Your New Leicester Square

There can be no doubt that Leicester Square needed a make over. Despite being the go to location for just about every major UK film premiere, and despite being dominated by the art deco splendour of the Odeon cinema, the square itself was run down, scruffy and down right seedy. Now, there is not too much wrong with seedy,  it does tend to go hand in hand with areas of entertainment like the Square, but the powers that be obviously decided that something needed to be done and in December 2010 work commenced on a complete revamp.

As Dylan Thomas once said “time passes”, and I found myself wandering and wondering thorough the square. Wandering because that’s what I do and wondering, not for the first time, if it would ever be finished. The hoardings declared “Your New Leicester Square, Opening April 2012“. I’m no expert but given that there were only four days of showery April remaining and a considerable amount of work still ongoing , that date seemed a little optimistic.

Finally, three weeks into May, it has happened. The hoardings are down and no doubt the crowds, encouraged by the warm weather, are already filling the space, leaving their litter and scrawling their names on the freshly hewn granite but hey, that’s life.

I haven’t yet seen the finished product, but I suspect that when I do I’m going to find it just a little too clinical but not to worry, it’ll soon gain the patina of the masses and will eventually reacquire that touch of seediness that it really needs to become London’s premiere entertainment district. Enjoy!

 All photographs, except the banner and the Odeon, predate December 2010. 

Does Anyone Really Understand The London Postal District Boundaries?

The boundaries are a bit of a mystery. Sometimes they make sense but quite often they don't. They frequently meander around with no apparent regard for development or geography and occasionally they rampage across the landscape , cherry picking specific locations for no apparent reason. Perhaps there are logistical requirements, spreading out the workloads of the poor beleaguered posties. Or perhaps it's all a big Post Office in joke. Who really knows?

You do have to ask yourself, just why it is necessary for Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to be in five different postal districts? Surely, it would have made sense for the boundary to follow the perimeter of the parks. It was hardly going to tax the resources of any one district, but no, the parks are unevenly divided between W1, W2, W8, SW1 and SW7, with the lines curving and twisting through the parks. The Serpentine, for instance, largely belongs to W2, but SW7 takes a bite out of its southern shore. The main north south boundary on the western side of the parks deviates to take most of the Round Pond into W8 but still manages to leave part of it behind in W2!

There are examples of this strangeness all over London, if you care to look. In reality, of course, it makes very little difference to our lives, but it is nice to know that this City so often seems to find a way to avoid conforming to what most people would consider to be logical…………….and I like that!