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East Anglia has some quirky villages which we have taken to occasionally visiting. One of the places we visited today was Mellis in Suffolk.
This former public payphone, bought by Mellis Parish Council for £1, has had its windows replaced with coloured stained glass made by villagers.
The panels, inspired by the flora and fauna of Mellis Common, were made under the guidance of artist Hilary Beal.
In the buildup to the Second World War, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, seizing Czech lands, partitioning the country, and supporting a German-aligned regime in Slovakia headed by Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest whose government actively supported the Nazi war effort and the Holocaust. In 1944, as German defeat began to look more likely, a coalition of communists, liberals, nationalists, and those guided by a mixture of ideological and pragmatic concerns rose up against the Tiso government and against German occupiers sent to secure Slovakia to the German side. Ultimately the rebellion was defeated militarily, but the uprising was an important event for Postwar Slovakia, both broadly, insofar as it helped Slovakia assert a moral claim to its role in the war, and more specifically to the postwar communist regime, insofar as it presented Slovak communists as anti-fascist freedom fighters who had opposed Nazism.
Above, the very interesting Bridge of the Slovak National Uprising, completed in 1972. It is a single pylon cable-stayed bridge that spans the Danube with no other supporting structures. There is a pedestrian/bicycle path below the autodeck (zoom in to see). That circular structure at the top, some 85 meters high, is actually a restaurant (we did not go up), and also the source of its unofficial name, the UFO Bridge. The design is reminiscent of other futurist architecture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, such as the Space Needle in Seattle or the Buzludzha Monument in Bulgaria.
The bridge was built to connect the Old Town of Bratislava to the neighborhood of Petržalka (background), a massive socialist era housing development with the characteristic prefabricated apartment buildings so common in Eastern Bloc countries. Unlike some of these developments elsewhere, it is, in fact, a very livable neighborhood, with immense public green spaces filled with walking and bicycling paths. I don't know if this is universal in Slovakia, but in the cities we visited (for example, Sturovo) these developments were all painted warm and inviting colors, a phenomenon that I believe followed the fall of communism.
Unfortunately, the bridge and its highway cut right through Old Town Bratislava, passing mere meters from Saint Martin's Cathedral. The construction of the highway destroyed good parts of the Old Town, including the Jewish Quarter. Today this creates a fair bit of noise pollution, separates the Old Town from Castle Hill, and significantly compromises the aesthetics of the city. Signage we encountered there suggests there is an ambitious plan in the works to cover that section of highway, turning it into a kind of a tunnel with walkable park above. The Slovak National Uprising Bridge, the Danube River, and the Petržalka neighborhood, taken from Bratislava Castle, Bratislava, Slovakia.
In 2022 murals were painted in Margate as a part of their Rise Up and Clean Up residency. More information can be found here: riseupresidency.co.uk Unfortunately we didn't find them all, being unfamiliar with some of the areas we gave up once we had walked 8 miles