squirmelia | Open House London 2006

Blizard Building

Open House London Weekend 2006 happened about a month ago now and it was then that I saw BedZED, the Gibbs Building, Neasden Bunker, The Stables, the Blizard Building and the Brunel Museum.

My bleary eyes flitted to the Hackbridge sign on platform 2 and I followed all the people that wandered out the station, underneath the muted grey sky. No-one went uphill. One girl had a map and I watched her curiously; my map came to an end some miles ago and I felt lost, passing unknown shops. I glanced at bus-stops, but their routes appeared to finish abruptly at the next street. An elderly couple seemed keen to ask the florist for directions, so I walked along the same road they did until I reached my first Open House London destination of the weekend: BedZED.

Beddington Zero (fossil) Energy Development. A row of wooden "eco homes", with purple, red and green funnels, almost like a terrace of oddly composed wendyhouses. There weren't queues.

Ecover products were scattered at random throughout the show home. The wallpaper had bluetits, magpies and robins on it. Lampshades above the staircase were pastel-coloured with cut-out butterflies. The children's room had dinosaurs, a plastic table speckled like Bakelite and a lampshade made from discarded print-outs and red stickers. The descriptions sounded space age: "sky gardens", "sky bridges", "electric vehicle charging points". This was the UK's largest eco-village, but the houses didn't really seem that much different from normal houses really and were less futuristic than I had hoped.

Bliegiessen

Heading back to central London, a glistening sculpture as tall as a building, was my next find. Inside the Wellcome Trust's Gibbs Building - Bleigiessen by Thomas Heatherwick.

There were also leaflets advertising the Travelling Apothecary, which was part of the London Design Festival and outside the nearby British Library, so I headed there next. It consisted of a few stalls set up in the courtyard and I watched as people were cured of celebrityitis, ikeamania, unprotected data (with a usb maria), and network addiction (with a special kind of tea) and I learnt how to make a recycling mascot out of milk bottles and how to make my partner jealous.

Travelling Apothecary

Neasden Bunker, I first visited in 2005 and enjoyed it so much that I went back again this year, still in fear of the apocalypse. Near to the bunker is The Stables, now a gallery and not actual stables, but also open during Open House Weekend. This year, it featured an "urban somnambulist" exhibition with photos of a nearby park at night shown in the dark former stables.

On Sunday, I saw the Blizard building at the Institute of Cell & Molecular Science, Queen Mary College, with its spikey seminar rooms, and then headed to the Brunel Museum for a trip to Wapping to see the underwater shopping arcades.

I didn't see much of the Thames festival this year, but I did see people clinging to traffic lights to get a better view.