The Piccadilly Hotel (today The Dilly) and Cordings – a glitch in the timeline?

I popped into The Dilly to see if there was anything left of what was, over 100 years ago, often described as one of the most impressive hotels in the world. I was on the hunt for any of its original 1908 construction or the 1920s revamp when it became one of London's best Jazz Age venues. Suffice to say, I couldn't find much from either period, but I did uncover an enigma whereby the dates for certain things simply don't make sense. 

This huge central London hotel fills the space bordered by between Piccadilly, Air Street and Regent Street. Its exterior at the time of writing slathered in scaffolding. However, many information boards attached to that metal protection hint at the building's history and the modern facilities available inside. 

I wandered into the bland foyer which still retains the three lovely ceiling lights. These elegant glass domes seem to me to be at odds with the modern PVC panels and printed info below, advertising the range of facilities available on other floors:

The room at the far left of the reception area retains some history – it is today Madhu's of Mayfair, offering Indian cuisine, set within the ornately sumptuous surroundings that was originally The Grill Room: 

Note the image bottom right above which is from one of the panels on the exterior of the building. The second photo within that shows a second room with lovely ceiling lights, which I also did not see on this occasion. I'll need to go back again. 

Returning to the reception area, there's an unmanned temporary counter advertising 'Downstairs at the Dilly'. I'd also noticed a sign on the exterior depicting an 'exclusive' dance studio, by which I am assuming that it's only residents or members who can use this facility.  

Convinced that either one of these spaces would have been the hall used for parties in the 1920s when the Bright Young Things dressed up in tailed suits and beaded dresses and danced the Charleston into the early hours, I headed down the stairs to investigate further but I ended up in a small basement lobby leading to a gym. Hmm. I'll have to check out some floor plans and go back for another try. I'm now recalling that there's an elaborately columned swimming pool down there somewhere too. 

Scuppered, I then headed to the upper floors via the lovely staircase which, I assume, dates from 1908 when the hotel first opened. Marble, metal and wood in elegant harmony, albeit badly married with some nasty modern carpet. 

On one of the landings there is an old London map etched into metal and lit so strongly that it's hard to see in person, let along photograph it. I've done my best here in an effort to show how bizarre it is that the designers of today's hotel have installed a map that shows this area before the hotel existed yet there is no annotation or explanation on or near it to explain to the uninitiated what they are looking at!

It's actually a very fascinating map and one I am not sure I have seen before. Note Regent Circus for Piccadilly Circus, dating it to the 1820s.  

I took a snap of the layout of one of the floor plans and continued up the stairs to The Terrace, passing through an area festooned with horrid fake plastic flowers* and a screen advertising the facilities available at the hotel. This includes a bizarre image of a 'bride and groom' entering the ground floor lobby. This repeats along the exterior of the building and I have often shown this image to friends to point at the strange camel toe effect at the front of her dress at thigh level – ugh!  Has the marketing department at The Dilly not heard of photo editing software?! And whilst I'm in picky mode – that TV screen isn't level. 

But the terrace area itself is actually a lovely space with, considering its locality, reasonably priced fare (ooh, careful Jane!). It sits behind the columns that run along along the main facade. Back in the 'Art Deco' era this terrace included an outdoor circular bathing pool, approx 4metres diameter, just like like one of the large collapsible ones you can buy today. I know this because I have photo somewhere of some young women in bathing suits here – when I locate that image it I will add it to this post.

And so to the enigma. It's about the timeline of this building which, doesn't seem to make sense.

Richard Norman Shaw's elegant Palladian/Baroque designs for this hotel are said to have started in 1905/6 with the 300-bedroom building opening in 1908 offering a wide range of additional facilities that included the aforementioned Grill Room, three basement floors for hospitality and entertainment, and four Masonic lodges(!). An illustration of the building is included within the info panels on the outside of The Dilly and within the in-house promotion. 

It comes from an advertisement in the New York Herald dated 1911, three years after the hotel had opened. 

But here's the enigma – look closely at that illustration and note that it is a drawing, not a photograph, and the hotel is depicted as covering the whole block including the corner space, complete with a flag on it. and Air Street is shown to be as big and fancy as the Piccadilly side, which is not actually possible because the hotel never covered this corner section at all. 

The Cordings shop was complete before the hotel was constructed as shown in this image. Note the  lovely ribbon-effect 1903 date stamp at first floor level above the entrance to Denman House at No.20 Piccadilly. The date is hard to see in my pics here, but trust me it's there:

This leads me to believe that designs for the hotel were started at least six years before it opened and this American newspaper (and possibly others too) simply used a preliminary illustration, no other visual image being available to them at that time. 

UPDATE: This press ad (c1909) further backs up this timeline as it shows the corner part of this block cropped out of both of the street views:

The Dilly's own history page doesn't offer much more than I have already written above. This piece by Historic Hotels is more comprehensive and includes some excellent images.

To find out more about RE Jones who owned the hotel from 1921, join me for my Southwark Ghostsigns guided walk, often available here.

*but you can't have a plastic straw with your cocktail, go figure.

Big, beautiful boot scrapers

I've been wandering around and properly investigating the St. James's area a lot these past few years, yet until earlier this week I hadn't noticed some superb metalwork within the entrance to 50 St. James's Street. Considering that I have quite a large photographic collection of London boot scrapers, I was confused how I'd managed to miss this enormous pair of decorated beauties either side of the door. 

A sign near the entrance says that the building is being renovated. There are remnants of scaffold pole footers and the whole thing needs a wash and brush up. The boot scrapers are sublime. I have never before seen any so opulently decorated. The lanterns at the top of the street level posts are no longer in place, hence why they are cropped out of my phots here, but their gas feeds are still evident below their three-legged struts. I had an inkling that building this would have originally been one of the area's many gentlemen's clubs as per White's, Boodle's, Brook's etc. But what was it more recently? I needed to do some delving.

Well, it turns out that for over 12 years this site has been behind scaffolding or under wraps of some kind which is evidence by looking at Google's retrospective street views. In 2012 the site shows that the building looked like the image above. 

A quick bit of googling and Wikipedia tells us that this is an 1827 Grade II listed building that was has been a gentleman's club (yes!*), a bridge club in the 1920s and then various casinos or gaming institutes. There are plans to convert the building for use as either a hotel or as residential properties. However, the written timeline in that Wiki link doesn't seem to correlate with the google streetview which clearly show that scaffolding was in place by August 2014 so I am a bit confused when the squatters were there.     

This 2012 image show the lovely gas-fired lamps beautifully silhouetted. I suspect that the lanterns were removed for safety reasons during the building works and I am hoping that, going forward, they will be reinstated, complete with the gas feed as per other lamps in this area, rather than retrofitted with LEDs.

* had I applied my brain I could have worked that this was William Crockford 's club – he was an interesting character to say the least!

Summer Show 2021 and Late Constable at the Royal Academy

I've seen a lot of art these past few weeks. And it's all good.

Last week I went to the Royal Academy Summer Show which this year is not restricted to a few weeks in the summer . It's a riot of colour and sort of reflects all the street art and road crossings that are brightening up the City at the moment.* I also like that this year's show has a greater percentage of textured, textural, handmade pieces such as collages and interesting things made out of found, recycled or collected objects. 

So absorbed was I that I only took a few photos and these include, top left, a sculpture by an artist friend, Jaana Fowler. I couldn't take a snap of my mate Johnny Bull's framed print because it was set so high on the wall – hey JB; well done re all those red dots!

And so to the small, but very absorbing, Late Constable exhibition at the RA which I visited on the same day as the Ron Mueck show in nearby Dover Street,

This interested me because I really like John Constable's sketches and preliminary work, more than I do his finished paintings which I often find a bit over-egged, chocolate boxy and twee. This show has some marvellous before and after comparisons (guess which ones I like best!) and lots of his weather studies – rainbows, storms, clouds etc, which reminded me of my A-Level art years when I was trying myself to master a decent cloud-painting technique, with an idea to produce an indulating old-style rollercoster (man made) against a backdrop of cumulonimbus (nature). I never quite got the hang of the clouds and I sort of gave up. Instead I made a simple graduation in the background that I wan't really pleased with. I must have dumped the lot or left it all in the plans chest there because, having just looked through my 6th form sketchbooks and other works I have saved from that era, I can't find any ref of that at all, and I now wish I'd been able to view Constable's efforts when I was a teenager to see how he too struggled to capture the ever-changing Great British sky.

It wasn't just the paintings and sketches that intigued me. We were at first perplexed by the studs and sliders on some of the frame (top right, above), something that we'd never noticed before but surely must be reasonably commonplace. We decided the sliders must be the closing mechanisms and the studs must be little handles to enable the front section, including the glass, to be flipped forward to allow the canvas to be loaded from the front, rather than from the rear which how modern frames are constructed. Please correct me if you know better.

There's plenty of time to see both exhibitions – The Summer Show runs until 2nd January 2022 and  Late Constable until 13th February – both ticketed. However, there are galleries and exhibitions at the RA that are free and well worth a visit. I'd particularly recommend the Collections Gallery on the first floor at the rear (easier via the Burlington Gdns entrance) where there are some marvellous artworks. Also, in the low level linking corridor adjacent to the toilets and lovely cafe, there are some absoultely stunning pieces of sculpture. Find out what's on at the RA here.

*Tbh, I'm not eally keen on those colourful crossings – the ones outside the RA along Piccadilly are looking really mucky these days. There's a good reason roads are a grey colour!

Goodbye Habitat Tottenham Court Road – but let's save Pollard's curved windows

Heading down Tottenham Court Road on a bus in early March this year, I noticed that Habitat had moved out. Oh dear. I got off the bus to take a few snaps. The exterior signage had been removed and the interior was being stripped. The lovely curved display windows that run around the shop on both sides were covered in dust. 

The windows around this part of the building are double co-joined curves – an expensive innovation, but this design allows the products to be seen clearly rather than be hindered by reflections from the street. The glass would have been installed in the late 1930s by Pollards, the go-to shop-fitting company of that era who had 'imported' this curved glass idea from the US. 

I went back in April and took some more photos. With all the furniture removed this gave clear views across the store space of the windows. Really good infitity shots are to be had from the exterior where mirrored end panels along the top sections repeat the curves.

I recall that the curved windows used to continue all the way along the full frontage – these were replaced with boring sheet glass c2000. I didn't take pics or note the specific date but I did find a photo ref of that somewhere – when I re-find it I will add it to this post.

There are only a handful of places in London where Pollards' unusual horizontal curved glass can be found these days and each install is unique... 

Fox umbrellas, at London Wall, Moorgate, was established in nearby Fore Street in 1868. As I understand, this is the first site where Pollards' curved glass was installed. It's really hard to photograph, especially when the place, which is today a cafe bar, is closed during lockdown or open with people sat at tables outside on the pavement. 

The double curves at the Fox shop here are shallower than at the other sites. I haven't a clue what those blobby bits of art in the window were supposed to be! At the extreme right end of the hand rail there is an imprint showing Pollards' non reflecting window patent numbers.  

The shop also retains many of the early C20th interior wood fittings. Pre-this Jazz Age refit, the display windows would have looked something like James Smith & Sons, New Oxford Street.

And then, of course, we have what is possibly the best-known example of these windows at Joseph Emberton's marvellous building for Alexander Simpson, a stone's throw from Piccadilly Circus. It opened in 1936 selling Simpson's range of men's clothing and is today home to Waterstone's bookshop. Here we a have two sets of single deep curves, again with the mirrored ends. During the Christmas 2018 period part of the windows were damaged and suffered huge cracks, as shown below protected by thick adhesive plasitc sheets. This being a Grade I listed building, the glass has since been replaced. Phew.

As per the Fox shop, on the hand rails on the Piccadilly-facing windows, Pollards name and 'patent invisible glass' can be found at both the extreme left and right,  rather than 'non reflecting' as per the Fox shop' along with two patent numbers can be found. 

More about Pollards in italics at the bottom.

Joseph Emberton's beautifully-designed building for Simpson has, in effect, two front doors – the southern entrance in Jermyn Street is just as impressive, implementing the same curved glass and showing that both entrances were of importance as regards customers, but I cannot find a patent mark on this side of the building:

The fourth/last London example, unless someone can tell me where to find others, is on the old gas showroom on Crouch End Broadway, today home to Barclays Bank, where double shallow curves meet and point towards us along both sides of the building. No Pollards markers to be found but there's some really nice Art Deco geometric metalwork at low level.

At high level, this building also features eight beautifully-carved panels carved by Arthur Ayres depicting the many different things that gas power could do for us.

Edward Pollard, shopfitter, company founded 1895. Listed at 134E+F Kingsland Rd, E2, as E.Pollard. 1906 moved to 29 Clerkenwell Rd. In 1913 E. Pollard & Co. designed and fitted Carreras Piccadilly shop. c1919 built a factory in Highbury. 1920s showrooms at 299 Oxford St (branches in Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin). By 1923 E. Pollard & Co.Ltd also have second Clerkenwell premises at 158-187 St John St (Hammond+Champness lifts building, rebuilt 1925-27). 1967 Pollard Group relocated to Basingstoke.

UPDATE: see the comments for reference of similar curved glass at HMV, 363 Oxford Street, which I have written about separately here. 

UPDATE 2: A photo of the Piccadilly store shortly after it opened can be found in Art Deco Style by Hillier and Escritt. Here is crop of the street level area of that image:

It seems to show curved pairs coming forwards as at the other locations, and I am now thinking that the deep curve we see there today, that swoops away from us, was installed at a later date. Intriguing.

Construction Time Again – rebuilding Central London

Travelling through Central London recently, admiring the view from the top deck of a bus, I couldn't help but notice the huge redevelopments are happening at the moment and how many gaping great holes there are in the ground. Covid-19 does not appear to have restricted the construction industry.

For instance, at New Oxford Street, just east of Centrepoint, there is a big whole where this has been demolished – there is now a completely clear view of Renzo's horrible coloured towers.

Turning the corner into Charing Cross Road, the new build around Tottenham Court Road station continues. Chunky great glass things replace the much-missed Astoria Theatre (which was my favourite live music venue) and other buildings and small streets in the vicinity. The huge glasshouse entrances to TottCtRd station still look out of place and out of alignment with their tall neighbour and it's evident that the glass within them has yet to be cleaned. Such a silly design – how could you clean them anyway?  Why do these things need to be so tall and ugly? Consider  and compare the flamboyant yet understed Metro entrances in Paris.

Keep travelling with me here. Buildings between Centrepoint and Denmark Place have evolved considerably of late. Denmark Street as a centre for live music has diminished considerably and Tin Pan Alley is no more. Opposite, on the corner of Manette Street, the pink-faced replacement for the Foyles building looks to be almost complete. Hurrah, at least, for the elegant beauty of the 1930s Central School of Art, now Foyles new home.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against change, I like to see the patchwork of history – all this knock down and replace is nothing new. Leases expire, buildings become unfit for purpose etc and need to be replaced. The Victorians, and the Georgians before them, rebuilt whole streets and, just pre-WWII there was another construction boom, but the amount of change happening at the moment in Central London is, for me, quite shocking. 

And so we continue to Cambridge Circus and turn right into Shaftesbury Avenue. All looks to be as was until crash bang boom, the whole of the block behind Piccadilly's iconic advertising hoardings has been reduced to just that – an almost two-dimensional sign:

And, so, over into Piccadilly itself. Nothing to report until we get to the Ritz. There is a big development with Caffe Nero on the corner here is covered in plastic, I know not why, and then further along at the corner of Half Moon Street the red brick building's façade is all that remains. Though, as you can see from this older streetview there have been hoardings around it since at least 2008; it had been in a poor state for decades.

I decided after that to just look left at the park

It's just occured to me that I have efffectively taken you on a free virtual tour!

Art Deco architecture in Central London

Oops, I let the blog posts take a back seat whilst I have been researching new walking tours these past few months.
Spurred on by the success of my Art Deco era guided walks in Shoreditch, Holloway, Spitalfields, The City, Camden and Arsenal, I can now offer a few more. Specifically Piccadilly, KX/StPancras, Soho, HattonGdn/Smithfield, Covent Garden and Bloomsbury all of which include less-visited unsung gems in the back streets.
In-depth info and how to book here.
Or visit my Jane's London Walks where you'll also find a quick-to view schedule.
I hope you can join me one day.

Hatton Garden to Smithfield – Modernism, Markets, Meta and Mysteries

St Giles to The Strand  – Flappers, Fashion, Fruit and Footlights

Soho Deco – Movies, Music and Motor Cars

Piccadilly Deco – Slacks, Flicks and Slots

All Change! St Pancras and Kings Cross in the 1930s

Dover Street Market in Burberry's, Haymarket

The 3-sided clock – where did it go?

In 1912 Burberry moved into its headquarters at 18-22 Haymarket. When they moved out in 2007 I was concerned what might happen to the building and watched the site avidly as the changes took place.
First the lovely clock disappeared. Then the hoardings went up with signs on them saying something about a market. Ooh, I thought; a market. Ah, but yeah, but no.  
The new occupant is Dover Street Market which moved from its previous location in... in Dover Street, to here. Isn't that a bit confusing?  
Last month I finally found the time to take a peek inside:

It's great to see so much of the old Burberry store over above and around the concessions within. The selling spaces wrap around the original central staircase, which, if my memory serves me correctly, is octagonal. It has lovely wooden handrails and the woodblock and parquet floor have been lovingly stripped down to enhance the grain etc. I also like the way nails on the floor have been hammered in as a kind of feature to show where the carpet used to be, ditto sections of the floor that are light or dark depending on when and for how long it saw daylight. Oh, and check out the lovely circular windows on the stairs and the original skylights within the ground floor ceiling.
A single lift runs down the centre of the staircase but even though there are doors on every one of the five(?) floors, on the day I was there they didn't seem to be working, so I suppose that's how rich people stay thin.
On the top floor there is a tea and cakes shop but I can't tell you if it's worth putting the salopettes and crampons on for as I couldn't see a menu or price list.
Some of the concessions/designers' spaces and display cases are really imaginative, more cleverly designed than the stock within; I saw a lot of simple cotton things that looked like pillowslips with added holes for arms, some scrumpled things that would have your Nan reaching for an iron, some very expensive basic T-shirts and lots of find 'em everywhere lately deconstructed patchwork shirts.
To clarify; Dover Street Market is no longer in Dover Street. Dover Street Market is a company and has moved to Haymarket, which was once a market for hay.
It must be really confusing for visitors to London. Consider if you asked someone to meet you at Covent Garden Market and you waited for them at Nine Elms whilst they wandered around the Apple Market (which no longer sells apples), or for Billingsgate they go to an events location near Cannon Street whilst you stand like a prawn in the East End* .

And, as far as I can ascertain, St James Market, Piccadilly, was also moved from its earlier location at the top of Haymarket to St James' Churchyard.
Any more? I am sure there must be.
But back to Burberry's – where is the clock? I was hoping Burberry had taken it with them to their new offices at Horseferry House but I can't see it in any of these pics. I had a look on their site for more info and notice the clock is not on the building in the pics from 1913. Hmmm.

*Try it for yourself – an online search for Billingsgate Market will show that it's either a fish market in Poplar, or one of the 25 Wards of the City of London

John Maine's Sea Strata at Green Park Station, Piccadilly – Utter Filth!

In 2011 a marvellous work by John Maine was opened to the public. Wonderful carvings within the rock evoke fossilised rock and the rolling sea. I was really impressed with it. Well, I still am impressed by the artwork.
But six years on it's filthy, and that's far from impressive.

It's been looking icky like this for at least the past year. Hardly a nice welcome for people entering the Royal Park behind. A plate within the pavement shows that this is Transport For London's private property.
Come on  TfL, get your jet washers out please.
John Maine's subtle pieces are inspired by nature. His other London work includes the war memorial within Islington Green.

More filth here.

A tour of The Society Of Antiquaries, Burlington House, Piccadilly

As you enter Burlington House courtyard heading for the latest art exhibition at The Royal Academy, look left to see the doorway to The Society of Antiquaries – and then go inside and book yourself on a tour because it's one of London's little known gems and it's fab.
Here are some taster pictures of my recent visit.

Lots of marvellous paintings and one portrait is of Richard III fiddling with his ring. Oh please! Titter ye not. That's exactly what the guide told us.
Plus shelves and shelves of old beautiful leather books and a multi-level library. On the day I was there we were shown some pages in a huge scrapbook containing exquisite ephemera and illustrations relating to the Duke Of Wellington's funeral.
I visited with the London Historians – if you would like to find out more about LH just click here and if you are tempted to join (and why not, it's also fab) and first heard about LH from me here then please mention my name/site as there are discounts available for recommendations. Thanking you in advance.
Now to ponder the pronunciation of 'antiquaries' ... it's an-tik-warries, as opposed to 'antiquarian' which is pronounced anti-kware-ian. Go figure.
Isn't english fun?!

Masks and a Monkey – In Your Face – Nina Conti at Criterion Theatre

Ventriloquism ... it's moved on since the days of Lord Charles and Orville.

Nina Conti, Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly Circus (right next to Eros)

This week and next Nina Conti brings to us her own version of this genre. Nina has, quite justly won awards for her ingenuity in this field. You may have seen her amusing and genuinely moving BAFTA nominated film on the subject.
I saw the Criterion show last night – Nina makes everything she is doing really obvious and yet we forget she is the voice behind everything we are hearing. She uses strap-on masks (as modelled by Nina above) on members of the audience and every night is different being as it's dependent on audience participation. It's a lot of hard work for her and yet she makes it look effortless.
That's all very clever, but my favourite bits were when Monk the monkey was [literally] on-hand making his often outrageous observations.

Until 12th March. See here for more details and how to book tickets.

Below are some other monkeys and apes I have spotted on my travels:

Graffiti in Kentish Town and Shoreditch, and a skeleton in the Natural History Museum foyer

Palmers pet store in Camden Parkway (now closed), windows in Holloway, a plastic bag in a tree.
And, spotted just last weekend at Portsmouth Cathedral – a monkey is the organ, and not just the organ-grinder's friend!!

London Lumiere – a review

Malcolm and I decided to spend two evenings taking in as much of this event as possible.

Friday 15th January
We first went to see the installation at Oxford Circus. It was marvellous and we admired the colour-changing mesh for perhaps ten minutes and then moved off to find new things, thinking that everything would be up to that standard. But no. I think we peaked too early...

We looked for something at Liberty's. We spotted a crowd of people at a window and could make out what we think was a dress in a window. The pic shown here isn't mine; it's one from their website that was at Granary Square (see also KX later on). So we moved on to Brown Hart Gardens where some cute little bird boxes edged the upper level, but that was it. Did we miss something better?
In Grosvenor Square lots of people were queuing to get inside the square at each of the four corners. Peering over the hedges it didn't look very busy in there and from what we could see it didn't look worth the scrum, so we gave up and went to see what everyone was crowding around on the south east corner; an illuminated old telephone box containing fish. This looked good (see pic above from Lumiere website) but, again, being a small installation it was hard to get anywhere near it. Shame.

And so to Piccadilly. A Tracy Emin-style neon script saying something supposed to be clever was on each end of Piccadilly Arcade. Hmmm. We moved swiftly past and stopped to watch the colourful projection on the Bafta building. The short looped animation was good and showed famous actors and relevant motifs about them and their films, but apart from Tilda Swinton and only a few others it was really hard to make out who the people were as we were too close to view it properly even though we rammed ourselves up against the shops on the opposite side of the road. For instance, just who is that woman above left? Basically, the thing was too big. We, and the people around us, all agreed it was better to see what was going on if you watched it through a camera screen to get a better/smaller image. I thought the light well below my feet was also worthy of a pic.

I did like the lovely lanterns and flying fish kites at the eastern end of Piccadilly. Simple, mesmerising, effective and easy to see from a distance. It was this kind of thing that always made the parade at the end of The Mayor's Thames Festival such a delight.
We really enjoyed being able to walk in the road, as at Oxford Circus and Regent Street.
The loud trumpeting of an elephant pervaded the air. And above Air Street (see what I did there?!) there was an animated CGI projection of an elephant's arse swaying left and right.

We walked through to Regents Street to view the front of the elephant. The street was rammed with people watching it. I stood and wondered what the point of it was. This was a recurring thought over both evenings. I mean, what relevance did an elephant have in that place? It wasn't even a real elephant. Had it not been there in that position on that night would anyone have given it a second thought?
We forgot to look in at St James Square and somehow bypassed the light flowers at Leicester Square and headed for Trafalgar Square.

Here, the letters from the top of Centrepoint, which is being renovated at the moment, were placed against the wall of the National Gallery. Watching the people, I noticed the thing to do here was stand against it and either take a selfie or get a friend to take a shot. It's all about the me me me these days. Intrigued how all these these idiots would get would be themselves as silhouettes against the bright light (pic1) I attempted to do better myself (pic2), but found it more effective to use the lights properly (pic3).
The fountains in the square also had installations:

One was filled with empty plastic water bottles; rubbish as art. The other had two rings of light strings and some chicken wire mesh that I couldn't see the point of. Both looked as if someone had thought, quick, quick, we need to think of something for Trafalgar Square...!
At Coutts Bank, just around the corner in the Strand, there were some neon dogs that looked like bows. We couldn't see them; again, the installation was small and the crowd blocked the view. I wasn't bow-wowed.
Enough for one night. A beer in the Nellie Dean to warm up and discuss the above and then home.

Saturday 16th January
We met at Victoria and walked down to see the projection on Westminster Abbey.

WOW!  A lot of work had gone into this. Very clever. The front façade changed by the second and the sculptures of the people around the door had been carefully coloured in and then accurately projected onto the building to marvellous effect. Really beautiful. I was actually inspired; for I think that was the point of all this
And so we made our way to Kings Cross. The tube station was closed (due to over-crowding?) so we exited at Euston and mooched along with the crowds. At KX the first thing we encountered was the birdcage, a permanent feature, which had been given a simple rainbow light treatment. On the rear of the German Gymnasium (now yet another eatery; I liked it when it was an art space) there was a projection consisting of series of moving dots that on closer inspection were people in the gym. A nice idea, but it seemed to be lacking something.

There were lots of people there and it took a while to access Granary Square, but we felt it wasn't what has been reported as 'crowded'. I suspect this was just on the tube, in the station and in the narrow access sections and pathways.
A large-scale animation was being projected onto what is now St Martin's School of Art. This was like the one when Madness played Our House on Buckingham Palace for Queenie's birthday except that it had no relevance to art, Kings Cross, or much to do with London except a few tube stations and hints about Hyde Park. It was circus-themed with hybrid 2D animals and birds performing tricks. I felt it was kooky French(?) humour mixed with Peter Blake and I got bored with it about half-way thorough. Again, what was the point? Was it promoting? What was it trying to achieve?
Between the art school and Waitrose was a strange satellite dish thing; it moved around, it spun slowly, it reflected lights. The roof there is angled and so I think a lot of its impact may have been lost in that placement. The music was oooooh-aaaa and it evoked sci-fi films and having stood there for what seemed ages, we rather hoped that an alien might appear, or that lasers would shoot out from it and decapitate people. Now that would be art, and we had our cameras at the ready. But no.
Later we read that the thing reacted to movement around it. Well, had they made that clear on site perhaps people might have moved about instead of just gazing gormlessly at it waiting for something to happen.

At the northernmost point there was a neon art installation of a person diving. Hmm. Seen better. Move on. And then we found that colour-changing dress (like the one at Liberty's, mentioned above). We could only see the straps of it due to the amount of people there.
Inside St Martin's was a lovely installation – a light tunnel made from recycled plastic bottles filled with water. This really appealed to me, both artistically and ethically, and I felt I'd finally found something with a message and a function. Truly inspirational. We didn't bother queueing to walk through the tunnel as it looked so nice from the outside. Again, it was selfies-a-go-go, so I joined in.
On the walk back to the station we bypassed the colourful lights being reflected onto people though they did look good and would have been better placed in a larger environment. It reminded me of a a rave party (not that I have been to any) or that Indian festival where everyone throws paint powder, But the path was too congested so descended the stairs to he new foot tunnel that leads to the tube station.

And I like it. I think this one will remain. Seems daft if it doesn't stay cos the softly-changing coloured lights are all embedded behind white walls. Looking straight at a wall it just looks white, but look along it and see vertical panels of colour. Ooh – a vast improvement from those horrid little off-white bathroom-style mini tiles they have put everywhere else in Kings Cross tube station; they were poorly installed and have become so mucky so quickly.
And so our two evenings ended.

Conclusion
So, in no particular order, my favourite things were Westminster Abbey, the flying fish, the mesh at Oxford Circus, the bottle tunnel, KX tunnel, and being able to get up close to the Centrepoint lights.
Did I feel enLIGHTened by all this? Yes and no, but mainly no. Ultimately I was more impressed looking up at the beautifully-designed ceiling at Kings Cross station.

St James's Market, Piccadilly, SW1

Last week I was wandering down towards Waterloo Place from Piccadilly and noticed that the area that once was St James's Market is surrounded by hoardings and in the process of being renovated.

So I looked up The Crowne Estate's site hoping to find that a street market might be included in the plans. Nope. 

However, this pdf (from the Useful Docs section) includes some interesting information about the plans plus some history of the site. 

For your delectation I am here including the lovely pics and historical info that can be found on page 7.

Job done