Last month we took a day off work and spent it out in London town exploring the sights and taking in the culture both high and low.
I wanted to visit the Design Museum where they were showing the designs of the nominees of the ‘Designs of the year 2012’ – a mixed bag of exciting, innovative, expected and unusual designs that included a couple of small electric cars, several building designs, quite bizarre clothes that fold up and look extremely uncomfortable and impracticable, and my favourite; a fascinating mine clearing device that looks like a cross between a giant dandelion seed head and a tumbleweed made with cheap plastic feet bamboo poles and a central unit complete with GPS mapping facility. The assembly is left to wander around at random where ever the wind blows it until it triggers a mine, the GPS showing the safe route through the minefield.
Whilst in the museum we had a look around the other exhibitions. One dedicated to the work of the influential product designer TerranceConran and another to a project called the MUJI Product Fitness 80 – this explained how if you reduced product materials to 80% of their current size how much you would save without necessarily noticing a reduction in the functionality or usability of the product.
Afterwards we went up to Camden Town and to an area we were unfamiliar with called The Stables. A deceptively large collection of disparate stalls and shops with an interesting array of merchandise on sale; mostly clothing either customised such as the gothic revival, 50’s revival, retro recycled, pop culture items, bondage and fetish items. Then there were the antique stores, the bag shops, drug paraphernalia, paintings and artworks and sweet and soap shops. As it was later on in the day and before the night time crowd came out it was pleasantly free from crowds which has put me off coming to Camden before (especially on the weekends when it is a horrific crush). We had dinner at the quirky Cuban restaurant and then made our way up Chalk Lane to the Roundhouse – a brilliant venue in what was originally a turning shed for steam locomotives before becoming a bonded store and now an auditorium with a large circular open space with tall steel pillars and intricate beams, where we saw the brilliant Dutch singer Caro Emerald perform her jazzy, retro rock ‘n roll style of music with a fabulous backing band and great projected graphics complementing each track. It wasn’t the longest show we have been to as she has only the one album out and is relatively new to the UK scene, but it was fun and we managed to get home before we turned into pumpkins.
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