An Alternative Writing Retreat
Walsall railway station doesn’t really exist. I was once mesmerised by the dark polished floor in the vast booking hall, and in awe of its wrought-iron canopy. Now whatever’s left has been swallowed inside a shopping centre named Saddlers as commemoration of a vanished industry. The usual shops – Poundland, Claire’s Accessories, a Costa Coffee…
Sometimes as he walked, taking long and meandering digressions down side streets and across squares, through underpasses and over raised walkways that spanned like triumphal arches the segments of silent motorway, the architect liked to think that the very formlessness of his wanderings was a kind of pattern in itself…
A Google search for “Voldemort’s grave” will return more than 100,000 results, most of them pointing to Greyfriars Kirkyard – a modest graveyard in the middle of Edinburgh, best known as the final resting place of Greyfriars Bobby…
There are 24-hour gyms open around the clock in most cities and towns in the UK. Here we examine the daily rhythms of these strange, liminal spaces…
It’s so easy to gaze disparagingly, even mournfully, on the site of an LPG tank in a garden. Easy to consider it misplaced, miscreant, a boil on the face of a view. An objection at a local planning meeting to its placement was met with a wry smile…
I’d spent too many hours at the wheel, racing the December dusk to get to our destination before darkness fell. Too many hours scrutinising every junction, traffic lane and sign, of passing through new places and barely seeing them…
“Crystal Palace Park still carries the name of something that is no longer there, a building of plate glass and iron from the high Victorian age…”
And then you realise that everyone around you – a crowd of thousands, all along the quays – are almost completely silent. There’s no wind, no rain, no massive heat from the fire, nothing, like everything else on earth has stopped…
Journalist Mackenzie Weinger travels in the footsteps of Thomas Hardy, through the partly real, partly dream-country that inspired his fiction…
Trump Tower is a unique cross between a shopping mall and a shrine. We wandered past the heavily-armed security guards into the public areas of the building…