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| Civic Pride: Bus Station Car Park, Lincoln, December 2014 |
I found myself back in my old
hometown of Lincoln again, over the Christmas period. My Mother still lives just outside the city
and I periodically go into town to mooch about when I’m over that way, for old
times sake if for no other. Boxing Day is an obvious time to struggle out of one's chair and walk off a few accumulated calories, - and to take the camera for a stroll.
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| Bus Station, Lincoln, December 2014 |
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| Bus Station Car Park, Lincoln, December 2014 |
I’ve written before about
Lincoln’s more picturesque aspects and how many of its older streets and
buildings are tied up with my memories of childhood and my teenage years. There’s no doubt that the most historical
surviving quarter of the city retains an obvious charm, and it’s impossible to
ignore both the Cathedral and the Norman Castle, perched high on the
escarpment, at its heart.
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| Bus Station, Lincoln, December 2014 |
However, it is easy to get
sucked into statements of the bleedin’ obvious, both visually and verbally,
when contemplating such edifices, and its certainly true that my artistic eye
and camera lens are generally drawn to a completely different brand of urban
beauty these days.
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| Bus Station Car Park, Lincoln, December 2014 |
Of course, you could argue that most of the images shown here fit equally comfortably into my regular comfort zone of car park-related iconography,
entropic architectural detail and primary yellow things, but I struggle to shrug
off my fascination with such stuff - so sue me, I guess.
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| St Mary's Street Car Park, Lincoln, December 2014 |
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| Bus Station Car Park, Lincoln, December 2014 |
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| St Mary's Car Park, Lincoln, December 2014 |
Some of these details of
curbs, duct covers, road markings, etc. tie in with ideas I’m currently exploring
around the theme of reinterpreted micro-landscapes. It’s too early to tell how that might really
play out yet, but for now, I’m justifying such images as valuable
research. Other, related examples are
simply just part of my unending fascination with the city as a realm of signs,
texts and potential clues, - an environment that might be read literally, conceptually or metaphorically.
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| Private Car Park, St Mary's Street, Lincoln, December 2014 |
Other things, like the
terrific little fireplace, now looking onto a small car park, where a building
once stood, or the beautifully re-rendered patch of wall adjacent to it, were
just too visually arresting to let pass without remark.
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| West Front, Lincoln Cathedral, December 2014 |
I found myself up by the
Cathedral as the gloomy Boxing Day light was failing, and had some notion of
trying to do something impressionistic about the illuminated West Front with
my phone, (in the ‘light’ of my previous post). When floodlit, that immense cliff of
decorative masonry can acquire an almost hallucinatory aspect that is hard to
resist. Sadly, the lights were yet to
come on so instead, I had to content myself with more formal ways of trying
to suggest something of the façade’s vertiginous qualities. It’s been there nearly a thousand years, and
even survived a minor earthquake, - so I imagine it’ll still be there for me to
try again another day.
The unexpected sight of that fireplace has really caught my imagination. I want to keep looking at it... I think I want to visit Lincoln just to see that now!
ReplyDeleteIt's good to know I'm not the only one to be cheered by such inconsequential little urban details. I'm not sure it would be worth travelling to Lincoln for on its own, but it is very close to the Railway Station, and there are various other attractions in the old home town if you walk up the hill.
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