Through a glass darkly

This strikingly striped taxi is a moving advert for budget fashion accessory chain Aldo, spotted from a bus going up Tottenham Court Road. The taxi overtook the bus, and then both obligingly slowed down just as I got my camera adjusted. The design is one of several by graphic designer Malika Favre, all featuring geometric backgrounds and a face with sunglasses. I dont think it depicts anything specific that Aldo actually sells. Coordinated cycle chic types might think, matching yellow sun specs to go with my yellow bike, but they don't really have them in bright colours.

Photo-based graphics on vehicles is a bit of a trend, printed on flexible plastic film that moulds to the contours of the bodywork. This one works because it's simple and emphasises the pleasing curves of the London taxi. Others are nastier: the Sky vans with lurid photos of TV shows are particularly ugly. There's a lorry I see regularly, printed to look like an oversized wooden crate of potatoes. Sometimes you might wish all vehicles were dignified dull colours with discreet lettering in a nice serif font, preferably gold, like the old Hovis ads. But of course in those days the streets were actually plastered with painted signs on house ends, shopfronts, billboards and sandwich-man boards, buses and commercial vehicles, you name it, huge lettering shouting out trade names and unproven claims. Even more visual clutter than we have today, apparently unregulated and completely lacking in wit or irony. Some of those old signs survive, washed out half-readable remnants left to fade away quietly. The Aldo shrink-wrap, on the other hand, may be here today but it will be gone forever tomorrow.

Another Thursday, another lunchtime recital

18th April: Zoe Lethbridge - flute and Julian Collings - organ, perform a programme of original works for flute and organ including works by Frank Ferko and JS Bach.

Looking at the options as one o'clock approaches, there's a choice between a single concerto by Brahms at Munster Square, or a selection of pieces for organ and flute at St Pancras Parish Church. The organ is obviously a more enticing prospect. St Pancras recitals start when the church clock strikes a quarter past one, so there's time to get there without bunking off work early, and collect the handout with a couple of minutes to spare. It's up there, the white-haired gent on duty tells everyone as they come in, pointing at an apparently empty corner of the balcony. You'll have to twist round in your seat to see.

That makes for a very odd concert and might explain why people are walking out as well as in. Usually the place is reasonably full, not full as in every seat taken, but maybe fifty people or so. Today the number stabilises at just nineteen people, including me and the man in charge, scattered around the place. Some of them actually are twisted round to see something, but mainly they are just sitting and listening. That's one approach to music: sit well back, maybe close your eyes, and absorb the music. The architecture of the church is interesting, so at least there is something to look at. What I like though, is to watch the performers and get a visual sense that the music doesn't just exist in a vacuum: to actually see the concentration and skill that go into making it happen. The way things are set up this time, that experience is tantalisingly close but never quite realised.

Up in the gallery, where the public isn't allowed to sit, is the organ and the keyboard console, which is a big wooden box set away from the organ pipes, with the organist completely hidden behind it. Our flute player is almost visible, a willowy figure with crazy long hair, but she's hiding behind the music stand and most of the time all you can see is knees and the end of the flute. After a while I get up and walk along the side aisle to see if there is a better viewpoint. There isn't. Once the organ gets going, though, the music makes up for all that.

Lunchtime recital at St Mary Magdalene Munster Square

Thursday 11 April: an unexpected treat today at the lunchtime recital series at Munster Square, often just a piano recital. Arriving late and unwrapping my sandwich outside to avoid annoying people with paper rustling noises, some rather amazing singing is audible as I push through the inner vestibule door. The door snaps shut behind me, fortunately with a muffled swish rather than a bang. When the song ends it's permissible to walk around the back and find a seat on the far side of the nave, trying not to make the chair creak too much. The front row is empty as usual: I choose an end seat two rows back.The singer is soprano Charlotte Richardson. She cuts a striking figure, standing in the curve of the grand piano with the stained glass and religious iconography as a backdrop, with her big hair and widow's peak, filling the huge empty space with pure clear notes, punctuated with the hisses and glottal stops of sung German, unexpectedly rolling the Rs. She's singing nineteenth century pieces by Liszt and Schumann, and rather later pieces by Richard Strauss, sixteen songs in all, all of them presumably unfamiliar to anyone except a true aficionado of the genre.For me, it's a touch of the unexpected magic that sometimes happens when you go to a recital knowing nothing about the performers or the music, and find yourself not wanting the moment to end. The songs have lurid titles: "I cannot grasp or believe it", "He, the noblest of all", "Now you have caused me pain for the first time". She explains the story of some of the them: Strauss's 'Die Nacht', she tells us, is about a woman and "her fears that the creeping shadows of the night, that steal away all colour and life from her room, will also steal away her lover..." Romantic histrionics, then, best appreciated in a language you don't understand. My sandwich remains half-wrapped, uneaten until it's time to go outside into the rain.

Sherlock Holmes's new case

Wednesday morning in North Gower Street: some unusually large white vans, unmarked, are parked on both sides, and the road is partly closed. Curious passers-by linger for a moment but there's nothing to see. By lunchtime though, there is quite a buzz of excitement, although there's still nothing much happening. The vans evidently belong to a film crew and some equipment is getting set up. There's a boom but no camera so I don't really look any closer. Part of the pavement is marked with bollards and a sign warns, if you enter this zone you implicitly agree to be an unpaid extra, although that's not quite how it's worded.

Word of the filming must have spread because there is a small crowd strung out on the east side of the street, waiting to see what will happen. The pub around the corner provides a clue with the chalked message "tweeds and deerstalkers welcome". Something to do with the Tweed Run, the vintage cycling event? No, I realise - of course it's the return of the TV series that was filmed here last year and the year before. But it's lunchtime and what I actually want is a sandwich, as fast as possible, to take to one of those tedious lunchtime meetings. It's a bit past one so I'm late already, but the Piccolo Sandwich Bar and Cafe down the side street is quieter than usual, and my sandwich is ready fast enough. A generator truck sits outside the cafe, some kind of offload vehicle with huge wheels, completely unnecessary in this setting but rather impressive. There's still no sign of a camera let alone anyone famous so I head off to my meeting, where we will learn how to use the new user-friendly image database.

North Gower Street is home to Speedy's, better known as the cafe next door to Sherlock Holmes's flat in the BBC television series. Baker Street itself is far too grand and touristy to be used as the location and the shabby Georgian terraces of this out-of-the-way street, just around the corner from Euston station, serve the purpose much better. It's also a lot easier to close off to traffic without seriously affecting a whole area of central London. Speedy's is good for bacon sandwiches but otherwise a bit of a dump, one of those cafes that remain in a 1950s timewarp and might do better to clear the place out and start afresh.

There was a bigger crowd after work, and I expect they did get to see some scenes from the forthcoming series starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson. Personally I hate waiting for anything - buses, people arriving at Heathrow, waiting for toast to turn brown, you name it - so I didn't stick around to find out.

Electronic and kinetic art at Ambika P3

Kinetica Art Fair was open over the weekend at Ambika P3, the gigantic underground structures laboratory in the basement of the University of Central London, which was once the Polytechnic of Central London and a hotbed of architectural and structural innovation. The show featured an eclectic assortment of creations ranging from hi-tech to Heath Robinson, but it somehow lacked a defining sense of achievement. There were plenty of fairly amusing things but hardly anything to take your breath away and leave you wondering why that had never been done before.

The entrance to P3 isthrough some kind of maintenance yard, through a narrow doorway where people with tickets were left wondering if they had to join the long queue, or push their way through. Inside, you enter via a balcony overlooking the main space. The smell of frying burgers was not encouraging and the place was too crowded but the space itself is dramatic.

There were some very charming handmade exhibits, slapdash in the best kind of way, made to just about do what they are supposed to do without excess polish. A small tree branch suspended from three concentric rings, with the twigs cut exactly at the line of the rings above them, so the whole thing scrambles, and then reassembles again as a complete branch. Silly stuff like vibrating pictures that you couldn't see properly because of the movement. An old typewriter that no longer typed words, but had a nylon filament connecting each key to one of around forty noise-making devices: arms that struck bottles part-filled with water, a worm drive that sent balls down a chute, each mechanism different and amusingly impractical. The good thing about those was the way you didn't need an explanation, you could just watch and the whole thing was apparent. I didn't mind the tiny sailing boat with a rotating spring mimicking the rise and fall of waves, although that was just a little feeble. There was a beautifully made ball race, sending ping pong balls on twisting wire ramps, taking one of several routes down to the lift mechanism.

A lot of the show was predictable, and the hi-tech tendency which you would think must be the driving force behind this show, turned out to be less sophisticated than you might hope. Mutant robot monsters in the familiar heavy metal mould, a real live model wearing some kind of bondage outfit with robot appendages, stuff made out of bicycle gears. Lots of diffraction effects achieved in different ways. A whole room of effects with lights and mirrors. There was one thing I'd read about beforehand, a shiny cylinder reflecting a strangely-shaped metal blob, the blob being precisely calculated to look like a human hand in the distorted reflection. It worked, and you could see why it worked but that was all it did. Finally, I found something promising, a wooden lay figure about a foot high and next to it a modest array of electronics. The instructions were: stand on the black square with your hands up as the diagram shows. When the machine has finished scanning your body, a red light will show. Then you will be able to control the movements of the lay figure by moving your own body. It was out of order though.

Really, the star of the show was the two-metre metal globe suspended over the balcony from one of the industrial gantries that run across the ceiling. Covered in a grid of lights programmed with an ever-changing display and placed where you can stand right next to it, or see it from the far end of P3: nothing not to like about it.

David Bailey at the William Morris Gallery

The newly refurbished William Morris Gallery opened in August last year with a bit of a coup, a rare viewing of the 14 metre long Walthamstow Tapestry by Grayson Perry. The place was down at heel, hardly ever open when you'd want to visit and always the same when you did get inside, so a revamp is quite welcome - even if it is perhaps a little too child-friendly. The purpose of the revamp is evidently to shift the gallery up a gear, from local Walthamstow attraction to a place in the London art world. This new exhibition is a selection of images of the East End by sixties icon David Bailey, reinforcing that objective. There are two quite different sets of images in the show, black and white street scenes from 1961, and much larger colour photographs of people in pubs and clubs from 1968. Bailey's photographs portray a world rather different from that same geographical area today.

Gritty, grainy scenes of children playing on bomb sites and tumbledown brick terraces are one part of it, the earlier set. Printed at modest size in high contrast deep black with a black border, they show half-familiar streets with that different life going on. They have a period charm, a kind of photography that was fashionable then and dates them quite separately from the subject matter. He uses that trick of waiting for someone to walk past so as to get a figure in the foreground, or captures his subjects apparently unaware - they might be apologising for getting in front of the camera, but he presses the shutter button precisely where they will be framed against a shop front or a pub window. The children, on the other hand, are obviously keen to strike a pose for the sake of a little attention. The background is relentlessly broken, damaged, worn out. It's almost jarring, then, to see Jean Shrimpton looking like the star she was, posing in an oversized sweater in the dingy hallway of his parents' terraced house. The down-at-heel East End has become such a cliche of the era that it very nearly misses that quality of affording an inside view, a sense of looking back in time and seeing how things really were, but you do get a strong sense of just how much things have changed. Apart from Jean, though, the subject matter is interesting but if you found them in a box of old photographs in a junk shop, you wouldn't think they were anything special.

Those black and white images are set against the seedy nightlife of pubs and private drinking establishments, photographed in washed-out colour and printed much bigger. These are sleazy scenes shot in unglamorous surroundings: peeling paint, cheap furniture and some truly awful wallpaper. Two peroxide blondes with dark eyebrows pose with drinks in hand. A rough-looking geezer with a broken nose, creased clothes and a filthy rag around his neck holds up his dimple glass in one hand, the makings of a roll-up in the other. A couple of characters sit alone in their overcoats, and some men in decent suits are clearly slumming it out east. Last but not least are the Kray twins, blown up life-size and leering evilly, almost comically, holding their twin pet snakes. You wonder what they must have made of David hovering with his camera, but of course he was a local boy and must have known how to fit in, how to talk his way into a crowd, flattering people to get them to pose for the camera. What you don't wonder is what to make of the images: they speak for themselves, showing a huge leap of confidence since those earlier street scenes.

It's not a huge selection of images and you're left wanting to see more - that would have made this a stronger show.