Nige admires the work of Charles Holden, the architect behind Southgate Tube Station, one of London's finest Art Deco Underground stations... That is not a newly landed art deco UFO above - it is Southgate Underground station, towards the end of the Cockfosters branch of the Piccadilly Line. I discovered this part of ... Read More...
Architecture
My work done, I toddled the length of Bermondsey Street peering critically into windows. Here was a teensy art gallery selling coffee; next door, in stark contrast, was a teensy coffee shop selling art. A barrel-chested man in ironic clothes with an improbably small dog was being rude to the baristas. ... Read More...
To the Watershed cinema and ‘digital creativity centre’, to hear Jonathan Meades talk about his new book. The event was part of the Bristol Festival of Ideas, and my escort was the combative Islington-based journalist Pippa Tregaskis, who two years ago interviewed Meades for The Dabbler ahead of his bewildering BBC ... Read More...
David Long’s new book A History of London in 100 Places tells the capital’s incredible history through 100 buildings, details and places, from Roman barges to Boris Bike stations. In the first of three exclusive extracts for The Dabbler, David looks at William the Conqueror’s White Tower... This is still by ... Read More...
Rita celebrates an Art Deco gem in an unlikely location... Where would you expect to find the venerable American Film Institute’s movie theater? There is one in Los Angeles of course, on the non-profit organization’s eight-acre campus in the Hollywood hills. You might expect their second theater to be in New ... Read More...
Bizarre Flemish coincidences and worshipping at the Temple of Apple in this dispatch, as Rita visits New York... I first suspected something was amiss with my New York Subway app when it advised us to travel from Midtown Manhattan to the Lower East Side via Brooklyn, on the other side of ... Read More...
If it weren't for a proper, old fashioned newspaper, I would not have discovered an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and would never have visited the extraordinary property that has recently been named one of 31 national treasures by the USA’s National Trust for Historic Preservation. Located at 2007 Franklin Street, Haas Lilienthal ... Read More...
First time visitors to Westminster Underground station may think they have walked onto the set of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on entering this subterranean cathedral of concrete, steel and chains. But such architectural gems are easily taken for granted on a daily commute. How often do we ignore wondrous feats of ... Read More...
The country's leading folly-hunter takes us to the most terrifying tower in Britain, at which his love for pointless buildings nearly terminated... Essex has a number of folly towers of a more traditional sort: all are eclipsed by Bull’s Tower in Pentlow, a rather attractive, unostentatious Victorian brick tower in a ... Read More...
What Dabbler wouldn't like to get paid for being the government's official Curator of Eccentricities? Worm goes in search of the man who had the best job in Britain... When the Festival of Britain landed on the south bank of the Thames in the summer of 1951, Architect and festival director ... Read More...