STAGE DOOR CIGGIES
Due to the new open air smoking ban, the following central London theatres have been graded according to their cast of smokers grabbing a few quick drags between acts and performances.
Theatre Tar Rating Lighting mechanism of choice
Royal Haymarket Low Bic lighter
Wyndhams High Swan Vestas
Young Vic Ultra low England Glory
Vaudeville Medium Zippo
New London High Matchbook from unknown cafe
Lyric Low-medium Bryant & May
LIFE AFTER TIN – THE BOOM-BOOM OF HEARTLANDS, TR15 3QY
There’s a place that doesn’t quite exist yet. But it’s very close to being born. Or rather being reborn out a landscape of grit that once bore tin when tin was worth the weight and might of gold. This place has 51,000 or so parents, or guardians, or freeholders, or trustees, all of whom make it boom. Not once, but twice, double beats – a boom-boom. They make it tick. Their roots are as deep as their pride. If ever a community pulled a place up off its knees, it’s here and (soon to be) now. The place has a name and its name is Heartlands. Off the A30 aorta, if you’re passing,
ONE LETTER PLACE NAMES (# 74,894)
Today I came across a place called Os, near Bergen in Norway.
What brevity I thought, to name a place so succinctly.
But this is longwinded for Norway – they have 7 villages called A (with a small circular accent above the A, a symbol I can’t find in my WordPress deck) as well as several farms called O.
Talking of O, Devon has a river by the same name, while the river D runs through Oregon.
E is both a mountain at Hokkaido in Japan, and allegedly a river in the highlands of Scotland.
Panama claims to have a place called U.
Which leaves us with Y, a commune in the Somme, France and similarly a settlement in Alaska.
Given the Sarah Palin association, I know which one I’d rather hook up with.
SALVAGETON
I’ve been travelling a fair bit this week, by road and by rail.
A few things stand out.
1. Deer and people throw themselves in front of moving vehicles.
2. Both forms of transport are bad for your diet.
3. Telegraph poles and sleepers are omnipresent. All that wood. All the wasted wood cut away and left to turn to dust to make that wood good. What good could, would and should that good wood be, make and do?
Here’s a sweet wrapper calculation: 225,000 miles of road in Britain, of which at least a third holds poles at 30 yards apart = 58 x 75,000 = 4,350,000 poles standing and a few thousand hanging around in creasote begging for another life.
Plus, 10,072 miles of rail In Britain, with sleepers set at a yard apart = 10,072 x 1760 = 17,726,720 sleepers doing a critical job and some of its sisters on the dole in some lumberjack shirted yard destined for raised beds and lettuces.
Ignoring the creasote and usefulness issues for a second, imagine we repurposed that wood to make a town, a new town made from old stock. We call it Salvageton or something equally descriptive so it is what it says on the sign. We build a school from scrap and even a hospital from filthy waste using some natural form of sterilisation such the aseptic steam method pioneered in Germany. Children are born here with an inherent appreciation of using what they find rather than nipping out to B & Q, who pay extortionate amounts to sponsor the town in return for no logo. It grows, messily, grubbily, dare I say it, organically. Kevin McCloud moves in. Frank Gehry pitches an idea which the town rejects for being too wasteful, Frank tries again. This time they pass his design for a forest. And they all sleep hummingly every after.
THE CREATIVITY OF DESTRUCTIONISM
Today my daughter threw more gusto into the dismantling of her lego tower than she did into the building of it.
Within the hour I’d received an email about an artist exploring the architecture of excavation. Join him at: http://oh-wow.com/dig/
Tell me readers, who is watching us and pulling the chords of chance?
THISNESS PRESENTS NOWNESS
There’s a whole of ness-ness going on in the world right now, as long-standing readers of thisness will know. No doubt thatness and thereness will one day compete for the title of The Royal Thenness. Until then, we’ll make do with Nowness, a new publication that calls itself a digital leader in luxury storytelling. I’m not really one for all-out luxury, but maybe you are.
Nowness has a love/don’t love button to trump/trash the content.
With all my love, please start here with Dana Lixenberg’s show at FOAM in Amsterdam:
http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/3/22/1378/dana-lixenberg-set-amsterdam#
WE BUILT, WE SLEPT, WE DISMANTLED
The ShelterBox Hotel lived for all of a night.
It went up in 9 hours and came down in 3.
In between we toasted the brilliant work of ShelterBox, the brilliant build of the crew and the brilliant verve of our guests who trusted us to create a hotel from scratch from scrap.
Here we are, an hour in.
Eight hours later, the doors open and guests rock up.
To those who came, who saw and who concussed after many too many drinks, we toast you.
SHELTERBOX HOTEL
By this time tomorrow night, I hope to be asleep with 24 others in a hotel we’ve built inside the Eden Project Mediterrranean biome from waste material in 10 hours to last for one night only.
When we say waste, we mean thousands of disused tent poles, scraps of sheepskin offcuts, torn parachute silks and some kids hand-me-down jumpers doubling up as water bottle jackets.
If you find yourself at Eden tomorrow, please come and help to thread a pole into our structure.
If it all works, joy to the world.
If it all fails, joy to the world.
The point is not to make a thing of everlasting beauty but to see what we can make as a temporary home for a small community for a short period of time, as this is the way ShetlerBox works.
We hope to raise money in doing this hard-to-do thing.
If you’d like to help the cause, please help here:
http://www.justgiving.com/shelterboxhotel
Thank you and sleep well.
SCRAPSTORE 1 SELFRIDGES 0
We live in a world of excess. Too much of everything and not enough of too little. So, to find a place that find places for all the things people don’t want anymore is a pretty amazing venture.
Scrapstore is run by Gary King. I’ve only met him once but he radiates belief. His warehouse in the Clay Hills of St Austell, Cornwall is rammed full of orphaned stuff. He also runs sister sites in Liskeard and Pool, near Redruth. The stories behind the stock are almost as fascinating as the stock itself. But I’ll leave those anecdotes up to Gary as he tells them better than words on a page every could.
Scrapstore makes you re-evaluate products and processes. Scrapstore makes you think about the idiocy of ownership. Scrapstore makes you grateful that everything here isn’t underground in bin liners.
I’m off for my second pilgrimage tomorrow and I told Gary I’d write about his brilliant enterprise. Hopefully someone, somewhere will read this and think twice before they next bin or buy.
‘FERAL OUTBREAK’ – CORNWALL DESIGN SEASON PANDEMIC STARTS TODAY
It’s rare that I plug anything in this blog, but today I owe a few people in lieu of this:
http://www.cornwalldesignseason.co.uk/
Over the past 6 months, it has absorbed a lot of my life, but so much more of Matt & Sasha’s lives, the twosome to whom this post goes out to tonight.
If you are anywhere near Cornwall, come. Track down one of 15 shipping containers hiding in the county and wander inside. Each crate contains an installation by a local artist or designer of a subject nominated by figureheads within the worlds of design, culture and academia. As far as I know, there is no money to be won, but there is an emotional pot of gold at the end of each rainbow. If you’re local, your heart may thump with pride. If you’re not, you might go oh-wow. Either way, you will leave the scene with a different mood.
As this week unravels, these rusty old crates will become less shy within the Cornish landscape as they receive a lick of love something like this: da-naaa.
