When you step into the Musée Albert-Kahn, one of the most beautiful and extraordinary places in the whole of Paris, a notice on the wall speaks out to you in French and English: Je ne vous demande qu’une chose, c’est d’avoir les yeux grands ouverts I only ask one thing of you: keep your eyesRead More
Some places have so little to tell about themselves, and that can be part of their appeal. Take Egypt Bay, for example. It’s a small bay on the northern coast of the Hoo Peninsula, that overlooked piece of land jutting out of the Kent mainland, caught between Essex and Sheppey. The River Thames flows byRead More
How intriguing to find a temple to Mithras resting underneath a temple to Mammon. Having visited the Guildhall amphitheatre and the nearby remains of Roman walls the other day, I have got the taste for seeking out Roman London. And so to the Bloomberg building in Walbrook (once a river, now a road) in theRead More
What are we to do with ruins? Visiting Athens, as I have been doing, you see a city defined by its ruined past. Everywhere, or in the centre at least, a modern city and the surviving traces of its existence two or three millennia ago, each define the other. The ruins of temples, market places,Read More