Images of architecture and urban fragments from around the world.
Developments in the iron industry played a central role in the Industrial Revolution. I have featured Ironbridge before, the first arch bridge in the world to be built from cast-iron designed by Englishman Abraham Darby (1678-1717) and architect Thomas Pritchard. So I will share a few images from around the other industrial areas of the town:
David Jones department store is famous for its animated Christmas window displays. And rightly so. I’m only sorry I didn’t get out in the evening to capture these all lit up, but trust me, they are superb and every child in Sydney ought to be taken to look at them.
Ursula Dubosarsky the award-winning Sydney children’s author was thrilled when asked to write an original story with an Australian flavour for the windows this year.
“I was thinking kangaroos, wallabies and koalas,” Dubosarsky says, but she quickly came around to the idea of using a reindeer. “It suggested a nice story of the Australian experience, which is very often an immigrant experience. Apart from indigenous people, we all appeared here from other cultures.”
Dubosarsky took home the toy reindeer to use for inspiration, as she often does. “You get a bit more personality from a toy. You know how it is, you think your teddy bear is talking to you,” she says. “I still use that technique, so I sat there with the reindeer.”
The tale he told her, Reindeer’s Christmas Surprise, was about visiting all his animal friends with presents, before getting a lovely surprise himself at the end of the story.
Lingering over windows in Sydney has the effect of leaving you with your mouth open – so many expensive shops. I couldn’t help admire the gleaming window displays; less is more.
I never shop where they don’t show the price in the window.
I’m not a fan of the commercialised Halloween. When I was growing up it barely existed in the UK, although the Christian practice of remembering the dead, including saints (hallows) and martyrs, goes back centuries. Trick and Treat and dressing up in scary costumes was an American ‘thing’. Instead we looked forward to Bonfire Night on 5 November. With accompanying ‘guy’, fireworks, bonfire toffee, Yorkshire Parkin, baked potatoes, mushy peas and toffee apples. Weeks before were spent collecting firewood, making the guy and saving pennies to buy sparklers, crackerjacks and catherine wheels.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November.
Gun powder, treason and plot
I see no reason, why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
But the fifth of November has been overtaken by Halloween. A vivid reminder of just how powerfully American culture and American consumerism can be transported across the Atlantic. Local shops create window displays suitable for the season. and now my own grandchildren look forward to dressing up as ghouls and ghosties and knocking on the neighbours doors for a treat.
Me? I just close the curtains and pretend I’m not in.
TRAVEL WORDS 