Meet Agata Oleksiak (aka OLEK), a “New York-based Polish artist” who’s the world’s first crochet street artist. Her works have been seen all over New York and London, and she’s bringing a bit of crocheted color to the world with her psychedelic yarn works and twisted gimp-esque crocheted bodysuits.

Head to the link to see some of her awesome guerilla artworks, from a crocheted car to the Wall Street Bull and some seriously twisted yarn covered rooms in-between. Olek seems hell bent on making the world a warmer place, one bright pink skein at a time.

Link  –via DesignTAXI

This 33 foot tall LEGO Christmas tree was unveiled last week in London’s St. Pancras International Station. It’s made out of 600,000 bricks, features ornaments made out of LEGOs and took over two months to build. Hopefully the children who visit the station won’t be tempted to take the towering plastic tree apart!

Link

This video is a fast-moving historical fashion show with dancing! The Viral Factory produced it for the grand opening of Westfield Stratford City on September 13th, which I believe is a shopping center, although it’s kind of hard to tell from the website. Music by Tristin Norwell. Link -Thanks, Vincenzo!

There’s an amazing collaboration between man and insect on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, a cloth woven purely from the silk of over a million Golden Orb spiders. This magnificent textile, naturally golden in color and seemingly imbued with it’s own luminescence, took over four years to make after eighty gatherers spent five years gathering the silk. Such a feat has not been attempted since 1900, when a spider silk textile that disintegrated over time was created for the Paris Exposition Universelle, and it’s not surprising that such a feat is almost never attempted, for the spiders with the best silk can only be found in Madagascar. But is all the effort really worth it for a piece of cloth that isn’t long for this world?

Link Image via John Brown

The River Fleet in London is a tidal river that once provided water for many industries. Over the years, it became quite polluted, then was consigned to flow underneath the city as London grew, until it was eventually incorporated into the sewer system. But the river is still there, filling its tunnels at high tide and ebbing to a trickle at low tide. Read about what happened to the River Fleet and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user sub-urban.com)

A new exhibition in London’s Mica Gallery will feature contemporary Egyptian art, much of which depicts themes and imagery from the Arab revolution. The exhibit includes graffiti from the streets of Cairo re-created on a gallery wall and a mummified man wrapped in pages from the Qur’an. Read more about this exhibition at the Guardian link.

Link

Hard to believe that some of these photos are over 130 years old. This post features a collection of interesting photography from the 1880’s of London. Some of the photos give a sense of everyday dwellings that people at the time lived in while others show the amazing architecture of the city at the time.

Link

Aha! I knew it! Those aren’t bearskin caps after all, as this ad for Eurostar by the Leg Agency proves.

Link via reddit | Agency Website

Photographer Horace Warner took hundreds of pictures of street urchins in the East End neighborhood of Spitalfields in 1912. At the time, it was one of London’s harshest slum areas, but has been gentrified in the past few decades. These photographs are a peek into the world that inspired Charles Dickens.

Little is known of Horace Warner and nothing is known of his relationship to the nippers. Only thirty of these pictures survive, out of two hundred and forty that he took, tantalising the viewer today as rare visions of the lost tribe of Spitalfields Nippers. They make look like paupers, and the original usage of them to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute, Quaker St, Spitalfields, may have been as illustrations of poverty – but that is not the sum total of these beguiling photographs, because they exist as spirited images of something much more subtle and compelling, the elusive drama of childhood itself.

Link -via Nag on the Lake

Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London . He took over 10,000 photographs, which he edited down to 4,000. He cut them up and pasted them together  into a composite photographic map of the city of London measuring 7.5ft × 4ft.

Nishino’s collages are on display at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London until April 2.

Link- Via The Map Room

What a wonderful design! Nick Patchitt of Nick Prints is offering everything important about London all rolled up into a big circle of icons. Can you name ‘em all? Via Londonist

Ted Burden, the centre’s founder, said: “We explained to him that if foxes were meant to be 72 storeys off the ground, they would have evolved wings.

“We think he got the message and, as we released him back on to the streets of Bermondsey shortly after midnight on Sunday, he glanced at the Shard and then trotted off in the other direction.”

Romeo likely won’t get another chance to live in a penthouse. Link -via The Daily What

Workers from the Thames Water company in east London plead with customers not to pour grease down the drain, because it clogs the sewers. That message is sing the tune of “Good King Wenceslas”. From the YouTube link:

Thames Water will donate 1p to WaterAid for every hit the film gets on YouTube (up to a maximum of 200,000 views, ending on 31 January 2011) to support the charity’s life-saving work to improve access to safe water and sanitation to the world’s poorest people.

Link -via Arbroath

Wouldn’t you love to browse a shop like this? Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in London is a Ministry of Stories project that gives children a place to go for inspiration and where they can write and get help with their school work. It was inspired by Dave Eggars’ 826 project responsible for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store in New York. The Hoxton Street store shelves are filled with items like brain jam and organ marmalade, pickled eyeballs, human snot, and my favorite, a canned vague sense of unease. Link -via b3ta

Jeffrey Martin shot 8,000 photographs of London and then spent six weeks stitching them together to create this amazing seamless 360-degree panorama of the city. You can zoom in and lose yourself looking at details, or zoom back and admire the city as a whole. The quality of this panorama was impossible to achieve only a year ago -and at 80 gigapixels, it is the largest 360-degree panorama in the world! Open the map to find specific landmarks, or take the tour to see places you’d never think to look for on your own. This is the next best thing to traveling to London, and you don’t even have to leave your desk! Link

(Image credit: Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net)

Lily’s Kitchen recently opened on Pimlico Road, in London’s upscale Belgravia neighborhood, and dog owners were quick to have their pooches test out the menu, for free. That’s right, your four-legged friends get to sit at one of the restaurant’s three tables and fill up their bellies with organic food served by a waiter, and you don’t have to pay for it. It sounds to good to be true, but this is just a clever way a dog food company has found to promote their line of organic foods.

During the six week period Lily’s Kitchen is open, dogs will get the chance to be the stars, for a change, while their owners relax or take care of their daily chores. The dogs are served their favorite dishes in paper bowls, by waiters who actually love serving canines, because they never complain about the food, check or stuff like that. After they’ve filled their stomachs, dogs have a wide range of pleasant activities to enjoy. They can have their bellies rubbed, snooze on a comfy sofa, have their aches soothed by a holistic vet, or even enjoy a nice story, read to them by members of the restaurant staff.

Link

Westminster Palace on the Thames river in London is the place where the parliament of the United Kingdom meets, both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The palace, along with Westminster Abbey and St. Margaret’s Church, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is also a must-see for anyone visiting London. The first palace on the site was built in the eleventh century as a residence for royalty. A fire almost destroyed the palace in 1512. After that, the King or Queen lived elsewhere and parliament met in the rebuilt structure. Another large fire ruined much of the complex in 1834. The rebuild after that disaster (which incorporated surviving parts of the original palace) gave the Palace of Westminster the look it has today. The construction took decades. In 1844, parliament decided the new palace should have a bell tower with a clock, which became the iconic tower we all recognize.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jon McGovern)

The nickname “Big Ben” is specifically for the clock’s hour bell (officially named the Great Bell), the largest of the five bells, but in common use also refers to the clock faces and the tower itself.

However, the proper name for the tower is the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster. It is also called St. Stephen’s Tower, a name given to the tower by Victorian journalists who also called the hall of parliament “St. Stephen’s Hall”. The Chapel of St. Stephen was originally built inside Westminster Palace as a private church for the king in the 13th-14th centuries (it took 70 years to complete). In 1547, parliament moved in and the chapel became the Commons Chamber. The House of Commons met there until the fire of 1834, which explains the use of the term St. Stephen’s Hall as used by journalists.

The Great Bell that became known as Big Ben first went into service in the tower in 1859. The first big bell cast for the tower weighed 16 tons and was hung in the yard in 1856, as the tower was not yet completed. It cracked and was recast as a 13 and a half ton bell in 1858, and was hung in the belfry in 1859. The process of hanging the bell, which some already called Big Ben, took a total of 18 hours over two days. It was first rung on May 31, 1859.

Soon afterward, that bell cracked as well, but instead of replacing it, the decision was made to repair the crack and use a smaller hammer to ring it. A wise decision, as the original hammer was twice as big as was recommended by the forge that made the bell! The bell was also rotated slightly so the hammer would not hit the repaired spot.

(Image credit: Flickr use Bill Timmins)

The clock itself was designed by Edmund Beckett Denison according to strict specifications from parliament, particularly for the accuracy of the clock, which was to be within one second per day -a tall order in 1851! The design was carried out by clock makers Messrs E.J. Dent & Co. and was ready by 1854. However, the works sat at the company for five years until the tower was ready. The official name of the clock and all four of its faces is the Great Clock of Westminster.

Who was the original Big Ben, anyway? Some believe the name came from British heavyweight boxing champion Benjamin Caunt. Caunt’s career spanned from 1815 to 1845, although he participated in one fight in 1857 that ended in a draw as both men were exhausted. He was 42 years old by then. The bare-knuckled fighter stood over 6 foot 2 inches and weighed over 200 pounds -and was nicknamed “Big Ben” during most of his career.

Others say that the name Big Ben came from Sir Benjamin Hall, the Commissioner of Works from 1855 to 1858. The most common story is that Hall delivered a long speech to the House of Commons on what to name the bell. Hoping to end the diatribe, someone quipped, “Why not call it Big Ben?” which produced laughter throughout the hall. The only problem with this story is that there is no record of it actually happening. Another story is that the first bell forged had Hall’s name inscribed inside, which led workers to refer to the bell as Big Ben. The name was not inscribed when the bell was recast in 1858, as Hall was no longer Commissioner of Works by then. No one knows for sure which, if any, of these stories is the real reason for the name Big Ben.

(Image credit: Flickr user Dominik Gubi)

Tourist sites refer to the tower and the clock as Big Ben, which is only natural as tourists want to see the clock tower and don’t know the terms St. Stephen’s Tower or Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster.

This post was inspired by the comments following a post on Big Ben’s Twitter Feed. Thanks to all who contributed!

This one is pretty nifty: LEGO has a new kit that lets you build the Tower Bridge of London (complete with the iconic red Double Decker bus and the Black Cab) out of LEGO bricks. Link

"We’re used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale," said Danny Brackley, a sewer flusher with Thames Water. "We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a 4-foot wall of solid fat."

The fat is the product of Londoners’ "sewer abuse" — using the water system as general garbage disposal. Particularly troublesome is Londoners’ habit of pouring used cooking oil down the sink. Once in the sewer, the oil cools, congeals and then traps other garbage.

Getting at the goo was not easy. Teams of workers, replete with breathing apparatus to protect them from the rancid smell, had to attack the fat with shovels. They then used water cannons to break down the "fatbergs" inside the sewer.

Link (Photo: Stewart Turkington)

Can you spot the two dummy houses in this photo? They look like the other houses on this upscale London street, but they’re just facade, only 5 feet wide, and the doors and windows don’t open.

Give up? They’re the two in the middle with the 18 blackened windows.

Before 1868, there were actual houses where the fake onces are now, at 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens. But the new Metropolitan Railway was coming through, the world’s first underground railway, and the locomotives needed a stretch of track that was open to the elements in order to vent the smoke and steam that would otherwise accumulate in the tunnels. So the railroad demolished the houses and built a facade that matched the other houses on the street, with similar architectural details. But if you look around back you can see the house-sized gap behind the facade, with the obsolete tracks below it.

Close up of the ‘entrance’ to 24 Leinster Gardens, complete with railings, door and plants. There’s a long tradition of wagsters sending pizza deliveries, taxi cabs and religious representatives to this address!

Link – via bldgblog

(Image credit: Mike Slocombe)

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

Here are Wenlock and Mandeville, the mascots for the 2012 Olympics in London, England. Wenlock will represent the Olympic games and Mandeville will represent the Paralympic games. Their names are a piece of history.

Wenlock is named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock where, in the mid-19th century, the Wenlock Games became one of the inspirations for the modern Olympic movement.

Mandeville’s name is derived from Stoke Mandeville, in Buckinghamshire, home to Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

In the 1940s Dr Ludwig Guttman came to the hospital to set up a new spinal unit to help former soldiers suffering from spinal cord injuries.

Looking for ways to inspire those in his care he encouraged them to take up sport and the Stoke Mandeville Games was formed, widely recognised as a forerunner of the modern Paralympic movement.

The characters’ appearances are loaded with symbolism, explained at The Daily Mail. Link to story. Link to website.-via Holy Kaw!

A man named Chalmers Butterfield took these beautiful photos of London in 1949 in deep, rich Kodachrome.  Here’s one of Shaftesbury Avenue at Picadilly Circus.  You can see this one, and several others from the series, in hi-res at How To Be A Retronaut, a website that is trying to match up these views with photos of present-day London taken from the same spots.

For example, one of the Retronaut readers found this view of Grosvenor Chapel in Mayfair on Google Street View, and it matches up nicely with the Butterfield photo #4 here. Another reader found a contemporary Google Street View on Sloane Street near Sloane Square, which shows how much has changed architecturally on that street since Butterfield took photo #3 in 1949.  Note the men wearing hats.

Photo by Chalmers Butterfield. 

Link – via twitter

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

Artist Stephen Walter made an enormous, detailed, hand-drawn map of London. It’s called “The Island” and is a satire of Londoners’ alleged view that their city is independent of the rest of the UK. In an interview about his work, Walter said:

Discoveries such as the First Earl of Salisbury having honeymooned, in 1589, in what is now a dodgy part of Edmonton caused much amusement. The map charts the birthplaces of famous people such as Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Palmer, Noel Edmonds and Phyllis Pearsall (the originator of the London A-Z). It notes where Winston Churchill went to school, the gymnasium where Arnold Schwarzenegger trained, where the speed of sound was first recorded, the place where Oliver Twist was taught to thieve, the hotel where Hendrix died, sites of old palaces and prisons and the main encampments of the peasant revolts …

Link via Make | Artist’s Website | Interview

“Food remains and seeds indicate that the preferred snacks were oysters, crabs, mussels, periwinkles and cockles. Walnuts, hazelnuts, plums, cherries, peaches, dried raisins and figs were also popular…”

The distribution of food remains over the site suggested that there was a class divide in the consumption of snacks. [Museum of London archaeologist Julian] Bowsher explained that remains found underneath the gallery seating suggested that the wealthier classes munched on crabs and sturgeon, as well as imported treats like peaches and dried figs. Meanwhile, oyster shells were found scattered all over the yard area, where commoners stood.

“At that time, oysters were indeed the staple diet of the poor,” Bowsher said.

Link.  Image credit: Museum of London Archaeology

YouTube link.

This is a true color movie, not a “colorized” one.

This wonderful film was made in 1927 by Claude Friese-Greene. Colour film from the 1920s is exceptionally rare, and this is a very powerful example… The Cenotaph sequence from around 3:37 to 3:54 is very poignant. This was filmed only nine years after the end of the Great War. The women and looking at the wreaths would very likely be wives and mothers of the men killed, and the Second World War was, at that time, inconceivable.

Claude Friese-Greene was the son of pioneering cinematographer William Friese-Greene, and devoted himself to developing commercially his father’s colour process – Biocolour – but without great success. It was soon overtaken by Technicolor and Claude abandoned the process. His role as a pioneer of colour film has now been recognised.

Some aspects of London have changed a lot in 80+ years; others have changed very little.

Link.

The London Beer Flood of 1814

If you’re going to go out, you might as well go out doing something you love. You hear that saying a lot, but I doubt even the most die-hard beer-drinker would have enjoyed drowning in 232,000 gallons of suds during the London Beer Flood.

The year was 1814, and a very old vat at Meux’s Brewery containing 135,000 gallons of fermenting porter finally decided to give in to old age. One of the metal hoops surrounding the vat snapped; the resulting noise was heard up to five miles away. As if that much on  and as if that wasn’t bad enough, it knocked over a bunch of other vats, causing a grand total of nearly 1.25 million liters of beer to spill out onto Tottenham Court Road and other surrounding streets. The gush was so massive and powerful that two houses were entirely destroyed. At a nearby pub – which had probably previously enjoyed their proximity to Meux’s Brewery – a wall caved in, killing a teenage girl who worked there.  The Brewery was located in a poor part of town called St. Giles Rookery, which was a bunch of tenements and low income housing.  Entire families lived in basements of these buildings, and when the beer suddenly rushed into through windows and walls, people were unable to get out and drowned. All in all, eight people were killed that day. Another person is said to have died from alcohol poisoning the following day.

People capitalized on the tragedy, though – many of the residents ran out to the streets with pots and pans to salvage whatever free alcohol they could get their hands on. And shockingly, some people took to exhibiting their dead friends and family for money.  Obviously this was quite the freak accident and people outside of the area were curious. To raise a little money, enterprising citizens decided to show the corpses for a fee. The police had to put a stop to this practice when too many gawkers crowded into one house, which was structurally unsound from the flood. The floor collapsed, dumping the lot of them into a basement that was still half-full of beer. 

Despite paying for the funerals of the drunkenly departed, the Meux Brewery was still sued for neglecting their equipment, especially when it came to light that an employee had previously alerted a boss to a crack in the vat that eventually erupted.  However, the judge presiding over the trial declared the whole tragedy an Act of God, finding the company free of fault. Something tells me the ruling would be a little different today.

The Great Molasses Flood

You think drowning in beer is bad? At least you could attempt to swim through the beer. Trying to fight through a sea of molasses would be all but futile.

And that’s exactly what happened in 1919, when a vat of the sticky stuff exploded at the Purity Distilling Company in Boston. The tank was 50 feet tall, 90 feet in diameter and held 2.3 million gallons of molasses. Much like the vat of beer in London, the tank just gave out. First-hand accounts from people in the area said the rivets popping out of the tank sounded like a machine gun being fired. And then came the wave – a solid, 15-foot-tall swath of molasses, 160 feet wide and moving at an astonishing 35 miles an hour. When you consider that molasses is the epitome of “slow,” 35 miles per hour is nearly unthinkable.

It happened at 12:30 p.m., just as a bunch of workers at the factory were taking lunch. They were among the largest group of fatalities, which also included two 10-year-old children and a 65-year-old woman who was just sitting on her porch when the entire house was smashed on top of her. Two entire blocks were practically flattened by the tsunami of syrupy sweetness – buildings in the immediate vicinity were completely knocked clear of their foundations and fell to rubble in a matter of seconds. When it settled, the molasses was waist deep, making it almost impossible for rescuers to wade through and try to save survivors.

Sadly, this disaster definitely could have been prevented. The tank was hastily constructed thanks to the increasing demand due to the war – back then, molasses was used in gunpowder. The foreman who oversaw the construction of the tank had no background and apparently couldn’t even read a blueprint, according to multiple sources. He was in such a hurry he didn’t even bother to test the tank for leaks with water when it was complete, as was standard practice. The vat was immediately filled with molasses, and you’d better believe it started leaking almost immediately. It leaked so much that neighborhood kids could stop by, fill up cans with syrup, and take it home to their mothers. In response to complaints about the leaky monstrosity, the company had the vat painted brown so the leaks wouldn’t be so noticeable. Pretty responsible, huh?

The company tried to make the public believe that the “sudden” explosion was the result of dynamite deliberately planted by anarchists, but the public didn’t believe it – and neither did the judge and jury. It took nearly six years of investigation, but the report found without a doubt that the company had been extremely negligent. U.S. Industrial Alcohol was ordered to pay the families of the 21 victims a total of $1 million. Boston smelled of molasses for decades afterward; some residents say it still permeates the air on the right day with the right wind.

Photo from http://edp.org/molasses.htm.

Earlier this year, photographers Eamon Lane and Carlo Nicora spent one weekend to photograph one thousand people (Flickr) on the streets of London. They asked the same question more than 1,500 times and succeeded in capturing an image an average of every 40 seconds.

Now, Gerard Franquesa and Sergi López Graells took the idea to Barcelona (Flickr, first image NSFW in a WTF kind of way, though – you’ve been warned) in hope that the idea will then spread to other cities around the world).

It’s kind of like people watching from the comfort of your own home: Link – Thanks Gerard!

The folks at Eden TV, a new UK-based natural history television network, celebrated its launch by building a 16-foot-tall of a polar bear and cub stranded on an iceberg. The sculpture was then set free to float down the Thames in an attempt to bring attention to the new network and to raise awareness about the polar bear’s dwindling habitat. 

– via inhabitat

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

If there’s one thing Star Wars fans and non-fans can agree on its’ that the music for each film, composed and conducted by John Williams, is simply outstanding. The familiar tunes have transcended time to become some of the most recognizable and best scores in the history of cinema.

Lucasfilm and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra have teamed for Star Wars: A Musical Journey which is set to unveil in April at London’s O2 arena before blasting off on a European tour. The two hour show features clips from all six films, live narration and orchestration.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

London artists now have a solution to the dilemma of renting expensive studio space to work in. Furniture designer Auro Foxcraft purchased four old Underground subway cars for 200 pounds each and mounted them to a rooftop, creating some unique, affordable office space.

Located atop a warehouse in Shoreditch, London, Village Underground as it’s called, only costs artists 15 pounds a week. And while the roof is a work area for artists the warehouse below is used to exhibit their work.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by whitespace.

Jason shot these images with a camera attached to gyro-stabilized mounts from a Eurocopter AS355, hired out at around £1150 (GBP) per hour, using Nikon gear and either a 14-24mm or a 70-200mm lens. Even with that, the low light and heavy vibrations can make things difficult, Jason says "I often shoot tethered to my MacBook Pro to check the sharpness of the images whilst I shoot."

Link

From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by mrbabyman.

Inspired by a scene of abandoned London in the zombie horror flick 28 Days Later, Ian Mansfield of IanVisits blog decided to bike down to London early Christmas morning and snap a few photos. This one above is of Piccadilly Circus, in London’s West End, completely devoid of humans.

Link | More at Ian’s Flickr photoset

Don’t Panic TV has a clip of "Larry" (actually LRRY-1), a fire-breathing robo-dog, like it’s straight out of Mad Max, roaming the streets of London. The contraption is built by Lyle of the Mutoid Waste Company. Link