Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 411

Exciting And Innovative News

I don't usually comment on popular culture, mainly because it's rubbish, but this was too good not to share. In one of those interviews designed to make a manufacturer look like it has an important role in society instead of being just another company flogging face-paint to bimbos, Rimmel conducted an interview with their [...]

London Gets Another Bath

This time it's South of the river, though. Digs in Borough have discovered a large Roman bath with hot and cold plunge pools and underfloor heating.The question, as always, is how much do you save and what do you cover up? Many Roman buildings never been fully uncovered, and now there are buildings on top [...]

Too Much To See

The London Design Festival starts today and is happening all over town, with hundreds of events taking place throughout the city – but it's also London Fashion Week, with, you guessed it, hundreds of events, and on top of that it's Open House Weekend, when some of the city's most private buildings throw open their [...]

The Tourist Attraction Created By Tourists

Like 221b Baker Street, the fictional address of Sherlock Holmes visited by legions of disappointed fans, Platform nine and three quarters (calling it Platform 9.75 would be easier on a computer keyboard) was visited by fans of Harry Potter so often that Network Rail built them one, complete with a porter's trolley sticking out of [...]

Death & Rebirth For The British Boozer

Two pubs are closing in Britain every day, reflecting a "perfect storm" of tax increases, cheap supermarket promotions and lack of support for licensees, according to a new CAMRA report. It's an old story and has been happening at varying paces for years, but this time there's a new twist.

The dying pubs are those ones [...]

Lost London

A couple of great images of London here. One is of the original Davenport's Magic Shop (now moved to underneath Trafalgar Square – see the last chapter of 'Bryant & May Off The Rails') from a book called 'Unexplored London'. This used to be opposite the British Museum, and it's now a Starbucks. I used [...]

The Fabulous Illness

The Thames Festival signifies the traditional end of summer, although Londoners know summer never actually started this year. Autumn is book time, when most of the literary awards take place and readings, events and festivals for the written word start.

I'm be hitting the ground running for a packed season this year, but one thing I'm [...]

Where Nightmares Come True

I took this in Vienna, one of a number of statues for children to play on. I guess they don't have the same nightmares as adults…

It's Not A Modern Britain For Everyone

Last week in Iran, these two teenagers were hanged for making love. For gay people who live in one of the 82 countries where homosexuality is criminalised, the world is not getting better: it is getting significantly worse. The shame of this is that 40 of these countries are members of the Commonwealth, and Great [...]

Embrace The Unpopular

Strange Attractor is an extraordinary magazine, although with just four issues in seven years I hesitate to call it a magazine at all. Rather, it's a series of anthologies pf the esoteric, filled with arcane but highly readable essays and articles on subjects ranging from Chinese sleeping sickness and misanthropic Victorian lemming-fanciers to Arthur Machen's [...]