There is something disquieting about looking at a series of plates with similar images of the Library of Congress in Washington DC on them. It is not altogether clear where they are simply mementoes purchased in a souvenir shop or if they are smaller limited editions, gifts to privileged users or friends of the library. Perhaps it was to make the former feel like the latter. Representative of the collection as a whole, the plates shown here depict the library in isolation, representing it in a time before neighboring buildings were built or simply blurring them out. In an attempt to help me explain them, the CCA’s Head of Collection Reference Renata Gutman found an essay by Dale Allen Gyure The Heart of the University: A History of the Library as an Architectural Symbol of American Higher Education Winterthur Portfolio 42 (Summer/Autumn 2008) on the role of the library in American campuses.

Allen Gyure’s thesis – which focuses mainly on university libraries – has strange implications for libraries in the electronic age. He describes the tertiary educational system in the USA in the early part of the 19^th century as being emphatically based on learning by rote. Examining a Yale report of 1828, he writes: “implicit in the report was the remarkable reasoning that single text with recitations is superior to the use of the library.” Apart from one stunning exception at the University of Virginia, designed in part by Thomas Jefferson, university libraries at this time where above or adjacent to university chapels. They were infrequently open for lending and were usually small.

Gyure’s suggests that the turning point in the architecture of university libraries was when in 1882 the Harvard Board of Overseers changed the universities motto from Christo et Ecclesiae to Veritas. It is this moment when seeking rather than repeating becomes the dominant mode of learning. Expressed in architectural terms, Gyure says, from this date university libraries become central to campus planning, and finally, some years after Jefferson’s death , began to live up to his vision of learning by giving libraries central or dominating positions within campus plans.

Replacing chapels and central administration as the heart of the university, the library was elevated to a quasi-religious status. Today, in an era when the institutional parameters of a lending library are being questioned, this has a charge. Here is the library as temple, the library as a closed institution containing knowledge. And this is what makes these plates so strange and so powerful. Certainly, the Library of Congress has a specific power: founded as it is on Jefferson’s personal library, sold to the US government after the British destroyed the original library in 1812. But the sanctity of the institution typified a general feeling about libraries, while an image of it reproduced on a plate today prompts a sense of unease.

An essay by Karen Coyle explains the growing anxiety about electronic information and the library. She explains that:

“In the electronic age rather than owing a unit of information … the library typically leases access to information. The use of leased information is governed not by copyright law but by the contract with the individual information provider.”

The liberation of information from the physical realm creates an anxiety for the institution of the library. How does it monitor usage? Disseminate information? Is it in fact obsolete?

In the UK this sense of insecurity about libraries has been exacerbated by budgetary concerns. As local authorities in the UK are forced to contemplate library closures due to the cuts by a conservative-led government, we are trying to express exactly what it is that makes a library so special.

Alan Bennett writing in the LRB describes it thus:

“I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled.”

The library as repository of learning and literary success can be a daunting place for a young man. Bennett allows us to see how this relates to himself a working class boy at Oxford in the 1950s. He describes walking across a square which is surrounded by libraries and has one the Radcliffe Camera sitting in the middle: “crossing it on a moonlit winter’s night lifted the heart, though that was often the trouble with Oxford, the architecture out-soared one’s feelings.”

And yet a hard won familiarity with libraries – the blessings they offered – Bennett implies made him who he is. His chance to read Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine to find a place to study without being bothered in his small family home, permitted him to explore the libraries of his youth in the face of the frightening admonitions of the ex-World War one servicemen and the stifling air of reverence in these places, designed above all to speak of civic pride.

Philip Larkin, a writer with whom Alan Bennett shared a great deal though Larkin was a poet and Bennett a dramatist and short-fiction writer, shared an even more extreme ambivalence with libraries. In a recent essay, the British architecture critic Hugh Pearman notes that during Larkin’s most productive years he was, in fact, building two libraries as part of his position as chief librarian at Hull University. Pearman notes that Larkin felt resentful towards his day-job for interfering with his literary endeavors. “Why should I let the toad work / squat on my life?”  he had written in his poem, Toads in 1954

Yet as Pearman details in his excellent study, Larkin was a hard working, conscientious librarian, and by the end a standout client. Castle, Park, Dean and Hook, the firm of architects who built the second library, were impressed. According to Geoff Hook, who is quoted in a biography by Andrew Motion, Pearman was a perfect client representative:

“He was able to by-pass obstacles by operating person to person. He knew it was a seat of the pants job and therefore went straight to the heart of the matter, whatever it was. It was an extraordinary talent— if he’d been planning London Airport it would have been the same.”

What would a poet’s airport look like? Surprisingly prosaic I would imagine. According to Pearman, the second phase of Hull University – a poet’s library – is “a defiantly strange eight storey crinkle – cut tile and plate glass lump.” Larkin was apparently more interested in housing a million books and calculating student-to-seat ratios. He didn’t seem to mind the overt brutalism of Castle, Park, Dean and Hook’s design that proclaims in its own machine-age way the importance of reading.

But then a library isn’t the same as reading or writing. Whilst he spent 14 years planning and building libraries, Larkin was also working on his best poetry. As Pearman notes: “it seems that the years of overwork building his libraries, far from holding him back, gave him the necessary impetus to write what he had to write.”  We need to bear this in mind as we consider the new generation of libraries, which will be architecturally at least quite different, even from Larkin’s libraries in Hull. Perhaps rather inadvertently, buildings like these became monuments to reading as an act of intellectual production, daunting in its own way. In the haphazard plan of British universities, Brutalism provided a means for the library to become an institution, a great keep of learning.

Of course, the re-thinking of libraries is not simply spatial. The rethinking of copyright law is now fundamental to the existence of libraries. Coyle wonders whether libraries could print out copies to lend to users, thereby retaining physical ownership of the information rather than acting as kind of leasing agent to the reader. This she acknowledges would not work for high demand items or long reports: “It doesn’t make sense to return printing to a cottage industry, taking place in libraries and homes.”  I would say that just because mass dissemination has a local point of distribution this doesn’t mean it is a cottage industry. A post office – another institution under attack in the UK – may be a local facility, but it is also a place were sophisticated methods of international financial and information exchange finally meet the end user. These two institutions could become one.

I think that the death of print is greatly exaggerated and that libraries may become localized free-to-print points with an area for reading on-site. Old libraries will retain their use. Newer libraries will express their role as sites of exchange rather than temples of learning. This process is already underway and explains why even librarians are slightly bemused by the librariana of Norman D. Stevens. Although they are only a couple of decades old they already feel like relics from a more deferential era. Personally I can live with libraries taking another step away from their 19^th century role as secular temples in order to become places were people gather information and in a room or two adjacent, quietly read. Were it not for their stupid name, the Idea Stores by David Adjaye in East London would be a good model. And indeed the Seattle Public Library is this on a grand urban scale married with a provision for much needed public space.

The stumbling block of course is copyright. Coyle’s other suggestion that copyright laws be developed in relation to the author rather than the publisher could radicalize the relationship between reader and writer, with libraries, if anything, gaining greater significance than they have now, becoming sites were books are printed not as a record of what has been published but what has been read. They will be staffed by those rare people who have the ability to help people find the information they want even if those people don’t know what they are looking for exactly.

Thanks to Renata Gutman for her help with this post. 

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

The strange British genius for turning media production into a prolonged spectacle, which we have seen during the hackgate scandal, dates back at least to the Great Exhibition of 1851 I would say. Reading through the huge profusion of books produced to coincide with that event one is struck by the advanced way in which the organizers thought of it as a mediated spectacle even before it happened. Routledge’s Guide to the Great Exhibition in 1851 one of these many products explains this in the first paragraph of its introduction: ‘Thousands and thousands throngs from all grades of society will witness it… while it will be presented to still greater numbers by the aid of pictures, by descriptions of in the languages of the principal nations and by each eye witness becoming as it were a lecturer upon what he has seen when he returns to his own country.’

In architectural terms the Crystal Palace may have been a single structure but it was also a celebration of reproduction. Paxton, describing his plan with pride declared that “a section of one part shows the whole’. However the palace was not simply a celebration of standardization, but more a theatrical approach to it. From west to east the flooring of the Palace was slightly inclined, as the Companion, puts it: ‘like the stage of a theatre’. What I find particularly fascinating about the Palace though was that they built an engine house nearby in order to power an on site printing press. It was effectively the site of its own dissemination. Made by serial production, it was mediated by serial production.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

What is astonishing about the coverage of the newspapers is not simply that they covered it a great length but that they covered it chronologically. Of course the state opening would get a big notice but papers like the Guardian published the daily experiences of their reporters at the Exhibition, noting meticulously, firstly the weather (of course) and then the shifting patterns of interest in different areas of the event.

“The room for the reception of agricultural implements attracted but little regard, their contents having a more immediate interest for those who it may be supposed are deferring a visit to London until a reduction in the price of admission… shall have placed its advantages more within reach.”

The French may have held several exhibitions in Paris in the earlier part of the century but the English seized the opportunity to firstly internationalize the event and secondly mediate it. Different publishers, all with familiar names, vied with each other for supremacy. W.M. Clark’s The Crystal Palace and Its Contents: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Great Exhibition of 1851 was published in weekly parts from October 1851 to March 1852. It opens with an exhaustive list of the contents of the book and the exhibition. In its Introductory Address, the editor suggests that ‘the advantages intended to society through this great undertaking will mainly depend upon the record of important facts eliminated, and the valuable examples presented to observation.’

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

A whole industry of printing, publishing and journalism stepped up to try and cover the scale of the Exhibition. Two official catalogues were made: a large one and a smaller condensed one. In the introduction to the former, Robert Ellis the editor of the official Catalogue narrates meticulously how four different forms were edited down to make the main catalogue and then the second condensed version of a portable size. The construction of the catalogue is part of the event. ‘The danger of inaccuracy also in the scientific descriptions and in their literary construction required attention,’ he writes, adding a note of drama. ‘A number of scientific gentlemen’ were convened to proof the pages. 48 pages of advertisements are added to the catalogues 320 pages of description.

The range is what is most staggering about the reportage on the event, with every conceivable reader catered for. Most spectacular though is architect Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt’s The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, which is effectively one of the most ostentatious but superbly, delivered pieces of lithography ever, performed by Day and Son. Showing selected items from the Exhibition which had been produced by a team of 20 draftsmen and a large number of lithographers, it featured astonishing prints of items entitled, ‘Specimens of painted lacquer work from Lahore,’ ‘Window Ornament from Tunis,’ ‘The Crystal Fountain by F & C Osler of Birmingham. From 1^st October 1851 to 7^th March 1853, 160 colored lithographed plates of the highest quality were published.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

The Post-script to the collected lithographs explains the purpose as not primarily concerned with informing a public but in showing off a production skills. “Shortly after the opening of the Great Exhibition, the Publisher called upon the author and stating his desire to demonstrate, upon a great scale, the capabilities of colourprinting as an auxiliary to industrial education requested him to undertake this work,” writes the editor. He then goes on to explain the publishing process.  Originally the publishers intended to serialize the work in 38 parts, once every two weeks, but then realized they wanted to serialize the publishing in five larger parts so found themselves having to increase the number of smaller parts to forty, selling them for 7 shillings and 6 pence each. The first number appeared on the 1st of October and the last will have been published on the 7^th March 1853.  Jones calculated that it had required 25 tons of stone to create the lithographs.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

In Society of the Spectacle Guy DeBord notes, ‘in a world that is truly upside down the true is a moment of false.’ And much as satirists have been having a field day pointing out the disparities between reality and reportage during the #hackgate scandal it is only in the pages of the Radical progressive magazine Punch that we really understand and appreciate the Great Exhibition in context. Initially the satirical magazine had derided the project but as it opened and was received well by the very proletariat that Punch wished to see enfranchised the magazine changed tack and acknowledged its generally positive impact. Indeed the magazine used it as a stick to beat other less efficient institutions.

The satirical magazine notes ‘that we are this year treated with the meeting in London of two very striking extremes in the shape of the Exhibition of Industry at Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of Idleness at the Palace of Westminster.’ The magazine uses the Palace as a means of criticizing the delay in getting the budget passed. ‘It is expected that by the time our visitors arrive from aboard, the arrangement of doing nothing will be quite complete.”

In another issue the magazine notes that thanks to the Great Exhibition the year of 1851 “seems to the Year of Expectations”. It goes on to note “Everyone is expecting something! Every lodging-house-keeper is expecting to let her lodgings at three and four and five times the normal rent… Every bigoted Englishman … expects to see every foreigner with long moustachios, long beard and long hair and dirty habits.’ It concludes: ‘we can only say that amongst so may expectations more or less fragile that it will be a very great wonder if a few of them are not broken.’

The British press is often typified by its extremes: from its most scurrilous publications like the now defunct News of the World to organs such as the BBC who at their best provide exceptional reportage. What makes British media so rich is its profusion, partly because of class distinctions. The contradictions that arise from this relationship gives the papers their bite whilst also making them at times, tiresomely self-referential. Just as publishers in the 1850s realized new ways of turning the Great Exhibition into a serial publishing event, so wiley editors of respectable papers have realized today that leaks now come in large format and that if you release them slowly using online and social media network dissemination, followed by analysis in print, you can ride the surf of a scandal for much longer.

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

The left-wing politician and journalist Nick Auf der Maur notes this story in his book The Billion Dollar Game. The hard-drinking hack / politico tells a story of the blighted Montreal games of popular legend. Auf der Maur bewailed the way in which democratic systems in Montreal such as they were were circumvented. The Olympics to him were an event over which hung a pall of misfortune, such as suggested by the story above. To him Montreal was created by an egotistical tyrant of a mayor Jean Drapeau and an extravagant – and this is significant to Auf der Maur – French architect Roger Tallibert.

It is hard to reconcile Auf der Maur’s extraordinary exposé of the Montreal Olympics published before the Games were even held, with the joy of visiting a truly extraordinary spectacle in the east of the city. What is significant is that the stadium is still tabboo to some. This extravagant architectural gesture built by a duo who constantly compared their endeavour to the building of the Parthenon and the Pyramid deserves to be heralded not just on its own terms but as the first of a particular kind of Grand Projet that defined the late 20^th century – formally and structurally extravagant and legible primarily as a gesture rather than as a building. It is more Calatrava than Calatrava and a very obvious result of the unfettered ambitions of Tallibert and Drapeau that even later apologists for the Games acknowledge was out of control.

And yet reading the book in the CCA archive, just hours afer having visited the megrastructure – a pool, inclined tower, stadium and velodrome in one – one realises that a narrative arcs particular to the Olympic Games defines our appreciation of the archtiecture the Games produces. Montreal defined a narrative of Olympic Games, which subsequent Organising committees have done their best to control.  Disapproval and dischord prior to the Games as costs shoot up for as yet unseen buildings. This is then followed by an alloyed appreciation of them during or immediately after the Games themselves.

In terms this is then followed by the legacy phase. This is typified by various state figures and critics engaging in intederminate economic arguments as to the true cost and benefit of the event in the aftermath which ultimately are irreducable to a result. How does one ultimately quantify the economic benefit resulting from an ill-defined changed in global perception of a place? Observing the 2008 Games in Beijing, one could see this arc established by Montreal followed closely. London is slipping into this pattern as well. The only thing that has changed is that the story is anticipated and managed in a much more ruthless fashion than it was during Montreal.

In the CCA Library is also a book by the novelist  and Professor of English Jack Ludwig called Five Ring Circus. It tells the story of the construction of the buildings through the actual event itself. Recording the opening ceremony in florid style Ludwig notes. “The Olmpics were all set to begin. With an unfinished tower. With temporary ramps and walks and staircases, wooden flooring that boinged under bodyweight and looked at  closely showed in spaces between boards an unbridled  prosepct of ground 30 or 40 or 50 fee below. A strong fresh smell of epoxy, the bonding material used to join the block in Roger Tallibert’s building plan, charged the air with an effluvium of newness.’

To Ludwig, the failure to complete the building on schedule becomes part of the pageantry of the Games. The extraordinary political battle taking place over who was responsible for failing to deliver the project on time and overspending is part of the spectacle of the event. Construction, even incomplete construction is part of the Olympic experience. There have been no greater failures in Olympic history than the failure to complete the inclining tower over the Montreal Stadium, but Ludwig reconciles this with the performances of the Romanian gymanst Nadia Comaneci and the German swimmer Kornelia Ender and pretty much shrugs it off.

For Ludwig, the spend on the Games is melioriated by its quixotic, almost poetic effect on Montreal, which becomes in his eyes forever touched by the Olympic spirit. Structures may not be finished, doping may take place but the Games took place. “In time Kornelia Ender’s every motion became part of a unique signature on Montreal space,” he says. Although the book is published in the same year as Auf Der Maur’s, the narrative has changed utterly simply becaue the book takes place after an incredibly successful event. Ludwig is able to cast his eye forwards to the future as well. ‘No matter what happens to Montreal … as result of the Olympic deficit, Drapeau will always believe that he was after all right.’

When asked by Nixon what he thought the impace of the French Revolution would be the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said it was “too early to say”. It has taken Paul Charles Howell a planning consultant and key player in the Montreal Olympic Organizing Committee some 33 year to finally put his thoughts on the event out into the world in his book The Montreal Olympics: An Insider’s View of Organizing A Self-Financing Games. By now he feels able to show that in terms of organsiation the Games were in fact a success.

Howell posits the fact that what is termed Olympic defecit was in fact cost. Explaining away Drapeau’s promise to make the Games self-financing, he suggests the figure of $2bn, commonly described as a defecit after the Games is inaccurate because it involves costs such as the completion of the stadium, the later conversions to the buildings and the cost of constructing the Olympic village without taking into account its resale.

The book redresses the balance to a degree pointing out how well used the facility is but it is far from conclusive. Howell overlooks the interminable problem with the stadium’s roof and although he states the benefits that have accrued to Montreal in as persuasive a way as possible, he admits ultimately however that his account-balancing is futile. One has to believe in the Olympic goals of excellence and fraternity through competition to acknowledge the benefits. One senses today that there is no sense of shared ownership of the stadium, which is although not for the delicate or faint of heart a truly remarkable piece of architecture.

These three books in different ways suggest that the political faultlines between city, state and federal government as well as the International Olympic Committee that existed during the mayorship of Drapeau, and were frequently manipulated by him, perhaps still endure. It is possible however, for greatness to exist in this internecine atmosphere and for the various viewpoints on the Games to be right and yet somehow miss the point. To an untutored observer, Montreal possesses a certain romantic sense of ambition, thwarted in part, attained in others that is peculiar to an Olympic city. But then that self-same untutored observer could also be the kind of person that finds the sight of his fellow countryman’s name inscribed onto a wall, surprisingly moving.

A plan to ban fireworks from the Opening Ceremony of the games, prompted IOC President Jacques Rogge into prolonged reminiscence about a salutary tale from the annals of Olympic history. Rogge, one of the rare members of the IOC to think historically when faced with a new challenge, went back to the Opening Ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Games, when the Olympic Cauldron was lit at the beginning of the Games by three athletes who rose on a hydraulic platform to an elevated cauldron sitting high above the stadium in Seoul. Doves which had just been released were still wheeling in the stadium. Some had come to settle on the cauldron towards which the athletes were rising with torches held aloft.

Rogge recalled what happened next – a sight that was visible to over 1 billion people who were watching the event on television. “The doves went in the cauldron and tens of doves were burned alive and there was a lot of emotion from the World Wildlife Fund and animal protection and the IOC decided no doves would be released any more,” he said.

(If you can’t stand the suspense go to 4:50 for the frying.)

Watching the footage again, one can’t help but feel a tad sorry for the IOC. Most of the birds wisely fly away at the first sign of the torches, but a conspicuous and in must be said utterly stupid, handful of pigeons, fail inexplicably to flee and are clearly cooked. It’s like watching a strangely ostentatious and particularly cruel barbecue – a piece of culinary barbarism that rendered pointless the protracted efforts made by Seoul’s civic authorities to suppress the eating of dog amongst its populace during the Games for fear of upsetting the foreigners.

Yet the releasing of doves had been part of the games since the Antwerp Games in 1920 as a commemoration for those who had died in the First World war. Originally the Games had been planned for Budapest but following hostilities the Hungarians were stripped of the event. Furthermore, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey were also banned from competing in the Games. The doves commemorated those that had died fighting on the side of the victors. It was only subsequently the gesture came to signify in the IOC’s parlance peace between nations, regardless of their role in specific conflagrations. In a piece of post-rationalisation the doves became intertwined with the tradition found in the ancient Games of their existing for the duration of the Games a truce between the warring cities of Greece. (A tradition which was often ignored.) However in 1920 the Germans, along with their allies were not allowed to attend the Olympic Games under pressure from the French. Peace amongst nations indeed. Typically for Olympic pageantry, this celebratory gesture, so quickly adopted and more often than not belying a more complex political reality, is hard for us to let go of. The Paloma de la Paz (pictured above) was used as an unofficial mascot at the Games of 1968 in Mexico. Some still consider it as a fig-leaf to cover the Tlatelolco massacre , a government assault on predominantly student protestors in the host city, which left hundreds dead. At the very least it is a sop to it.

After, the decision was made to stop the simultaneous release of doves with the lighting of cauldrons, the image of the dove persisted for a good while longer in Olympic imagery. Live doves were released at the 1992 Opening Ceremony in Barcelona, but this had to be done several hours before the flame was lit. Later opening ceremonies show that it took the Olympic movement a while to kick their dove habit. Balloon doves were released in 1994 at the Lillehammer Winter Games and paper doves were used at the Atlanta Ceremonies in 1996.

Indeed the pageantry of The Games which predominantly developed in an ad hoc fashion between the wars, is now becoming virtual. When the Sri Lankan National Olympic Committee president Hemasiri Fernando says the extensive use of fireworks during the ceremonies causes a potential polluting effect, one can’t help remember the stunning sequence of firework footprints during the opening ceremony for the Beijing games.

After over-hearing an animator boasting in a bar, a reporter for China’s Beijing Times revealed days later that the sequence had not actually happened. Around three billion people watched the animation believing that a series of giant footprints created by fireworks had proceeded through the night sky from Tiananmen Square to the Bird’s Nest stadium and had been filmed from above by a helicopter. A fallacy as it turned out.

So whilst the reason to get rid of fireworks is ostensibly their perceived environmental threat – “we all have the responsibility to protect this earth and the fireworks have a tremendous effect on the environment,” says Fernando – this feeds into a greater faith in the virtual. Indeed, the perniciousness of fireworks to plant and animal life is largely unproven. It seems more about controlling the kind of complexity that sees doves accidentally fried than anything else. The fact that Danny Boyle the artistic director of the opening ceremony for London 2012 has affirmed his faith in the performance being a live one, is only partially reassuring.

As the consequence of the steady inflation of expectation when it comes to ceremonies and the need to control the chaos, the 21^st century has seen the rise of the professional Ceremony producer. Hamish Hamilton, who will work alongside Boyle in the organisation of the London 2012 ceremonies made his name directing events such as the MTV and BRITs. This year he directed the half-time show for the Super Bowl and the Oscars. These two events are ostensibly live events but have become far more emphatically television events; largely augmented by film or TV footage.

Beijing was the first time the International Olympics Committee employed its own broadcaster to provide full coverage of the sport and ceremonies to different channels around the world. London will be the second time. No pigeons will be hurt during the opening ceremony but then the fireworks may have to be faked. It seems strange that the sport being celebrated is so unpredictable but the ceremonies themselves are controlled to the point where parts of them no longer exist in any material way.

Good ol’ Igster has become the darling of the London Paper and BBC London AND the Metro with this lovely little film, which turns Google’s Streetview into a narrative device as opposed to an orientation device. Tellingly Igster created the film first, taking about 6 hrs to record the footage. Then he sped it up around 1500%. It was only then that the he wrote the song and recorded it with friends as a bit of a laugh. 

I’m not a huge fan of the song but the video is brilliant. (It might be worth turning it down.) Without wanting to get too BLDGBLOG about it, the film imagines what it would be like if the underground was overground, which is a nice inversion. It’s a lovely bit of wish fulfillment too speeding through the city.  It also neatly references the London to Brighton series of films, which began in 1953 with a 4 minute time lapse of the journey, then went down to three minutes in the 1980s. And then two minutes a bit later. Igster’s journey though was never undertaken by a single individual. It is the result of one individual finding his way through the exhaustive photographic work of a whole fleet of photographers. 

Despite having several branch lines, the Northern is still the spine of the city’s transport infrastructure north to south and much improved on the dark days of the 1990s. It would be strange to have it split into two separate lines as was planned, although this does seem to have gone on the back-burner since Crossrail was announced and the Olympics development got undeway. It seems as if London is becoming increasingly divided along its east-west axis by planners rather than its north-south one as it still the way most of its inhabitants do, I think.

Great little documentary on Pirate Radio in London, first broadcast around 1995 or so if the total fixation with all things Jungle is anything to go by. The documentary comes down pretty firmly on the side of the broadcasters and all the more admirable for doing it in their slightly stuffy voices. “From trip hop to handbag house” “it’s all very different from Radio Caroline” – all pronounced in perfect RP.

Nice bit in the third part of the documentary in which a police appears on a pirate radio station to talk about race relations and another nice little bit in which one of the Department of Trade Industry’s foot soldiers expresses sneaking admiration for the pirate broadcasters ingenuity, technical skills and determination. 

However, it does reveal how little the ridiculous situation has changed. Authorities have been increasing their efforts to crack down on pirate radio stations in the UK. Now though it is the regulator Ofcom which is trotting out the tired old line that the broadcasts interfere with emergency service frequencies. In 2008 Ofcom raided 43 studios used by illegal stations and shut down 838 illegal transmitters. Even if technology is getting better, the pressure by big business on smaller illegal operations is getting stronger.

This top little documentary also highlights the fact that mainstream broadcasters are today operating at a level consistently below standards just over ten years ago. So as underground broadcasters hold the line, the mainstream ones deteriorate.