Made You Look

There are two sights visible from the Overground train between Camden Road and Kentish Town West that I've always meant to photograph, but I've never found myself in a good vantage point on the often-crowded trains until today. The first message (heading west) that beckons as you pass is this one, quite near the tracks:

The second is tiny in comparison, way off in the distance (I've even zoomed this photo a bit for clarity):

I always enjoy the combination of being loudly (in terms of font size) told to smile followed by a typographic whisper to panic (creative spelling aside). After many more stops, we got off in West London to wander a bit. When we passed this house, I had to look twice to make sure there really was a house somewhere behind all that foliage!

We went into Holland Park, keeping our visit short--not because of the park itself, which is quite wonderful, but because of my continuing battle with all the sneeze-inducing bits in the air. While I focussed in on the crane in the distance, Bob was first to spot the hippo!

Since we were in the neighbourhood, I wanted to have a peek at a piece by Dan Graham that has been placed in Holland Park as part of the London Festival of Architecture. Triangular Pavilion with Circular Cutout Variation H turned out to be a bit underwhelming,

but it still made for some interesting views from the right angles.

After we left the park, these impressive residences caught my attention, as much for their appearance as for their name: Observatory Gardens. (The novel I'm reading right now is called Observatory Mansions.)

It turns out that Observatory Gardens has its own claim to fame:

I spotted this next sight from across the street, and even when I got a closer look, I still couldn't make much sense of it. The Czech Corner Garden features sculptures entitled Haiku, by Vaclav Vokolek:

We walked for a short time on Portobello Road, where these Scrabble-esque tiles mocked us:

(I wish Ys were worth seven points!) Almost directly across the street, we spotted this plaque on George Orwell's former residence:

We wandered for a bit more,

slowly heading toward the rail station. A tiny Space Invader marker perched on this bridge,

and we made a detour into a big Sainsbury's shortly afterward to stock up on a few items. It was a good thing we stopped, because it absolutely poured while we were inside, with the rain drumming on the roof in a way that made us spend longer inside than we had initially planned. Even when we were done shopping, it was still raining, and we got quite wet on our way to the station. As I shivered in the cold rain, lugging my share of our sopping-wet grocery bags, I reminded myself that this was just the type of weather I had been hoping for! :-(