Shit London: Snapshots of a City on the Edge

Shit London began life as Facebook group for Londoners to post their pictures of strange and unusual things they spotted on their travels around the city. These are photographs of the unintentional human comedy that surround us in the city. It’s the flotsam and jetsam of city life, the overlooked minutiae, the tragic, the grotesque and the basest of base. It’s the adapted posters, the dirty joke on the back of a van, the mispelt signs, the glory hole in the public loo, that weird shop down the end of your road and the knob graffiti strategically placed for maximum effect.

The Shit London Awards are now in their second year of celebrating the crummy, weird and outright rubbish sides to the capital. These are awards open to all with no particular photographic skill required to enter. This is photography which doesn’t favour a DSLR over an ancient camera phone, where the focus isn’t on focus and where composition isn’t part of the competition.

You will find the 2012 Awards, and much, much more, here:  

Harrods

Christmas lights on Harrods, the biggest department store in Europe, with over 1 million sq feet of trading space. 

Map Shows Every London Bomb Of The Blitz

The excellent blog Londonist has a fascinating item today: 

Wow. Simply, wow. Someone’s only gone and mapped every known bomb of the Blitz. Bombsight.org contains thousands and thousands of datapoints and shows, on even the most glancing inspection, just what a pummeling our city took all those years ago.  The map is based on archive research, drawing together official bomb censuses for the period between September 1940 and June 1941. It therefore lacks later bombing raids and attacks by flying bombs and rockets later in the war. What is there, however, is an invaluable resource for researchers and anyone with a curiosity about the history of our city.

See the piece, and follow the links, here

Tomorrow's fish and chip paper

How the front pages of the serious papers record the Leveson Report 

Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday

There are more than 100,000 war memorials across the United Kingdom and many of them will be the focus of reflection for Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.  This year, 11 November, which commemorates the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 when the guns of the Western Front fell silent after four years of war, falls on a Sunday, so the two special days to remember those who lost their lives in war become one.

The first Two Minute Silence in London, on Tuesday 11 November 1919, was reported the next day in the Manchester Guardian;

The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition. Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of 'attention'. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still ... The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain ... And the spirit of memory brooded over it all. 

The RAF Memorial stands in a fine position on Embankment, looking south over the river, and with its back to the Ministry of Defence.   Erected in 1923, it is a tribute to the men and women of the RAF. In 1946 additional inscriptions were added in memory of those who died in the Second World War

Per Ardua ad Astra the motto of the Royal Air Force translates as Through Struggles to the Stars

Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich

The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, designed by Christopher Wren, built between 1696 and 1712.    UNESCO records it as being of “outstanding universal value…..the finest and most dramatically sited architectural and landscape ensemble in the British Isles”.