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home elsewhere london

piccadilly

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Peter's map, my gps failed

Definitely a tick

Aspreys

Floris

Bicycle Pumping Station

Arcade off Jermyn Street

Grenson boots

Paper flowers

Café

Reflection

The Albany

 

King and Queen by Lynn Chadwick under the clock

Fortnum & Mason's clock
The partners come out on the hours.   We were lucky to be passing at just the right time.
In April 1951, the Canadian businessman W. Garfield Weston acquired the store and became its chairman following a boardroom coup In 1964, he commissioned a four-ton clock to be installed above the main entrance of the store as a tribute to its founders. Every hour, 4-foot-high (1.2 m) models of William Fortnum and Hugh Mason emerge and bow to each other, with chimes and 18th-century–style music playing in the background. Since Garfield Weston's death in 1978, the store has been run by his granddaughters, Jana Khayat and Kate Weston Hobhouse.   We did not know about the spiral staircase, picture from the web.

In the gateway to the Royal Academy

Phone box there too

Piccadilly Arcade

Burlington Arcade

Mothers and babies

We had coffee at this charming pub

Edward Hyde first Earl of Clarendon (Photo-shopped or something older)

The Goat

Reflection

London map on the ceiling

Albermarle Arcade

A little over the top...

Royal Institution

We visited the Faraday Museum

Faraday on the right

I love this one

With

Without

Christmas decoration

It was not animated

Rodić Davidson Architects is hosting an exhibition of new work by automata maker, Paul Spooner
“The plan is to make six objects; one for each of the six windows looking onto Bury Place. Two are done, two are thought of and two are neither done nor thought off.”
The pieces will start to arrive in mid-March 2019.
Done: ‘Physics for Cats’. Powered by a mouse wheel, a version of Galileo’s Inclined Plane apparatus gradually tilts a track on which a cat on a trolley is free to roll. When the forces of friction and gravity are overcome the cat travels from one end of the track to the other. Momentum is destroyed by buffers at either end of the track and springs that absorb some of the shock. A pair of boxwood spheres hanging under the cat’s tail demonstrate inertia.
Done: ‘Cork Cathedral’. There are two cathedrals in the city of Cork. The Protestant one was designed in the Gothic Revival style by William Burges, architect of Cardiff Castle and nearby Castel Coch. There are several towns that are named after building materials; Stone in Staffordshire and Boulder, Colorado, for example, but none offer as much fun for the playful mechanic as Cork and its Belgian twin, Liège.
Thought of: ‘Solid, Liquid, Gas’ and ‘We want a Window and we want it Here’.
Paul Spooner (b. 1948)

Despite having an engineer for a father, Paul Spooner went to art school and despite receiving an art education from three of the titans of the business, Harry Thubron, Jon Thompson and Tom Hudson, he never became a proper artist but, in his early thirties, took up the then almost extinct profession of automatist. A series of fortunate circumstances led him from the schoolteaching and lorry driving jobs he’d done after art school; he moved to Cornwall with his wife Sue, he met Peter Markey, who had been making mechanical sculptures and selling them in Sue Jackson’s shop, Cabaret, in Falmouth. Cabaret Mechanical Theatre became a destination for enthusiasts of mechanical playthings, with works by Paul, Peter Markey and Ron Fuller. Paul installed “The Last Judgement”, a coin-operated machine, in the window of the shop and used the proceeds to buy a lathe. Since then he hasn’t stopped producing devices, made mostly of wood, mostly small enough to fit on a mantelpiece but sometimes of more ambitious sizes.
Ben Davidson, Rodic Davidson Architects says:
The influence of the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in Covent Garden, in part, defined my direction in life. I remember visiting on many occasions, in my teens, on family trips to London from Cheltenham, where I grew up. I was utterly fascinated and the influence, I am sure, formed part of my decision to study architecture and my continued love of experimentation, exploration and tinkering with models and mechanical things.
Rodic Davidson Architects is based very close to the old location of Cabaret. The practice occupies premises at 1 Pied Bull Yard in Bloomsbury - no more than a 10min walk away from the basement vaults in Covent Garden market that Cabaret occupied between 1984 and 2000

Supplying gowns to the Royals

 

I have mixed drinks about feelings

Our comfortable sofa and lunch table

He moved

Individual booths

Duke of Argyll

Graffiti

 

 

Not Rufus but Charles James

Reflection I did not want, I was snapping the lights

The Three Greyhounds

Seven Dials

 

 

Neale's Yard

Crazy Pig Design

Reflections

 

 

Ship Tavern

Enemies 1, 2, 3.

It was getting colder and darker so we came home