Prolific coffee chain Starbucks has announced it intends to revamp its network of cafes to coincide with the Olympics and Queen’s Jubilee this summer, commencing with the chain’s 70 London outlets.
This will attempt to move away from the standardised approach taken thus far to pursue individually designed stores that fit in with their local neighbourhoods.
The Drum: Starbucks embark on store refresh ahead of the Olympics
Nowadays our orientation is very often not longer based exclusively on the actual geography and their landmarks. There are loads of alternatives, from street numbers to GPS routing in our smartphones, to guide us to a destination. All of those wayfinding devices have in common that they are abstracted projections of the real world’s spatial arrangement. Which brings us to two interesting implications: First, because abstraction means in this case a decrease of information, something is lost. And second, the longer you are using a device the more you accept it or get used to it. For instance the geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.
‘Metrography’ attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.
Benedikt Groß: Metrography – London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map
celebrates the varied and visual qualities of fast food signage, and the people involved. On the surface it may all look the same, but the differences reflect a ubiquitous, and humorous vernacular design. It will make you laugh, ponder and hungry for chicken!
After enduring an increasingly dull CRM conference in central London, my colleague and I decided to skip the concluding question-and-answer session and make our separate ways into the city. I got hold of my dear friend Tom, and we agreed to meet outside Tottenham Court Road tube station before heading off east to meet up with some more nice folk. I stood under the covered entrance to the Dominion theatre where we had agreed to meet, smoking a cigarette and killing a few minutes until our agreed meeting time. It was wonderful to be back in the hustle and bustle of the city I call home. I remember savouring the noise, the smells, the drizzle.
When Tom appeared, we rounded the corner to the first bus stop in New Oxford Street, and pratted around with the ticket machine before stepping back to wait for the right bus. “So,” said Tom, for we had not had a proper catch-up in a long while, “what’s this I’ve been hearing about you having seizures?” With spectacular comic timing, and part-way through a word in my reply, it happened again.
These days, I don’t often have cause to encounter the Metro newspaper that clutters the entirety of the London public transport system of a morning. For something that used to play a vaguely significant role in my morning routine, I feel I should miss it.
The truth of the matter is that I don’t. In fact, I’m rather glad that I don’t encounter it, as it saves me from the temptation to read it. The paper is a muddle of articles partly recycled from the previous day’s Evening Standard, awkwardly-written “light interest” items, and a crossword.
“Everything you ever wanted to know about London — written by Londoners.” Those of us in the city should throw ourselves at this—it could be mindblowingly useful.
The origins of the existing UK Postcode go back as far as the middle of the nineteenth century and arose from the rapid growth of London in the earlier years of that century. So rapid was this that the then Post Office could no longer regard the city as a single town from the viewpoint of sorting mail. Thus the division of London into Postal Districts in 1857-8 effectively divided the capital into smaller and semi-independent postal towns. Sir Rowland Hill, the designer of the first stamp and the man who introduced the uniform postal rate for the whole country, carved up London into eight such Districts.
Look through the window as you travel between Tottenham Court Road and Holborn on the Central Line and you’ll see a station – where no passengers have alighted since 1932. This used to be British Museum station. Or perhaps you may notice the tunnel wall change from cast iron tubing to bricks as you travel on the Piccadilly Line between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner. This also used to be a station. Down Street, closed in the same year as British Museum. These stations are often referred to as ghost stations.
There are about 40 abandoned or relocated stations on the Underground network along its entire 255 miles (408Km) of trackway – some subsurface and some above ground. Some have vanished without trace whereas others are almost intact, grimey time capsules of the era when they were closed.
London Underground History – Disused Stations on London’s Underground