Virtual London
Mar 24th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
Years ago I heard an interview on Radio Canada, on either CBC Sunday Morning or As It Happens, with Lord Clancarty on the subject of UFOs and his view that the earth was hollow and that aliens lived beneath our feet.
America’s media don’t generally do tongue in cheek interviews and irony is quite alien, so I tuned in regularly. Perhaps not like a Frenchman listening to the BBC in occupied France during World War II, but… you get my drift.
A flavour of Clancarty’s delusions can be obtained from his obituary (link above). He was one of those eccentric English artisocrats, like Lord Lucan, who owned a small tract of the neighbouring island and who never had to work for a living.
After the interview Clancarty’s location was reported as being so many “miles from Reading” and thereafter this became a kind of CBC in-joke. Interviewees in the UK were occasionally sent up with a concluding reference, in passing, to how far they were from Reading.
All this came back to me this morning when I followed a link sent to me by Google Alerts and, in two clicks unrelated to the subject at hand, found that Lord Clancarty may have been righter than he knew. He claimed that there were entrances at the North and South poles, and in Tibet, to an underworld beneath us.
But he neglected to mention London.
Meanwhile, above the portal to the underworld at London Bridge Station, an impressive work designed by Renzo Piano and partners is in progress.
At 310m, The Shard, shown above right, will be the tallest building in Western Europe.
Our view of the Gherkin is obscured by another building but this one should be an unmissable addition to the London skyline.
Click on these panoramas (twice) to see the skyline, today
and as it will be in 2012
(annotated version here).
I wonder if Mr.Piano missed a trick here? The problem with new buildings in cities like London is storage space.
The idea of being able to take an elevator down to some storage space or, for that matter to a cinema or an underground shopping complex or a library has a certain appeal. And why not a tube station? I’m not aware of any building in London with its own underground train station, which seems surprising. There are a few abandoned underground stations that could, perhaps, save an entrepreneurial architect some digging (example).
Not so visible, but happening surely, is the construction of a virtual London. You can get a glimpse of the future here and here, and a glimpse of versions of the past too, if the same techniques are used to bring it to life.
There are quite a few sections of underground, now unused for, among others, security reasons, with direct access to certain buildings - Winston used it quite regularly, nearest loo to the war rooms!