A flag on the Mall

ON A RECENT visit to the Capital I noticed this installation - named "Flag (Union Jack)" by artist and sculptor Frank Benson - from St James's Park, sitting on the outside of the ICA building on the Mall. Although in an area surrounded by examples of the national flag, it stands out due to the subtle distortions, which enhances the natural movement of the flag. 

Benson explains his work and contextualises it in a Youtube video here.

Budget Day

A very merry Budget Day. As usual, these pages will be avoiding serious analysis and dealing solely in the frivolous and ethereal.

The Rt. Hon. George Osborne MP will almost undoubtedly be the last Chancellor of the Exchequer to use the famous Budget Box. Used to convey the papers of Chancellors since Gladstone had it commissioned in around 1860, the box has - in living memory - shown rather severe signs of age. 

Both Jim Callaghan and Gordon Brown opted not to use the box, using modern red boxes instead. It was brought out of semi-retirement by Alistair Darling and presumably taking out of service for the last time by Osborne for his June 2010 budget.

The old red box, made of pine wood, covered in red leather and bearing the name of the office and the Royal Cypher of Queen Victoria became emblematic of British budgets. Tradition demands a photocall outside 11 Downing Street before the short journey down Whitehall to the Palace of Westminster. Today, a modern box will be filling-in.

Unlike some of the standard ministerial red boxes produced, the Budget Box does not require to be bomb-proof, or able to sink to the bottom of the sea, nor indeed is it large enough to accommodate a bottle of whisky.

At a cost of around £400-800, and with the advancement of technology, the red box may eventually become a thing of the past. However, in one of their better acts, the last Labour government spent a good £50,000 updating the State's collection. Ministerial papers may give way to a laptop or a tablet, but I imagine the boxes will remain for a good while yet.

Dean Village

From a walk along the Water of Leith in Edinburgh.

The building on the right is Well Court, built in 1886 and extensively restored in 2007 by the Edinburgh World Heritage Trust. Originally designed as workers' housing complete with social facilities, it is today used as private flats.

The small pedestrian bridge is part of the Water of Leith walkway which extends from Balerno, in the city's south-west to the Port of Leith, where the river flows into the Firth of Forth. The two towers in the far distance are of the Dean Gallery, part of the National Galleries of Scotland and effectively combined with the neighbouring Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Commonwealth Day 2013

Marking Commonwealth Day this year the Queen, acting as Head of the Commonwealth, will be formally signing the new Charter of the Commonwealth agreed by the member nations in December last year.

The Charter is the first major statement of the common values of the organisation in areas such as human rights, democracy, the rule of law, international development and international peace. However this document is not signed in the name of sovereign states, but rather of the people of the Commonwealth. The Charter will only have as much relevance as people imbue it with, and ultimately it will be up to us to take a robust view on compliance. 

Without putting aside idealism entirely, the record of some governments even within this family of nations often falls significantly short of the ideals to which they are now committed. Perhaps in future Commonwealth Days we can look back on this year as a real stepping-stone on the way to putting these common values into practice. 

Happy Commonwealth Day from Britain. The Commonwealth flag (amateurish as it may be) will be flying from public buildings across Edinburgh tomorrow, whilst the flags of all 54 members will be unfurled across London as depicted in that cheerful photograph above. 

London in Gigapixel

BT has created a record-breaking 320 gigapixel panoramic photograph of London during the 2012 Olympic Games. Taken from the top of the British Telecom (formerly, Post Office) Tower in Camden.

Flag Flying in Kilmacolm

Good on Inverclyde Council.

From the Gryffe Advertiser.

England's last castle

One of the central themes of this obscure corner of the internet has always been a fondness for anachronism and, more widely, finding the unusual in the guise of the ordinary. Few subjects match that short criteria better Castle Drogo in the surprisingly hospitable moors of central Devon.

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Tall Ships Race, Greenock

The Tall Ships' Race returned to Renfrewshire this week, with Greenock serving as the finishing line for the first race from Waterford in Ireland. Beginning in 1956, the first race took place between Devon and Portugal and became an annual event hosting a series of races.

In Greenock, the boats effectively sit in dock for a few days, whilst the town plays host to an international bunch of sailors and makes something of a festival out of the occasion. On Tuesday, the ships will progress northwards to Shetland's capital town of Lerwick, where a second race will be staged to Stavanger in Norway's Rogoland before a final race to Sweden closes the event for another year.

As is natural for these pages, flags had to be brought up at some point. So I give you the largest flag of the day, on the mast of Columbia's Gloria. For those less interested in flag-focused mobile phone camera photography, the BBC has some rather better images of the weekend on its website here.

Justice and the Supreme Court

"He who pays the piper, as they say, calls the tune"

Possibly the most disturbing thing a politician, never mind a Scottish Justice Secretary, can say in relation to the independence of the judiciary. Amongst Kenny MacAskill's recent comments on the Supreme Court was the labeling of the institution as an "ambulance chasing court" its role in upholding the Convention rights in Scottish criminal law cases.

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The new New Town

St Vincent's Place in the northern marches of Edinburgh's New Town. The building to the centre is William Playfair's St Stephen's Church (1827) which forms the modern gateway to the Stockbridge district of the city.

The two terraces, to the left and right, are the south block and north block of a modern development tying together Fettes Row and St Vincent's Street, plugging the last remaining gap in the so-called Second New Town, the area developed beyond Queen Street Gardens. The buildings are is a twist on the Georgian design of surrounding buildings, with a more clearly modern balconied reverse, and divided into distinct apartments.

More bloody flags

The North American Vexillological Association has, according to semi-objective criteria, ranked the appeal of the various state and provincial flags of the United States and Canada. New Mexico, above is, I believe, an unworthy winner. My personal preferences, from the two nations, are Quebec and Maryland, coming in at third and fourth place respectively.

Updates have been a little thin on the ground of late for reasons obvious to most. Since I've harped on about it often enough, I should probably indicate that I'm very happy indeed to see a proposal for directly elected Provosts in Scotland's four main cities form a prominent part of the Scottish Conservatives' 2011 manifesto. More on all that soon...

Renfrewshire flags

Raising the profile of local flags in Scotland, part II: Renfrewshire.

This is, or rather would be, the heraldic banner of Renfrewshire. Like all banners, it is simply one way of displaying a coat of arms, much as in the case of the flag of Angus previously mentioned here. As with all armorial bearings, these banners must be possessed by a defined legal person - the new City of Inverness was refused an application for arms as it had no city council to grant them to - as such the banner was first granted to the Renfrewshire County Council, and is now the property of Renfrewshire Council, perhaps more properly Mid-Renfrewshire Council as its jurisdiction extents only over one of three parts of the county. Of the other two modern council areas, Inverclyde has gained arms (and, thus, a theoretical banner) whilst East Renfrewshire manages to survive (somehow) without.

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