Pink Pineapple
The Nottingham correspondant and I spent a thoroughly enjoyable weekend undertaking various explorations and somehow celebrating my birthday along the way. Amongst our activities was a visit to Columbia Road to gather material for a sound/image project that we are doing together.
For the benefit of those who don't know, Columbia Road is a sunday only flower market in deepest darkest Hackney (East London), and is an altogether good thing. As that part of East London is rapidly becoming gentrified (solidly built georgian/victorian terraces, 10 minutes from the city, small wonder), the market has become slightly diluted with shops selling overpriced yuppy tat, but the flower stalls remain the same selling a wonderful selection of miss-spelled flowers and plants ranging from the mundane to the rare and exotic, and, this is the killer, they are very cheap.
If you want citrus, or olives or even hardy bananas, hie you there. I have had occasional hankerings to have a pineapple (and I know you can grow them from the tops), but the beastie in question that I was thinking of is the variegated pink pineapple (AKA Ivory pineapple) Ananas comosus variegatus. I was happy to find both the plain green (with a fist sized fruit) and the variegated, and settled on the latter, a bargain at a fiver.
After a couple of hours freezing to death (it was a very cold and sunny day), we bought some hot prawns and calimari and made our way back, pausing along the way to record some ghost advertising.
I recently discovered the advertising ghosts blog; http://advertising_ghosts.blogspot.com/
I have always been fascinated by ancient ads and trademarkings, and East London is a particularly rich site, if you know where to look, mainly I suppose because there has never been enough money or inclination to change things. Soon, or maybe even sooner, all this will be swept away with the tide of blandification and associated corporate feeding frenzy that the tube extension and the olympics will bring. Check it out now, while it's still there, things are vanishing daily, and what is happening now is relatively benign compared to what is waiting round the corner.
posted by Lampy @ 1/31/2006 11:12:00 am
1 Comments:
I heard yesterday that the Dalston Lane Theatre is to be demolished to make way for the East London Line extension (although it's 400 metres from the proposed track, and guess what, there's to be a luxury housing developement on the site.
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