Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 487

The Hidden Cost Of The City

There's an insane amount of stuff going on in London in the autumn; pick any area from fashion to sport, art to literature, history, theatre, festivals, gigs, food and parties and it's all here – but how much does it all add up to? You can easily wipe out your budget if you're not [...:]

Least Apposite Use Of The Word 'Euro'

Taken outside a workman's cafe quite a long way from the Eurostar terminal…

Seeing Music 2

Films can be saved by music. Try watching the opening sequence of 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' with the sound off – it's like seeing someone's terrible home movies. But with the John Barry score in place, it's transformed to something special. This year, the excellent score to 'Inception' lifted the visual elements and showed [...:]

Seeing Music

Some days music makes me so excited I just want to run about taking bites out of the world – replaying 'The Choral Links' while walking over Waterloo Bridge at sunset filled me with excitement the other night – why is it that some of us are electrified by music and others untouched?

I'm trying to [...:]

Haunted London

I'll be doing a Gothic Night in London at the London Metropolitan Archives on October 29th this year – the archives are an astonishing resource for anyone interested in this city, and contain everything from the law court rolls – literally, parchment rolls containing the law cases of London – to maps showing where bombs [...:]

The Unseen Bryant & May

Check out the book cover and you'll find me on the trigger of the gun.

The excellent Martin Edwards (check out his Crippen novel 'Dancing For The Hangman') has edited this collection of Crime Writers' Association authors (of which I am proudly a member), and I've finally done something I've threatened to do for ages – [...:]

Re:View 'Made In Dagenham'

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The subject seems almost wilfully designed to put audiences off; the story of a British car factory strike in the sixties. Worse, it's made by the director of 'Calendar Girls', probably my least favourite film ever. A pleasure and a surprise to report, then, that 'Made In Dagenham' is a winning, smart [...:]

Jason Does New York

British photographer Jason Hawkes has featured on this blog before, but now he's done the same thing he did with New York. For some reason the results are less impressive than I thought they would be – I think it's because he couldn't fly as low as he did over London, so you lose the [...:]

London Old & New

Two examples of the architects' art, one a view of an entirely unnecessary set of windows above the railway track in Paddington Station, tricked out by the Victorians to look like a harem palace for no other reason than the fact that it gives pleasure to the eye.

The other, a dominating city block on the [...:]

Re:View – 'The Town'

The town in question is Boston's Charlestown, a deprived community which apparently nurtures more carjackers and bank robbers than anywhere else in the entire United States. We follow four of the crims, led by Affleck (starring and directing) through a bank heist, and the kidnapping of the manager (Rebecca Hall), then to the inevitable love [...:]