Think for Yourself

Today we enjoyed one of our favourite Sunday afternoon activities: wandering through East London, where even roadwork signs are fair game for a bit of added attitude.

The Hackney Peace Carnival mural (completed in 1985) takes up one side of a nearby building (and a detail from the mural also covers one side of our Hackney library cards).

Hackney has (more than) its fair share of buildings that either seem like they could be derelict

or are unambiguously so.

It also has a seemingly endless number of artists' studios,

and we stumbled upon an open studios day at a building that we hadn't visited before.

With friendly people, complimentary hot beverages (did I mention it was freezing today?), and the chance to wander in and out of a variety of studio spaces, we were happy that we happened to zig instead of zag, arriving on Hertford Road by chance. The only disappointment of our visit was that there were some nice pieces up for silent auction, but the minimum bids were far too rich for us.

This graffiti marks a construction site where condos seem likely to appear in the near future:

The underground car park in this building is right by the canal--hence the traffic lights and the bollards.

Although I initially thought this was a wall of upside-down hearts, when we got closer, the hearts turned into right-side-up bums!

It may be December, but the only snowflakes in London are still the electric kind.

Although this tree is certainly nice enough, the surrounding bits lend quite a bit of sadness to the celebration, don't you think?

As we hurried home for steaming mugs of coffee, we passed Santa's reindeer, relaxing in the pub with just two weeks to go before their big night.