St. John's, Smith Square

If there's a type of stone that characterises London, especially the Government estate and major historic buildings including Buckingham Palace and St Paul's, then that stone is Portland Stone. It's a limestone, dating back to the Jurassic Period; some facies (varieties) are very fossil-rich, with Grove Whitbed being rich in oysters, and Roach Stone being famous for it's 'Osses' heads' (Trigoniid bivalves) and Portland screws, a variety of gastropod mollusc.  Other facies are freestones, very suited to carving by stonemasons.

There's a reason for the popularity of  Portland Stone in London, and for its use to rebuild St Paul's after the Great Fire of London in particular - Sir Christopher Wren owned shares in a certain quarry on the Isle of Portland!  His use of the stone set a trend, and now, in addition to the buildings I've already cited, think in terms of Regent Street, the Old Bailey, the Bank of England...  One of my favourite buildings is St John's in Smith Square, Westminster. It's a deconsecrated church now in use as a classical music venue.  One really hot day, I happened to walk towards it, and there was something about the light, the gleaming stone and the green of the trees that was beautiful and almost exotic.  Being me, I raised my camera almost in supplication; this photo was the result.

#100Photos #27

Conditional discharge

 

These spent batteries were at the top of a full, tall but narrow cylindrical recycling bin.  If that's one snapshot in one shop then hopefully there are many thousands more being recycled each week across the country.

But:  How many more are *not* being recycled?  And how the heck many are we using??  Why???

#100Photos #26

Blue up

Just an opportunistic snapshot from a lunchtime -  I was heading back to the office and looking for something other than swans to photograph after stretching my legs with a short riverside walk, and I looked up to see these colours and shapes.  It just had to be done.

#100Photos #25

Marmalades and nectar

I'm very much a country mouse.  We live at the edge of a city, so we're close to amenities, but I spend hours walking through local countryside. Most weeks, I see far more sheep and cattle than I do people -  and I'm more than happy for it to stay that way.  I see deer, foxes, the occasional weasel, and rascally rabbits,  I hear skylarks singing, there are red kites circling overhead, kestrels hovering, flocks of titmice and charms of goldfinches, and the summer is full of swallows.  There are wild hops growing near the village pub, and the hedgerows are full of blackberries at this time of year. 

We get an amazing variety of invertebrates - I'm not expert enough to be able to differentiate all the hoverflies, for instance, but some are easy to identify; the hornet mimics are amazing, and have abdomens with stunningly pure yellow stripes.  I love the marmalade ones - when I'm in the garden, the air is often full of them. Hoverflies don't have stings, by the way, so it's safe to get up close even to the hornet mimics; they have evolved wasp-like colours as a form of protection.  I was lucky enough to get this photo of four of them one day this summer; I love the vibrancy of the colours!

#100Photos #24

A sideways look at life

To quote a friend on a message board I used to frequent, "Sometimes you just gotta."  I stood my phone on the arm of this bench and took the photo.  I was originally just interested in the bench (yes, I know, but photographers are like that) and the sideways look at life was purely serendipitous.

#100Photos #23

Vanishing from St Pancras Station

 

Please let me stress that it wasn't me vanishing from St. Pancras!!

When you start doing art at secondary school, whether that be a Grammar School or a Comprehensive or one of the modern Academies, they make sure that you know that the pointy bit of the pencil goes on the paper, and that the chewy bit doesn't unless you need it to. When you've mastered that bit, they start teaching you about things like composition and perspective and vanishing points and the rule of thirds (which is not about school dinners).

As my Other Half and I were looking along the platform, that came back to me across the decades, and I was amused that the vanishing point - where all the lines meet in the distance - was not in the centre of our view which is where you start practicing from when you're 11, and that from where we were standing, it was directly in line with the change from glass to opaque roofing and along the infrastructure directly underneath that.  Mind you, it does follow the rule of thirds quite nicely!

#100Photos #22

The view from the train

I hadn't been through Manningtree, in Essex, for donkeys' years until the day I took this photo; seeing the Stour Estuary took me right back to my schooldays.  I'm the first to say that this is not a great photograph, but:

Picture this.  Me at twelve years old. Abba had not yet stormed the Eurovision Song Contest, and we'd not even joined the Common Market when I first set foot on Manningtree station, and it was just a few short years later when I last did and I had entirely forgotten or had never previously realised just how tiny it is!  Mind you, I hadn't seen that many stations to compare it to... I was travelling on my own to and from boarding school - my parents sent me an RAF travel warrant (well, my father did - he was the one in the RAF) and a note that said they'd meet me on the platform at Venlo, on the German border in the Netherlands.  That set the pattern for the next few years; a local train into Norwich then an onward train to Harwich,  

I had to change at Manningtree a couple of times and I knew when I got there that I was that much closer to boarding the Avalon (lovely old ship!) or the Queen Juliana (hmmm...) for the overnight voyage to the Hook of Holland and the train to Venlo on the German border across the much larger estuaries in the Netherlands.  My suitcase was bigger than I was, and this was back in the day when suitcases didn't have wheels, but you know what?  I didn't actually care, because I was going home!  OK, there was always a return journey, but for some reason I don't remember changing at Manningtree on the way back;  I might not have done, I may have gone up to Norwich before changing.  Who knows?  But I certainly looked out for this spot even then.  

In my later schooldays, the RAF did what they were good at and got us to and fro by air from Luton to Wildenrath, firstly by charter flights and then by a VC10 from Air Support Command.  My memories of those journeys involve tube travel across London and Bloodhound missiles on the perimeter at Wildenrath.  The last time I made the outbound trip, I stayed overnight at RAF Hendon, now the site of the RAF Museum.

This photo is no great work of art, but it''s pure nostalgia for me.  There's also something in my soul that this sort of landscape appeals to, in the same way that I love charcoal or pencil sketches and lovely old black-and-white photographs.  I love estuaries; I love saltmarsh, I love glasswort and sea purslane, I love the creeks, I love the bleakness on a winter's day.  I also love rich, deep colours but they're for another day and another photograph.  

I'll say one thing, though; I didn't go through Manningtree again until the late 2010s, when I took this photo, and it was only then that I realised how small the station actually is.

#100Photos #21

Honeysuckle

I was in Bristol a few weeks ago for a face-to-face meeting of one of work's Networks. It actually turned out to be cheaper to travel via London than via Birmingham, thank goodness - they've done a great job with the concourses in 'Brum', and you can get a fairly decent coffee, but the platforms still have roofs of Stygian darkness, and they sometimes change trains' platforms at rather too short notice for my liking and mobility.  Going via London Paddington gives an opportunity to spend some quality time with the fossils in the limestone platforms, and that is always a bonus.

Getting back to Bristol, though, we had a good session at the opening meeting, and most of the group were taken on a foraging trip to learn more about it. That was up a rather steep hill, but our office happens to be just near the Cathedral, and if there's one thing I'm a sucker for, it's a good cathedral.  The history, the atmosphere, and for me as a geologist the very stone of the building, and the various decorative stones, are always interesting whether I'm wearing a professional hat or a personal one.

(The evening meal, by the way, when we all met up again, was Japanese - my partner and I love Studio Ghibli films, so I just had to sample a bowl of ramen for the first time. It's the law.)

Coming to this photo (in a rather roundabout manner, I'm afraid), the following morning entailed a visit to a City Farm, where we were given a tour and an explanation of the Farm's work with the local community, and the role of their volunteers.  The able-bodied among my colleagues did an hour's good honest hard work to say thank you for the tour; I took quite a few photos for work, and took a few snaps like this honeysuckle for what I laughingly call my own 'archives'.  I do like flowers that have a wonderful scent, and this honeysuckle had that in spades.  It photographed pretty nicely as well for a passing shot with a mobile phone!

#100Photos #20

Portholme - a slightly misty meadow

 

I remember the morning I took this one.  I was on a train on the East Coast Mainline, on my way to the QEII Centre in London for the annual UK conference hosted by ESRI, the Geographic Information Systems software giant. It was a red letter day in my calendar for a number of reasons - mainly because ESRI use the event to showcase advances in their software, using it to demonstrate all manner of fascinating things.  There was a fair bit of cartography in my day job back then, and this was food for all sorts of techy thought.

They also have great speakers - two that come to mind are Dr Hannah Fry, who was demonstrating the use of GIS to predict the progress of a pandemic (this was in 2018, before Covid-19 but a very clear warning of how such a pandemic would spread), and geographer, writer, explorer and TV personality Nick Crane making the plenary speech on the power of geography.   I also vividly remember a speaker from Disney showing us how the company use used their City Engine software to design a city for Zootopia.  They also have great food every year, some fascinating exhibitors, and some pretty good swag.  

Coming back to this photo, delegates were taking photos of their journeys down and posting them online; the train went past one of my favourite meadows, Portholme SSSI, Huntingdon, as the light was perfect and the Great Ouse was mirror-like.  This photo was the result of luck rather than planning!

#100Photos #19

Swans and clouds, reflected

We've moved offices a couple of times over the many years I've been with my employer; our last office was just 100 metres or so from the river*.   I spent many a lunchtime walking along the riverbank, either alone or with one or more friends, getting some fresh air and watching birds or butterflies (or both) or looking to see what was in bud or in flower.  One day the light and reflections were just perfect for this shot. We were some way away away from the spot where the swans usually congregate in the hope of free food - where they mass, you'd never see enough actual water to see reflections like these!

#100Photos #18

*Our current office isn't that much further from it, but we're closer to the other bank.