As part of my continuing trawl through photographs from our Planning collection I’ve been looking at the section preceding and following Earls Court Road. This of course includes the Commonwealth Institute. I have an odd selection of images which wouldn’t hang together for one big post but make sense in small batches. Hence, a few more short posts.
Who he?
Well, some sort of stylised ape, maybe a baboon. West African I would think although I can’t pin it down any further. In this picture he is sitting peaceably on a stone floor. But that’s not why Planning had a picture of him.
Can you see the place marked out for him on the right of the picture?
Here it is slightly clearer:
An orange shape next to the stairs and the path which takes you to the walkway entrance. It’s as though he was about to be beamed in, to materialize on a rainy day in Kensington.
Did it ever happen? Does anyone know?
Today of course the walkway is gone and one of the two Holland Green buildings stands in front of the former Institute. You still walk in that direction to get into the Design Museum, as my son and I did recently to see the Stanley Kubrick exhibition. ( Which finishes on September 15th so if you’re at all interested get down there quick. It’s well worth it. And it contains one image supplied by this department. Any guesses?)
More on the former Institute soon.
Dave Walker
The Library Time Machine 
September 2nd, 2019 at 3:45 pm
Funny that the pictures were taken on a rainy day. This was the place Miss Borchardt used to bring us on heavily rainy days at Queen’s Gate when the park too wet. We loved looking down through that giant lens to Australasia. There used to be (maybe still is) something similar in the Rand McNally building in Chicago — you could look through a big lens to the other side of the world.