Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 428

Credit Crunch Still On Shock

A window full of career opportunities from a job centre in Cornwall.

Goodbye To The Gasometers

'The back-lands of King's Cross are like the arse end of Manchester or Leeds,' wrote a New Statesman journalist in 1999. 'I love it here. I go down into them, dodging the lorries driving in to collect ready-made cement from hoppers as big as grain silos. I huddle up against the canal wall. An Austrian [...]

Ten Good Things About Cornwall

1. The stunning, unspoilt beaches.
2. The clotted cream ice-cream cone.
3. Finally, genuinely brilliant restaurants.
4. The clarity of light.
5. No sirens.
6. Surprises around each corner – The Tin Mine Experience! (strapline: 'More Than Just A Cornish Tin Mine!') Bee World! The Bonsai Nursery & Japanese Garden!
7. Pubs still filled with taciturn locals and elderly couple [...]

London's Hidden Cow Railway

I was talking to a lovely lady called Maggie recently at a party, and she told me about the catacombs beneath Charterhouse Street by the Smithfield Meat Market. The access premises was once called The Slaughterhouse Gallery. The longest cavern beneath it was bricked up to block the entry to a disused underground traintrack which [...]

Re:View – 'Agnosia'

Another day, another astonishing Spanish genre film, this time a period baroque thriller by Eugenio Mira.

Joana suffers a disorder that stops her from being able to tell familiar faces apart. Those she sees every day have to wear different coloured rosettes to enable her to differentiate between them. Her father is a brilliant [...]

Frightfest Is Coming!

Frighfest, the annual August Bank Holiday horror bash, is entering its twelfth year and will be bringing more chaos to Leicester Square than the Cross-Rail roadworks have. My pal Graham Humphries is doing a tasteful minimalist jacket design for the Red Gloves books, and has just illustrated the new Frightfest poster with his horrible Brainman [...]

Free Sparkling Water For London

The woman in front of me at Tesco has ten litre-bottles of sparkling water and another ten of still water in her shopping trolley. Is she insane? London's tap water regularly beats bottled water in blind taste tests, and yet diners and shoppers often order bottled water shipped in from France.

So Thames Water is rolling [...]

Going Scarlet In Cornwall

This weekend I'm in Cornwall, staying at a very clever eco-hotel overlooking a broad sandy beach near Newquay. Having complained about the difficulty of reaching Cornwall for the weekend (a minimum time of five and a half hours by train, six by road or one hour five minutes by air) I decided to put my [...]

Leicester Square, Twinned With Afghanistan

This is how Leicester Square looked during the strikes of the seventies. It's not much different now, except that tourists have replaced the binbags. Actually, if you look carefully you'll see that the surrounding buildings were a lot nicer then.

Now, thanks to excessive plastic signage, the rampant spread of outside drinking areas, takeaways, mimes and [...]

Scissor Act

I've long been fascinated by the world of Soho Square's film censors. We were supposed to call it a Board of Classification but I think they just lost that right with the outright banning of 'Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence'.

Back in the sixties we had John Trevelyan, who brought a more liberal approach to [...]