substantially the same at the time of Gasson's '88 revision. The threefold relationship now is between "Keep Clear", "Keep Out" and CCTV. Fine democracy, as the great man himself says.

2009

Haven't posted anything this year - the weather's been crappy and I refuse to take snow photos. Last night it rained lots so there's just one shot - Savage Gardens from the Old Cheshire Cheese (The good one, not the famous one.) Blurry and bloody awful light conditions so I "posterised" it; at least the colours are quite nice. The building at the end of Savage Gardens should be the offices of Trinity House but isn't any more. I've been looking down this street, on and off, for the best part of thirty years.