Broadgate Tower, early December

Another before/after to remark upon. The most striking thing is how much 201 Bishopsgate - the building in the foreground - has grown in the past month or so. It's about 4 floors, and nearer to finishing 2 unfinished floors than the 3 unfinished floors were last time. Does that make sense?

But the difference to the Broadgate tower is far less striking. Recall that last time it was 15 storeys high. Now it is 18-19 floors, but from Bishopsgate Street it's 201 Bishopsgate that dominates at present. It has a nice organic curve to it, like the Bullring. It's incredible how unnoticable the tower is given that it's about twice as tall!

I wish I'd made more of an effort to choose easily identifiable places to stand to take my "progress" photos. Look at these:

They're just not good enough. The slight difference in position distorts. The second one looks far more complete, but it's mostly due to the camera angle. It does look a lot neater though. Unlike the belly of the beast. Having siad that, they are starting to do some old fashioned brick and mortar building work at the Bishopsgate street end, so there is at least some effort to keep the whole thing shipshape. It may be a losing attle though, as the people up at the top use this chute to displace their mess onto muggins below. No sign of how the metal tubes are being used though.

There is apparently little evidence to support that there were huge ramps leading up to the Pyramids of Giza, up which slaves/craftsmen would putatively pull the stones from which to build the pyramid (incidentally, did you hear about the Bosnian pyramids?). These days, however, much time and effort, it seems, is devoted to putting in place the temporary paraphernalia of construction. The construction company's temporary offices are a five storey building, which would dwarf most buildings where I come from. Another feature is the cladding in evidence here:

To digress ever so slightly, it always amazes me how rusty the girders are allowed to get. I have a feeling the rust colour may be fire-proof paint (think I remember seeing something similar in a 9/11 documentary), but in this photo they have begun to clad it in a whitish steely material. There's a gang plank too, just in case of a building mutiny.

No - the thing I was looking at was the white cladding to the right. A close up shows it has lots of tiny arrows printed on it. All those nice looking arrows printed, and it's only a temporary fixture. Would plain white not have done the job just as well? If it's an incidence of branding, they could've chosen a less generic symbol.

You can see Broadgate Tower from down the road from me, y'know