Tell me about where you live

luka

Well-known member
I live on the A2 the main road out to Dover and the continent. I live at the bottom of a hill, at a crossroads. The A2 is the east west axis and the north south axis goes to Lewisham in one direction, Greenwich and the Thames in the other. If I climb the hill I am in Blackheath. The roof of the world. I often have my birthday sat there among the exhaust fumes. The skies are very large and dramatic. There are mansions along its perimeter. Greenwich park is away to one edge of it. I haven't seen a more beautiful park anywhere in the world. The views over London are staggering. Capitalism is fairy lights. I love London but I grew up in the east, the low marshland around the Lea and I need space. I need emptiness. I need big skies.
 

luka

Well-known member
I like to walk up the hill, the HGVs hurtling towards you at 40 miles per hour, the road bending, all that weight and speed tilted towards you.
 

luka

Well-known member
Today I was up at the Point, a little piece of parkland, with caves carved into rock beneath it, and one of the best views in all of London. I saw the most beautiful sunset I have ever seen. I was in tears. It was too beautiful to be real but too vivid to be a dream.
 

luka

Well-known member
I remember in Autumn walking through the park in this great sweeping world of yellow. Caught up in all this glorious yellow. To be able to track the seasons in that park is something I'm super grateful for.
 

sufi

lala
There was a wonderful rainbow up here in stabby edmonton this afternoon, all bright against the grey clouds with a faint second band, you could see where it landed as the rain was falling in front of the houses across the way. Its a fairly green area with some desolate anti-human spaces around the gigantic earthworks for our local 'a' road.
we live on a space station type estate, dropped on a former toxic light industrial site, next to a small gurgling brook full of nasty stuff.
it's lovely here by the north circular and the arla depot, but i have to get on a plane to somewhere else at the crack of dawn
 

luka

Well-known member
I want to hear all about Barry, Berlin, São Paulo, South Devon, Dublin, New York, Manchester, Wood Green, your little patch and how you interact with it.
 
When I walk in North, East or West it's all like this

Chalk-Paths%20copy.jpg


Also to the North, the world's deepest hand-dug well, now located in a hospital car park. Why they decided to start digging a well at the top of a hill, 'tis a mystery.
 

luka

Well-known member
I was thinking about doing a countryside thread. I love hills and that. Rivers. Trees. Fucking absolutely love them.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
When I walk in North, East or West it's all like this

Chalk-Paths%20copy.jpg


Also to the North, the world's deepest hand-dug well, now located in a hospital car park. Why they decided to start digging a well at the top of a hill, 'tis a mystery.

where do you live then?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I live in a strange village or even town about 10k outside Lisbon, it's a mixture of the pretty and the banal (seems there is no planning permission rule - you can buy some land and throw up whatever you like, no matter how ugly) but it's by the river and the marshes and a few minutes from Lisbon by train. We're on the 3rd floor and can see the river and loads of other stuff. It's got a small rundown castle which is about 700 years old but (typically for Portugal) has been thoughtlessly converted into a cheesy bar, also a nice church and a massive house which (I guess) was built for the priest and several squares where old people often sit segregated into men and women like they were at primary school. Also lots of empty scrub - some of it fenced off, some of it open to you if you wanna risk it - and, the worst thing, loads of rubbish tipped into the bushes and long grass.
It's weird cos the town is divided into bits by the motorway, some places which are really close as the crow flies are all but inaccessible on foot or take an hour to get to. If you walk down the street you see loads of old ladies dressed all in black glaring at everyone - I think they grew up under Salazar and hate to see young people having fun.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Walking across here is pretty great

passtejo_cover.jpg

You can walk (or ride) about 7k across those marshes from one town to another right by the Tagus.
 
Last edited:

DannyL

Wild Horses
I live in Hackney, squeezed between Shoreditch Park and the canal. The building is fairly dilapidated postwar council stock, and we're last on a long chain of rebuilding works, which kinda puts us in the crosshairs of the running down of local government budgets, debates about their collective duty, insane London property prices, gentrification and so on. All this discourses swirling around above our heads like smoke from a BBQ. The most striking geographical features are the park next to us and the canal. The park is great, like an extended front garden for me in summer even though it's very flat and empty of much wildlife and tree growth. It's more like a flat expanse of green than much else, and that took a beating in last year's hot summer. The canal - complete with Drax throwups (and a million others) - is like a kind of mainline for hipsters and probably one of the nicest walks one can do in London. Probably the best thing about the estate is it's quite cut off from roads so you get lots of kids running around playing and screaming, sounding like proper urchins.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
a narrow middle class enclave at the meeting point of the traditionally (though rapidly gentrifying) areas of deptford and peckham. the locals are mostly caroline lucas types, soft spoken, artistic and left wing, however there are poorer immigrant households freckling the demographic map. around the corner is a rather astounding street in which everyone's latino; so much so that the one african kid who lives on it knows how to speak Portuguese without having taken a single lesson.

it's on a hill and rather poetically the more uphill you go, the richer it gets. at the top of the hill is a park, which is unremarkable other than it allows you to see the whole of the london skyline.

across the road from me is a drug den in in which shady characters amassed rather brazenly talking about brining uzi's to clubs. down the hill is the the beggining of pecham and the old kent road. it's full of homeless people and alchoholics and there are buildings that still show bullet holes from an ostensible kray twins drive by. if you walk the other way you get deptford, a special place that's like a magic-realis bazar. if you keep walking you get to luke's house or you get to goldsmiths. i'm not that into art students, but i do like in recent years a larger and larger trans-gendered community has amassed around goldsmiths. the cohabitation of pious africans with such blasphemers makes me proud of liberal democracy.
 
Top