A view of Ludgate Hill

A game of TimeGuesser turned up a picture of crowds gathering, at the end of the First World War in 1918, at Ludgate Circus looking up Ludgate Hill towards St.Pauls Cathedral caused me to wonder what had changed since then.

The street view today shows much has changed – click image to embiggen.

View up Ludgate Hill towards St. Pauls from 1918 and 2024

The spire of St. Martin’s church is recognisable; and just above the chap’s hat on the far left it looks like the top of one of the fancy finials that still adorn the building on the left.

The railway bridge was never much admired:

Of all the eyesores of modern London, surely the most hideous is the Ludgate Hill Viaduct— that enormous flat iron that lies across the chest of Ludgate Hill like a bar of metal on the breast of a wretch in a torture-chamber. – Walter Thornbury, ‘Ludgate Hill’, in Old and New London: Volume 1(London, 1878), British History Online [accessed 9 March 2025].

and it was removed in 1990 with the arrival of the City Thameslink rail service (the canopy protruding on the right) which passes under the road.

But perhaps the single greatest change since then… nobody is wearing a hat.

Background image not appearing on mobile devices

Spent some time trying to figure out why the background image on my site’s home page was not being displayed on mobile devices although it was appearing in a desktop browser. There are, of course, endless solutions that may or may not have worked for someone in the past. They suggested tweaking your CSS coding or adjusting the size of the image or some other voodoo. None of these worked for me.

What worked for me was simply ensuring that the image’s colour profile was set to sRGB. Once that was changed everything worked as expected.

Making A Flat A Home

2018-03-01

With the windows freezing on the inside and icicles forming on the outside….

2018-03-18

What we need is a curtain! That is all.

The Olympic Torch Passes By

An early rise on a grey drizzly Sunday morning to cycle down the road to catch the Olympic Torch as it passes through [wikipop search=”Chorlton-cum-Hardy”]Chorlton[/wikipop] on its way to [wikipop search=”2012_Summer_Olympics”]London[/wikipop] (the long way round). There was an impressive crowd given the hour and weather. The anticipation built…

…some succumbed to the freebies from the corporate sponsors…

…and then there it was…

The BBC’s excellent TorchCam dutifully captured the whole event…

 

….and my orange clad elbow…

Alas no one on the [wikipop search=”Greater_Manchester_bus_route_86″]86[/wikipop] was in the mood to wave back at the cheering crowd as they slowly followed the torch.

Looks sound

While looking at the pictures of Sasaki Makoto

[iframe src=”http://www.sasakimakoto.com/portfolio/7-contact_sheet.html” width=”100%” height=”480″]

[iframe src=”http://www.sasakimakoto.com/portfolio/8-contact_sheet.html” width=”100%” height=”480″]

…the first question that comes to mind is…

What would that sound like?

Like this…

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and this…

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