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...
Psychogeography
Want to get your hands on one of the best nature books of the year? Read on to find out how you can win one of 3 copies of Meadowland by John Lewis-Stemple... What really goes on in the long grass? Meadowland gives an unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life ... Read More...
Must be fun living in the bit of Holland that's within the bit of Belgium that's within Holland, especially if you were in a police car chase. Despite that, here's another Wikipedia discovery that's not going to make it onto my holiday list... Baarle-Hertog is a municipality belonging to the Belgian ... Read More...
Are there any Dabblers who have personal acquaintance with the reality checkpoint unearthed in today's unusual wikipedia article? Reality Checkpoint is the name given to a large lamp-post in the middle of Parker's Piece, Cambridge, England, located at the intersection of the park's diagonal paths. The name comes from an unofficial ... Read More...
Time for the second installment on the curiosities of our capital city from Peter Watts - journalist,self-confessed London geek, and author of Know London. Streets beneath streets, layer upon layer, we descend into history... Paul, the librarian at Time Out, first told me about the street beneath Charing Cross Road in ... Read More...
I very much like the fact that the alien airport featured in today's unusual wikipedia article was named by the local council. Opened in 1963, Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport is located about four nautical miles (7.4 km) south of the central business district of Green River, Wyoming on a mountain known ... Read More...
Worm guides us through the jerry-built plotlands of Great Britain... Plotlands began in the 1870's as a way for speculators to offload marginal farmland as Britain's agrarian populace uprooted en masse to the big cities. Whether barren or dangerously flood prone, worthless land was portioned up and sold off square by ... Read More...
Time was when my idea of a decent American film seemed to involve someone like Nicholas Cage (back when he was human) gunning a beat-up Dodge Charger into the Californian desert before having a strange dreamy pre-dawn sequence involving some hollow concrete dinosaurs in a parking lot. Sadly we don't ... Read More...
The lucky winners of the latest Dabbler Book Club selection… Free books. What’s not to like? Especially when the book in question is Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, a book that has deservedly been sitting in the bestseller lists for weeks now. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive and celebrated voice, the book ... Read More...
For the first time in history, more than half the population - 3.3 billion people - is now living in cities. Elberry reviews 'the ultimate guidebook to our urban centres'... From the sky, England still looks green. On the ground, it's another story, all cancerous conurbations and serial ghettos. Most people ... Read More...