Edinburgh Festival month.
Fireworks
Sketch Club in London
and my mum taking Jessie Bowden’s funeral. Jessie was 101.
Keith napping after lunch. He’s about to retire: all the leaving do’s have left him sleepy.
An interesting chat with the guys from DC Thomson, although not the guys who do the drawings. I do want to meet them.
A quick look at a tall, elegant office in London…
…and the clock tower of St Pancras, recently framed by the stepped new public space at Kings Cross.
The kids on the sofa. Watching someone else having a tablet shot seems to be almost as good as having a tablet shot.
The main thing that happens in pubs is you spend time talking to drunk people. Some of them are entertaining. This is Marc, on a fun night at The Pig & Butcher with Kev.
Harry Arora, first class Mortgage fixer at Barclays.
I’ll not be retiring anytime soon.
A beautiful day in Dundee, listening to suited men discussing where the city is going, whilst watching people walking along the route to the new V&A. Kengo Kuma’s spectacular building, and the exhibits the V&A will bring, will transform this part of town. Other waterfront developments to follow. It’s the sunniest city in Scotland, they tell me.
Chatting to Tara the train driver about what it’s like to drive the East Coast Main line trains up and down to London. From my middle aged perspective she seems barely old enough to drive the trolley, but was happy enough with 140mph trains. The old diesel 125s are like classic cars, the electric 225 more like a modern. You can’t go at 140mph because the signals are too close together.
It’s time for us to move on from Fettes Rise, designed by Morris & Steedman in the late 1960’s. By far the best place I’ve ever lived.
Going places in the generational sense. With my mum at her eightieth birthday in Glenfarg, a place she knows well from her childhood. I’m trying to work out the generational steps that got the family got from living in the station master’s house here, in 1890, to coming back for a visit in 2015.
Didn’t quite work it out.
Admiring the Britannia on the last day of the Easter holiday. It’s an interesting tour: a glimpse into a world where hierarchy must be emphasised in everything from crockery to wall panelling to drink, otherwise the illusion might slip.
We’d spent some time in York, having fun and looking at trains.
This might look like boys activities, but we all enjoyed it. Back home, the Stockbridge Arts Club had it’s first meeting. It’s a foil to our partner’s “Book Group” and might take a little while to find it’s core purpose…
Waiting for a train in Dundee, thinking about what the new station might be.
Something we looked at earlier this year in London, but didn’t get.
At the Scottish Property Awards with some people working on the dramatic transformation of Dundee Waterfront. It’s a project gathering momentum.As if to illustrate this, at the end of the listed awards it looked like they’d won nothing, but five minutes later there were two on the table. The transformation of the waterfront is particularly impressive as it’s only a part of the wholesale changes in the city. We often look abroad for good examples of this sort of urban renewal but there are lessons to learn closer to home. In Dundee they’ve got support for change from politicians, council officers and local investors and decades of work are coming to a conclusion.
Surprisingly radical for such a conservative looking bunch.
http://www.dundeewaterfront.com/
Sitting in Lidl’s car park admiring Reiach & Hall’s simultaneously simple and complex civic offices whilst wondering what else we might get the chance to do in Dundee. It’s a place that’s very different now from how it was 15 years ago when I started working here, and I’m pleased to have played a small part in that at Ardler & Mill o’ Mains.
Next part of the transformation: Kengo Kuma’s V&A.
http://vandaatdundee.com/your-future/
http://www.reiachandhall.co.uk/Project/Civic/dundcivic_01.html
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