VauxhallVelcraux

I really meant to write more about London while I was actually there, but I forgot entirely about the need for voltage adapters and sort of preferred to go out every night and then get up early in the morning and walk around. So now I'm back in New York attempting to make good on my promise (largely to myself) to show off my new camera and its capabilities. What are some of the interesting things I did that coincide with the photos currently uploaded to my iPhoto?

• I ate Marmite. (If you say it like a "cockney" would, it sounds like you 'hate' Marmite!" A more relevant tidbit about cockneys is that they don't actually exist).
  
• I didn't go to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard or to the London Eye or to the Tower or Piccadilly Circus or Speaker's Corner.
  
• But I did get to see a lot of brutalism!

It's not quite Queensboro Plaza, but there's nothing quite like the abortious carbuncles of top-down midcentury urban planning designed to replace Luftwaffe bombing craters on the cheap.

"Why won't the pedestrians behave like they do in the rendering?!" the social engineer was overheard to exclaim.

Sometimes, though, an expressway cutting through the urban fabric actually provides a nice counterpoint to a defunct canal.


I didn't just stick to the gentrified precincts of northwest London. I went to Brixton in search of Electric Avenue, but I couldn't find it. Here's some proof that I made it all the way to the end of the Victoria line:


I couldn't find Electric Avenue because I refused to walk around with an A-to-Z guide and it wasn't depicted on the "continuing your journey from Brixton" map in the Tube exit. (Side note: Transport for London must employ dozens of graphic designers, because every station--plus every single bus station--has a different, and very helpful street map centered on where you actually are. Not like coming out of a NYC subway station at, say, Grand Street and seeing an awkward parallelogram from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side etched on a waterlogged papyrus). Anyway, Brixton was pretty diverse. It's funny, being liberal-minded, how your inclination to call black people "African Americans" doesn't apply in the UK. There, they're known as Africo-BritaniccanLilongweAntananarivoshanan'anphuphu. Many more of them are Francophonic than one finds in Brooklyn, and the segregation isn't nearly as extreme, but maybe that's only because it's socially acceptable for white people to live in council estates. There are also far more Muslims, which is somewhat interesting because if any US city contained both a high proportion of Mohammedans and a large absolute number, I think Bill O'Really?s minions would have a freakout. Maybe they're only just getting by without a major race riot or State-imposed halaal roundup, but I think London deserves greater recognition for having sustained a terrorist attack without subsequently persecuting the Muslims who live there.