Ged Carroll

Category: london | 倫敦 | 런던 | ロンドン

Why London?

First of all I live in London, I put down my roots here because of work. Commuting from the outside towns into the city takes a long time. People only tend to do that when they don’t have to come in every day or getting their kids into a good school is important for them.

Secondly it is an area distinct from the rest of the UK, this is partly down to history and the current economic reality. It is distinct in terms of population make-up and economic opportunity. London has a culture that is distinct from the rest of the UK, partly due to its population make-up. Over 30 percent of the city’s inhabitants were born in another country. From music to fashion, its like a different country:

  • As one women’s clothing retailer once said on a news interview ‘The further north you go; the more skin you see’.
  • The weekend is a huge thing outside the city. By comparison, it isn’t the big deal in London. The reason was that there were things you could enjoy every night of the week.
  • You can get a good cup of coffee
  • The city was using cashless payments way before it became universal elsewhere in the country
  • The line has extended into politics. London opposed Brexit. London, like other major cities it is one of the last holdouts of Labour party support in the 2019 UK general election

London posts often appear in other categories, as it fulfils multiple categories.

If there are London subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • The ultimate driving machine + more things

    The ultimate driving machine

    Interesting interview with author Steve Saxty on how BMW as a modern car brand came into being as the ultimate driving machine and a discussion on what eventually became the 1-series. The brand value of it being the ultimate driving machine actually came from a review by US magazine Road & Track in the early 1970s.

    This seems to have parlayed itself into an internal insight at the company and was then manifested in advertising by the 1980s. I remember seeing an interview with an ad exec at the UK agency claiming that it was an insight they had come up with. The truth can be a pesky thing.

    BMW 730i (1989)
    The phrase itself worked really well from the small lightweight sporty saloons that Road and Track loved to the large executive models of the 7-series. Whatever your criteria was, BMW positioned itself as the ultimate driving machine.

    More BMW-related content here.

    Bob Hoffman’s rage against the machine

    AWXII - Day 1

    Bob Hoffman is a long-time ad man and long-time commentator who points out the foibles of technology-driven marketing. His book 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising is a good read for anyone jumping on a plane. Hoffman has recently given away two books in electronic format Inside the black box focuses on the online advertising industrial complex, MKTG STINX takes a broader brush to things.

    BBC coverage of GAA All-Ireland hurling final

    For a long time BBC Northern Ireland have covered the key GAA matches. But this was the first time that the main BBC network carried the GAA All Ireland hurling final. 3pm I sat down in front the television to watch the BBC with volume down and my Mac playing the RTE Radio 1 commentary through its speakers. This is the same way as I have listened to the game all my life and I wasn’t going to change now. But it was refreshing that I didn’t have to trek out to a pub or fiddle with a VPN to secure video of the game. Cork vs. Clare gave hurling neophytes a great introduction with the winning score done during the last play of extra time.

    Thamesmead time’s up

    I have a soft spot for brutalism as an architecture style. I put this down to the clinic I was taken to as a small child which was part of a bigger civic centre including a library. It had massive concrete features and overhangs. It was quiet inside, great to climb and play on outside and the overhangs kept the hottest sun away from the massive round windows.

    Brutalism felt comforting and futuristic, which was probably why Stanley Kubrick shot key parts of A Clockwork Orange in Thamesmead. But the Peabody Trust are well on their way to demolishing Thamesmead’s iconic buildings.

  • Backroom

    I have used Flickr as my visual diary and my older pictures end up in odd places, but none odder than an office move picture and Backroom. The office move picture seems to have something about it that others feel.

    Empty office
    The interior of my old office in 74 New Oxford Street

    I had posted it on Flickr, which is a site that I use as my personal picture library, visual diary and image hosting for this blog.

    Flickr

    Flickr is a photo sharing site. It has discussion boards, groups for different kinds of photography. It hosts images that can be embedded. While it has had an app for longer than Instagram has been around, its freemium model and late adoption of filters meant that Instagram covered the mass market and Flickr was more for dedicated photographers of sorts.

    I started getting messages in Flickr about the picture

    Hello, I am messaging you about an old photo you took. 11 years ago you took a photo of an empty office. If you remember where this building is may you please tell me. I want to know where it is because it is the photo in an article for backrooms level 4 (I’m not sure if you know what that is but  it is a really bug mystery.

    filerew

    Curious about the Enigmatic Office Building – Dear Ged Carroll, I stumbled upon this intriguing picture you posted on Flickr back in 2011 (September 12, 2011). It’s a captivating shot of an empty office building, and I’m really curious about its location and the story behind it. Could you please share more details about where this picture was taken or how you came across it? It seems like it might be part of an online mystery, and I’d love to learn more about it.

    George Williams

    Until I got the message from filerew, I had no clue about Backroom.

    Empty office

    The empty office picture was taken at 74 New Oxford Street, the building had the now unfortunate name of ‘ISIS House’ at the time. The agency that I worked for had been on a long lease in the space. It had originally been fitted out sometime in the 1980s or early 1990s for Comic Relief. There had been no changes since. It was as tired looking as the photo showed.

    The furniture was taken away by the company who outfitted our new office. The landlord took the building back as tenant leases ran out. They then stripped the building down to the studs and thoroughly refurbished it as a modern glass fronted block. Even the building entrance moved from 74 New Oxford Street to 70 New Oxford Street.

    The photo has a grainy quality as it was taken quickly using an iPhone 3GS, hence the considerable noise in the image that softens it, rather like watching a film on a VHS video tape. It was a dark and cloudy day, which gave it the soft even lighting and shadows.

    Backroom

    Backroom is a sort of online game that seems to be similar to boardgames such as Dungeons and Dragons with players consulting the site. The backrooms of the title are dystopian places with some supplies for the players and various risks of imminent death.

    Something about the mysterious feeling of the picture inspired them to use it in their game. The Backroom site does weird me out a bit however.

    Most of my images are available on a creative commons licence, so the creators at Backroom were perfectly entitled to use it.

    More related content here.

  • Jeremy Deller + more stuff

    Jeremy Deller

    Jeremy Deller is famous for examining 1980s events from the MIner’s strike to rave culture. Most notably his work Acid Brass, working with the William Fairey Brass Band on cover versions of early house and techno music. In this documentary he walks a group of sixth formers through the context that rave culture began in.

    Smiley detail

    Jeremy Deller has hosted a reenactment of the Battle Of Orgreave and made an inflatable version of Stonehenge in a piece called Sacrilege.

    Jacobs cream crackers

    As a child, I would have eaten several cream crackers manufactured on this line. In more recent times the production of Jacobs products were moved abroad for cost cutting reasons. There is something mesmerising about watching the process of production.

    Cyberpunk

    Quinn’s Ideas exploration of Neuromancer pointed out some links that I hadn’t realised in the formation of cyberpunk as a genre and cultural force.

    LA Noir

    Why film noir happened when it did, and why it is so synonymous with the city of Los Angeles is explained in this documentary which features an interview with author James Eilroy.

    EDC

    Everyday Carry (EDC) – whilst having evolved as an online cultural phenomenon has been around for as along as men and boys have had pockets. My childhood friend Nigel was obsessing about Swiss Army knives and really small Leica binoculars back when I was in primary school. His Dad was a well-to-do dentist and Nigel fulfilled his EDC goals before coming a teen. It was only natural that it eventually became a thing when the internet came around. Kevin Kelly had been talking about cool tools on the the web for the past quarter of a century; Drop.com when it was founded over 12 years ago covered products that would be considered EDC today.

    All of which leaves me more puzzled why EDC has sudden become the focus of media attention in the quality newspapers.

    Tacit and explicit knowledge

    Vicky Zhao’s content are handy thought starters for presentations and problem solving. I particularly enjoyed this one on tacit knowledge.

  • The New Working Class

    The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley is unashamedly wonkish in nature. Ainsley comes from the left of the political establishment. She is an executive director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. She had previously worked for Unite and as a government advisor.

    Ainsley posits that the Labour Party is out of touch of who the working class are and what they care about. Deindustrialisaton and immigration has changed the nature of what working class means. They might have lower middle class incomes working in the services sector. Traditional blue collar roles declined to represent about 14 percent of the British population.

    Ainsley’s The New Working Class is a testimony to how out of touch policy makers and advisers with the society that they claim to represent. This also makes wonder about the usefulness, and or, the attention paid to polling and research done by political parties in the UK. The Conservatives understanding of hard-working families shows at least some understanding at a high level of who the new working class are.

    What struck me about the book is that much of the ‘new’ working class isn’t actually that new at all. The struggle to make ends meet is one that Orwell would have recognised the best part of a century earlier. The challenge of unemployment is one that haunted much of the 1970s and 1980s.

    Family is still important and while society is secular, working class communities have been more socially conservative. That doesn’t mean that they hate gays or immigrants, they take a common sense approach to fairness but they will be concerned about family. The rate of change in society and the desire for working opportunities has been more of a driver over immigration than outright racism back to the rise of Enoch Powell.

    I had thought I would gain new consumer insights in the same way that I have had in the past, reading books by like likes of American pollster Mark Penn, but this wasn’t the case with Ms Ainsley’s book. Ms Ainsley has clearly written for a different audience. Instead of the ‘new new’ insight, her work is a 101 guide for politicos to the society that the profess to live in and represent. That scared the hell out of me. More on the book here. You can find more book reviews here.

  • Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan + more stuff

    Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan

    One of the best YouTube channels that I currently subscribe to is the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. I used to enjoy visiting the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. I particularly enjoyed their public talks. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan seems to run to a similar model as its Hong Kong counterpart. Its YouTube channel shares the regular public talks that they host by a wide range of experts. More Japan related content here.

    Ronnie Drew on the Dublin Pub

    Ronnie Drew of The Dubliners talks about the iconic nature of the Dublin pub. O’Donoghue’s was famous in Irish music and particularly famous for the short film O’Donoghue’s Opera, which Drew starred in.

    Incremental metal forming

    Additive manufacturing has managed to offer substitutes for short runs of moulded, cast or milled parts. Incremental metal forming offers a similar substitute for complex stamped parts. It’s an area that is is being currently developed. This has more potential than you would think due to the high cost and commitment to tool making needed if you wanted to use a process like progressive stamping.

    The Boy and The Heron

    The Boy and The Heron aka How do you live? is Studio Ghibli‘s latest film. I picked through the trailer with friends who are fellow Studio Ghibli fans. The Japanese movie title references a Japanese book How do you live? which features in the films universe. How do you live is a book where an Uncle documents his discussions with his nephew as the boy faces up to the challenges of childhood. In some respects How do you live? reminded of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World – in terms of feeling, if not style.

    How do you live? is as well known in Japanese circles as a children’s classic in the same way that Ursula LeGuinn’s The Wizard of Earthsea would be known to English speakers. But in English it doesn’t have the same cultural resonance, so hence the much more descriptive The Boy and The Heron. We were all relieved that the film is not a 3D CGI work like Earwig & The Witch.

    Looking at the trailer it evoked memories of other Studio Ghibli films

    I got to see the film at a special screening at London International Film Festival. But not going to share any spoilers until well after it goes on general release, save to say it’s well worth watching, but you knew that anyway.

    Create real magic

    Coca-Cola tapped into the trend for generative AI to allow consumers to remix existing advert artwork and make their own version. As far as I know Accenture was one of the main agency partners involved. This is less about the future of advertising and more about how the technology itself has become the meme, rather like all things cyber in the mid 1990s.

    A la Soledad O’Brien presenting with a Leo LePorte voiced avatar on MSNBC show The Site during 1996 and 1997.