Open House London 2014: A Randomly London Summary

02j - Staircase in St Pancras Hotel

Looking up the Grand Staircase in the St. Pancras Hotel

For those of you who missed it, last weekend was Open House London 2014, which offered a chance to see inside 800 buildings across the capital that are not normally open to the public.

The most popular options this year included: The Gherkin, The Cheesegrater, The Bank of England, 55 Broadway (London Underground HQ), Houses of Parliament, and 10 Downing Street, among others. As you’d expect, they were incredibly busy, which meant you either needed to get a ticket well in advance, or be prepared to queue for hours.

However, there’s a whole world of interesting building to explore besides the most popular ones. Better yet, you can often see two or three of them in the time it would take you to see one of the others.

Just to give you an idea of the types of buildings you can get access to, here is summary from what I managed to see this year:

Continue reading Open House London 2014: A Randomly London Summary

Over London Dusk & Night – Another Amazing Jason Hawkes Video

Over London Dusk & Night is another amazing video from the aptly named Jason Hawkes. I’ve previously featured his video ariel 1 on the site before. He’s probably the best aerial photographers/videographers in London today. Some of the shots he gets are absolutely breathtaking.

In this video he looks at London at dusk and at night. Some of the locations/landmarks featured include the Shard, St. Paul’s, Canary Wharf, the London Eye, Houses of Parliament, Piccadilly and Oxford circuses and many more. I love seeing London from the air and hope you do too.

Know of any other similar videos, let me know in the comment section below.

Must Watch London Architecture in Motion Video

I really want to get the word out about this amazing video of London’s architecture shot in Hyperlapse. It was shot by Mattia Bicchi and features pretty much every single iconic landmark in London. These include:

King’s Cross Station, Strata Tower, Palestra Building, Royal Albert Hall, British Museum, RBS Building, Wembley Stadium, Heron Tower, Broadgate Tower, O2 Arena, St. Giles Building, Tower Bridge, Shard Tower, National Maritime Museum, Wellington Arch, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Canary Wharf.

You can learn more about Mattia from his website, follow him on twitter @Matt_hi (protected account) and visit his Facebook page.

I was a little worried when I first watched the video on Youtube because it only had 550 views. However, it turns out you can also watch it on Vimeo here, where it seems to have gotten a lot more love. I really look forward to seeing what Mattia comes out with next.

New Video Featuring Area Around Waterloo And Canary Wharf

Hope you’re all having a great bank holiday weekend. I found this short video on reddit by user green_tito. It features some great random shots of London, primarily featuring the areas around Waterloo station (including Lower Marsh) and Canary Wharf. Do you notice how sunny everything looks in the video? Well that’s no accident as it was shot back in March, 2012 when we actually had a few weeks of nice weather.