“Excalibur“, Wikipedia tells me, “is the legendary sword of King Arthur which may be attributed with magical powers or related to the rightful sovereignty of Britain.” As a French poem of round 1200AD the place it first seems relates, “Arthur obtained the British throne by pulling a sword from an anvil sitting atop a stone that appeared in a churchyard on Christmas Eve“.
“On this account, as foretold by Merlin, the act couldn’t be carried out besides by ‘the true king’, that means the divinely appointed king or true inheritor of Uther Pendragon“. This gained’t occur at at present’s occasion in Westminster Abbey, though there does look like reasonably lots of medieval mumbo-jumbo – described by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as “an object of mindless veneration or a meaningless ritual.“
However Excalibur can be the title of of what was one of many extra attention-grabbing estates in London, a pre-fab property constructed throughout 1945-6 by German and Italian prisoners of struggle utilizing two prefabricated designs of housing, and was initially meant to final 10 years.
The proprietor of the land, a Lord Forster gave it to the London County Council on a promise it will be returned to parkland when these single-storey two bed room non permanent homes have been cleared.
The property lasted reasonably longer than anticipated and a lot of the 187 houses have been nonetheless being lived in after I paid one other go to on sixth Could 2014 to make some panoramic pictures and likewise to go to the Prefab Museum, an artwork venture by Elisabeth Blanchet.
My first go to had been again within the Nineteen Nineties, after I walked the Greenwich Meridian in London as part of a proposed Millennium venture, Meridian, which did not appeal to the funding wanted to finish it, although I had taken all the images I wanted. Solely a few of these north of Greenwich are on line. The Greenwich meridian really ran by way of the centre of the pre-fab which housed the museum.
I’d returned again in 2010 to take extra footage after studying that the property was to be demolished, regardless of valiant makes an attempt to put it aside. And naturally that promise made to John Forster, 1st Baron Forster of Harraby was forgotten – and he had in any case died in 1972.
Half a dozen of the pre-fabs have been finally listed after an extended battle and so ought to survive the demolition of the property. However it was actually the property that was vital reasonably than the person buildings. Though components of the property have now gone, a lot nonetheless stays, however has been allowed to decay significantly since I made these panoramas on Could sixth 2014. All of those footage present a roughly 140 diploma horizontal angle of view – and roughly 90 levels horizontal, with some high-quality clouds in a blue sky. These are a small pattern of the roughly 70 pictures I made on the day.
The photographs on-line – a lot smaller than the orginals – are literally twice the width they seem on this publish and you’ll view them bigger – in addition to many extra – on My London Diary at Excalibur Property.
Tags: demolition, Elisabeth Blanchet, Excalibur, Excalibur Property, Greenwich Meridian, housing scarcity, listed prefabs, meridian, Meridian venture, panoramas, panormas, peter Marshall, pre-fab, pre-fab property, prefab, prefab museum, the true king
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