Articles by Jen Pedler

The Instituto Gould , where we stayed in Florence, is situated in the Oltrano district - in other words, the other side of the Arno. It's a great area to stay; tucked in amid the artisan quarter, away from the tourist bustle but still within convenient walking distance of all the main sights. The guest house was originally built as a palazzo for a noble Florentine family in the mid 1600s and was acquired by the Gould Institute in the 1920s. The Institute is named after its American founder, E…

It's that time of year again. The Open House listings are live on the web, the green books are plopping through people's letter boxes. And as usual there's a mad scramble to book tours of the most 'prestigious' venues. The booking system last year was a fiasco; the servers crashed leading to reams of irate complaints on facebook - some people's entire lives seemed to have been ruined by their inability to get through. While there's an undeniable attraction in the possibility of visiting a hi…

Thanks to the Man in Seat 61 , my favorite rail travel website, I've discovered the cheapest way to go to visit my friend in Trier, Germany. If you book an 'any Belgian station' via Brussels Eurostar ticket (which I managed to do for £39 each way) you can get as far as Arlon. A ticket from there to Luxembourg is about £10 each way and then when you arrive at Luxembourg you buy a Luxembourg Special ticket to Trier which is just under €10. That ticket is a bargain day return between Luxembourg…

Over the last few weeks I've been wondering about the silver geometric shapes on the buildings behind Granary Square in King's Cross. They looked like a silver streak of lightening flashing from the old coal depot in the east, across the granary building and over to the goods sheds on the west side. Then I noticed there was a viewing platform at the end of King's Boulevard so I wandered up that way one day on my way home from work to take a look. The viewing platform is a wood and scaffolding…

Ever since the first New Bus for London came into service on route 38 in February last year I've been meaning to go for a ride on it. The problem was that Victoria to Hackney is not a route that co-incides with any of my regular journeys so I would have had to make a special trip. Not only that but I would also have had to plan the timing as there was only one of the new buses in operation and the rest of the time the route was served by the regular buses. But all that has changed now. Since la…

Wow! ipernity just gets better and better! Verdict on the script? 10/10 ***** Thanks, team!

I've been observing the development around King's Cross for the past few years, most recently the new flats along York Way. Watching these being slotted together reminded me of the Bayko Building Set I had as a child; one of my favourite toys. First came a steel frame, then windows were slotted in and insulation panels inserted - these are 'Kooltherm' suggesting that they are designed to stay cool in the summer and retain heat in the winter. Finally an outer cladding is added over this. On…

If you're like me, when you move house you pack everything into labelled boxes so you have some idea of where things need to go when they reach their new home. Of course, it takes some time to unpack everything and, again if you're like me, years later you find some odd box that you never got round to unpacking and start to wonder why you even wanted the things you put in it... But things were not so organised when I moved here from f****r. Over there, in a way, my photos were already packed i…

There was a time when a boutique was a shop where you could buy trendy clothes. It now seems to have become a term that is attached to almost anything if someone wants to imply that it's something not run-of-the-mill or offering a personalised, unique or individual service. It's used a lot to describe hotels and now it seems it can also apply to flats as shown by the banner outside this new development going up by Regent's Canal in Camden. What is a boutique flat? Small? Tren…

When I moved here 20+ years ago the corner shop was run by an Indian couple known as Fred and Sue. I don't know how long they'd been there before that. They lived upstairs and brought up children and then grandchildren there. My daughter (now in her 30s) had her first job delivering papers for them. It was handy to pop to the corner to buy a newspaper, tobacco, milk or the occasional emergency rations; a tin of beans, eggs, loaf of bread... It wasn't really the sort of shop you'd buy much el…

I've set my home page so that immediately under this blog there's a block displaying my 'latest' album. I've also discovered that, as this simply means the album that appears first when you view the albums in the organizer, this can be any album you like as you can re-order the albums so that the one you want to display is first in the list. Which is a long-winded way of saying that if you scroll down below the blog you'll see a mosaic of my London A-Z album; a collection of London streetname s…

The big M couldn't have found a more appropriate street to set up in. Not that I frequent it, I hasten to add...

I have to admit I never saw the point of some of the groups that existed on flickr. I remember one being set up with the sole purpose of becoming the *biggest* group and encouraging members to add their entire photostream to the group?! Then there were the comment groups - add one comment x - that would clutter up your comments with flashing icons and rotating gifs. "You are my winner" !flash flash ! "Your photo is AWESOME - as seen in the I've Got More Comments Than You Have group" !jigg…

All my spare time over the past few days seems to have been consumed by my migration from flickr. There's still a bit of sorting out left to do but I'm ready to start moving forward here now and posting pics that were never part of my flickr photostream. Some of these will be the backlog that I was going to get round to posting there but today it was a beautifully sunny bank holiday Monday and I went on an outing with a friend and took the first photos I have taken since moving to ipernity. Ha…

Yes, like most other flickr refugees, I'm setting up a new home on ipernity because I don't like the changes flickr has made or the way they were implemented. Yes, ipernity is a lot like the 'old' flickr and perhaps that is why it has attracted so many of us. But it is not flickr, and I hope never will be. I hope the site won't become a victim of its own success and be made an offer it can't refuse from some faceless corporate entity. What I like about ipernity so far This blogging f…

I'm starting to feel at home here already! Going back to flickr, as I still do while I'm sorting things out there, feels like a visit to an alien planet. Discovered two more random faves on oldish photos last time I was there. Again from a newly signed up member with a twee coloured camera icon (yuk, the sort of thing you'd buy a 2 year-old!) but no pics at all, which is at least better than the porn... Yet another addition to the block list. It will be nice to leave all that behind me soon.…

Yesterday some weirdo with a bunch of porny pics on his photostream faved this photo of mine on flickr. (Don't worry, it's safe to click the image below as I've now brought the pic over here!) Why? And how did he even come to find it? It was posted back in Feb 2012 and buried on p.47 of my photostream (not that there's any real concept of paging with the new scroll of death). Of course, I immediately blocked him but what I noticed was that he'd just joined!! If this is the kind of new memb…

I am a refugee from the Great Flickr Disaster of May 2013. The first I knew of it was when I was checking facebook on my phone over breakfast. A friend had written: "Have you seen the hideousness that's the revamped Flickr? no no no no no NO!" I discovered what she meant when I opened my flickr page. It was like being parachuted into a disaster zone. My home page was a jumbled mosaic of seemingly randomly sized pictures - a latest upload from one of my contacts was so huge that it filled a…