The slow motion political assassination of Britains Prime Minister dominates the news here. So far it's all been a bit Et tu Brute but without a dagger. Perhaps that will change today. To jolly things up the BBC plays a sound clip of the American President emerging from a two hour session with President Xi . He informs us that this is ' the biggest and most fantastic summit the worlds ever seen . It's so big I can tell you that in the States no one is talking about anything else '.
This estate agent style hyperbole causes us to wonder if we should keep a small pied a terre in Edinburgh. We used to have a rambling old flat at the top of the Mound . You can see it just to the immediate left of the castle in this photo. It was unusual for having a Georgian wig cupboard. We rarely used it. In August the Edinburgh Tattoo was held on the castle esplanade and the noise and crowds used to drive us crazy. The military police would diligently search the take away pizza boxes or delivery vans for explosives. This consigned us to cooking at home for the duration.
There's a little known entrance to Waverley station that leads out towards a side road onto Calton Hill. This is a part of town tourists seldom see. Facing anyone who walks this way is the Regent Bridge. It was built as a memorial for those who fell in the Napoleonic wars and spans a large deep volcanic gully. It was , in its day, prohibitively expensive to build and subject to huge cost over runs. I'd bet not one in a thousand folk who walk along the road above know that they're crossing a bridge.
The Starbucks on George Street has an interesting 1970's era frontage with five brass sculptures mounted on triangular granite walls. The brass figures seem to be a strange combination of Jacobite Highlanders and native American Indians. This modernity is out of place in the New Town but it is, in its own way, a quite wonderful piece of architecture. It's certainly too good to be a coffee shop. It has the look of an upmarket travel agency but try as I might there's nothing to be found about its original use or who the architect was. It's the sort of architecture you can walk by a hundred times without noticing it. That in a sense is a measure of its success.
The beaches on the train ride home are the preserve of solitary dog walkers. Five miles outside Edinburgh and the population soon peters out as the big city retreats into the distance.
Far away from big city life mother duck continues to monitor control the footfall on the pavement outside the Shawarma House.
Something bright and exotic in bloom on the banks of the heron pond.
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7 comments:
Hari OM
That's a Marsh Marigold... and isn't Edinburgh just one of the best cities in the world? (I may be biased, but I've lived in a few and it takes some beating.) Now... as to that shopfront...
From south to north along the frontage, the five copper sculptures depict:
A Samurai wielding a sword.
A Roman soldier holding a round shield.
An Australian Aborigine equipped with an oval shield and a boomerang.
An African warrior carrying a large shield and a long spear.
An American Indian (Native American) wearing a feathered headdress and holding a bow and arrow.
While the shopfront was later integrated into Hugh Martin & Partners’ wider mid-1970s modernisation of the block, the sculptures themselves date back to the early 1960s. They were commissioned for the General Steam Navigation Company Ltd., a major commercial shipping and cruise operator that occupied the building. The figures were chosen to visually showcase the diverse, international destinations connected by global shipping networks and the travel industry. They remained a fixture of the facade through subsequent tenancies by other travel corporations, including P&O Travel and Going Places.
The figures are mounted individually on five distinctive, marble-clad angled fins. The zig-zagging, structural glass of the shopfront steps back and forth between these fins, creating a highly sculptural, mid-century modern aesthetic that is protected today under the building's Category A statutory listing.
So you were very on-spot with the travel agents suggestion! YAM xx (the inveterate archive miner)
Oh, well done, Yamini
Sometimes a nice place to visit, is a difficult place to live. The cost of a flat, will pay for a lot of nice hotel rooms.
Judging by all cranes in that first photo, it looks like there is a lot of construction going on in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, whatever they are building now may not have the whimsicality of that Starbucks building (many thanks to YAM for the additional research).
The talk on premonition is charging “adnission”? Cheers to Yamini to the short essay on the Starbucks building.
JoAnn in Maryland
Thank you, Yamini for mining those archives. That was fascinating! I am psychically encouraging your idea of a small flat in Edinburgh!
Brilliant! Thank you.
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