Set the alarm for 6.30 this morning to get an early start on the new Tower Of London exhibit (The Tower At War) and immediately, promptly and decisively failed to spring out of bed. In fact it took me another two hours, and when I did emerge it was with a crushing headache. Someone's trying to tell me to slow down a little. So, Plan B with the Vitamin B. To the Tower on Monday hopefully, which meant today I could stay closer to home...
Continuing the recent trainspotter museum saddo theme (although clearly I see it differently), I went up the road this morning to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum. So that's what the huge brick chimney on the western skyline has been all this time! Some of the engines are extremely old, particularly the 90- and 100-inch Cornish machines which used to pump water into London from here up until the mid-1940s. Looking at those titans, built in the late nineteenth century, reminded me of few things so much as H.G.Wells' original conceptions of the various machinery used by Martian invaders in The War Of The Worlds...and a far cry from what we are doubtless about to have inflicted upon us by Spielberg and Cruise, borrowing, using and abusing that fine novel's name. It's the scale of the things which brings the comparison to mind, as well as the sharply articulated technology, and some very cluey engineering. Children of the Industrial Revolution, these dark satanic things were built to impress visually as well as to work well. The 90-inch machine is still run regularly on weekends along with several of the other lovingly-maintained engines in the place, but both the Cornishes are housed in a three-story-high Georgian factory block, so to look down on them from the top of the beam assembly one has to climb two storeys of iron stairs. You don't have to spend your life excitedly noting down serial numbers in a leather pocketbook to be impressed by the architectural, as well as mechanical, beauty of these creations. It's nice to see not everything in England is heading towards spreadsheets, gum-chewing wideboys in cheap suits and real-estate vampirism.
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