BORIS TO BOOT OUT WESTMINSTER PROTESTERS?http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2010/05/exclusive-boris-gets-tough-on.htmlInteresting but I wonder how this will play out, assuming the legal permissions are received. The Parliament Square protestors would probably draw a big crowd of defenders. I shouldn't be surprised to see another Poll Tax riot-style disturbance ens...
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IS CAMERON THE TORIES' RAMSAY MACDONALD?Ramsay MacDonald was Labour Prime Minister during the Great Depression and economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was a period of great political instability and the major parties were split over the need for cuts in public spending. In 1931, MacDonald formed a National Government with the Conservatives to stay in power. He was expelled from the Labour Part and, ever since,...
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BBC, FLINTOFF AND DUBAIBBC News at 6 and 10 ran lengthy pieces on Andrew Flintoff having moved to Dubai to build his career as an international cricket mercenary. Flintoff is, it turns out, an 'ambassador', presumably paid, for Dubai and the BBC piece had all the characteristics of a tourist puff piece for the place. There certainly wasn't much news in it and one wonders what deals were done behind the scenes to bring it to our...
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APPLE'S I-SLATE AND QUANTITY VS QUALITY -PART ONE OF TWOWith the I-Slate (or whatever it ends up being called) almost upon us, Ben Hammersley's series on the implications of e-books is a must read for everyone in the publishing business. If you're a journalist, because it will show you how the right technical platform will transform the value of the content you create - and the way you create it; if you're a developer because...
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CAMLEY STREET NATURAL PARK
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CAMLEY STREET NATURAL PARK
When I first came to London in the Eighties we used to go to warehouse parties in Battle Bridge Road, just behind King's Cross. The area was a mix of old canal and railway buildings, deserted and rather desolate for somewhere so close to the centre of town. It was known principally as a red light district, because there were man quiet streets where kerb crawlers and prostitutes could go about their business.
Development was just beginning back then and the area progressively became London's largest building site as the St Pancras Eurostar terminal and the surrounding 'King's Cross Quarter' took shape.
I went for a walk around the area yesterday. There are lots of shiny modern, rather characterless buildings and shops: the Guardian have moved up there, for one. But there remain some pleasing reminders of the areas industrial past: gasometers, brown brick canalside buildings. The Battle Bridge Road warehouse where we used to party has been razed and there is some sort of development going on. I took a couple of photos, surveilled by a suspicious security man. He didn't call the police, though....
The purpose of my visit was to take a look at the Camley Street Natural Park and it's Natural London photography exhibition. It turns out that the park, built on an old coal yard, came into being at about the same time that I was attending those Battle Bridge parties. It's a few acres of carefully crafted wilderness alongside the Regent's Canal and very beautiful and on a damp, late afternoon in winter, soothing and restful. I particularly like the glimpses of industrial architecture through the foliage. I wonder how long the gasometers and warehouses will remain, though.
I love finding unexpected little places like this, like the overgrown botanical gardens you often find in European cities; they contrast with manicured, packaged and reparcelled, high-land-value nature of most urban space.
It turned out that the exhibition is next weekend, so I'll go back then.
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PAYMENT AND PIRACYIf payment becomes the norm for online news and content sites - and the idea is getting up a head of steam - I wonder if they will have to grapple with the question of piracy. Will opportunistic blogs, for example, start lifting articles wholesale and reproducing them? Might pirated versions of newspapers start to spring up? My suspicion is that they will.Today there is a report that online music piracy has fallen...
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Yasmin Alibhai Brown grapples with the internet in the Independent. She would like more regulation - censorship, if you like - preventing what she sees as extremes of violent pornography and personal attacks (from which, she says, she has suffered).It is true that there is distasteful stuff online and that debate in forums and on blogs all to often curdles into abuse. But, given that the web is bound by all the laws that govern...
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Quite nice and tells you quickly that there is a fire in Dean Street, Soho and presents some pretty good pics. Doesn't tell you much else, though. How did it start, anybody inside, dead, injured etc. Perhaps at this point you need a reporter asking the basic questions.
Also, because it happened in the centre of media land where everyone has twitter, cameraphones etc. If it had happened in Newton Abbot or Burnley, it wouldn't be getting this attention
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Quite nice and tells you quickly that there is a fire in Dean Street, Soho and presents some pretty good pics. Doesn't tell you much else, though. How did it start, anybody inside, dead, injured etc. Perhaps at this point you need a reporter asking the basic questions.Also, because it happened in the centre of media land where everyone has twitter, cameraphones etc. If it had happened in Newton Abbot or Burnley, it wouldn't be getting this attention
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