The living wall, invariably dead or dying, is a common sight.
Spotted, just above the entrance to Embankment Tube station. The weeds on the roof are doing just fine.
A rather Dalek-esque robot cleaner in Charing Cross station. It slides, almost silent, across the cracked paving stones, halting whenever its sensors detect a human presence.
The inevitably outsourced service (in this case, cleaning by Mitie) has been outsourced yet further, from a human to a blobby robot.
The pavement-blocking flurry (an attempted collective noun) of dock-less ebikes. At once the best innovation in personal mobility in decades, and the most flagrant triumph of personal convenience over the commonweal since plastic food packaging.
Endless, like some optical illusion.
The inevitable queue for the security queue, a farcical manifestation of safetyism, whereby in order to keep a museum or gallery safe, visitors must queue for a security check, thereby making themselves a target (recall the Brussels airport attack) of the phantom danger that the airport-style security seeks to prevent.
In reality, this is little more than a job-creation scheme (that is, a cost to the rest of us) for high-viz Britain.
Not seen in this photo - the legions of primary schoolchildren, each in a high-viz jacket. How did the human race survive prior to the issue of high-viz jackets to TikTok-watching fake security guards, and small children?
The crap American candy shop, paired with the crap souvenir shop. Only a self-loathing country would allow such glistening turds in its principal tourist district.
The supply chain for these shops is a contemporary marvel - imagine the factory, somewhere faraway, churning out different versions of this for London, Paris etc, then shipped by container so it can be sold by surly Turks and sideways-looking men from the sub-continent. An endless circle of enterprise, manufacturing and ersatz rip-offs of naff originals.
On Regent Street, perhaps the original planned shopping street, the international symbol of diversity and right-thinking hangs (appropriately) like the flag of a conquering power.
The cyclist pictured, like perhaps three-quarters of cyclists in post-Covid, term three of Sadiq Khan London, ran the red light further up Regent Street.
Around the corner, the Crown Estate tries to describe the contemporary experience of arriving at any mainline train station in London.
Outside the national gallery (currently undergoing refurbishment to create a more inclusive space), the international symbol for reductive thinking is scrawled on the paving stones.
Curious to see the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol used in this way.
Admiralty Arch, a potent symbol of imperial might at the tail of the Mall, is wreathed in plastic, in preparation for becoming a luxury hotel (something London is apparently short of). To repeat myself, what sort of self-loathing country would sell-off a marker of its former greatness like this? The “Old War Office” hotel, round the corner on Whitehall, begs the same question.
Charles I looks out across the stationary traffic clogging the length of Whitehall down to his great banqueting hall. The Grand Old Cause never stood a chance.
On the pedestrian bridge straddling the approach to Charing Cross, the Briton is reminded that all his infrastructure (in this case, Charing Cross railway bridge itself) has been financialised and assetized.
The Southbank now boasts, if that is the correct word, a semi-permanent (that is, seasonal, and annually re-erected in glorious plywood) streetfood market, that bastion of thin beer and American fast food. Behind the tantalizing signs, the wasted piles-up even and anon.
Britain excels at bins. Not at their frequent collection or utility of location, but in their variety of colour, their being overfilled in beauty spots, and (when they are not for use by the general public) their rank disdain for the idea of recycling.