Recent posts may have given you the impression that Stockholm is a beautiful city—that was certainly the impression left by my visit. Yet, I’m afraid, a monstrous carbuncle looms over the city: Kaknästornet.

Built in 1957, it is a broadcast tower with radio, television and satellite masts. Until 2018, it was open to the public, and had a notoriously poor restaurant looking out over the city—but these days, the security risks are considered too high for such frivolity.

This is Hoop-La (2014), a sculpture by the American sculptor Alice Aycock in the Princess Estelle Sculpture Park in Djurgården, Stockholm. It was, in fact, the first piece acquired for the park.

I found it intriguing: it combined scale with real detail and finesse. The whole form seemed to change as I puzzled my way around it. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it at first, but found it intriguing. And, in the end, perhaps to be intriguing is perhaps the point of the work.

In 1983, King Olav V of Norway presented this rock to King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. It symbolises Noway’s thanks for Sweden’s support in the Second World War, because nothing says ‘thank you’ like moving a 15-tonne rock 300 miles. It sits near the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Stockholm.

Not far away, there’s a very different rock: Space Seed by Bigert & Bergström. This bronze sculpture, inspired by a meteor shower, is intended to reflect both the destructive power of meteorites but also their suspected role in the origin of life. While the outside is burned and dark, the inside has a shiny golden finish. I rather liked it.

Apparently, Bigert & Bergström envisages people sitting on and crawling through their rock. I suspect the same behaviour would be frowned upon for the memorial rock. It’s so hard to keep up with rock etiquette these days.

When I came across this Peter Linde sculpture in Djursgården in Stockholm, I understood it to be called ‘woman of peace’ and assumed it to be an anthropomorphic representation of the idea of peace. I liked it, but I had a sneaking sense of discomfort at the underlying gender politics of representing ‘peace’ as a woman: it felt very vaguely misogynistic for a sculpture created as recently as 2016 in a country as forward-thinking in gender equality as Sweden.

I should have known better.

The English title is, in fact, ‘statue of the lady working for peace in the world’. It was presented by Swedens Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. It is dedicated to the memory of Alva Myrdal and Inga Thorsson, both Swedish women who did notable work in the field of nuclear disarmament. They are pictured on the base. The statue also serves as a tribute to all women—known and unknown—who are working for peace in the world.

This is the Waldermarsudde oil mill in Stockholm, built in 1784 and once used to produce linseed oil. These days, it’s part of the Prins Eugens art museum.

I just walked past it, so don’t have much more to tell you about it. Instead, allow me to present some disparate thoughts on windmills a long way from Sweden.

As a child, I used to be taken on an annual trip to Norfolk to visit my extended family. Seeing windmills there was always a particular treat. I particularly liked windmills with ‘headphones’, which was my inexplicable choice of word to describe sails.

One windmill we visited often was Sutton Mill, built in 1789 and the UK’s tallest surviving windmill. I only realised when coming to write this blog post that it closed to visitors in 2008, and has had something of a torrid time since, with its cap removed and bits falling off. It has now been restored and is a holiday home available to rent.

The Norfolk mills website has a nice potted history, including recent events.

I can’t find a picture of me at Sutton Mill, but here I am looking typically full of sunshine on the back of a boat on the Norfolk Broads twenty-odd years ago:

There was a lovely article by Kate Youde and Susie Mesure in the FT recently about the challenges of living in a windmill: it’s hard to find furniture to fit circular rooms, you can’t really hang pictures on sloping walls, that kind of thing. It’s unbelievable that they failed to mention Jonathan Creek.

I’d never previously clocked that windmills often need two entrances. As the cap rotates with the wind, a single entrance could be blocked by the sails. I can’t believe that I’d never thought of that before.

In 2007, I took this photograph of a windmill somewhere in Norfolk. The embedded geolocation is wrong, and I’ve spent far more time than is sensible trying to work out which windmill it might be.

I reckon it is Stow Mill, which Norfolk Mills says would have been open to the public in 2007… though it, too, has now also been converted into a holiday rental.

This is a much newer mill than Sutton and Waldermarsudde, constructed as a flour mill in 1827. Happily, though, this one proves the FT’s rule about windmills having two entrances on opposite sides, lest one be blocked by the sails… or at least it used to, but the second entrance was bricked up when shorter sails were fitted.

Thirty years ago, King Carl XVI Gustaf ordered and funded the construction of these obelisks in a square in central Stockholm. They were later moved to a less conspicuous location on the quayside.

Let’s not pretend that we can’t see why they were moved: they’re ugly. Terrazzo concrete does not sit well with plexiglass covered waves of brightly covered lights. Concrete monuments are explicitly designed to last centuries; electronic gizmos and light bulbs are not. It’s very 1990s.

The symbolism, though, is interesting. The flashy do-dahs are there to show data on the air and water quality in Stockholm, and to remind us of the impact of humanity on nature—and vice versa. King Carl XVI Gustaf is a very similar age to King Charles III, and this is a topic that clearly interests them both. Perhaps expressing environmental concerns are part of the role of a modern European monarch.