Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 464

Thanks A Bunch, BT

Most nights there's something different rotating on the vast circular screen at the top of the Post Office Tower, as I still like to think of it. I can see it from my kitchen and it looks very cool. Sadly, BT, not exactly known for its visionary sense of style, has decided not to reopen [...]

The Gap Grows

As the huge internet hit 'Gap Yah' shows, the gap between the children of the upper middle classes and the rest of us is opening fast. This Christmas the West End seems to be filled with two types of students; young folks with nice clothes and strangulated vowels talking about skiing and Barbados, and normal [...]

Re:View – 'Never Let Me Go'

This is one of the new generation of SF movies that concentrate on character more than hardware, so that you could bracket it with 'Moon' and the underrated 'Mr Nobody' (see trailer on this site). Tommy (Andrew Garfield), Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Ruth (Keira Knightly) grow up in an alternative-timeline 1950s-style boarding school where the [...]

London's Forgotten Abbey

After our family moved from Greenwich to Abbey Wood, I went exploring the bluebell-filled woods and came across a ruined abbey. I recently went back to find it exactly the same as in my childhood, just as deserted.

Lesnes Abbey was founded by Richard de Luci, Chief Justiciar of England, in 1178 as an act of [...]

Thamesmead: London's No-Go Zone

I was interested to read about Stella English, the winner of the show 'The Apprentice', who grew up on Thamesmead and still managed to land the £100,000 job. Thamesmead is London's most notorious housing estate, home to some 50,000 people.

In recent years it became known as the fraud capital of the UK because of its [...]

How Victorian London Was Destroyed

Harold Macmillan.
Peter Walker.
Peter Shore.
Geoffrey Rippon.
Lord Hailsham.
These are some of the vandals who should be named and shamed for destroying the roofscapes, skylines and grand views of London. Gavin Stamp's new book 'Lost Victorian Britain: How the Twentieth Century Destroyed the Nineteenth Century's Architectural Masterpieces' is far from being another 'nostalgia heritage' book.

Instead it's a devastatingly [...]

Still One Of The Greatest Fantasies

Having loved the Phillip Pullman trilogy, I was reminded of T H White's wonderful 'The Once And Future King' when I saw this cartoon (I'd credit it, but can't now remember where it came from).

The odd thing that struck me about White's book when I first read it, though, is that it suddenly stops several [...]

Why Good Writers Must Replace Idiot Writers

Being a book judge is an eye-closing experience.

The Bad Books continue to pile up (with some PRs submitting anything they can lay hands on) and I am giving them sidelong glances with the same despair I feel when entering King's Cross post office (which seems to sell mobile phone covers, shawarmas, apples, ironing board [...]

Yes, Lovely. Make It Stop Now.

Every year, all of my life, there's been a tidbit at the ends of the news around this time of the year, telling us what the bookies' odds are for a white Christmas. Although I have never been in a betting shop, I'm vaguely aware that there's one in every high street, and they were [...]

Christmas Under London

Many odd events take place in the cavernous vaults that run beneath London's raised railway system. The great Victorian brick platforms that carry our trains out to the rest of the country make perfect venues, and if you head down to Bermondsey or Vauxhall after midnight you'll find queues snaking off into holes in walls.

Every [...]