The best thing about crusing around the city on my pushbike is that it is easy to explore streets and dead-ends that you don't normally get to in the car.
I found this factory or warehouse beside a railway line in North Melbourne. The use of the contrasting colours in the layers of bricks drew my attention but I really liked the way the bricks interlock on the corners.
This fantastic corner shop is in Jetty Road, Glenelg. It is probably two buildings but the colour scheme and the deco motifs on the verandah face bring them together to great effect.
I love the corner. The window is cut into the curved face of the wall with a shallow eyebrow above it. The number certainly adds style and you wouldn't have any difficulty finding No 97.
Front on, the shop takes on an Egyptian feel with the two round columns flankng the doorway and continuing through verandah to the second storey. It is the decoartive element between the columns on this level which seems Egyptian to me.
This view also shows how the dark blue (which also reminds me of Egypt) has been used to highlight the decorative elements and tie the parts of the building together.
This is the amazing former Odeon cinema in Woolwich, South London.
It was designed in the late 1930s by George Coles.
It no longers operates as a cinema and is occupied by the New Wine Church.
55 Broadway is the amazing headquarters of the London Underground. It was designed by Charles Holden in the late 1920s. Holden also designed many of the iconic art deco style tube stations around London.
I snapped this picture of a tile on the wall of a tube station and I reckon it is the best picture I am going to get of 55 Broadway.
This is possibly my favourite grandstand any where in the world.
It has nothing to do with Aussie Rules football, which I adore, or any sport because I have never seen a match here and I don't think I've even set foot in the stand itself let alone taken a seat.
Current AFL team Hawthorn played here until 1973 and continued to use it as their training base until they moved to Waverley a few years ago. The stand is named after the Hawks legendry player Michael Tuck who played a league record 426 games, all for the club in a career spanning 1972-91. Naturally, Tuck was selected in the Hawthorn Team of the Century and the painting commissioned to commemorate the selection of that team shows the grandstand in the backgound.
The stand was designed in 1938 by Stuart Calder and has been listed by the National Trust.
The streamline design is spectacular. The circular tower at one end contrast with the somewhat blunted cut-off look at the other. I have heard there may have been plans for a matching tower at both ends but I haven't seen any proof that it was planned that way.
In my opinion there isn't a view that is not beautiful. Maybe if I had stood in the outer, shoehorned between the railway line and the boundary fence in the mid-winter rain watching St Kilda get done I might have a different view on the subject. But all my Hawthorn inflicted misery has been at other footy grounds so I get to visit Glenferrie and appreciate it for it's beauty.
Out at their new hi-tech training base at Waverley, Hawthorn have established the Hawks Museum. I was out there on Monday and was thrilled to see the door to the museum office. It was the old door to the President's Office at Glenferrie.
Peter Haby, Club Historian and Museum Curator, told me that the door had been removed during a renovation of the offices at Glenferrie Oval in the early 1990s. Head trainer and former player Andy Angwin had salvaged the door and kept it in a storeroom until he could pass it onto the museum.
I'm glad he did. It's a beauty.
MELBOURNE ART DECO
.jpg)
