Birmingham (January 2015)
I went up to Birmingham today, to see a soon to vanish scene. In the middle of the city there stands, for now, a giant concrete building. The …
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Warsaw
I have been to Warsaw before but still feel a child like thrill as my train pulls into the city. I think because it was a long time goal, a reminder of my first foray to Europe, to Paris waiting for the train home at Gare du Nord. On the departure board there was no Crewe or Doncaster, or Swindon. Instead Brussels, Hannover, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow. Exotic cities of the Old East.
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Gdansk
Gdansk. Danzig. The city where the first shots of World War II were fired and where the opening salvos that finally brought down the crumbling Eastern Bloc were unleashed. And, as that experiment in Empire has collapsed, so it feels that the centuries of wealth has drained and departed from the city: no more the town’s Baltic trade, no more the Free City and no more work at the mighty Lenin shipyards. Though not yet gone.
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Laceways, Birmingham
There is something about city snowfall that takes one back in time. Not the huge snowfalls followed by bright sun that typifies an American winter – strong white under pale blue. No, I mean the type of snow that falls slowly, wetly, all day and blankets the city under the gloomy grey murk of Northern European skies.
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Blankenberge
On the Belgian Coast sits the strikingly ugly town of Blankenberge. A kilometre long wall of apartments, uniformly ten stories high, separates the land and its low lying town from the rolling brown waves of the North Sea.
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