January in Albertopolis

 I thought about going through my unposted photos from earlier in the year when I wasn't blogging, and putting some up throughout December like I'd been doing at the end of every month, but looking through January's it struck me that a more honest recap of the year might be just to honour that lack of intention. Why catch up? I had also forgotten how widescreen old photos from my good phone were, but here are four.

 I'd never noticed this collonade before. These are from January, and the early setting sun had made it unignorable. I'd been living in Kensington for three months now, and had finally decided to revisit the enormous museums along Exhibition Road as a resident, wanting to feel I was exploring my new environment, with an emphasis on the "my" rather than on the "new." I'd known this area all my life.

 

 During Boris Johnson's Mayorship – although he may have had no more to do with this than he had with the Boris Bikes – this road had become a "shared space" to "honour the area's cultural importance," meaning it stopped being a road for cars to drive down, and became instead a pavement for cars to drive down. This apparently resolved "the long stand-off between pedestrians and cars," until ten people got hit by a taxi in 2017. This whole campus is called "Albertopolis" I found out today. It suits it. I keep discovering new ways in which, over a hundred and fifty years after the death of Queen Victoria's husband, the landscape of London still orbits his absence. The railings here weren't always black.