Shard

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001 020 2015-06-26 uk london shard canada water cloudsThe Shard, Southward, London. June 2015

The world is not static, and if the roots of our perceptions, traditions, hold static, then we are doomed, I say, into destructive dogma.

R.A. Salvatore

We’d just arrived in London after ten months of travel. This was our final leg before returning home. We were tired.

We left our homestay at Honor Oak and jumped on the overground towards London Bridge. Stepping out of the Metro station, there she lay: The Shard. The tallest building in Europe, eclipsing One Canada Tower in London. This is one serious building. (Designed by Renzo Piano, an Italian.)

And it was staring us in the face.

 

 

 

Passage

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002 LGV283 2015-06-18 france paris passage shopping arcade passage Jouffroy

Passage Jouffroy, Grandes boulevards, 2nd Arr., Paris. June 2015

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Thomas Hardy

Within these passages were invented the world’s first shopping malls.

This one, built in 1845, was the first to be built entirely of cast iron and glass, and to have radiant heating rising from the floors. They’re one of the treasures of urban Paris, but you have to search around for a bit to find them.

Spiral

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003 LGV265 france paris pigalle apartment staricaseOur staircase, Pigalle, 9th Arr., Paris. June 2015

It’s like climbing a staircase. I’m on the top of the staircase, I look behind me and I see the steps. That’s where I was.

Jeanne Moreau

Pattern and colour always attract me.

We lived for a month in the 9th Arrondissment of Paris, near the famed Moulin Rouge and Montmartre, where Van Gogh, among others, lived. Our apartment was an old one, and had not been fitted with a lift. We climbed these stairs every day, sometimes three or four times, to get to our floor, the sixth.

As far as we can tell, these were the original treads, the original cast iron balusters, and the original oak handrails. Over a hundred years old.