Seen in London - Catch up edition

I've been doing a lot of scouting for the past few weeks, and I've been to a few interesting places. Seen a lot of stuff...

The worlds cheeriest funeral parlour.




A really cool wall art thing-me-jig in a really cool warehouse apartment converstion with a really cool Pueruvian photo on it. A big fucking bag of cool really!


One of my favouritest buildings in the world.


We filmed in a 5 star hotel right next to St Pauls for a day. It also had a penthouse with a garden rooftop view of it, complete with glass lift to get there! Also THE BIGGEST FUCKING TV I'VE EVER SEEN! God, I don't get paid enough for that lifesyle.....yet. ;)


The remains of a very bad day for three people.



Westminster cathedral. What a beauty! lol Never seen it properly before :)




























The globe. Sam Wannamakers dream. I really want to see a proper Shakespeare play done in there this year.

A man in a gibbet! lol I really got a kick out of seeing that as I've always want to see one of those (even if he wasn't real lol





























And two of the most impressive (and expensive) cakes I've ever seen, as it was the director (Bryan O'Neil) and lead actor (Rollo Weeks) birthdays on the same day. One was a chocolate bonanza, shaped like a rose, and the other was a cream and Every Fucking Fruit You Can Think Of, including cumquats, lychees, passion fuits, and some strange white shit with seeds that I'm ashamed to say I couldn't name lol Needless to say, both were fucking gorgeous! :)

Happy Valentines Day from 1695

It seems finding a partner has never been easy! lol Hope you are having a lovely day wherever you are and whoever you are with. For once, Im not sulking today. Perhaps Ive grown up eventually lol, or am just past caring! x

Tower Bridge

I found myself back at Tower Bridge yesterday. It really is a fantastic construction. And right next door to that other fantastic construction - The Tower of London.

Monument

The Great Fire of London 1666 started famously in Pudding Lane. Over 100,000 Londoners lost their homes to it, yet only 6 people died!

A few years after, a budding architect called Christopher Wren ;) built Monument to the fire.

The 311 steps to the top nearly killed me! But the views from up there were absolutely worth it.

"The Monument stands at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill in the City of London. It was built between 1671 and 1677 to commemorate the Great Fire of London and to celebrate the rebuilding of the City.

The fire began in a baker's house in Pudding Lane on Sunday 2nd September 1666 and finally extinguished on Wednesday 5th September, after destroying the greater part of the City. Although there was little loss of life, the fire brought all activity to a halt, having consumed or severely damaged thousands of houses, hundreds of streets, the City's gates, public buildings, churches and St. Paul's Cathedral. The only buildings to survive in part were those built of stone, like St. Paul's and the Guildhall.

As part of the rebuilding, it was decided to erect a permanent memorial of the Great Fire near the place where it began. Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor General to King Charles II and the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, and hisfriend and colleague, Dr Robert Hooke, provided a design for a colossal Doric column in the antique tradition. They drew up plans for a column containing a cantilevered stone staircase of 311 steps leading to a viewing platform. This was surmounted by a drum and a copper urn from which flames emerged, symbolising the Great Fire. The Monument, as it came to be called, is 61 metres high (202 feet) - the exact distance between it and the site in Pudding Lane where the fire began.

The column was completed in 1677, and in accordance with Wren's original intention, was at first used as a place for certain experiments of the Royal Society, but vibrations caused by ceaseless traffic proved too great for the success of these experiments and they were discontinued; thereafter the Monument became a place of historic interest, unique of its kind, providing visitors with an opportunity to look across London in all directions from a height of about 160 feet, being the level of the public gallery."

Lincoln

I found myself in Lincoln on Monday as my Dad had an old army friend from USA visiting, and he wanted to go see Lincoln cathedral and castle. So off I went as a dutiful son.

What a beaufiful place! And just ripe for filming in (Ron Howard agrees with me as he filmed part of The Da Vinci Code in it lol).

Got to find me a reason to bring my next film there (or write one thats set there! lol)

Royal graffiti

We've upscaled the house requirements for Expose. Gone is the farmhouse/cottage, now we are looking for a Country House/Manor house lol.

I have visited some AMAZING places recently. Some incredible houses with so much history sloshing around that I they dont know what to do with it!

One house, Great Tangley Manor has a room made from the beams of captured Spanish Galleons from the Armarda! lol. But also this house has had a few kings stay over the years. And there seems to be a trend of the Monarch scratching their name into a set of windows! lol. King George and Queen Mary, and King Edward VIII (who was called Albert)

But still looking for the prefect house. There are actually so many I dont know where to start! loo. Fingers crossed.

Standing Tall

A really cool picture from 1918.

FACTS:
Base to Shoulder: 150 feet
Right Arm: 340 feet
Widest part of arm holding torch: 12 1/2 feet
Right thumb: 35 feet
Thickest part of body: 29 feet
Left hand length: 30 feet
Face: 60 feet
Nose: 21 feet
Longest spike of head piece: 70 feet
Torch and flame combined: 980 feet
Number of men in flame of torch: 12,000
Number of men in torch: 2,800
Number of men in right arm: 1,200
Number of men in body, head and balance of figure only: 2,000

Total men: 18,000

The Corpus Clock

Prof Stephen Hawking is to unveil a remarkable £1 million clock with no hands that pays tribute to the world's greatest clockmaker.

One clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude, took 36 years to build and he was still calibrating it when he died at his home in London on March 24, 1776, his 83rd birthday.

The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building.

It will be unveiled on 19 September by Prof Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time.

Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist who studied at the College in the 1950s has put £1 million of his own money and five years into the project.

"One of my heroes is John Harrison," he says.

Of Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement', explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping.

"No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escape wheel 35 mm across and hidden in the case, it is 1.5 m across and visible with the grasshopper escapement around the outside," said Dr Taylor.

He calls the new version of the escapement a 'Chronophage' (time-eater) - "a fearsome beast which drives the clock, literally "eating away time".

It is the largest Grasshopper escapement of any clock in the world.

The Chronophage "hypnotises the watcher with its perpetual motion, punctuated by an extraordinary repertoire of slow blinks, jaw-snaps and stings from its tail," says Dr Taylor.

The Corpus Clock, a true mechanical mechanism, which is wound up by an electric motor, has no hands. "It is a new way to show time, with light," said Dr Taylor.

The clock has no digital numbers, either, but instead a series of slits cut into the face, each a tenth of a degree across.

Blue LED lights are arranged behind the slits, and 60 quarter inch lenses, so that when the escape wheel moves, a series of rapidly darting lights runs in concentric circles to mark passing seconds, and pause at the correct hour and minute.

What appears to be lights flashing in sequence are actually controlled mechanically, using the same principle as a zoetrope, the old fashioned way to view a moving image through slits. The total wattage used by the clock is less than that of three 60 watt bulbs.

Its massive round face, nearly five feet in diameter, was engineered from a single sheet of stainless steel, the mouldings - like a series of waves rippling outwards - were blasted into place by precisely-controlled explosions under water. On the hour, a chain drops into a wooden coffin hidden behind the clock "to remind us of our mortality," he said.

The clock also plays tricks on the observer, seeming occasionally to pause, run unevenly and even go backwards. All this is achieved through mechanics rather than computer programming.

Harrison used his clocks as time standards for the marine chronometers he had pioneered to deliver accuracy great enough to allow the determination of longitude at sea.

There have been few significant advances in the mechanical clock since Harrison went against the grain of contemporary thinking by using large pendulum swings, enlarging the pendulum's "dominion" to reduce errors.

Among Harrison's many remarkable innovations was the gridiron mechanism, consisting of alternating brass and iron rods assembled so that expansion and contraction rates cancelled each other out as the chronometer moved from the tropics to colder climes.

He was also the inventor of the first caged roller bearing, the father of the ball bearing, in his last clock. Over 100 ball bearings are used in the Corpus clock.

Nobody expects the Czech Inquestion

The museum of Medieval Torture in Prague doesn't leave you in much doubt that it wasn't a good time to be a non-believer in the middle ages - or a woman frankly. Certainly not one who was good with herbs, or maybe had a wart on her nose. http://www.heartofeurope.cz/museum_6.html#torture

People were just so inventive at inflicting pain on other humans. And some of the things had for women! Jesus, only a man, and one who wasn't getting any, could have thought of those!

But the bloody-thirsty schoolboy in me sure enjoyed it! lol