Flying Down to Rio

Small independent cinemas should be cherished. This is the Rio in Burnham-on-Crouch and I hope it's still there. The poster outside is for Gladiator, so you never know. It isn't of any great architectural merit, no art deco Egyptian here, and it looks as if part of the roof is missing. But for what it lacks in streetscape credibility it more than makes up for in sheer maritime exuberance. The blue and white paint scheme seems somehow just right in this airy Essex estuary town, so much better than a soulless multiplex on an industrial estate. The last time I went to one of those, a boy sat three seats away from me with a huge bucket of popcorn. I said 'I hope you're not going to eat all that', and he replied 'It's not for eatin' mate, it's for throwin' at people'.

Underfoot 1

It's funny how even the most mundane of things can suddenly become embued with interest. I don't normally wander along streets with my face down in the gutter, unless it's a Friday night and I've been held to ransom in Shoreditch, but this image suddenly came to my attention as I left a Shepherd Neame pub in Colombo Street, a little to the south of Blackfriars Bridge in London. If it hadn't been dramatically lit by the late September light it would almost certainly have gone unnoticed. I didn't arrange the neat pile of leaves, they were grouped like this the last time a breeze ran down the quiet street, and I didn't have to move dog-ends or chewing gum either, remarkably. But as I knelt there fiddling about with my focal lengths a woman from some flats nearby did ask if I was alright. I almost certainly pretentiously saw it seventeen feet high in Tate Modern, an homage to the Boyle Family, perhaps called Edge of Darkness or something. But no, I just liked the look of it.

Harvest Home

One of my pleasures at this time of the year is watching big bits of kit at work in the fields. And avoiding them on the road. This afternoon I came across a huge New Holland combine harvester coming down the hill from my village on a narrow lane that was about a foot less in width than the yellow monster. There was simply nowhere scratch-free to go, so I made for the ditch and Mr. New Holland neatly combined a twenty yard stretch of hedgerow. We both made sympathetic gestures at each other. He probably guessed (quite rightly) that country boy though I am I never get my hands dirty unless I put the black ink cartridge into the printer upside down. This picture was taken in the Lyveden Valley in Northamptonshire as my neighbour lurched around the field doing something with bales of straw. We were regularly distracted from our respective pursuits by his extremely perceptive wife arriving every half hour with ice cold Stellas, placed like fairground targets on the bonnet of the Landrover.

Back to Nature

I've got a thing about lettering, particularly when it crops up in unexpected places. You will always find stuff like this in the remoter reaches of scrapyards, but sometimes they can be a joyful surprise. Like when you trip over an old plough left in a spinney between fields, and when you've finished having a good swear you discover the maker's name embossed on a crossbar shouting back at you, albeit somewhat rustily. This Simms Thingy is still relatively unscathed, but the briars are starting to twist and turn, slowly but inexorably perpetrating a cover-up job.

Getting Allegro Over

You don't see many Austin Allegros around these days. Ask anyone who had one and they'd probably give you a few good reasons why. I seem to remember they had a peculiar almost square steering wheel. But I couldn't resist this one, parked up at a local garage. It was an extremely rare convertible model (I think you had to do the conversion yourself with a chainsaw) in an impossibly bright shade of orange. But just look at the badge. Not just redolent of the age, anytime between 1973 and 1983 surprisingly, but of every Yes album cover, 70's boutique window and post-hippy designer's letterhead. In their absorbing book My Dad Had One of Those, Giles Chapman and Richard Porter come up with the astounding fact that the Allegro was 'supposedly more aerodynamic in reverse than going forwards'.

Cardington Arrest

These simply gigantic buildings have been arresting the attention ever since they were first built at Cardington in Bedfordshire, in the early twentieth century. They are airship hangars, the first one built here in 1917, the second brought here from Pulham St. Mary, Norfolk, in 1926. My father first pointed them out to me from a train as it left Bedford station, later he showed me little sepia Kodak snapshots he took here of the prodigious R101 just prior to its tragic demise in a muddy French field near Beauvais in 1930. After all that I obviously couldn't resist including them in my book Pastoral Peculiars. They are 812 feet long and 275 feet wide, Nelson's Column would fit inside- and upright. The doors are opened on their own little railway track.

Welgar Shredded Wheat

Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by well-known brand names that could be seen on factories at the side of railway lines. It started with a big neon sign saying 'Weetabix' between Wellingborough and Kettering at Burton Latimer. Then of course there's Horlick's at Slough (a copy of their U.S. factory in Racine, Wisconsin) and the sadly empty Ovaltine factory at Kings Langley on the Euston line in Hertfordshire. A cut-out timber Ovaltine Dairy Maid could also be seen up on an embankment above the factory. Another household name apparently about to disappear from the railway sightlines is probably my favourite, Louis de Soisson's 1925 factory in Welwyn Garden City. A machine age, wipe-clean, eau-de-nil and white masterpiece just next to the station. I suspect the prospect of turning the whole thing into massively over-priced loft-style apartments is just too tempting; a brand that was once at the heart of one of the first garden cities exiled to a soulless industrial 'park' somewhere.