Brick talk

This landed in my in-box, nestled deep within an unsolicited self-styled 'corporate report'. A certain pathos in the confrontation between the big confident man (check those muscles) and the shorter man with a servile expression. Especially when you read the word 'misformed' on his sweatshirt. Why isn't he wearing proper hi viz like a real workman? And why does that soft-focus brick in the foreground not match all the rest? It could be another caption competition...

With apologies to those being doubly exploited in this image

A splash of colour

The chaos that is Charing Cross Road, cut off from Tottenham Court Road by mega-construction work on the new Crossrail station, is temporarily made even worse by Foyles, which seems to have taken over the whole block. Scaffolding covers Foyles, at least I think it does, but most of it is something to do with Central St Martins Lofts who are presumably converting the old art college to disgustingly expensive apartments. The scaffolding does feature a rather nice mural by Rebecca Hendin, huge but not big enough to cover all the building works. Of course nobody paints a mural full size these days - it was probably done on her iMac - but there is plenty of detail. It's been there for ages apparently, but I just noticed it.

A moment's reflection

A rare burst of morning sunshine enlivens the bustle of Ridley Road market in Dalston, open every day except Sunday. Around nine on a weekday the place is a hive of activity with vans unloading and stalls being set out for the day. The sun is low in the sky with one side of the street in deep shadow, while on the sunny side the bright light intensifies the colours of fruit and veg, rolls of fabric and cheap tee shirts, and adds sparkle to pots and pans. The stallholder taking a break with his iPod has evidently got his work done already, waiting perhaps for the first customer to show up.

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.

Free cash

Just a traffic accident, or a ram-raid attack on a City Road cash kiosk?

So what's gong on here? A smashed kiosk is roped off with police tape, sides leaning drunkenly, wires trailing loose and debris scattered around. People stop and take pictures on their iPhones, speculate about what might have happened and move on. The kiosk has signs proclaiming 'Free' and 'Cash Withdrawals' and the company name, 'Cashzone (Every transaction counts)'. A smaller sticker reads 'Ink Stain System Fitted' and, confusingly, 'No Smoking'. The kiosk itself seems to be a converted telephone booth, perhaps not the most suitable use for such a flimsy structure, but the cash machine is still in there, not working, but not noticeably damaged and presumably still full of ten and twenty pound notes. The machine nestles at a angle among the smashed sides, along with an impressively large electric siren and oddly, a bundle of brightly coloured nylon fabric that might be a tent or some kind of safety wear.

Lying behind the rubbish bin, a completely detached sign misleadingly tells you 'Free Cash'. Maybe free cash was the idea behind this, a ram-raid attempt that failed. Cashzone's website reports a recent ram-raid on a convenience store in Warwickshire but doesn't mention this, so maybe it's just the result of bad driving, a lorry reversing inaccurately or a drunken driver losing control. Either way, a graphic reminder that we're not entirely insulated from the possibility of violence.

Wall to wall iTech

This is Apple trying to hang on to the lion's share of the gadget market. They haven't quite taken over the entire Tube network but it rather feels as if they would if they could. Quite pretty in an abstract way, but surely people must realise - that multicolour effect isn't going to work if you just buy one iPod.

Headcam crazy

What's this craze for headcams all about?

Filming yourself riding a bike might once have seemed absurdly pretentious, something only an avant garde artist would do, but nowadays the cycle magazines advertise helmet mounted cameras and it's no surprise to discover that people buy them. They even wear them in the street: this guy is at the London Cycling Campaign's Big Ride earlier this year. But while riding a bike is invigorating, frees your thoughts from everyday worries and only gets slightly boring if you do the same route every day, watching a video of someone's bicycle commuting route is of course like watching paint dry. Not exactly riveting.

The original purpose of the headcam was to capture exciting off road action on mountain bikes, so you could re-live the moment and perhaps work out why you crashed. There's a definite trend though, for urban cyclists to wear one on the way to work as a matter of course. I even know someone who does just that.

I suppose there can be exciting moments. Once I cycled the length of Tottenham Court Road holding a digital camera in one hand and steering with the other hand. 'Where's the drama?' my other half sneered, until it came to squeezing through the narrow gap between a bus and a lorry*, dodging pedestrians at the red lights and all that - it looks a lot more dangerous on camera than it really is. Not worth uploading to YouTube though, and soon deleted to free up hard disc space. Back in 2004 someone made a six-minute video of a messenger bike race in New York city that actually did bear watching, but only because it featured a group of riders being outrageously illegal, stopping cars and pedestrians in their tracks.

So do the modern headcammers want to capture bits of everyday excitement? No, apparently it's a form of insurance, a way to record bad driving and aggressive drivers, just in case. There are endless clips posted online featuring petty disagreements between cyclists and drivers. Some not so petty you might think, since they involve death threats, but of course that's all talk except in very rare cases. The trouble with this approach is that it encourages a combative attitude, which weight for weight doesn't look like such a good idea - an average bike weighs around 15kg, maybe 10kg if it's an expensive racing bike, while a typical car weighs 1200kg. It might be a good idea to think twice before you go banging on car windows, shouting at drivers at the next lights - and then threatening them that it's all on video. Getting people angry is not going to make the roads any safer.

*Note: that was a stationary bus and a stationary lorry. You should never ever do that if the vehicles are moving or even have time to move before you get to the next traffic lights.

Get your bike fixed?

The other day I visited my favourite bike shop, Bikefix in Lambs Conduit Street. The owner mentioned that they get some bad reviews online, so I checked it out next time I got to a free wifi cafe. What a lot of negative comments! Of course all bike shops get that sort of review, it's not that Bikefix has a monopoly on negativity, but it does seem a bit above average. Actually it's quite a special place, full of odd bikes and nice accessories that you would never see anywhere else, and a complete antidote to the On Your Bike type of bicycle supermarket. You might even meet some interesting people there, especially if talking bikes is your sort to thing.

So why the comments? The issue here seems to be a huge comprehension gap. It's a bit like when I try to explain to my wife what's going wrong with our loft conversion: I'm an architect but she knows absolutely nothing about the practicalities of building, so I end up sounding like a condescending arsehole (so I'm told). We just don't speak the same language, although being an architect I can at least draw pictures to make things clearer, but it's also a matter of different priorities, different values. Bike shops are like that. You come in with your typical ordinary bike and you know there is something wrong with it. Maybe the chain keeps coming off, or it won't change gears any more. Probably you've already decided how much it's worth to get it fixed and you hope to get it back in time to ride home that evening, if not within the next fifteen minutes. Now, the staff at Bikefix are without exception bike nuts, like most proper bike shop staff. They know about every kind of bike there is and probably have some heavily customised machine of their own that they change around every week to make it cooler, or faster, or just plain different. What are they going to think of your ordinary bike? Well, to keep it short, they are going to see more wrong with it than you do. They know what they would do if it was their bike (strip it right down and replace most of the parts, throw out those luggage racks and all those unnecessary bolted-on bits, maybe even a quick spraycan job to brighten up that dismal dull silver-grey finish). What can they do about your problem? They know exactly what will happen if they just replace the bit you think needs replacing: the chain will still come off, or the gears will be ok for a week and then start to seize up again. So they explain what they see as the way to sort it out permanently, and of course it's five times the figure you had in mind, maybe more than you paid for the bike in the first place. And it will be ready on Thursday, not today. After all, it takes time as well as parts, and shops only exist to make a living wage. Of course that's not what inevitably happens - most repair jobs are actually quite straightforward - but you can see the scope for frustration. That's one route to disillusionment, but maybe also inspiration to put your money in the right place and invest in a decent bike, whether by ditching your old piece of crap or by getting it to work nicely.

At the other end of the scale, some of the gadget freaks who like expensive bikes are among the most persnickety people in the world. Is that a proper English word? It certainly feels like the right word to describe that particular combination of uncertainty and obsessive attention to detail. Take a look at a specialised bicycle forum if you don't believe me, or have a laugh at the one review of Bikefix on Time Out. These people know enough to know what they don't like but not enough to know how to achieve what they do want. A no-win situation for everyone involved, potentially.

Do satisfied customers wrote reviews? I once bought a lemon-yellow Brompton there. They have an excellent online system for choosing all the different options for colours, gears, type of handlebar etc. but after I did that I went in to finalise the order. They didn't like the colour but they didn't try to change my mind, and warned me accurately about what was then a long order time. It certainly didn't occur to me to find an online review site and say how the yellow was exactly as lemony as I hoped and the bike had absolutely nothing wrong with it. Between the two extremes, Bikefix is a pleasure to visit and they can usually do or get whatever it is that you want. Within reason.

Colour explosion at Kings Cross

This splash of colour is what used to be the worthy but dull Kings Cross branch of Barclays Bank. As a matter of fact the bank is still there, but the rest of the building is a newish fashionable hotel, the Megaro, with interior designed rooms at more than 200 quid a night. At first sight it's quite striking, but a splash of colour is all it is, there's nothing very inspired about the design, and it completely muddles the architectural language of the building. It's not illegal (although it's in a conservation area no planning permission was required) but you could say it's short-sighted, not really worth the permanent damage.

The hotel is a typical London block, built in the early twentieth century in red brick with lots of fine carved limestone details, nothing very exciting by London standards, but just try looking for that kind of thing in an American city, for example. That paint is guaranteed for twenty years, apparently, but the novelty is going to wear off much sooner than that. Will it come off? No, most unlikely: even intensive graffiti removal techniques don't entirely remove all the paint, and over an entire building that would be ridiculously expensive. Sandblasting might work but it destroys the surface of bricks. So the original natural materials are likely to be covered up permanently.

One can only hope the owners will keep the facades freshly painted, and maybe next time do something that actually makes use of the architecture instead of camouflaging it.

Dumb and Dumber

I finally got around to watching the film Dumb and Dumber starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, a mere seventeen years after it first came out, and laughed so much I cried. Carrey can be extremely annoying, but in this case the humour works - although the characters are stupid, the film is in fact rather intelligently written and tightly directed. Which brings me to today's subject: these posters on the Tube showing bright young things holding up placards inscribed 'I WISH...' So what is that about? There are several versions of the poster with different wishes, and a helpful Internet address links to a lot more. Obviously this is about selling clothes but for once, the advertisements divert attention away from the main object into this eye catching sidetrack. Quite an annoying sidetrack, given the banal wishes and cloying cluelessness they express. I mean, if you can make a wish, it might as well be a decently ambitious one, not just some modest passing fancy. Like those three wishes jokes, you should be careful what you wish for.

The wishes fall into neat categories. Modest wishes (I wish more fun [sic], I wish for a puppy, not to be bored). Ridiculous fantasy wishes (I wish for international travel to be free, to travel the universe in a spaceship). Flaky wishes to change the world (I wish for people to realise their happiness, I wish love to all my loved ones) and the frankly self-centred (I wish to have everything I ever wished for). The standard stuff of the internet age I suppose, all those half-considered contributions vying for attention. The pleased look on the models' faces combined with the nonsense wishes is what I find annoying, but I suppose the target audience will love it, and maybe even send in their own wishes. "I wish for a puppy." Grow up, buy yourself a puppy if you really want one. There are some more personal statements that make a bit more sense (I wish to live in the same city as my sister, I wish to have my book published) . One I rather like runs, 'I wish people on our planet [would] start working together and not against each other'. I don't think that's what the advertising agency was looking for though. It's almost as if stupidity sells.
"Make a wish at www.esprit.com"

Walk don't run

Not a murder scene, this slightly alarming black figure is stuck to the floor of Victoria Station to reinforce the message, "You'll run into trouble if you run in stations". The way railway stations are organised, with platforms announced at the last minute, running for the train en masse is the norm. You might think a human figure would at least attract attention but people were casually stepping on this sign as if it wasn't there. It won't work, but it's quite graphically stylish, in the tradition of the signs you used to see on the Tube. I wonder if anyone remembers the London Undergound  "Keep Feet off Seats!" sign when it showed two feet, one in clumpy lace-up boots and and one in high heels, in the days before signs all went down the pictogram route? It's refreshing to see a sign with a depiction of the human figure that isn't quite reduced to the stick-man level. Actually he has a lot in common with the London Sidelines silhouette man (on the sidebar, scroll down a bit). Perhaps they will introduce a female version too.

Advertising Christmas

Yet another giant LED screen appears in London, with a backdrop of yet another massive office development (actually, it's just visible to the right of the photo, behind Euston Tower). While it's tempting to see rapacious development as a sign that the economy hasn't collapsed yet, you sometimes wonder what is happening to the city. Giant screens are part of the attraction at Piccadilly Circus, but do we really want them spreading to any vacant site, stealthily replacing boring old paper posters and finding new high-profile spaces that still haven't been used for advertising? On the Tube system it's happened on a large scale already. London Underground have phased out paper posters completely to replace them with illuminated posters and LCD displays, installed projectors on platforms, and put banks of video screens on escalators. The only thing that stops them putting moving images on the corridors is that it's thought to be disorienting, and therefore likely to lead to people bumping into each other - an effect that presumably doesn't come into play when you're running down the escalator. At Euston Station, a recent overhaul of a very untidy station concourse has been resolved by putting in giant video screens all round, up at high level where there used to be a collection of uncoordinated adverts. Currently the whole lot are advertising the new Range Rover, as if London needs any encouragement to fill the streets with overpowered gas-guzzling status symbols.

The advertising screen in this photo overlooks the traffic underpass on Euston Road. Inevitably we are going to see more of these in the near future.

Bicycle chic

An old butcher-boy delivery bicycle is a standard cliche for a certain type of healthy food shop, parked outside perhaps to suggest old-fashioned values: proper groceries wrapped in brown paper and delivered to your door, which is of course far removed from the self-service, over-wrapped reality. Recently bicycles are being put into shop displays of all kinds, tapping in to the current wave of cycling chic. There was a paisley-covered bicycle in Libertys - ridden by the Liberty's skeleton (but that's another story). Hanging in the window of a fashion shop in Oxford Street is a red-and-white retro cruiser bike with rotating wheels. Specsavers in Tottenham Court Road has a wrought-iron bicycle shaped display stand, not a real bicycle, but then that's an odd shop selling all sorts of stuff apart from specs. There are plenty of others, as becomes apparent once you start to notice the trend. Bike shops don't count of course. This one adorns a smart but otherwise anonymous cafe in Tottenham Court Road.

Grey faces in the City of London

A paved sculpture garden, alongside St Mary Axe in the City of London, sits in the shadow of the Lloyds building, the famous inside-out building by Richard Rogers. The garden has trees and planting boxes, and the amazing Sky Mirror by Anish Kapoor, six metres wide and reflecting the buildings around - if you climb something high enough, that is, otherwise as you might expect from the name it reflects mainly just the sky. One side of the garden is enclosed by a long yellow hoarding, concealing the construction site next door, and it seems to be a venue for artworks rather than advertising. Last year it bore a quote from Mahatma Gandhi running the full length of the hoarding: "Be the change you want to see in the world". Recently I spotted these oversize heads photographed in black and white, superimposed on the yellow background.

One lengthy Google search later, I can report that the grey faces are in fact part of a promotion for the insurance company Aviva. Their "You are the Big Picture" campaign put large black and white photographs of supposedly individual customers in noticeable places including night-time projection onto the National Theatre. To quote their website "It shows that we at Aviva want to get to know our customers as individuals". There is a charity link-up with Save the Children but that doesn't mean it's not 100% about self-promotion.

Bike Week - Street art or annoying intrusion?

How did this bike get so rusty, and why is it abandoned? In fact it's advertising. Take an old bike, customise it without making it valuable, and leave it locked up to a street sign. It's been done before, with old bikes sprayed the same colour all over. Rusty chic is a logical progression. Notice how this is a perfectly functional bike, with everything apparently in reasonable working order, except there are no brakes. Perhaps it's a fixed-wheeler and doesn't need brakes? No, it just doesn't need brakes because it's not going anywhere. The front wheel and a discreet logo are the clues to what it's advertising - zoom in to the picture if you want to find out. Westminster council are clearly not amused, that's a Notice of Removal of an Abandoned Bicycle attached to the crossbar. So is it cynical exploitation, littering the streets with yet more commercial overload, or does it provide a little harmless street art - probably without having any useful advertising value?