Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

It's always interesting getting a different angle on things.

Take this picture of Tower Bridge. It's not often you get the chance to go under one of London's most best-known landmarks while it lifts it's famous tilting spans. Let alone twice in one day...

That's what happened recently, when marypcb and I had the chance to sail down the river on the Lady Daphne, a fully rigged Thames sailing barge. Its mast is tall enough to force the bridge to open every time it passes under, stopping the traffic on one of the city's busiest roads.

It's certainly not the usual view. The towers loom above you, while the tons of metal of the spans rise slowly and silently into the sky. Deep in the bridge gears are tuning, raising the bridge.



What's usually in shadow is now in light, and you can finally see the patterns in the ironwork under the roadway, written in the rivets and girders of the Victorian engineers that hold up to the rigours of today's traffic. There's a power in the iron, a solidity and rigidity that just seems to go on and one - even despite the rust from the salt waters of the tidal Thames.



Of course, when you're taking photographs of the bridge,the people on the bridge are taking photographs of you. It's all terribly meta...



London, England
August 2009