At the moment I’m spending a couple of afternoons a week at the British Library. I get off at Euston Station tube and then make the shortish walk from there to the library.
It seems that the powers that be at Euston Station want to encourage you to walk, not only to the library but to St. Pancras and King's Cross stations, and there are marked walking routes that supposedly help you to avoid the pollution of the Euston Road.
As a natural subversive this is troubling to me. Yes, I want to walk, but I don't want to be told to walk, and I certainly don’t want to be told where to walk.
So I’ve been taking short cuts through the Ossulton Estate, a collection of council flats built in the late 1920s and early 30s. When I first walked walked through, it all seemed very east European and ruined, movie-set-ish, and you know me, I like that sort of thing.
And I was reminded of Karl Marx-Hof in Vienna which is a fine building made much less grim, though no less cinematic, by being painted red.
But now I see that the part of the Ossulton Estate I walked through - Levita House - wasn’t really in ruin. It was apparently just being stripped down in preparation for a new paint job, so that it now looks like this.
Me, I’d have painted it red.
This being the winter, it’s generally dark when I leave the British Library, and as I walk out I look up at Eduardo Paolozzi’s statue, widely known as “Newton After Blake” which looms over me, without quite making eye contact.
Of that triumverate - Paolozzi, Newton and Blake - I think only the last had much interest in walking.
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