Tag: tourism

  • Hotel Design Revisited:Cube/HotelMy Tyrol

    Hotel Design Revisited:Cube/HotelMy Tyrol

    The changes made to the operation have enhanced its attractiveness, especially the addition of the pool to the front of the building. The design changes are evolutionary and reflective of the operator standards. In some ways, the design concept is diluted but the fact this is now operated by someone other than the original suggests…

  • Long and Winding Road

    “Living is easy with eyes closed Misunderstanding all you see It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out It doesn’t matter much to me” (Strawberry Field Forever- the Beatles) Funny how on this long and winding road, life goes along. Just three years ago I was running a successful on-line magazine, travelling,…

  • The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?

    The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?

    It stands erect, ringed in red and white. The dark wilderness of its base set aside from the billowing white up swelling of the chalk cliffs behind it. Thrusting upwards in public warning, its tip glazed and different to its shaft, it stands out by day attracting the attention of thousands who come to gaze…

  • An African Gem: Bushmans Kloof

    I have been to many places had many adventures, few compare to the delights of Bushmans Kloof. Asked to sum up my visits by a friend, I said “Simple, this is a little piece of heaven come to earth”.

  • From Hull, Hell and Halifax, Good Lord deliver us!

    At a time when net migration into the UK is causing concern, the number of northern cities in decline is remarkable, and testament to the lack of judgement by those who run our economy. Population decline is inevitably linked to industrial decline, a decline that through my lifetime has characterised, and continues to characterise this…

  • Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft

    The Ditchling Museum and Gallery came close to winning major design awards for the conversion, and is a pretty charming building, sensitively converted and extended to form a fine small space. Endowed by the Sackler Trust the museum will feature a steady stream of shows devoted to one of the most famous residents of the…

  • Chicago Style

    Arguments still continue about Wright’s use of colour, and a long debate raged around his 1959 Guggenheim Gallery in New York, now painted white although the belief was that it was originally a buff colour (photo dates from 1976). Like his own home the Guggenheim was designed from the inside out.

  • Art lives Outside the Hive

    The city needs the constant injection of youth and brains sucked in from the rest of the country, and it spits out its elderly. In England we spit them out to places we mockingly call ‘God’s Waiting Rooms’

  • Exploitation vs. Conservation: Wildlife Tourism in Crisis?

    It is distressing for these communities and for the operators, that poaching is so endemic that it is now threatening the survivability of whole species (the Western Black Rhino, last seen in 2006,is now officially extinct). With death of these beasts come the death of the businesses that rely on their presence. Worse, far worse,…

  • France is failing in Laon

    Grey narrow streets carry the dust of ages. Pale blue skies and sunshine throw shade echoing the dark shadows that are the past of this ancient town. Ghosts walk the streets . A town that has a past but seems to have little future

  • Walking Wounded

    Walking Wounded

    The dangers of physical and emotional ‘burn-out’ for the creative mind. Creativity needs nurturing. As Picasso is supposed to have said, ‘artists are the elite of the servant classes’ but need treating with respecrt

  • Silly Season in Seaford

    The frenzy started when a photographer for the Mirror saw the pictures. Although on a holiday he lives in Seaford and has himself linked into the local Coastguard, so he saw the images straight away. He rang me and persuaded me that the Mirror should have the pics ahead of any other national media, but…