Urban Magic

Kings Cross St. Pancras

Posted on Sunday, April 26th, 2009 in London | 1 Comment

St. Pancras was actually built as part of a competition to build the news Houses of Parliament, after the original burnt down in 1834.  For years it slumbered as a huge gothic monument to Victorian ambition, servicing not very glamorous lines to not very exciting places.  Then Eurostar came along, and all of a sudden, St. Pancras was taking a leaf out of Liverpool Street Station’s book, and everything was shiny, glassy, well-lit in a cool light and generally radiating expresso and champagne.  Trains head off to Paris or Disneyland, Lille or Brussels, as well as rather less glamorous destinations like Sutton or Bedford.

Twenty yards away, Kings Cross services the lines to Cambridge, Edinburgh and Leeds, (as well as Hogwarts) and its main hall is never ever not packed with people waiting to catch the fat lumbering trains that sit farting in its platform like elephants after a dodgy seafood meal.  You usually stand a good chance of hearing a Geordie or a Scottish accent outside Kings Cross, although going the other way is heavily disencouraged by having to go via a ticket hall that moves at a speed to make tectonic drift seem sparky.

Underneath all this lot, you can find Piccadilly, Northern, Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith and City and Victoria Line trains all competing for space at the bottom of a maze of escallators.  In 1987, there was a fire in Kings Cross, in which 31 people died.  This was in the day in which escallators were wood, and cigarette smoking was still permitted on the underground.  A plaque can still be found commemorating it, though you have to look a bit to find it. 

Buses also converge on these two stations, although strangely enough, the 205, which is supposed to pass through, can almost never, ever be found when you need to catch it ever.  Sages agree that it is far, far faster to get out and walk between the stops on Pentonville Road, outside the ex-Thameslink station (disused after St.Pancras got its make-over), to the next stop thirty yards ahead, than to wait for your bus to go round the one-way system where Kings Cross Road meets the Euston Road meets York Way, as those particular thirty-yards are contenders for the slowest in London.

In Praise of Roger Zelazny

Posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 in Writing | 3 Comments

I’m sometimes asked who my favourite writers are.  And, while the list is long and extensive, Roger Zelazny has never yet not passed my lips.  I am more than happy to be a one-woman fan club for Zelazny, and sing his praises in all things.  Although dead now (most of my favourite writers are dead, damnit), he turned out a mass of work, ranging from extremely geeky science fiction of the guns-ships-aliens-in-space kind through to fantastical monsters and epic battles of the swords-and-cloaks variety.  His imagination ranged from sentient rocks with a thing for spontaneous nuclear fusion, through to battles between order and chaos for the control of the known (and unknown) universe, to tourist trips across futuristic earth, the misdeeds of gods, alien and human, and the personal lives of lizard-emperors who need a hundred years to frame a sentence.  Even if all this were not impressive enough, Zelazny wrote with a mixture of poignancy and wit that could turn on a five pence; somewhere between Raymond Chandler met Jane Austen met Terminator.  His most famous, and probably most easily discoverable works, were the ten volume Chronicles of Amber, but if you’re looking for a quicker, shorter read, you could try Damnation Alley, the story of the last Hells Angel left on a ravaged Earth, or This Immortal, or, if you have a weakness of Hindu/Buddhist mythology taken to a new level, Lord of Light.  His short stories are well worth reading too – To Die in Italbar or The Last Defender of Camelot are both packed with a mixture of the surreal, the comical, the tragic and the frightening.

Springtime

Posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 in London | 2 Comments

So, every year in Tokyo, according to the BBC World Service, there is a celebration of cherry blossom.  Weather reports contain a feature on the progress of the cherry blossom as it spreads across the islands of Japan, until finally a special tree in a garden in Tokyo blooms, picnic-goers materialise for lavish feasts below the flowers and the season is declared to be underway.

Now… I won’t pretend we have quite such a thing for cherry blossom in London.  Spring usually announces itself by the population of the city spontaneously stripping down to the bare minimum of clothing, regardless of how cold it is, and attempting to gain a tan under the celestial equivalent of a 20 Watt bulb.  But we do have cherry trees which do come into bloom, and spring has finally come to the city…

The Barbican Centre

Posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 in London | No Comments

The Barbican Centre is a vortex in space and time that would do Dr Who proud.  It lurks in a fat, raised-above-street-level dollop between Moorgate, St Pauls and Goswell Road, in a place where clearly a lot of bombs fell back during the Blitz.  Do not, do not, do NOT assume that normal laws of geography apply within its walls.  In its maze of walkways, towers, crescents, squares, avenues, internal ramps, stairs, bridges and tunnels are hidden away two theatres, three cinemas, one concert hall, three restaurants, one secondary school, one lake, one music shop, one library, one music and drama school, one news agent, two galleries, a conservatory and, on occasion, an ice rink.  In terms of programming, the organisers at the Barbican are perfectly happy to mix up a film schedule of X-Men and 1950s noir classics; a theatre program of Shakespeare done by kabuki dancers and plays about two men in a bath.  Mystic yellow lines are painted on the tiled floors of every corridor, theoretically to guide you from A to B in as convenient and logical way as possible, with maps recommending you take Exit 15 for here, or Exit 5 for there; yet, without fail, all these yellow lines invariably lead to the roof.  Don’t ask me how they do it, it’s one of those great mysteries. 

The Barbican also possesses its own micro-climate.  Courtesy of the materials of which its built and the large open spaces enclosed within walls and tunnels, the Barbican is a perpetual wind trap.  The weather outside may be as calm as a yogi monk on a diet of lettuce leaves, but so long as the sun has been shining or a drop of rain has fallen, there will be a force 7 storm doing its bit inside the internal courtyards of the Barbican, and all umbrellas are futile.

Personally, I love the Barbican Centre.  I love visiting its theatres and cinemas, particularly now that the theatres have woken up to the realisation that under-26 tickets should be cheap if they want to have future audiences.  I spent many happy months in the library as a kid reading every fantasy book they had, and if you’ve got a few hours to spare, I heartily recommend getting lost within the Barbican’s walls, just to see if you can find a hidden palace within its walls…

G20 Protests in London

Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 in London | No Comments

So, this week, as probably the whole world knows, the G20 leaders met in London to talk about how economically stuffed we all are.  And, because economics is a subject about which I know just enough to know that I really don’t get it, and because the protesters who went into the city in preparation for the G20 summit seemed to cover every political movement from Environmentalists to Marxists, I kinda forget to take the protests into consideration when trying to find a bus.  Much walking and an unlikely train ride later, I made it home, but not before I’d joined in the general atmosphere of ‘oh look – a protest’ that seemed to be buzzing around the Liverpool Street area, and taken a few photos…

I should add, that I read later headlines like ‘anarchists fight for the city’ and saw news footage which suggested that ten thousand very angry people were trying to overthrow capitalism with use of big sticks, death outfits and stuffed zebras.  While I can’t really testify from my position of having wandered into a demo by mistake, I will say that the demonstraters I saw seemed very peaceful environmental activists.  I should also add that I also saw a copper sat outside Marks and Spencers with about four inches of blood-stained bandage pressed to his head and a police medic for company.  So I guess I conclude…

… that I don’t really know.  (And probably neither does anyone else.)

A Madness of Angels

Posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 in Writing | 7 Comments

A Madness of Angels is now, finally, out in the UK shops!  So now’s the chance to see what it’s all about… I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!