This artwork by the Belgian couple Tom and Lien Dekyvere was part of Canary Wharf’s festival of winter lights, but has since been adopted into the permanent collection.

It is a boulder made from discarded circuit boards. It lights up, but I vastly prefer it in its daytime mode, where it looks much more like a boulder and much less like a twinkly trinket.

When I’ve seen this work previously, I’ve taken it as a commentary on the impact of technology on the earth’s natural resources: all those rare earth metals returning to the rocky form from whence they came. The growth of artificial intelligence, with its outsized carbon emissions, felt like it lent the sculpture extra contemporary relevance.

In the course of writing this blog post, though, I’ve discovered that my interpretation does not align with the artists’ intention, which is more about highlighting the imperfection of digital representations of the physical world—which, I suppose, explains the garish light display.

I also thought the label was misprinted, and should have been ‘El Antica’, which I assumed to be Belgian for ‘the antique’, but that’s a load of rubbish too.

Good Lord, it’s the second post about a church in a row, I’ll need to hand this blog over to my brother if I’m not careful. Today’s visit is to St George’s Chapel, hidden away at what was once the centre of the Heathrow Airport site.

I’ve long known this existed, but I’d never visited. I’ve recently been reading Flying Blind by Peter Robison, and its mention of memorials to those killed in plane crashes spurred me to call in.

Except, one can’t call in. The church itself is open only for services. Opened in 1968, it was designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who more famously designed Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and the Ulster Hospital. It is in a cave dug beneath Heathrow, stylistically similar to a crypt, the better to provide sound insulation from the noise above.

St George’s was designed with three apses, so that the Anglican, Catholic and Free Churches didn’t have to share. In the 1970s, the churches perhaps realised how petty and, dare I say it, unchristian that seemed, and so the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council banded together and rededicated one of the apses for shared used. They allowed the other two to be dedicated to use by non-Abrahamic religions, in a show of multi-faith… who am I kidding, this was the 1970s, of course they didn’t. They plonked a Bible in one of them, a font in the other, and carried on just as they were. Other faiths weren’t catered for until 1998, when a separate ground-floor multifaith prayer room was opened.

I couldn’t see any of this because the door was locked: as best as I can tell, it only opens at lunchtime four times per week these days, all of them for Catholic services. There was an A4 notice posted on the door with a number to call for urgent chaplaincy assistance… which was the same number one is advised to call if there is any ‘inappropriate behaviour’ in the vicinity. I’m not sure whether the chaplain prays for divine intervention in unruly behaviour or whether the security guard comes down to take your confession.

I’m being snippier than I mean to be. You can be as atheist as me and still think that the Garden of Remembrance is quite lovely. The 16-foot oak cross is arresting, and the many and varied memorial plaques are moving. The enclosed nature of the garden makes it a surprisingly peaceful and quiet place to sit and contemplate.

There is something genuinely delightful about the fact that Heathrow has protected this space while everything around it has changed. It’s a glorious bit of human-focused inefficiency, a rare place in an airport where one can sit in peace without being expected to handover cash.

Long may it continue.

Twenty years ago, I used to walk across Stockton’s Trinity Green daily, shuttling between my rented student house and lectures at Durham University’s Queen’s Campus… though in those days, it wasn’t called Trinity Green; it was just a ruined church.

Twelve years ago, I got around to writing about the slightly grisly history of the ruined church that stands at its center—and the graveyard that has now become the Green itself.

Wandering across the Green again, I reflected on how lovely the space has become, mostly thanks to work that was done some years after I moved away from Stockton. It’s become a great bit of urban greenery, with the once frequently vandalized and graffitied ruined church now sensitively fenced off, adding a beautiful atmospheric centerpiece.

It’s easy to imagine an alternative history in which the ruined church was flattened and its churchyard redeveloped into a car park or something similar. Instead, Stockton Council had the foresight to create something really special.

Until I saw this sign, I’d never heard of the ‘8 Bridges Way’, a walking and cycling path along the River Tees—despite having visited the Transporter Bridge many times, which is where this circular route begins and ends.

Having seen the sign and searched the web, it feels very much up my street: a twelve-mile river walk is just the sort of thing that Wendy and I might mosey along on any given weekend, especially given that we could easily catch a train down to Middlesbrough which would leave us a stone’s throw from the start.

I’ll have to add it to the list!

In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened, ushering in the era of steam locomotion—though initially only for freight, as passenger coaches continued to be drawn by horses until 1833.

But that’s not all that happened in Stockton in 1825: the Shambles also opened. It is still going strong 199 years on, though these days it hosts all sorts of shops rather than just the butchers that traditionally occupied a shambles.

I walk past these lovely gates outside Charlotte’s Butchery fairly often, and every time, I’m reminded of this video which I first posted eighteen years ago (with the image quality you’d expect):

It’s twelve years since I last visited the transporter bridge: the longest extant transporter bridge in the world. It remains an astonishing sight, although in one crucial respect, it has changed beyond recognition.

For five years now, the Transporter has been out of service, becoming a monument more to modern underinvestment in infrastructure than early 20th century engineering. It looks like it might take investment of £30m to press it back into service.

Waiting for me dad, a sculpture by Mackenzie Thorpe, commemorates families waiting for the return of the workers across the bridge at the end of their shifts on the industrial sites beyond. As events transpired, it was unveiled about twelve weeks before the bridge ‘temporarily’ closed, which lends it a melancholic air to expectation it depicts: the figures will be waiting for far longer than they expected for anyone to return over the Tees.