Camera-happy.

Speaking of train rides, I took a fairly brief one the other night to meet an old-old friend. To get to Waterloo Station I followed a route along my long-ago commute, from when I worked in London over one summer - over the Thames and past the Royal National Festival Hall and past the IMAX improbably placed at the nexus of some underground tunnels. It's probably better that I show you.
A view of the London Eye from the walkway I took to cross the river. This was not the same bridge I crossed as a wee tyke - that's Waterloo Bridge, and this is called something like the Royal Jubilee Pathway, running alongside train tracks (the Hungerford Bridge)

Said train tracks, with train. Graffiti on the right side of the brick wall said something like "French Touch Rust". I couldn't tell you why.

The stairs leading up to the Golden Jubilee footpath. The footpath was completed in 2002, in a prize winning design from some folks you can look up (including the WSP Group, about which I believe there is a New Yorker article worth reading, somewhere out there). One thing I find notable about British urban design in this period, and it's true here and in the Millennium Dome - about which much more to be written - and it's true to some extent of the Eye, is how spindly and insect-like it all is. In the picture you can see one of the peaks that lines the footpath, seemingly a vaulting feature, reminiscent of a suspension bridge but on a pedestrian scale - but for all its angle and its threadbare wires, it seems sadly lacking in majesty to me. The Millenium Footbridge connecting the Tate Modern to St Paul's across the Thames eschews this under-committed lightness for solid metal piping, though that doesn't seem to keep it from swaying.

In Canary Wharf there are more examples of the weakness for white wires, especially on footpaths. Perhaps sometime I'll take a trip out there.

Our walk quickly lands us in the very solid architecture of the late 1970s - the concrete cubes of the National Theatre, which is on the left here. On the right is the British Film Institute. Ahead is one of the many overhead pathways that link the buildings in this strange complex of culture. It is striking in completing this walk how much of it is above and below street level. There's something surprising about looking up and seeing humans walking around, unaided, in the sky.

This picture was a scramble and I'd hoped to take it ten seconds before, when four suited men were crossing over.

Roughly at the center of the shot you can see the rounded top of the IMAX cinema, which is where we're going next.


The IMAX theatre sits like a shiny button amongst the circuitry of the city streets At this point in our walk, cars go up. We go down.

It's a pretty straightforward network of walkways down there, but somehow I recall it being strangely confusing and a bit terrifying, returning from my summer job on late nights. Perhaps it was the presence of decrepit buildings such as the Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women, seen here. I believe it closed in 1936, and if I ever write a horror film, I will set it there.

Amongst the many curiosities of the IMAX - its association with the relatively staid and repertory-driven British Film Institute, its strangely central and yet out-of-the-way placement - its arboreal surroundings are of particular fascination for me. As seen here, they evoke some sort of botanical paradise, allowing green-tinged light to filter down through the canopy of leaves. And on the left you can see lots of ads for the Batman movie. Which I hear is really awesome in IMAX.

Really, really awesome.

The way this works is, you take that little tunnel to the IMAX, and then you take this one away from it. On its walls you can find the poem Eurydice by Sue Hubbard, in a fairly fanciful piece of public art. Walking past it twice a day, I never read it through - stopping to do so seemed antithetical to the rush-rush ethos that, in my youth, I longed for as a hallmark of adulthood. Certain verses caught my eye, though. "Sour night-breath," which you could almost make out at the start of the third line above. "Steel tracks lead out out / past cranes and cremetoria," earlier on. And, towards the end, "the sun feathers my face / like your once eager kiss" - though it occurs to me now that eager kisses are not often feather-like.

Finally, the arrival, at a grand station which, for all this solid stone at its entrance, is strangely drafty inside. It lacks a proper roof, covered instead with a folding wave of translucent panels, so that you don't know if you're inside or out. Birds fly about, and the half-gray light is a little disorienting.