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Stories, snapshots and sneak peeks from the streets in and around Bloomsbury.
Browsing All Posts filed under »View of the Week«
View of the week: UCL’s Institute of Making
A lively crowd attended this afternoon’s grand opening of UCL’s new Institute of Making. The Institute’s overall-clad Director, Professor Mark Miodownik (who you might know from Dara O’Briain’s Science Club, or the 2010 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures), was on hand to mingle and answer questions. Mark has written a book on materials, Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our […]
View of the week: Bentham’s great escape
November 8, 2012
After over 150 years of confinement, philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton made a brief bid for freedom from its wooden display box at University College London on Thursday 8th November 2012. The auto-icon made it only as far as UCL’s Rock Room, where it attempted to hide amongst other ancient objects and curiosities. The tactic failed, however, […]
View of the week: Dickens’ writing desk
August 21, 2012
If you’ve come to Bloomsbury to visit Doughty Street’s Charles Dickens Museum, only to find it closed for refurbishment, you can still get a glimpse of the literary giant by visiting the nearby Foundling Museum. Several objects and mementos from the life of Charles Dickens are scattered about the museum, as part of the small Dickens and the […]
View of the week: World’s oldest dress?
July 14, 2012
Amongst the 80,000 objects housed within the walls of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, one in particular has an appeal that extends beyond Egyptology, to the history of fashion and textiles. The Tarkhan dress was unknowingly discovered by archaeologist and collector Flinders Petrie at Tarkhan cemetery in Egypt, in excavations that took place between 1911 and 1913. At the […]
View of the week: Einstein’s brain
April 11, 2012
If you visit the Wellcome Collection‘s latest exhibition, Brains: The Mind as Matter, you will surely want to lay eyes on one of their most heavily-promoted highlights, a piece of Albert Einstein’s (1879 – 1955) brain. The sliver of cortex on display is not particularly illuminating, and far from the most interesting thing in the gallery space. […]
View of the week: New concourse for Kings Cross
March 27, 2012
The new concourse at Kings Cross St Pancras, designed by John McAslan and Partners, was recently unveiled and has been grabbing lots of attention from media and architecture enthusiasts alike. On the day we visited, there seemed to be as many people photographing the steel roof as there were scurrying to catch trains. It certainly is striking […]
View of the week: BPAS protest
March 15, 2012
I thought I’d have to go all the way to the USA to see abortion clinics being targeted by religious protesters, but no – it’s happening right here in Bloomsbury. Spurred on by Ben Goldacre‘s recent tweets about an ongoing protest in Bedford Square, I wandered down to see what the fuss was about. Police were […]
View of the week: Spring Festival
March 2, 2012
Is it really springtime in London? The British Library says so, and has a fashion & creativity-themed Spring Festival, running from 1 – 5 March 2012, to prove it. Today, the library forecourt hosted a pop-up craft market, made up of a dozen competition winners including Cole of London, Ketchup on Everything, Phoebe Richardson, Ruby Red and Squid […]
View of the week: British Library
February 6, 2012
After a reasonably mild winter, London has at last had its first (and possibly only) snowfall of the season. Here is the British Library‘s forecourt, with Eduardo Paolozzi‘s (1924 – 2005) Newton sculpture covered in a few centimeters of snow. The 1995 bronze sculpture is a representation of the scientist Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727), after a famous illustration of the same by William Blake (1757 […]
View of the week: “I Can Not Help the Way I Feel”
January 23, 2012
This bulbous, organic sculpture by John Isaacs, I Can Not Help the Way I Feel (2003), is just one of many features of the Wellcome Collection’s permanent gallery, Medicine Now. The life-like construction of polystyrene, steel, foam, wax and paint simply demands attention. Every time I see it, I can not help feeling that I shouldn’t have eaten that […]
London Bytes
- View of the week: Alien doppelgänger March 28, 2013 Belinda
- Noam Chomsky @ British Library March 27, 2013 Belinda
- View of the week: Lichtenstein @ Tate Modern March 12, 2013 Belinda
March 16, 2013
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