Battersea, in all its desolation

So Beautiful Britain magazine — a magazine that I could find no evidence of anybody having ever heard of — is putting out press releases about their latest "survey". It's a survey of Britain's worst eyesores and best loved buildings. But wait, doesn't that press release get a little bit, er, weird?

Beautiful Britain magazine stresses need for more red tape and launches e-petition.

some PR bollocks

Gosh.

Turns out that the purpose of the survey is not entirely to attract publicity for the magazine that nobody has heard of. Rather it's a chance for some poor provincial nimbys with money enough for a PR company to push their grudge against the planning laws. Their meaningless survey has come up with some brilliantly bizarre and entertaining "facts", though.

1. Three quarters of Britons live within six miles of an eyesore. FACT.
2. "A staggering 68% of Brits want to see more red tape."
3. "Most Brits (82%) claim that wind farms are noisy and destroy the countryside" — another reminder that ignorance should be no barrier to having an opinion.
4. Three quarters of Brits prefer "old-style buildings" to "run-down industrial estates". Presumably the other quarter are quite fond of the nation's run-down industrial estates.

The main purpose of the press release then is to promote Beautiful Britain's publicity stunt petition to the prime-minister:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to defend, encourage and enhance local democracy in the planning process, ensuring that everyone has a voice in decisions about large-scale and significant developments that affect them, and so deliver urban and rural communities that people can live and work in and enjoy.

Submitted by Rob Yarham of Beautiful Britain Magazine

Number of signatures? Five.

I hesitate to make fun of absurd press releases and publicity flops like this because the hyperactive children in PR will, on cue, claim that the fact that somebody is making fun of it means that it must have been a PR triumph. But by that meaningless metric, this one has already been a triumph: everyone is already making fun of the parochial nimbys at Beautiful Britain for including two of Britain's best loved landmarks in the list of eyesores: Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's Battersea Power Station:

Europe's largest brick building, a great art deco cathedral of industry and progress, literally the source of our power, the light that lit our homes for fifty years.

A cavernous hall hung with golden brown bricks that light up each time the sun goes down over Chelsea Bridge.

It is true that Battersea Power Station makes the eyes sore.

And it makes the heart ache.

A building that is such a part of the nation's history and heritage and culture — from its fundamental position in the development of the modern city infrastructure, through the iconic films and album artwork that defined an era, to the time that it decided to catch fire and have a blackout on the day that they had wanted to launch BBC Two.

Now roofless and rotting, surrounded by rubble in a neglected neighbourhood.

Empty inside, where once there were great panels of art deco controls for early electronics, quietly keeping the city moving through every shift and surge.

Paint peeling on crumbling chimney stacks supported by scaffolding that could fall in the next storm, already too late to save.

It is in this desolate state of destruction because nimbys and greedy developers have pissed around for thirty years with toy models and red tape. Beautiful Britain have cited this "eyesore" as evidence that planning laws need reform to give more power to local people to block modern eyesores in favour of the good old fashioned "old-style" old buildings from the good olden days, which three quarters of Brits would prefer to see in place of run-down industrial estates. Meanwhile, the actual local people of Battersea fight tirelessly to save their monument of maturing modernity from the red tape of the councils and the bullshit of the developers who calmly stand by watching the clock count down the remaining days before it simply topples over in the wind and washes away into the river.

Planning laws, corrupt councils and ineffective politicians really do alienate local people. They make it difficult for local people to improve their homes and communities, and easy for outside companies to come in and mess up. That makes people feel helpless, ignored, oppressed, and angry. There is a productive reaction to this: to organise and fight for the right progress and the right improvement. And there is a counter productive reaction: to oppose modernity whatever its individual merit, and hide away in a sickly-sweet mock-tudor facade of "Beautiful" Britain.

Catch it while you can. "The ruins of Battersea Power Station" are exhibited on the south bank of the River Thames from now until their collapse. Nearest tube: Pimlico.

Location: Castlerigg

In the house where I grew up, on the side of a kitchen cupboard above the kitchen sink is a small wide yellowed print on a bent and battered cobweb covered card, faded with the light of five thousand sunrises and dappled from the condensation of countless boiled kettles.

It's a print of the stone circle at Castlerigg, the Celtic Carles of Keswick, looking north over the shapely Cumbrian fells of Latrigg and Blencathra, known as Saddleback, in the northern lakes.

A neolithic druidical astronomy set, aligned with the autumn equinox and set centre stage on a minor eminence in a cavernous amphitheatre.

An antique shelter for the sheep, trap for the tourist, and prop for the photographer.

Built to catch the light and the lightning, the sun, the snow and the storms.

More photos in the Cumbria gallery...

Moving photographs

When flickr introduced video functionality, the community was divided. To a certain type of purist it was the beginning of the end, or the last straw; the big coporate takeover ignoring the wishes of a passionate established community in favour of mass appeal. A certain type of purist flouced off and cancelled their membership.

To the rest of us, flickr videos are just moving photographs: just another way to capture the light and landscape, the streets and streams of changing scenes.

more moving photographs...

I get mail

Spam mail. I don't mean your regular crap. Professional spam mail from the professional spammers: PR. Somebody put me on a list and now all kinds of companies and individuals are paying all kinds of PR agencies lots of money so that the PR agencies can pay the mailing list compiler a load of that money to send me spam about their crap photography competitions. And then I laugh at them in public. Money and time well spent all round, I think.

Last week, for instance, Rebecca at AppleJupp could hardly contain her excitement to be announcing to me the totally new "mobile phone photography course" being organised by "Photography Made Simple". For just forty pounds, this unique course will, for the first time ever in the UK, teach you how to take photos with your Blackberry. But where do you go to become a qualified cameraphoner? Crystal Palace.

Sadly, as it was last Saturday, I was too late to make an anonymous tip-off.

Tough on crime in fantasy land

I used to work on Cleveland Street in central London. Our next-door-neighbours at "The Tower, 60 Cleveland Street", were one British Telecom. Their offices were designed for some old fashioned method of telecommunications routing involving microwaves, and so it just happens to be one of the most distinctive -- most noticeable -- buildings in the country, being as it is, a narrow cylindrical building of 620 feet, covered in antennae and dishes, in an otherwise low-rise and conventional section of the centre of a major world city. Legend has it that, because of the potential military importance of the communications networks, the tower was only officially revealed to exist in 1993 by an MP responding to the persistent rumours -- conspiracy theories! -- that there might possibly be a large and unusual shaped top secret skyscraper somewhere in the vicinity of the Totenham Court Road. These days, the tower is largely redundant: the idea of using microwave technology as the backbone to a communications network didn't really have time to catch on before fibre-optics became the in thing. These days, most of those antennae and dishes are decoration, unplugged and silent, protected from removal by a grade II listing. The building is nothing more than heritage. It just sits there looking pretty, counting down the days to the Olympic games in LED lights that can be seen from miles around.

At the same time as working in Cleveland Street, I was living in the shadow of another transmitter, the more mundane but equally difficult to miss Crystal Palace Transmitter, which rises 720ft above the chalk hills eight miles south of the city centre. Though only the second tallest structure in the capital, once its 360 foot base height is factored in, it becomes the highest, and is prominent on the horizon from around the city. It is the main transmitter of television and radio -- local and national, BBC and independent, analogue and digital -- for the whole city.

In february 2008 I photographed the transmitter from the public park below it and was issued with a stop-and-search by the metropolitan police. A pair of officers drive a patrol car around Crystal Palace all day specifically for this purpose (at least, this was the case in 2008). I think they were probably just bored and wanted something to do -- somebody to talk to -- for five minutes. They explained the reason for their constant zealous and jealous vigilance: the transmitter hosts the emergency services radio system (I have subsequently been unable to verify this fact) and is known to be a terrorist target. One of the officers said, "nah, it's fine, just, like, you shouldn't put the photographs on the internet or whatever, cos they might be used by terrorists in planning an attack."

There are 418 flickr photographs tagged "Crystal Palace Transmitter", and approximately 38,000 google image hits, alongside the usual detailed Wikipedia article and fine google earth coverage. Its existence is not one of London's better kept secrets.

The point I want to make about all this is not about whether the things the policeman said are true or lawful, or to bitch about the general behaviour of individuals in the metropolitan police (these two might have been a bit dim, but they were perfectly nice), nor is it really about the need to stand-up for our civil liberties (you're familiar enough with that argument already). Because the idea of stopping and searching photographers in the name of keeping London safe fails at a much more fundamental level than the civil liberties argument: terrorists don't go around photographing the crystal palace transmitter. And piles of money -- our money -- are being spent to act upon the absurd idea that they do.

There are two main reasons why terrorists don't go around photographing the Crystal Palace transmitter -- apart from the fact that it's easier to look the photos up on Google Earth. Firstly, it's because terrorists aren't photographers. I don't simply mean that, like almost 100% of people, almost 100% photographers are not terrorists. I mean that terrorists aren't photographers. Perhaps in cheap TV dramas, where one can't illustrate that a character is shady by showing that he is thinking shady thoughts, terrorists go around with their expensive SLR equipment taking photographs of their targets. In the real world, they don't. When asked for evidence to support the efficacy of their activity, the best the police can do is point to one guy who went around filming stations with a phonecam and who was successfully prosecuted for, er, fraud and immigration offences. He could, perhaps, theoretically, be linked to terrorism, though, they say. And apparently that's good enough evidence for police in London.

Secondly, terrorists don't go around photographing the Crystal Palace transmitter because terrorists aren't interested in the Crystal Palace transmitter. Not unless they are shit terrorists. I'm not an expert on the way terrorists think, but I understand that Terrorism Studies 101 teaches that the goal of the terrorist is to make a scene: to get into the headlines and get into people's heads; to spread their message and to spread fear. Toppling a tower in a suburban park and depriving a few million people of Celebrity Big Brother for the five minutes that it takes the engineers to switch on the backup signals is somewhere down in the thousands on the list of the most effective ways one could achieve that goal. Toppling an iconic piece of architecture in a busy central business district -- even if the tower was functionally redundant -- would have a far higher impact. Which is exactly why terrorists did target the BT Tower: the IRA exploded a bomb there in 1971. But I never did get a stop-and-search on Cleveland Street.

Some of us still cling to the unfashionable idea that if one wants one's actions to be effective, they need to have some basis in reality and be informed by evidence about how the world works. The Home Office told us what they think of that idea back in October. If there's one thing the Home Office can be commended for, it's being consistent in ignoring the inconvenient complications of the real world as they instead throw our money away on absurd ineffective solutions to serious social and security problems.

Housekeeping

I have been quiet here for a couple of weeks while getting my blogging in order. Over the past couple of years I've been blogging here sporadically on a random assortment of topics from photography to publishing via skepticism and hardcore science. Because that combination of interests is rather unique and few of you care to read my uninformed thoughts about all of them, but because I can not decide on any particular topic to give up writing about, the blog is therefore being broken up and the parts sold to the highest bidders. So from now on, you can find me blogging in these places:

• On the nature of science, skepticism and bad arguments at Lay Science
• On science publishing, open data, and the future of the scientific paper at Journalology
• On hardcore cancer biology at a location yet to be announced
• and the stuff that I just made up off the top of my head -- the LabLit and Skepticism Lit -- at another location yet to be announced

Leaving this site to become a dedicated photography site. That doesn't mean I won't be writing much here. I'm going to be stepping up the blogging about photography and about being a photographer in London and the UK, and about some of the photogenic and not-so photogenic locations that I stumble upon. You may also have noticed that the site has just been reskinned ready for its new photography focus -- do take a look around at the updated galleries!

But what if you do happen to have all of the same interests as me and do want to hear my uninformed views on all of them? That's OK! I've made another little site to amalgamate them all -- you just need to subscribe to that!

Thanks to everyone who subscribes, and please take a moment to update your subscriptions -- unless you were only ever here for the photography talk.

Extract

Here are a couple of short extracts from a piece I started writing in the summer on the subject of research fraud. One day I will find the time to pick up work on it again. By this stage in the story is has been established that the narrator is a European student, the setting is the Midwestern United States, and "Jeff" is the narrator's boss, an Assistant Professor.

It is a banal coincidence that Sabriena and I celebrate the anniversary of our birthdays on the same day of the year.  The day happens to fall in the second week of August, nine days after Kate and my arrival.  Aside from Sabrina herself, the only person who wished me a happy birthday on that occasion was the large bored desk clerk at the Social Security Administration.  Kate and I had taken the afternoon off and the bus downtown to queue up for an hour in order to receive the magic number that opens up the exciting possibilities of bank accounts, pensions, and legitimate salaries.

And so I turned twenty standing in a queue just so that a clerk could fill in some forms on my behalf.  Afterwards, Kate went out to spend the evening exploring the downtown area of the city; for me, however, finding out just how soulless and depressing that city centre is would have to wait for another day.  I had to ride the bus back up the hill to the university.  I had been asked to.  Well, not exactly asked to.  It was simply assumed that I would.  Jeff had already given me the work to do.

When I arrived back, shortly after five, Sabrina was still working too.  Working rapidly but with great skill.  Transferring micro-quantities of liquids between millilitre Eppendorf tubes with a speed and accuracy that was thrilling to watch -- a skill that I would soon acquire myself.  Sabrina had two young children and a birthday dinner appointment that she couldn't miss.

I had no such excuses.  That would be the first day that I would work through to eight, and it would not take long for this to become normal.  Jeff seemed like a nice enough guy, just a little hard working, hard driving, and ambitious.  I was fine with that; I might have to learn to say "no" if ever I found myself with other things to do, I thought, but otherwise I didn't mind the work.  And he was friendly and jolly with everybody.  He shared jokes about the latest publications with the professor emeritus who sometimes toured the building in his wheelchair.  He shared jokes about last night's basketball with the cleaner.  The kind of person who, when he asks you how you are, you don't even notice that he couldn't care less.

So I found myself spending an evening in the cramped and crowded culture room, one of several small rooms that doubled as a partition between our half of the wing and our neighbouring lab.  This room, ten feet by eight, was stuffed with two incubators, similar in size and design to the standard upright fridge-freezer, and two great laminar flow cabinets. These latter devices provide a a metre by half-metre working space with a glass screen and aperture to insert one's arms, surrounded by an array of bulky nineteen-eighties machinery for maintaining the correct pressure and airflow for sterile technique.

I wasn't alone, of course.  Often I would find myself last to leave the laboratory, but as often there would be somebody still to bid goodnight to at seven, eight, nine o'clock.  On this occasion it was the post-doc Earl.  He was occupying one of the cabinets, processing fresh surgical explants ready for his experiments.  I silently gave thanks to be working with a long immortalised population of cells, happily growing suspended in nutrients in a jar, free from the grisly details of life in a complex multicellular organism.  I settled down where the fresh flesh -- the bloody fatty cancerous lump -- would be out of sight.

Over those three hours or so of repetitive mixing of liquids, swirling of dishes, counting of cells and centrifuging of tubes, Earl and I chatted.  About our projects and our governments, the places and the people that we knew.  He was a proper American, from Biloxi Mississippi.  Wide and freckled, bald and bearded and southern-accented.  An educated liberal, of course – everyone was.

And we talked about the lab and its people, past and present.  We talked about the prof, Adam, who had been born Adolf in 1930s Germany; the other post-doc, John, from Oregon, who rose at four each morning to ensure that he could always be home for dinner with his daughters; the students, Sabriena and Tanya, and Kara and Billy who had married in Vegas; Pam the laboratory manager; and Jeff.  It wasn't the first time that I had heard stories about Jeff.  But up until then the advice had been vague, delivered with a smile and a wink.

Earl took no such trouble.  He was never rude to Jeff, but he was the only person I had seen return Jeff's charm with a blank face that asked "why the fuck is this guy still talking to me?” Jeff and Earl talked about politics in exchanges that would be described as "robust".  As a reaction to his Chinese upbringing, Jeff had fallen to the opposite extreme of American libertarianism, and he was probably the only academic in the building who had supported the war.  But Earl didn't hate Jeff for his politics.  He could handle robust exchanges.

It was hypocrisy and shallow charm that Earl hated.  The way Jeff talked to Sabrina when an experiment failed.  The pressure that he put on her to work late and not see her children, when he was driving home to his own.  And it was the loss of the previous laboratory manager, Joannie, who had been under Jeff's management.  She had quit without giving notice after only a few months of it, and nobody ever found out the exact reason.  A straw just broke the camel's back, they supposed.  Despite his distance from those events, Adam had at least had the sense to take direct responsibility for Pam when she was hired in Joannie's place. "Don't let him bully you," Earl said.

--

By the end of August, I was largely left to manage experiments and get on with them myself.  I had been taught all of the basic procedures and scribbled notes in a file labeled “Joannie's Protocols”, so Jeff disappeared to his office.  He would occasionally come down to the lab to look at some results, declare them unsatisfactory, and give orders for a repeat experiment, or some variation with a different drug or concentration.  Cell culture experiments take some time.  Not because the procedures are complicated and intensive -- though they can be -- but because cells need to be grown for several days, exposed to drugs for hours and given a day or more for the effect of the chemicals to become apparent; proteins separated on paper need to be incubated with antibodies overnight; photographic films left for hours to pick up faint sources of luminescence; and stocks of cells need feeding at three day intervals – no more, and no less.

The job of the cell biologist is therefore not a nine to five monday to friday affair.  Working at weekends -- just the essential tasks as part of ongoing projects -- is normal.  Everybody does it sometimes.  It was the last saturday in august that I got on my new bicycle and rode off into the heatwave at ten in the morning.  There was an hour of essential tasks to see to, and perhaps some less essential ones, which could really wait until monday, but which involved results that people were very keen to see.

When I wondered in, Adam was making a rare visit to the shop floor.  He stood at the edge of a very large puddle almost shouting at the man in the sleeveless shirt and tool belt who stood beside him staring at the water.  Jeff and Earl were moving soggy cardboard boxes up onto shelves.  Billy had headphones on and was standing in the puddle working and ignoring everything that was happening around him.  Ten minutes later Adam and the facilities guy were joined by Karen, head of the neighbouring lab, who had come to collect her barrel of distilled water from the water distillery that we shared with the rest of the wing.

It transpired that the second-year undergraduate student who did odd-jobs in Karen's lab several evenings each week had set the distillery running the previous evening.  Only that day returned from the summer break, by the time he had completed his other chores he had forgotten about the machine and went home.  Overnight, a gallon of water each hour bubbled over the top of the barrel, tumbled down the sides of its trolley, and slowly spread across the watertight black linoleum floor.  Most of it had accumulated in the little tissue culture room, whose wooden furniture would still be damp and beginning to smell on Monday.

On the Monday morning I saw that undergraduate for the first time. Karen led him in to make an apology to Adam.  Short and shy, he was trying to disappear behind her, but she pushed him out to stand in front of everybody and speak.  I didn't care what damage his flood might have done.  I was far too distracted by his blue eyes, scruffy hair, hint of beard, and the nerdy pun on his t-shirt.  I lent on a bench and tipped a jar crashing over the floor before he could finish his apology. But by then nobody else really cared what damage his flood might have done either.  Reports of the first levee breaches were on the radio and eastern New Orleans was already under water.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed Biloxi Mississippi, and the fungal contamination that grew in the damp tissue culture room destroyed hundreds of hours of carefully prepared surgical explants.  Three days later, while Earl threw piles of flasks and dishes into a biohazard bag, Jeff stood in the doorway of the tissue culture room complaining about the sudden rise in gas prices.  Earl broke his nose, walked out, and never came back.

Competition time

IanVisits notes the irony of the Docklands Light Railway, famous for their absurd private policing of passengers' photography, launching a photography competition and inviting you to send in photographs taken at their stations, even though their security patrols stop people from taking photographs at their stations. Obviously the scheme was dreamt up by the PR and marketing department, who think that they can get hundreds of publicity photos, some of which are bound to be quite good, for a single payment of £150 (or nothing at all if the prize was in turn given to them free by the manufacturer's marketing department) -- a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring a photographer.

It's a trick that marketing departments and PR companies everywhere seem to have really caught on to this year. Don't pay a professional photographer a grand to get the shot you need, make people do it for free! Offer a cheap prize as bait, call it a competition, and make sure the small print gives you unlimited rights to the catch. Then, target your spam at a few good photographers, and hope that some of them fall for it.

Here are just a couple of the more surreal competition subjects that PR agencies have pestered me with lately:

• Media Consulta PR agency send unsolicited mail on behalf of the EU Safety and Health at Work Agency, who seem to think that it would be exciting to share "my image of Safety and Health at Work." Ironically, their unsolicited bulk mail appears to break theEU's rules on unsolicited bulk mail. But at least the EU were offering a whole €1,000.
• Ceres PR send unsolicited mail on behalf of the HGCA -- the cereal farmers' marketing board. They've created "Annual Farmhouse Breakfast Week", and think that you might want to hand over your photography in exchange for a mid-range kitchenware set. Hey, why not also get a mathematics student to write the formula for a perfect breakfast?

Sadly, the DLR competition seems to have made a schoolboy error -- not in asking members of the public to do something that another department is using all the intimidation it can muster to stop the public doing, but in its offering of a prize. A cheap compact digital camera. Who would want a cheap compact digital camera? Hint: not the brilliant photographers you want to give you fantastic free marketing shots.