Old garages make me feel nostalgic for a Toronto that no longer exists. The city's laneways used to be full of small wooden garages, but in my neighbourhood at least, many have been torn down and replaced with better built but characterless cinder block structures. The contrast between the black and shades of red on this one appeal to me. I also like the insulbrick in the gable.

Almost every year Toyota reminds us that they're soon going to be putting us in these characterless, anonymous, autonomous transportation pods.

Stop It, Toyota! These are fucking awful.

Public transport in the French city of Lyon is a well-organised affair, with buses, trams and local trains falling under a single network, TCL (Transports en commun Lyonnais), operated by Keolis. The tramway is a modern, efficient if somewhat characterless system typified by tram no. 24, one of 73 virtually identical Alstom Citadis trams in use, captured near Saxe - Préfecture station on 1 July 2014.

Yew Tree Farm is a collection of beautiful, now derelict, buildings just outside the village of Burscough in Lancashire. The farm and surrounding fields are due to be developed despite fierce local opposition. I'm sad to see field after field being lost to development and it seems to be happening all over the country. I don't know how long Yew Tree Farm has been derelict, but it's an absolute haven for wildlife and was alive with bees, hoverflies and butterflies. I'm happy that I was able to see it and wander around the lovely old buildings before it's all flattened and becomes yet another characterless housing estate.

Sorry my entries have come in so late, I built them a week ago but pictures are coming with a delay. I built a late-1950, maybe early 1960s (around 1960, anyway) Motorama show car, representing what 1950s America thought the future would look like, with glorious chrome, afterburners, and 50-foot-longness. Unfortunately, it's the middle of 2011 and so far, instead of afterburners, we have characterless tin cans. Returning to the subject however, this model is pretty tame for Motorama.

Enjoy guys :)

Sunlight through the 1868 canopy roof creates shadows on the upper floor of St Pancras International Station in London as a lone passenger walks to catch her train.

In 1967, when London seemed Hell-bent on modernising itself with concrete and characterlessness at the expense of its historic past - especially if that past was Victorian - this station was just 10 days away from demolition. A high profile campaign, spearheaded by the Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman (who wrote at the time of St Pancras' 'great arc of Barlow's train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic'), managed to save it, and turn the tide against London's wholesale destruction of its Victoriana. One hundred foot high, and with 18,000 panes of glass in it, the roof is now the centrepiece of the restored structure - widely referred to as the most magnificent railway station in the world - with the statue of Betjeman far beneath it a worthy tribute to a great and eccentric Englishman, without whom St Pancras in this form simply wouldn't exist...

Taken in London, England on September 15, 2011.

It's new. It's got a cafe. It's next to Wembley Stadium. It's part of Brent Civic Centre. It's a bit characterless.

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

Together Shoreditch and Spitalfields in the East of London constitute the most exciting place to be in London. The population is young, dynamic and imaginative; Friday and Saturday nights are a riot with a plethora of bars and clubs many with their own unique flavour. But what makes this area really special is that Shoreditch and Spitalfields comprise what one might call, ‘the square mile of art’; a de factor open air art gallery; with graffiti, posters and paste-ups being displayed on the main streets, down the side roads and in all the nooks and crannies of this post-industrial environ.

From Eine’s huge single letters being painted on shop shutters, to the haunting propaganda posters of Obey, to Cartrain’s political black and white pop-art; and to the one very small bronze coloured plastic circle, with the imprint of a dog shit and a man's foot about to step into it, which I once saw pasted to a wall, there is an incredible diversity.

Being on the streets, the work can be destroyed, taken or painted over at any minute. It is fragile and transient. Furthermore the juxtaposition of different pieces of art is random and unpredictable both in content and its location, which means that each day throws up a new and unique configuration of work within the streets, which you can only experience by travelling through the city.

Street Art Beginnings

The reasons for why East London has seen the flowering of street art are manifold. The post-industrial legacy of Shoreditch’s crumbling low-rise warehouses, not only provides an environment in which the artists and designers can do their work, but East London’s proximity to the City of London provides an economic source of support for the artists and designers; and finally Shoreditch with its building sites, old dilapidated warehouses provides a canvas upon which those artists can display their work and increase their commercial value.

Set against the characterless nature of the steely post-modernity of the city, the autumnal colours of the terraced warehouses in Shoreditch, no bigger than four to five stories high; offer a reminder of the legacy of a thriving fabrics and furniture industry which blossomed in the seventeenth Century. Both Shoreditch and Spitalfields have industrial pasts linked to the textiles industry, which fell into terminal decline by the twentieth century and was almost non-existent by the end of Wolrd War II. The decline was mirrored in the many three to four storey warehouses that were left to decay.

The general decline was arrested in the 1980s with the emergence of Shoreditch and Hoxton (Hoxton and Shoreditch are used interchandeably to refer to the same area) as a centre for new artists. It is difficult to say what attracted the artists to this area. But it was likely to be a combination of the spaces offered by the old warehouses, the cheap rents, and the location of Shoreditch and Spitalfields close to the City of London; where the money was to buy and fund artistic endeavour.

Not just that but post-war Shoreditch dominated by tens of post-war tower blocks, built amidst the ruins of the terraced housing that lay there before, which was bombed during World War II; had the rough edge which might inspire an artist. Shoreditch hums with the industry of newly arrived immigrants but also of the dangers of the poorer communities which inhabit these areas. Homeless people can be found sat underneath bridges on the main thoroughfares on Friday and Saturday nights; and Shoreditch is apparently home to one of the largest concentrations of striptease joints and a number of prostitutes. So, Shoreditch is a crumbling dirty, dodgy, polluted mess but it also has money; and these two factors provide an intoxicating mix for artists, who can take inspiration from their environment, but also rub shoulders with people who have the kind of money to buy their work.

By the early nineties Hoxton’s reputation as a centre for artists had become well established. As Jess Cartner-Morley puts it ‘Hoxton was invented in 1993. Before that, there was only 'Oxton, a scruffy no man's land of pie and mash and cheap market-stall clothing…’ At that time artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin were taking part in ‘A Fete Worth than Death’ an arts based event in Hoxton. Gradually these artists began to create their own gravity, attracting more and more of their own like. Clubs and bars began to emerge, as did a Hoxton style, ‘the Hoxton fin’ being a trademark haircut. Many designers and artists located around Shoreditch and Spitalfields. Shoreditch has also become a hive of studios for artists, vintage fashion shops, art students and musicians.

At the same time as an artistic community was forming fuelled by money from the City, London was subject to a revolution in street art. According to Ward, writing for Time Out, the street art scene began in the mid-1980s as part of London’s hip-hop scene. Graffiti artists, emulating what was going on Stateside, began to tag their names all over London. According to Ward many of those pioneers ‘went on to paint legal commissions and are at the heart of today’s scene’. That is to say, from the community of artists congregating in East London, a number were inspired by graffiti, and because the East London, with its countless dilapidated warehouses, and building sites, offered such a good canvas; they went on to use the East London as a canvas for their work.

Little seems to have been written about the individual journey’s particular street artists have taken to get to where they are, which help illuminate some of the issues talked about in this section. Cartrain said that Banksy was a huge influence for him commenting that, "I've sent him a few emails showing him my work and he sent me a signed piece of his work in the post."

What created the East London street art scene may also kill it

The East London urban art scene is unlikely to last forever, being the symptom of a delicate juxtaposition of industrial decline and economic forces.

The irony is that the same factors which are responsible for the creation of the East London art scene are likely to destroy it.

Politicians from all parties, spiritual leaders for global capital, tell us of the unstoppable forces of globalisation. They say if Britain is to continue to dip its paw into the cream of the world’s wealth it needs to become a post-industrial service economy; suggesting a rosy future of millions of Asians slaving away co-ordinated by keyboard tapping British suits, feet on desk, leant back on high backed leather chairs, secretary blowing them off.

Art, which is feeble and dependent upon the financial growth of an economy for its survival, will have to shape itself around the needs and demands of capital.

The financial district of the City of London, lying to the south of Shoreditch, has been successfully promoted as a global financial centre, and its mighty power is slowly expanding its way northwards. Plans are afoot for the glass foot soldiers of mammon, fuelled by speculative property investment, to gradually advance northwards, replacing old warehouses with a caravan of Starbucks and Japanese sushi places and a concomitant reduction in dead spaces to portray the art, increased security to capture and ward off street artists, increased property prices and the eventual eviction of the artistic community. Spitalfields has already had big corporate sized chunks taken out of it, with one half of the old Spitalfields Market being sacrificed for corporate interests in the last five years.

So then the very same financial forces, and post-industrial legacy, which have worked to create this micro-environment for street art to thrive, are the same forces which will in time eventually destroy it. Maybe the community will move northwards, maybe it will dissipate, but until that moment lets just enjoy what the community puts out there, for its own financial interests, for their own ego and also, just maybe, for the benefit of the people.

Banksy

Banksy is the street artist par excellence. London’s street art scene is vibrant and diverse. There is some good, cure, kitschy stuff out there, but in terms of creativity and imagination Banksy leads by a city mile. His stuff is invariably shocking, funny, thought provoking and challenging.

Banksy considers himself to be a graffiti artist, which is what he grew up doing in the Bristol area in the late eighties. According to Hattenstone (2003) Banksy, who was expelled from his school, and who spent some time in prison for petty crimes, started graffiti at the age of 14, quickly switching over to stencils, which he uses today, because he didn’t find he had a particular talent for the former. His work today involves a mixture of graffiti and stencils although he has shown a capacity for using a multitude of materials.

Key works in London have included:

•In London Zoo he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in six-foot-high letters.

•

•In 2004 he placed a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, and stuck the box on a wall of the Natural History Museum.

•

•‘A designated riot area’ at the bottom of Nelson’s Column.

•

•He placed a painting called Early Man Goes to Market, with a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping trolley, in the British Museum.

•

His work seems to be driven by an insatiable desire to go on producing. In an interview with Shepherd Fairey he said, ‘Anything that stands in the way of achieving that piece is the enemy, whether it’s your mum, the cops, someone telling you that you sold out, or someone saying, "Let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza." Banksy gives the impression of being a person in the mould of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher or Lance Armstrong. Someone with undoubted talent and yet a true workaholic dedicated to his chosen profession.

Its also driven by the buzz of ‘getting away with it’. He said to Hattenstone, ‘The art to it is not getting picked up for it, and that's the biggest buzz at the end of the day because you could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and you paint something big where you shouldn't do. The feeling you get when you sit home on the sofa at the end of that, having a fag and thinking there's no way they're going to rumble me, it's amazing... better than sex, better than drugs, the buzz.’

Whilst Banksy has preferred to remain anonymous he does provide a website and does the occasional interview putting his work in context (see the Fairey interview).

Banksy’s anonymity is very important to him. Simon Hattenstone, who interviewed Banksy in 2003, said it was because graffiti was illegal, which makes Banksy a criminal. Banksy has not spoken directly on why he wishes to maintain his anonymity. It is clear that Banksy despises the notion of fame. The irony of course is that ‘Banksy’ the brand is far from being anonymous, given that the artist uses it on most if not all of his work. In using this brand name Banksy helps fulfil the need, which fuels a lot of graffiti artists, of wanting to be recognised, the need of ego.

Banksy is not against using his work to ‘pay the bills’ as he puts it. He has for example designed the cover of a Blur album, although he has pledged never to do a commercial job again, as a means of protecting his anonymity. Nevertheless he continues to produce limited edition pieces, which sell in galleries usually for prices, which give him a bit of spending money after he has paid the bills. Banksy has said, ‘If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial’ (Fairey, 2008). Banksy has over time passed from urban street artist into international artistic superstar, albeit an anonymous one.

Banksy has a definite concern for the oppressed in society. He often does small stencils of despised rats and ridiculous monkeys with signs saying things to the effect of ‘laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge’. Whilst some seem to read into this that Banksy is trying to ferment a revolutionary zeal in the dispossessed, such that one day they will rise up and slit the throats of the powers that be, so far his concern seems no more and no less than just a genuine human concern for the oppressed. Some of what seems to fuel his work is not so much his hatred of the system but at being at the bottom of it. He said to Hattenstone (2003) ‘Yeah, it's all about retribution really… Just doing a tag is about retribution. If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something - that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it’

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian has criticised Banksy for his depictions of a monkey wearing a sandwich board with 'lying to the police is never wrong' written on it. Certainly such a black and white statement seems out of kilter with more balanced assessments that Banksy has made. Brooker challenges Banksy asking whether Ian Huntley would have been right to have lied to the police?

Brooker has also criticized Banksy for the seemingly meaninglessness of some of this images. Brooker says, ‘Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her. Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff.’ Brooker has seemingly oversimplified Banksy’s message, if indeed Banksy has one, to fuel his own criticisms. It is easy to see that for many the Vietnam painting tells us that the United States likes to represent itself with happy smiling characters, that hide the effects of its nefarious activities responsible for the real life faces of distress seen on the young girl. Something that we should be constantly reminded of. But then that’s a matter of politics not of meaninglessness.

Banksy’s ingenuity comes through in his philosophy on progression, ‘I’m always trying to move on’ he says. In the interview he gave with Shepherd Fairey he explained that he has started reinvesting his money in to new more ambitious projects which have involved putting scaffolding put up against buildings, covering the scaffolding with plastic sheeting and then using the cover of the sheets to do his paintings unnoticed.

Banksy has balls. Outside of London he has painted images in Disney Land; and on the Israeli wall surrounding Palestine. How far is he willing to push it? What about trying something at the headquarters of the BNP, or on army barracks, or at a brothel or strip club employing sex slaves, or playing around with corporate advertising a la Adbusters?

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

First a river, then a canal, then covered over by a market, now dull, wide and characterless.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

Together Shoreditch and Spitalfields in the East of London constitute the most exciting place to be in London. The population is young, dynamic and imaginative; Friday and Saturday nights are a riot with a plethora of bars and clubs many with their own unique flavour. But what makes this area really special is that Shoreditch and Spitalfields comprise what one might call, ‘the square mile of art’; a de factor open air art gallery; with graffiti, posters and paste-ups being displayed on the main streets, down the side roads and in all the nooks and crannies of this post-industrial environ.

From Eine’s huge single letters being painted on shop shutters, to the haunting propaganda posters of Obey, to Cartrain’s political black and white pop-art; and to the one very small bronze coloured plastic circle, with the imprint of a dog shit and a man's foot about to step into it, which I once saw pasted to a wall, there is an incredible diversity.

Being on the streets, the work can be destroyed, taken or painted over at any minute. It is fragile and transient. Furthermore the juxtaposition of different pieces of art is random and unpredictable both in content and its location, which means that each day throws up a new and unique configuration of work within the streets, which you can only experience by travelling through the city.

Street Art Beginnings

The reasons for why East London has seen the flowering of street art are manifold. The post-industrial legacy of Shoreditch’s crumbling low-rise warehouses, not only provides an environment in which the artists and designers can do their work, but East London’s proximity to the City of London provides an economic source of support for the artists and designers; and finally Shoreditch with its building sites, old dilapidated warehouses provides a canvas upon which those artists can display their work and increase their commercial value.

Set against the characterless nature of the steely post-modernity of the city, the autumnal colours of the terraced warehouses in Shoreditch, no bigger than four to five stories high; offer a reminder of the legacy of a thriving fabrics and furniture industry which blossomed in the seventeenth Century. Both Shoreditch and Spitalfields have industrial pasts linked to the textiles industry, which fell into terminal decline by the twentieth century and was almost non-existent by the end of Wolrd War II. The decline was mirrored in the many three to four storey warehouses that were left to decay.

The general decline was arrested in the 1980s with the emergence of Shoreditch and Hoxton (Hoxton and Shoreditch are used interchandeably to refer to the same area) as a centre for new artists. It is difficult to say what attracted the artists to this area. But it was likely to be a combination of the spaces offered by the old warehouses, the cheap rents, and the location of Shoreditch and Spitalfields close to the City of London; where the money was to buy and fund artistic endeavour.

Not just that but post-war Shoreditch dominated by tens of post-war tower blocks, built amidst the ruins of the terraced housing that lay there before, which was bombed during World War II; had the rough edge which might inspire an artist. Shoreditch hums with the industry of newly arrived immigrants but also of the dangers of the poorer communities which inhabit these areas. Homeless people can be found sat underneath bridges on the main thoroughfares on Friday and Saturday nights; and Shoreditch is apparently home to one of the largest concentrations of striptease joints and a number of prostitutes. So, Shoreditch is a crumbling dirty, dodgy, polluted mess but it also has money; and these two factors provide an intoxicating mix for artists, who can take inspiration from their environment, but also rub shoulders with people who have the kind of money to buy their work.

By the early nineties Hoxton’s reputation as a centre for artists had become well established. As Jess Cartner-Morley puts it ‘Hoxton was invented in 1993. Before that, there was only 'Oxton, a scruffy no man's land of pie and mash and cheap market-stall clothing…’ At that time artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin were taking part in ‘A Fete Worth than Death’ an arts based event in Hoxton. Gradually these artists began to create their own gravity, attracting more and more of their own like. Clubs and bars began to emerge, as did a Hoxton style, ‘the Hoxton fin’ being a trademark haircut. Many designers and artists located around Shoreditch and Spitalfields. Shoreditch has also become a hive of studios for artists, vintage fashion shops, art students and musicians.

At the same time as an artistic community was forming fuelled by money from the City, London was subject to a revolution in street art. According to Ward, writing for Time Out, the street art scene began in the mid-1980s as part of London’s hip-hop scene. Graffiti artists, emulating what was going on Stateside, began to tag their names all over London. According to Ward many of those pioneers ‘went on to paint legal commissions and are at the heart of today’s scene’. That is to say, from the community of artists congregating in East London, a number were inspired by graffiti, and because the East London, with its countless dilapidated warehouses, and building sites, offered such a good canvas; they went on to use the East London as a canvas for their work.

Little seems to have been written about the individual journey’s particular street artists have taken to get to where they are, which help illuminate some of the issues talked about in this section. Cartrain said that Banksy was a huge influence for him commenting that, "I've sent him a few emails showing him my work and he sent me a signed piece of his work in the post."

What created the East London street art scene may also kill it

The East London urban art scene is unlikely to last forever, being the symptom of a delicate juxtaposition of industrial decline and economic forces.

The irony is that the same factors which are responsible for the creation of the East London art scene are likely to destroy it.

Politicians from all parties, spiritual leaders for global capital, tell us of the unstoppable forces of globalisation. They say if Britain is to continue to dip its paw into the cream of the world’s wealth it needs to become a post-industrial service economy; suggesting a rosy future of millions of Asians slaving away co-ordinated by keyboard tapping British suits, feet on desk, leant back on high backed leather chairs, secretary blowing them off.

Art, which is feeble and dependent upon the financial growth of an economy for its survival, will have to shape itself around the needs and demands of capital.

The financial district of the City of London, lying to the south of Shoreditch, has been successfully promoted as a global financial centre, and its mighty power is slowly expanding its way northwards. Plans are afoot for the glass foot soldiers of mammon, fuelled by speculative property investment, to gradually advance northwards, replacing old warehouses with a caravan of Starbucks and Japanese sushi places and a concomitant reduction in dead spaces to portray the art, increased security to capture and ward off street artists, increased property prices and the eventual eviction of the artistic community. Spitalfields has already had big corporate sized chunks taken out of it, with one half of the old Spitalfields Market being sacrificed for corporate interests in the last five years.

So then the very same financial forces, and post-industrial legacy, which have worked to create this micro-environment for street art to thrive, are the same forces which will in time eventually destroy it. Maybe the community will move northwards, maybe it will dissipate, but until that moment lets just enjoy what the community puts out there, for its own financial interests, for their own ego and also, just maybe, for the benefit of the people.

Banksy

Banksy is the street artist par excellence. London’s street art scene is vibrant and diverse. There is some good, cure, kitschy stuff out there, but in terms of creativity and imagination Banksy leads by a city mile. His stuff is invariably shocking, funny, thought provoking and challenging.

Banksy considers himself to be a graffiti artist, which is what he grew up doing in the Bristol area in the late eighties. According to Hattenstone (2003) Banksy, who was expelled from his school, and who spent some time in prison for petty crimes, started graffiti at the age of 14, quickly switching over to stencils, which he uses today, because he didn’t find he had a particular talent for the former. His work today involves a mixture of graffiti and stencils although he has shown a capacity for using a multitude of materials.

Key works in London have included:

•In London Zoo he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in six-foot-high letters.

•

•In 2004 he placed a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, and stuck the box on a wall of the Natural History Museum.

•

•‘A designated riot area’ at the bottom of Nelson’s Column.

•

•He placed a painting called Early Man Goes to Market, with a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping trolley, in the British Museum.

•

His work seems to be driven by an insatiable desire to go on producing. In an interview with Shepherd Fairey he said, ‘Anything that stands in the way of achieving that piece is the enemy, whether it’s your mum, the cops, someone telling you that you sold out, or someone saying, "Let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza." Banksy gives the impression of being a person in the mould of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher or Lance Armstrong. Someone with undoubted talent and yet a true workaholic dedicated to his chosen profession.

Its also driven by the buzz of ‘getting away with it’. He said to Hattenstone, ‘The art to it is not getting picked up for it, and that's the biggest buzz at the end of the day because you could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and you paint something big where you shouldn't do. The feeling you get when you sit home on the sofa at the end of that, having a fag and thinking there's no way they're going to rumble me, it's amazing... better than sex, better than drugs, the buzz.’

Whilst Banksy has preferred to remain anonymous he does provide a website and does the occasional interview putting his work in context (see the Fairey interview).

Banksy’s anonymity is very important to him. Simon Hattenstone, who interviewed Banksy in 2003, said it was because graffiti was illegal, which makes Banksy a criminal. Banksy has not spoken directly on why he wishes to maintain his anonymity. It is clear that Banksy despises the notion of fame. The irony of course is that ‘Banksy’ the brand is far from being anonymous, given that the artist uses it on most if not all of his work. In using this brand name Banksy helps fulfil the need, which fuels a lot of graffiti artists, of wanting to be recognised, the need of ego.

Banksy is not against using his work to ‘pay the bills’ as he puts it. He has for example designed the cover of a Blur album, although he has pledged never to do a commercial job again, as a means of protecting his anonymity. Nevertheless he continues to produce limited edition pieces, which sell in galleries usually for prices, which give him a bit of spending money after he has paid the bills. Banksy has said, ‘If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial’ (Fairey, 2008). Banksy has over time passed from urban street artist into international artistic superstar, albeit an anonymous one.

Banksy has a definite concern for the oppressed in society. He often does small stencils of despised rats and ridiculous monkeys with signs saying things to the effect of ‘laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge’. Whilst some seem to read into this that Banksy is trying to ferment a revolutionary zeal in the dispossessed, such that one day they will rise up and slit the throats of the powers that be, so far his concern seems no more and no less than just a genuine human concern for the oppressed. Some of what seems to fuel his work is not so much his hatred of the system but at being at the bottom of it. He said to Hattenstone (2003) ‘Yeah, it's all about retribution really… Just doing a tag is about retribution. If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something - that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it’

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian has criticised Banksy for his depictions of a monkey wearing a sandwich board with 'lying to the police is never wrong' written on it. Certainly such a black and white statement seems out of kilter with more balanced assessments that Banksy has made. Brooker challenges Banksy asking whether Ian Huntley would have been right to have lied to the police?

Brooker has also criticized Banksy for the seemingly meaninglessness of some of this images. Brooker says, ‘Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her. Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff.’ Brooker has seemingly oversimplified Banksy’s message, if indeed Banksy has one, to fuel his own criticisms. It is easy to see that for many the Vietnam painting tells us that the United States likes to represent itself with happy smiling characters, that hide the effects of its nefarious activities responsible for the real life faces of distress seen on the young girl. Something that we should be constantly reminded of. But then that’s a matter of politics not of meaninglessness.

Banksy’s ingenuity comes through in his philosophy on progression, ‘I’m always trying to move on’ he says. In the interview he gave with Shepherd Fairey he explained that he has started reinvesting his money in to new more ambitious projects which have involved putting scaffolding put up against buildings, covering the scaffolding with plastic sheeting and then using the cover of the sheets to do his paintings unnoticed.

Banksy has balls. Outside of London he has painted images in Disney Land; and on the Israeli wall surrounding Palestine. How far is he willing to push it? What about trying something at the headquarters of the BNP, or on army barracks, or at a brothel or strip club employing sex slaves, or playing around with corporate advertising a la Adbusters?

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

St Nicholas, Dersingham, Norfolk

The first time I went to Dersingham church, they were just locking up for the day. Never mind, I'll come back, I thought. Twelve years passed. Now, I was cycling around the villages to the north and east of the Sandringham estate, mopping up a handful of Norfolk churches that I'd missed when I first cut a swathe through the county. This was one of them.

So at last I stepped into its big interior, and I am afraid I found it a bit characterless. I'm sorry about that. Some big churches have a wow factor, but it just didn't happen to me here. Perhaps I would have preferred a bit of dust, a bit of peeling plaster, I don't know. I thought that St Nicholas is what a church would be like if my mother had been responsible for cleaning it - spotless, and everything lined up. Anyway, I notice that I took nearly 40 photos, so there was obviously plenty to see.

Then I headed out of Dersingham. climbing and climbing, and suddenly left the strange gloom of Kings Lynn, the Wash, the forest and the marsh country behind me, climbing up through narrow lanes through beautiful rolling fields, some being harvested. The sun was shining brightly, and it was with utter joy that I whooped along until descending steeply into Sherborne.

A Suzuki Swift they told me at the hire place. I can identify a Sunbeam Talbot or Armstrong-Siddely Sapphire at half a mile, but I think the last car I could, with confidence, put a name to was the Ford Sierra. It was a decent, though characterless little runabout and rather gutless for these mountain roads, but for 22 Euros a day one couldn't expect too much. They drive on the "right" (i.e. left) side of the road in Cyprus too. Made a silly mistake though. It was handed over with half a tank of petrol, the understanding being that if I brought it back with half a tank there'd be no charge for fuel. Fair enough. At the first opportunity I topped up the tank, thinking that the extra half tank ought to do me for two days of driving around. When I gave the car back the gauge still hadn't budged from the F mark. No chance of reimbursement of course. Broke my bloody heart.

As I glance up from my keyboard chilly gusts herd grey clouds, pregnant with rain, across a cheerless sky. It gives one a slight feeling of dislocation to reflect that the photo was taken only two days ago. Not evident in this black & white shot are the lobstered forearms and richly encrimsoned Bentos cranium, following only a single day's exposure to the early spring Mediterranean sun. Unfortunately I have to wear heavy protective clothing at work, but perhaps if I wear my hard hat on the back of my head my colleagues will notice and feel suitably envious. Oh, the games we play.

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

A characterless lager in a can calculated to appeal to young adults. Made in Sweden.

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

I got up early for early shift today - I was due to start at 8, so at 0645 I was at a spot that I wanted to photograph on a misty sunrise.

Turns out the mist was far, far too thick to be of any use to me, so I stopped by the Knapps on the way to work. I absolutely refuse to do the standard shot there, with the fence as a lead in to the boats - it's not easy to find something else, but I try.

Today, the spiders did me a favour, the gorse bushes were just covered in webs which had picked up water droplets and made the bushes look interesting as oppose to the usual dark green blobs.

The mist adds lots of depth here, I personally really like the fact that the water and sky merge completely and you can't tell one from th other. Not the best shot though, a tad characterless, but it's one to remember for the future.

All of my photos are taken as one shot, unless specifically stated otherwise.

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St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

Characterless Sixties 'civic-style' shopping centre, blessed with very few chain stores of note

The solari split flap boards have now been replaced with quiet, characterless, headache-inducing LED's.

Wonder is anybody else misses the tick tick tick, as they spin round.

After our lunch at a friend's I took advantage of some lengthy computer 'fettling' going on inside to sit in the sunshine and draw.

This is a small group of earth buildings, common to this area, but often covered up with characterless render.

An almost empty garage. Buses seen at rear of garage were by this time being stripped for spares. No money I'm afraid. Stagecoach, at least injected money into the bus business and provided plenty of new stock, even if the buses like the Dennis Dart were characterless.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

A rather characterless Wetherspoons pub near Minories. (More recent photo of it, from 2025.)

Address: 87-91 Mansell Street.

Owner: JD Wetherspoon.

Links:

London Pubology

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

One of the things I really dislike about the town today is the way Heaton Street was stopped off and turned into this nondescript area that just consists of backs of buildings. I walked through Curtis Walk today and out into this unrecognisable townscape. It's become what the anthropologist Marc Auge described as a 'Non-Place' - transient, commercialised, characterless spaces where no-one stops or really needs to be.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

Together Shoreditch and Spitalfields in the East of London constitute the most exciting place to be in London. The population is young, dynamic and imaginative; Friday and Saturday nights are a riot with a plethora of bars and clubs many with their own unique flavour. But what makes this area really special is that Shoreditch and Spitalfields comprise what one might call, ‘the square mile of art’; a de factor open air art gallery; with graffiti, posters and paste-ups being displayed on the main streets, down the side roads and in all the nooks and crannies of this post-industrial environ.

From Eine’s huge single letters being painted on shop shutters, to the haunting propaganda posters of Obey, to Cartrain’s political black and white pop-art; and to the one very small bronze coloured plastic circle, with the imprint of a dog shit and a man's foot about to step into it, which I once saw pasted to a wall, there is an incredible diversity.

Being on the streets, the work can be destroyed, taken or painted over at any minute. It is fragile and transient. Furthermore the juxtaposition of different pieces of art is random and unpredictable both in content and its location, which means that each day throws up a new and unique configuration of work within the streets, which you can only experience by travelling through the city.

Street Art Beginnings

The reasons for why East London has seen the flowering of street art are manifold. The post-industrial legacy of Shoreditch’s crumbling low-rise warehouses, not only provides an environment in which the artists and designers can do their work, but East London’s proximity to the City of London provides an economic source of support for the artists and designers; and finally Shoreditch with its building sites, old dilapidated warehouses provides a canvas upon which those artists can display their work and increase their commercial value.

Set against the characterless nature of the steely post-modernity of the city, the autumnal colours of the terraced warehouses in Shoreditch, no bigger than four to five stories high; offer a reminder of the legacy of a thriving fabrics and furniture industry which blossomed in the seventeenth Century. Both Shoreditch and Spitalfields have industrial pasts linked to the textiles industry, which fell into terminal decline by the twentieth century and was almost non-existent by the end of Wolrd War II. The decline was mirrored in the many three to four storey warehouses that were left to decay.

The general decline was arrested in the 1980s with the emergence of Shoreditch and Hoxton (Hoxton and Shoreditch are used interchandeably to refer to the same area) as a centre for new artists. It is difficult to say what attracted the artists to this area. But it was likely to be a combination of the spaces offered by the old warehouses, the cheap rents, and the location of Shoreditch and Spitalfields close to the City of London; where the money was to buy and fund artistic endeavour.

Not just that but post-war Shoreditch dominated by tens of post-war tower blocks, built amidst the ruins of the terraced housing that lay there before, which was bombed during World War II; had the rough edge which might inspire an artist. Shoreditch hums with the industry of newly arrived immigrants but also of the dangers of the poorer communities which inhabit these areas. Homeless people can be found sat underneath bridges on the main thoroughfares on Friday and Saturday nights; and Shoreditch is apparently home to one of the largest concentrations of striptease joints and a number of prostitutes. So, Shoreditch is a crumbling dirty, dodgy, polluted mess but it also has money; and these two factors provide an intoxicating mix for artists, who can take inspiration from their environment, but also rub shoulders with people who have the kind of money to buy their work.

By the early nineties Hoxton’s reputation as a centre for artists had become well established. As Jess Cartner-Morley puts it ‘Hoxton was invented in 1993. Before that, there was only 'Oxton, a scruffy no man's land of pie and mash and cheap market-stall clothing…’ At that time artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin were taking part in ‘A Fete Worth than Death’ an arts based event in Hoxton. Gradually these artists began to create their own gravity, attracting more and more of their own like. Clubs and bars began to emerge, as did a Hoxton style, ‘the Hoxton fin’ being a trademark haircut. Many designers and artists located around Shoreditch and Spitalfields. Shoreditch has also become a hive of studios for artists, vintage fashion shops, art students and musicians.

At the same time as an artistic community was forming fuelled by money from the City, London was subject to a revolution in street art. According to Ward, writing for Time Out, the street art scene began in the mid-1980s as part of London’s hip-hop scene. Graffiti artists, emulating what was going on Stateside, began to tag their names all over London. According to Ward many of those pioneers ‘went on to paint legal commissions and are at the heart of today’s scene’. That is to say, from the community of artists congregating in East London, a number were inspired by graffiti, and because the East London, with its countless dilapidated warehouses, and building sites, offered such a good canvas; they went on to use the East London as a canvas for their work.

Little seems to have been written about the individual journey’s particular street artists have taken to get to where they are, which help illuminate some of the issues talked about in this section. Cartrain said that Banksy was a huge influence for him commenting that, "I've sent him a few emails showing him my work and he sent me a signed piece of his work in the post."

What created the East London street art scene may also kill it

The East London urban art scene is unlikely to last forever, being the symptom of a delicate juxtaposition of industrial decline and economic forces.

The irony is that the same factors which are responsible for the creation of the East London art scene are likely to destroy it.

Politicians from all parties, spiritual leaders for global capital, tell us of the unstoppable forces of globalisation. They say if Britain is to continue to dip its paw into the cream of the world’s wealth it needs to become a post-industrial service economy; suggesting a rosy future of millions of Asians slaving away co-ordinated by keyboard tapping British suits, feet on desk, leant back on high backed leather chairs, secretary blowing them off.

Art, which is feeble and dependent upon the financial growth of an economy for its survival, will have to shape itself around the needs and demands of capital.

The financial district of the City of London, lying to the south of Shoreditch, has been successfully promoted as a global financial centre, and its mighty power is slowly expanding its way northwards. Plans are afoot for the glass foot soldiers of mammon, fuelled by speculative property investment, to gradually advance northwards, replacing old warehouses with a caravan of Starbucks and Japanese sushi places and a concomitant reduction in dead spaces to portray the art, increased security to capture and ward off street artists, increased property prices and the eventual eviction of the artistic community. Spitalfields has already had big corporate sized chunks taken out of it, with one half of the old Spitalfields Market being sacrificed for corporate interests in the last five years.

So then the very same financial forces, and post-industrial legacy, which have worked to create this micro-environment for street art to thrive, are the same forces which will in time eventually destroy it. Maybe the community will move northwards, maybe it will dissipate, but until that moment lets just enjoy what the community puts out there, for its own financial interests, for their own ego and also, just maybe, for the benefit of the people.

Banksy

Banksy is the street artist par excellence. London’s street art scene is vibrant and diverse. There is some good, cure, kitschy stuff out there, but in terms of creativity and imagination Banksy leads by a city mile. His stuff is invariably shocking, funny, thought provoking and challenging.

Banksy considers himself to be a graffiti artist, which is what he grew up doing in the Bristol area in the late eighties. According to Hattenstone (2003) Banksy, who was expelled from his school, and who spent some time in prison for petty crimes, started graffiti at the age of 14, quickly switching over to stencils, which he uses today, because he didn’t find he had a particular talent for the former. His work today involves a mixture of graffiti and stencils although he has shown a capacity for using a multitude of materials.

Key works in London have included:

•In London Zoo he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in six-foot-high letters.

•

•In 2004 he placed a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, and stuck the box on a wall of the Natural History Museum.

•

•‘A designated riot area’ at the bottom of Nelson’s Column.

•

•He placed a painting called Early Man Goes to Market, with a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping trolley, in the British Museum.

•

His work seems to be driven by an insatiable desire to go on producing. In an interview with Shepherd Fairey he said, ‘Anything that stands in the way of achieving that piece is the enemy, whether it’s your mum, the cops, someone telling you that you sold out, or someone saying, "Let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza." Banksy gives the impression of being a person in the mould of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher or Lance Armstrong. Someone with undoubted talent and yet a true workaholic dedicated to his chosen profession.

Its also driven by the buzz of ‘getting away with it’. He said to Hattenstone, ‘The art to it is not getting picked up for it, and that's the biggest buzz at the end of the day because you could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and you paint something big where you shouldn't do. The feeling you get when you sit home on the sofa at the end of that, having a fag and thinking there's no way they're going to rumble me, it's amazing... better than sex, better than drugs, the buzz.’

Whilst Banksy has preferred to remain anonymous he does provide a website and does the occasional interview putting his work in context (see the Fairey interview).

Banksy’s anonymity is very important to him. Simon Hattenstone, who interviewed Banksy in 2003, said it was because graffiti was illegal, which makes Banksy a criminal. Banksy has not spoken directly on why he wishes to maintain his anonymity. It is clear that Banksy despises the notion of fame. The irony of course is that ‘Banksy’ the brand is far from being anonymous, given that the artist uses it on most if not all of his work. In using this brand name Banksy helps fulfil the need, which fuels a lot of graffiti artists, of wanting to be recognised, the need of ego.

Banksy is not against using his work to ‘pay the bills’ as he puts it. He has for example designed the cover of a Blur album, although he has pledged never to do a commercial job again, as a means of protecting his anonymity. Nevertheless he continues to produce limited edition pieces, which sell in galleries usually for prices, which give him a bit of spending money after he has paid the bills. Banksy has said, ‘If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial’ (Fairey, 2008). Banksy has over time passed from urban street artist into international artistic superstar, albeit an anonymous one.

Banksy has a definite concern for the oppressed in society. He often does small stencils of despised rats and ridiculous monkeys with signs saying things to the effect of ‘laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge’. Whilst some seem to read into this that Banksy is trying to ferment a revolutionary zeal in the dispossessed, such that one day they will rise up and slit the throats of the powers that be, so far his concern seems no more and no less than just a genuine human concern for the oppressed. Some of what seems to fuel his work is not so much his hatred of the system but at being at the bottom of it. He said to Hattenstone (2003) ‘Yeah, it's all about retribution really… Just doing a tag is about retribution. If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something - that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it’

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian has criticised Banksy for his depictions of a monkey wearing a sandwich board with 'lying to the police is never wrong' written on it. Certainly such a black and white statement seems out of kilter with more balanced assessments that Banksy has made. Brooker challenges Banksy asking whether Ian Huntley would have been right to have lied to the police?

Brooker has also criticized Banksy for the seemingly meaninglessness of some of this images. Brooker says, ‘Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her. Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff.’ Brooker has seemingly oversimplified Banksy’s message, if indeed Banksy has one, to fuel his own criticisms. It is easy to see that for many the Vietnam painting tells us that the United States likes to represent itself with happy smiling characters, that hide the effects of its nefarious activities responsible for the real life faces of distress seen on the young girl. Something that we should be constantly reminded of. But then that’s a matter of politics not of meaninglessness.

Banksy’s ingenuity comes through in his philosophy on progression, ‘I’m always trying to move on’ he says. In the interview he gave with Shepherd Fairey he explained that he has started reinvesting his money in to new more ambitious projects which have involved putting scaffolding put up against buildings, covering the scaffolding with plastic sheeting and then using the cover of the sheets to do his paintings unnoticed.

Banksy has balls. Outside of London he has painted images in Disney Land; and on the Israeli wall surrounding Palestine. How far is he willing to push it? What about trying something at the headquarters of the BNP, or on army barracks, or at a brothel or strip club employing sex slaves, or playing around with corporate advertising a la Adbusters?

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

Together Shoreditch and Spitalfields in the East of London constitute the most exciting place to be in London. The population is young, dynamic and imaginative; Friday and Saturday nights are a riot with a plethora of bars and clubs many with their own unique flavour. But what makes this area really special is that Shoreditch and Spitalfields comprise what one might call, ‘the square mile of art’; a de factor open air art gallery; with graffiti, posters and paste-ups being displayed on the main streets, down the side roads and in all the nooks and crannies of this post-industrial environ.

From Eine’s huge single letters being painted on shop shutters, to the haunting propaganda posters of Obey, to Cartrain’s political black and white pop-art; and to the one very small bronze coloured plastic circle, with the imprint of a dog shit and a man's foot about to step into it, which I once saw pasted to a wall, there is an incredible diversity.

Being on the streets, the work can be destroyed, taken or painted over at any minute. It is fragile and transient. Furthermore the juxtaposition of different pieces of art is random and unpredictable both in content and its location, which means that each day throws up a new and unique configuration of work within the streets, which you can only experience by travelling through the city.

Street Art Beginnings

The reasons for why East London has seen the flowering of street art are manifold. The post-industrial legacy of Shoreditch’s crumbling low-rise warehouses, not only provides an environment in which the artists and designers can do their work, but East London’s proximity to the City of London provides an economic source of support for the artists and designers; and finally Shoreditch with its building sites, old dilapidated warehouses provides a canvas upon which those artists can display their work and increase their commercial value.

Set against the characterless nature of the steely post-modernity of the city, the autumnal colours of the terraced warehouses in Shoreditch, no bigger than four to five stories high; offer a reminder of the legacy of a thriving fabrics and furniture industry which blossomed in the seventeenth Century. Both Shoreditch and Spitalfields have industrial pasts linked to the textiles industry, which fell into terminal decline by the twentieth century and was almost non-existent by the end of Wolrd War II. The decline was mirrored in the many three to four storey warehouses that were left to decay.

The general decline was arrested in the 1980s with the emergence of Shoreditch and Hoxton (Hoxton and Shoreditch are used interchandeably to refer to the same area) as a centre for new artists. It is difficult to say what attracted the artists to this area. But it was likely to be a combination of the spaces offered by the old warehouses, the cheap rents, and the location of Shoreditch and Spitalfields close to the City of London; where the money was to buy and fund artistic endeavour.

Not just that but post-war Shoreditch dominated by tens of post-war tower blocks, built amidst the ruins of the terraced housing that lay there before, which was bombed during World War II; had the rough edge which might inspire an artist. Shoreditch hums with the industry of newly arrived immigrants but also of the dangers of the poorer communities which inhabit these areas. Homeless people can be found sat underneath bridges on the main thoroughfares on Friday and Saturday nights; and Shoreditch is apparently home to one of the largest concentrations of striptease joints and a number of prostitutes. So, Shoreditch is a crumbling dirty, dodgy, polluted mess but it also has money; and these two factors provide an intoxicating mix for artists, who can take inspiration from their environment, but also rub shoulders with people who have the kind of money to buy their work.

By the early nineties Hoxton’s reputation as a centre for artists had become well established. As Jess Cartner-Morley puts it ‘Hoxton was invented in 1993. Before that, there was only 'Oxton, a scruffy no man's land of pie and mash and cheap market-stall clothing…’ At that time artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin were taking part in ‘A Fete Worth than Death’ an arts based event in Hoxton. Gradually these artists began to create their own gravity, attracting more and more of their own like. Clubs and bars began to emerge, as did a Hoxton style, ‘the Hoxton fin’ being a trademark haircut. Many designers and artists located around Shoreditch and Spitalfields. Shoreditch has also become a hive of studios for artists, vintage fashion shops, art students and musicians.

At the same time as an artistic community was forming fuelled by money from the City, London was subject to a revolution in street art. According to Ward, writing for Time Out, the street art scene began in the mid-1980s as part of London’s hip-hop scene. Graffiti artists, emulating what was going on Stateside, began to tag their names all over London. According to Ward many of those pioneers ‘went on to paint legal commissions and are at the heart of today’s scene’. That is to say, from the community of artists congregating in East London, a number were inspired by graffiti, and because the East London, with its countless dilapidated warehouses, and building sites, offered such a good canvas; they went on to use the East London as a canvas for their work.

Little seems to have been written about the individual journey’s particular street artists have taken to get to where they are, which help illuminate some of the issues talked about in this section. Cartrain said that Banksy was a huge influence for him commenting that, "I've sent him a few emails showing him my work and he sent me a signed piece of his work in the post."

What created the East London street art scene may also kill it

The East London urban art scene is unlikely to last forever, being the symptom of a delicate juxtaposition of industrial decline and economic forces.

The irony is that the same factors which are responsible for the creation of the East London art scene are likely to destroy it.

Politicians from all parties, spiritual leaders for global capital, tell us of the unstoppable forces of globalisation. They say if Britain is to continue to dip its paw into the cream of the world’s wealth it needs to become a post-industrial service economy; suggesting a rosy future of millions of Asians slaving away co-ordinated by keyboard tapping British suits, feet on desk, leant back on high backed leather chairs, secretary blowing them off.

Art, which is feeble and dependent upon the financial growth of an economy for its survival, will have to shape itself around the needs and demands of capital.

The financial district of the City of London, lying to the south of Shoreditch, has been successfully promoted as a global financial centre, and its mighty power is slowly expanding its way northwards. Plans are afoot for the glass foot soldiers of mammon, fuelled by speculative property investment, to gradually advance northwards, replacing old warehouses with a caravan of Starbucks and Japanese sushi places and a concomitant reduction in dead spaces to portray the art, increased security to capture and ward off street artists, increased property prices and the eventual eviction of the artistic community. Spitalfields has already had big corporate sized chunks taken out of it, with one half of the old Spitalfields Market being sacrificed for corporate interests in the last five years.

So then the very same financial forces, and post-industrial legacy, which have worked to create this micro-environment for street art to thrive, are the same forces which will in time eventually destroy it. Maybe the community will move northwards, maybe it will dissipate, but until that moment lets just enjoy what the community puts out there, for its own financial interests, for their own ego and also, just maybe, for the benefit of the people.

Banksy

Banksy is the street artist par excellence. London’s street art scene is vibrant and diverse. There is some good, cure, kitschy stuff out there, but in terms of creativity and imagination Banksy leads by a city mile. His stuff is invariably shocking, funny, thought provoking and challenging.

Banksy considers himself to be a graffiti artist, which is what he grew up doing in the Bristol area in the late eighties. According to Hattenstone (2003) Banksy, who was expelled from his school, and who spent some time in prison for petty crimes, started graffiti at the age of 14, quickly switching over to stencils, which he uses today, because he didn’t find he had a particular talent for the former. His work today involves a mixture of graffiti and stencils although he has shown a capacity for using a multitude of materials.

Key works in London have included:

•In London Zoo he climbed into the penguin enclosure and painted "We're bored of fish" in six-foot-high letters.

•

•In 2004 he placed a dead rat in a glass-fronted box, and stuck the box on a wall of the Natural History Museum.

•

•‘A designated riot area’ at the bottom of Nelson’s Column.

•

•He placed a painting called Early Man Goes to Market, with a human figure hunting wildlife while pushing a shopping trolley, in the British Museum.

•

His work seems to be driven by an insatiable desire to go on producing. In an interview with Shepherd Fairey he said, ‘Anything that stands in the way of achieving that piece is the enemy, whether it’s your mum, the cops, someone telling you that you sold out, or someone saying, "Let’s just stay in tonight and get pizza." Banksy gives the impression of being a person in the mould of Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher or Lance Armstrong. Someone with undoubted talent and yet a true workaholic dedicated to his chosen profession.

Its also driven by the buzz of ‘getting away with it’. He said to Hattenstone, ‘The art to it is not getting picked up for it, and that's the biggest buzz at the end of the day because you could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and you paint something big where you shouldn't do. The feeling you get when you sit home on the sofa at the end of that, having a fag and thinking there's no way they're going to rumble me, it's amazing... better than sex, better than drugs, the buzz.’

Whilst Banksy has preferred to remain anonymous he does provide a website and does the occasional interview putting his work in context (see the Fairey interview).

Banksy’s anonymity is very important to him. Simon Hattenstone, who interviewed Banksy in 2003, said it was because graffiti was illegal, which makes Banksy a criminal. Banksy has not spoken directly on why he wishes to maintain his anonymity. It is clear that Banksy despises the notion of fame. The irony of course is that ‘Banksy’ the brand is far from being anonymous, given that the artist uses it on most if not all of his work. In using this brand name Banksy helps fulfil the need, which fuels a lot of graffiti artists, of wanting to be recognised, the need of ego.

Banksy is not against using his work to ‘pay the bills’ as he puts it. He has for example designed the cover of a Blur album, although he has pledged never to do a commercial job again, as a means of protecting his anonymity. Nevertheless he continues to produce limited edition pieces, which sell in galleries usually for prices, which give him a bit of spending money after he has paid the bills. Banksy has said, ‘If it’s something you actually believe in, doing something commercial doesn’t turn it to shit just because it’s commercial’ (Fairey, 2008). Banksy has over time passed from urban street artist into international artistic superstar, albeit an anonymous one.

Banksy has a definite concern for the oppressed in society. He often does small stencils of despised rats and ridiculous monkeys with signs saying things to the effect of ‘laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge’. Whilst some seem to read into this that Banksy is trying to ferment a revolutionary zeal in the dispossessed, such that one day they will rise up and slit the throats of the powers that be, so far his concern seems no more and no less than just a genuine human concern for the oppressed. Some of what seems to fuel his work is not so much his hatred of the system but at being at the bottom of it. He said to Hattenstone (2003) ‘Yeah, it's all about retribution really… Just doing a tag is about retribution. If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something - that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it’

Charlie Brooker of the Guardian has criticised Banksy for his depictions of a monkey wearing a sandwich board with 'lying to the police is never wrong' written on it. Certainly such a black and white statement seems out of kilter with more balanced assessments that Banksy has made. Brooker challenges Banksy asking whether Ian Huntley would have been right to have lied to the police?

Brooker has also criticized Banksy for the seemingly meaninglessness of some of this images. Brooker says, ‘Take his political stuff. One featured that Vietnamese girl who had her clothes napalmed off. Ho-hum, a familiar image, you think. I'll just be on my way to my 9 to 5 desk job, mindless drone that I am. Then, with an astonished lurch, you notice sly, subversive genius Banksy has stencilled Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald either side of her. Wham! The message hits you like a lead bus: America ... um ... war ... er ... Disney ... and stuff.’ Brooker has seemingly oversimplified Banksy’s message, if indeed Banksy has one, to fuel his own criticisms. It is easy to see that for many the Vietnam painting tells us that the United States likes to represent itself with happy smiling characters, that hide the effects of its nefarious activities responsible for the real life faces of distress seen on the young girl. Something that we should be constantly reminded of. But then that’s a matter of politics not of meaninglessness.

Banksy’s ingenuity comes through in his philosophy on progression, ‘I’m always trying to move on’ he says. In the interview he gave with Shepherd Fairey he explained that he has started reinvesting his money in to new more ambitious projects which have involved putting scaffolding put up against buildings, covering the scaffolding with plastic sheeting and then using the cover of the sheets to do his paintings unnoticed.

Banksy has balls. Outside of London he has painted images in Disney Land; and on the Israeli wall surrounding Palestine. How far is he willing to push it? What about trying something at the headquarters of the BNP, or on army barracks, or at a brothel or strip club employing sex slaves, or playing around with corporate advertising a la Adbusters?

www.ravishlondon.com/londonstreetart

Unfortunately, Oklahoma is full of ugly characterless portable trailer-house post offices like this.

Wainwright is a small community located in southwestern Muskogee County between Muskogee and Okmulgee.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

Spectral Mornings

Hackett, Steve

Chrysalis CHR 1223

1979

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

According to www.grangetowncardiff.co.uk this landmark is soon to be demolished, no doubt to be replaced by a cheap and characterless housing scheme. It was opened in 1847 but has now been empty for a couple of years.

TORREJAS EN MIEL: A … Exceptional

If there is a better version of this dessert, it would get my yet-to-be-awarded “A+”.

Torrejas are Guatemalan sweet rolls called molletes that are stuffed with custard and cheese. They dipped in beaten egg and then fried. Think stuffed French toast.

Hot sweet syrup is poured into the bowl with the torreja. Miel means syrup in Guatemala. Honey needs the word “bee” added … miel de abajas. The syrup for the torrejas is not honey.

The problem with torrejas is the filling is often either undetectable or missing, the syrup characterless and watery, the roll soggy. Not so here.

The pillow roll, warm from the fryer, was stuffed with fresh white cheese cushioned by thick custard. The sensuous scent of cinnamon filled the air even before the server set the dish on the table. The syrup was a satisfying symphony of spice. If you have never tried these, IMO, this is the place to do it.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

St Margaret, Fleggburgh, Norfolk

As you head eastwards, Norfolk falls away behind you. The landscape simplifies, as though the wind from the grey North Sea has scoured it of anything inessential. In late winter, with the fields ploughed and the caravan parks empty, it can seem a tabula rasa, an empty slate, cleansed and waiting.

The village is called Fleggburgh, but the parish is Burgh St Margaret. It lies a few miles inland from the sprawling resorts of Yarmouth, Caister and Hemsby, but its fate is very much tied to theirs. The area's biggest employer is the leisure industry, and the east Norfolk towns and villages seem empty outside of high summer. And, just as the seaside towns rose to prominence in the late 19th century, so there was a knock-on effect in the hinterland. Outside of Norwich, this is the only part of Norfolk where the population was actually rising in the 1870s and 1880s, and this pretty church underwent a major renewal, an almost complete rebuilding, at the hands of Diocesan architect Herbert Green.

Along with his predecessor Richard Phipson, Green bestrides the landscape of church Victorianisation in East Anglia. The bodies of their work are considerable, and it wasn't just their own plans; anyone else's work would also have to cross their desks for them to cast a cold eye upon it. Their enthusiasms were as different from each others as it is possible to be, I suppose. Phipson was a technician, with an eye for detail. In restorations, his innovations blend fairly seamlessly into the medieval, which sounds good, but often leaves a rather dour, characterless atmosphere. Sometimes he went mad, producing extraordinary spires on a couple of churches in the Stowmarket area, and he could be very impressive on a grand scale, such as the complete rebuilding of St Mary le Tower in Ipswich.

Herbert Green, on the other hand, was a Victorian first and an medievalist second. Sometimes it is hard to see the medieval origins at all behind his rebuildings, scourings and facades. Here at Burgh, he built a 'Perpendicular' nave and a 'Decorated' chancel and tower, which is of course exactly the relationship you find at so many rural medieval churches in East Anglia. It's just that here it isn't real - to all intents and purposes, this is a faux medieval Norfolk parish church.

The harsh blue knapped flints would look even worse if it wasn't for the thatching that softens them. One curiosity - note how high the gables at the east end of the nave and chancel rise above the thatch. That on the nave is even higher than the bell windows of the tower. This must be because they are substantially the medieval originals. But nothing else is, I think. The red-brick arching to the windows helps a bit, but really this is a severe exterior, and knapped flint on such a scale would soon fall out of fashion, to be replaced by the cosiness of the Arts and Crafts movement. We can already see this happening here, for there is a cottage dormer window above the porch to be thankful for. It is here for a reason, because it lights the little gallery tucked into the roof space.

Inside, everything is Herbert Green's, pretty much. There is no tower arch, just a doorway, through which you can access the gallery. The furnishings are all of a piece, and the font is in the style of the 15th century. Green was very fond of Norman fonts, so it is interesting that here he chose a font to match the (imitation) Perpendicular nave rather than the (real) Norman south doorway. The stone reredos is perhaps more in Green's heavy style.

There are a couple of items of interest. A figure brass of 1608 remembers Richard Burton, the minister of this parish; it is remounted in a marble setting on the chancel wall. Opposite it is a moving memorial to George Thompson Fisher, who died in WWI. He was son of the Rector here who had overseen Green's rebuilding, and who was, incidentally, the very last Bishop of Ipswich.

The jewel in the crown of all this is the east window of 1968 by Paul Jefferies, in the uninhibited dynamic style of the time. It features the figures of St Margaret, St Luke and the Blessed Virgin. St Luke's bull looks a cheery sort, and St Margaret dispatches her dragon with aplomb. Mary, who is shown as the Queen of Heaven, is a little less vigorous than the other two figures. Her lack of an accompanying animal throws the composition slightly out of balance, and you wonder why she wasn't placed in the central light.

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

The Boring Store, 1331 N Milwaukee Ave. I have some shots from inside the store... but I decided to not ruin the surprise.

All you need to know is that if you are in Chicago, you would do yourself a great disservice to NOT visit this store. You won't be disappointed. Oh, and check out the 826 org. It's a good thing, a very good thing.

"No longer supplying anything of utility.

The region's first exclusive supplier of holes (not to mention equipment used for making holes in things such as drills, augers, awls, punches, bradawls, very sharp sticks, and, of course, the ever-popular gimlet) we were surprised a year or two after opening our doors that most customers who happened to stop in conceived of us only as purveyors of characterless, dreary, banal, mundane, tiresome and tedious merchandise. Well, after some prolonged consideration, and after two pears of absolutely no business whatsoever, to say nothing of not wanting to be accused of misrepresenting our inventory, we were more than happy to point out to said customers that such things as holes, drills, augers, awls, punches, bradawls, very sharp sticks, and, of course, the ever-popular gimlet, could actually be considered, at least among the general lay populace, somewhat lackluster, if not genuinely and irretrievably dull. Needles to say, these customers usually left in disgust, and rarely returned."

Taken in my first year at Selly Oak Boys School in Birmingham 1972. If you have seen the film Kes, thats what it was like. Regular canings from Mr Leeke or Mr Waldron an ex lancaster bomber pilot who would speak to you and still move his chin adjusting an invisible flying helmet strap, an hilarious memory of lovely old english tweed suited characters, wearing RAF tie's, sadly never to be seen again, and since replaced by the characterless, boring, toe touching, and very corrupt 'queer' pc brigade . Nobody complained about their human rights and it was easier than doing homework!!! Ten kids all shoving their hands under the cold taps in the toilets, I still laugh about it today Lol! Unlike the big soft pussies running around today. We all loved mr Leeke, tough but fair! Mr Amos deserves a mention, (Green tweeds and cavalry twill, lower school) he was small but developed an amazing ability to leap in the air and bring the cane down harder lol!! The incredible flying tweeds!

St Mary, Bucklesham, Suffolk

Set down a quiet lane not far from its village centre, this is an attractive little church despite a relatively undistinguished pedigree. Small churches which were largely rebuilt during the second half of the 19th Century can sometimes be a little characterless, but not so here.

The rebuilding took place throughout 1878, and when the church reopened after being closed for nearly a year, there were, according to the Ipswich Journal, gasps of astonishment at the impressive and radical alterations. The nave had been extended and a new south aisle and chancel added. Not much had survived the restorers, but early 14th Century doorways were retained, the one on the north side with its external holy water stoup. Some work was retained from an earlier restoration in the 1840s, including the east and west windows which were reset in the new walls.

Inside, the church retains its 17th Century pulpit and 15th Century font. In medieval times this must have been quite an impressive church, judging by the foundations of the great west tower which were uncovered in the 1920s. But centuries of neglect meant that by the 18th century it had fallen, and like many rural Suffolk churches, St Mary was virtually derelict by the time of its restoration.

A sign of changing attitudes to old buildings is the London newspaper which reported at the time of the rebuilding that the old church had been conspicuous by its ugliness. It added that fortunately, its situation was not a prominent one, so that only those living in Bucklesham remember it as an eyesore. As much as we might have preferred the old church to the new nowadays, I think this trim little building would still please the Victorian villagers today.

Sword art online 2 - Swag from Hyper Japan show ( this year at the corporate, confused and characterless O2 rather than earls court)

St Peter and St Paul, Langham, Rutland

You leave Oakham on the road into Leicestershire, and shortly come to the large, apparently undistinguished village of Langham. The name is one of the most common placenames in England, meaning simply 'long village'. But I remember this Langham for a reason I am sure many other people do. Twenty-odd years ago we used to go this way to visit friends in Derby, and if you wound down the car window at Langham you might just catch a delicious whiff of malted barley being heated, for the village was home to one of the great independent family breweries of England, Ruddles.

The day came when Ruddles was taken over Morlands of Abingdon, who closed the Langham brewery, but who were in their turn taken over by the rapacious Greene King, who closed the Abingdon brewery as well as the Langham one, and switched production of both Ruddles and Morland's Old Speckled Hen to Bury St Edmunds. But of course neither beer was ever the same.

Ruddles was a victim of its own success. In 1996, Ruddles County bitter was voted the best beer in the world no less, and was advertised on national commercial television. It even achieved 'protected geographical status', one of only three English beers to do so. But by then the brewery had only a year of its life left. I remember seeing the brewery buildings closed and derelict soon after, but they are all gone today, to be replaced by typically characterless housing. The name remains in Ruddles Avenue.

Not far off is the church of St Peter and St Paul, which Pevsner records as being large and imposing, which is certainly true, although it is a bit quirky as well, because the huge south transept is no longer balanced by the one on the north side, giving the church the shape of a letter T.

The tall spire is visible for miles, and the church is set in a wide, open churchyard. As Pevsner also observes, the interior is large, airy and spacious, but perhaps a little dull, and this is not unfair. The leaven in the lump is one of the largest expanses of Ninian Comper glass in the country, the vast windows in the east of the chancel (the orders of angels, 1907) and the transept (a selection of favourite Saints, 1912) both being his. Otherwise there is not much to set the pulses racing, but it is all pleasant enough and obviously well-loved, looked after and used.

Outside in the churchyard I noticed the grave of Sir Kenneth Ruddle, a member of the brewing family dynasty. All gone today.

Eight whiskeys, some Bourbon, some not. Two small glasses. And one long Friday night at home. Even taking our time, trying very small (1/4 - 1/3 oz pours), tasting neat and with one very small ice cube, and lots of water and crackers in between, what started out as a scientific tasting probably lost some of its calibration somewhere along the line.

The winner...well, let's just say it wasn't me, shall we? I'm still recover...I mean, considering. The losers...strangely enough, our least favorite overall was probably the Jefferson's Reserve, although I've bought and liked that in the past. This tasting, against the others, it just seemed completely thin and characterless, with almost no finish on the tongue. The Bernheim's was nowhere near as complex as a true bourbon, but for all that was quite pleasant on its own merits. And for all its lack of pretense by comparison to some of its brethren, with a little ice the Knob stood up for itself well, without it has a bit of a harsh alchohol bite that some might not shine to.

Although I tend not to like Jack (seems overly commercialized and bland to me these days as a Scotch drinker as well, or maybe I'm just saturated by the advertising?) the Gentleman was not bad. Good sweet finish and complexity with a nice slow alcohol burn...don't ruin this one with ice. The difference in wood flavor to the other bourbons (Gentle Jack is "mellowed" before and after barrel aging in maple charcoal) was also quite obvious side-by-side.

The outstanding favorite was probably the Elijah Wood 18yr, with the Garrison Brothers Texas (yes, Texas) Spring 2011 bottling bourbon a close second, and the Woodford Reserve just a hint behind it in third. The Garrison stood up better to a little ice, and had a definite extra something to the flavor...almost like leather and smoke, rather in keeping with the TX theme. I could even close my eyes and imagine the smokiness being somewhat single-malt Scotch-like, although the overall flavor didn't have any of the iodine and seaweed you expect out of a good Orkney. But the Elijah just had more rounded complexity, more fruit and caramel and vanilla in the finish, depending on your own breathing it varied a lot (and lost character with more than a tiny drop of water to open it up, so don't waste this one over "rocks"). Of course, it seems hardly fair comparing a 2-3 yr old vintage (even with TX's "accelerated" aging) to an 18 yr old. The Woodford is a bit smokier than the Elijah, a bit more caramel and fruit than the Garrison...sort of in between the two, but the other two stood out as avatars of a particular taste profile.

Regardless, we're sincerely looking forward to giving at least the top 3-5 a bit more slow, patient consideration. The others....just splash a shot or two over a crapload of ice and don't think about it.