Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Pan's people*

*May in fact be a 'tower', not a 'people'

As I was saying, I now have a bike-lock, so leaving the bike unattended holds no fear for me! (well, a lot less than before. I thought I'd got a good bike-lock; a Factor 8 no less. But I've since discovered the factors go up to 15. Slightly more comforting is that I am a medium when it comes to bike helmet sizes. I think head size is one area in life where being average is distinctly better than being at the big or the small end.)

Previous to today my entrance to Canary Wharf has either been via the DLR station or the cavernous tube station. Some of these occasions have been fairly recently (I sometimes meet Keith to go to the cinema at East India Quay as it's roughly halfway between us. Exactlty halfway would probably be Poplar, which it's probably best to avoid, what with being pushed in front of trains). But not once during these visits have I seen the messiness that lies just behind the wall of tall buildings.

Pan peninsular towers posterOne of the main culprits as far as unitidiness goes is the new Pan Peninsula Tower, high-rise luxury living with - the placards drum this into you - it's own cinema, holistic health spa, cocktail lounge and signature restaurant (Could that be a world first - I've heard of a signature tune, and even a signature dish, but not a signature restaurant. does this mean they will also have many other restaurants which will be forced to be mediocre and forgettable in order to guarantee the signature status of the waterside restaurant?).

pan peninsular towersIt's actually a pair of towers (as evidenced by the following photo), so god knows why they call it a Tower. Interestingly, there was some work going on at the weekend, unlike the new city-scrapers. I took a short video of the lift going up and down to prove it, but can't be bothered uploading it... but you'll believe me, won't you.

I'm not sure how much living is done in docklands. I've known one or two people who've lived there or there abouts over the past few years, and the complaint is always the same - that there's never anything to do, particularly at the weekend. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how luxurious the flat is if getting there after a night out means a long taxi ride. Maybe there will start to be a culture change in the area, with it becoming a rich man's playground, rather than just a rich man's office. The closest to a club they have in docklands at present is a hotel 'club and restaurant,' and I can't help thinking the area will need to become a lot more vibrant before it can attract clientele who could probably easily afford a comparable flat closer to the west end.

See what I did there - undermined years of market research.

P10105502 signs to finish off. The first is a spelling mistake (see if you can spot it) which is funny simply because of the general rule: the bigger the font a spelling mistake is printed in, the funnier it is. That's the rule!!

(At work today a job description and advert for a new job was sent round all the staff and contained more hilarity than its font-size alone merited:

Duties will include liaising with internal staff, dairy management and producing error free documentation.
Talk about falling on your own sword.)

The second sign is below, from a different building project, but worthy of mention. It makes me think of the swimming pool docu-soap in The Day Today, with Stephen Coogan saying "In 1976 no-one died, ...". Can't help wondering what the last reportable accident was. Decapitated scaffolder?

Also , I notice they stopped counting last August. This could mean one of 2 things:
  1. Construction workers have been dying every month since then, and they don't want to blight their record by taking them into account.
  2. Nobody's done any work since August.
My money's on 2.
Safe work at docklands

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