Monday 21 April 2014

Scandinavian Influence

The flat is in dire need of a spruce up, it always happens in Spring, the sun comes out and the cracks show up. I have been contemplating Scandinavian interiors and came across a website called Fabulous Frank. I do like a white interior - and they do it in shades! This should be a pinterest page really, but I haven't got my head round that yet. 

















I could even do it for Erbie’s raised bed which has been in the pipeline of my mind for 3 years now.


Anyway just thought I’d share...

Thursday 3 April 2014

Bus Museum - Acton Dep Open Day - March 2014

One of the good things about having a boy is I get to do boy stuff, having spent my whole life doing girl stuff, being a girl, perhaps I'm a tomboy at heart. As Erbie loves anything with wheels, buses used to be wheelie up there on the list and even though he is 5 now and in Year 1 at primary they still have a little place in his heart, so booked us tickets to go to the London Transport (showing my age there, I mean Transport For London) Acton Depot Bus Museum open day. It was a lovely clear March morning and we got there by tube.

Walk this way
Walk this way - or this way! Erbie steams ahead, dressed in bus red trousers.


Outside the depot 
 The depot - a great hangar of a building, houses a historical collection of TFL underground trains, which you can walk through and alongside, even sit in the drivers seat...

Inside the depot
 There were also activities for children, and some rather watchable working lego train sets.

Lego train set
Erbie spent a long time watching the lego train set, we went back 5 times. 
Manned by a Star Wars fan


 There is also a room of signage, mmmm signage, I have a vested interest, having been a graphic designer before mummydom.

Remember these.

An original underground train, look wooden floors and painted seat.



A Victorian delivery train with milk churns



Ah, public transport

Bus man
Lovely old bus

Original Routemaster
 Outside were a collection of more recent buses and articles for sale,  you could even buy old luggage racks, they'd look good in a converted warehouse kitchen.


Luggage rack anyone 

Signs for sale



Clocking in
Inside there was also a plethora of memorabilia, clocking-in clocks and station clocks, old escalators and huge bits of engine amongst, signs and parts of tunnel!

Station clocks
 In the shop you could purchase merchandise made from iconic seat fabrics, coasters, bags, mugs, tea towels, you name it with the tube map on. I couldn't resist the coasters and got a tea towel for each of my siblings no longer living in London.

Cushion covers 
Cushion covers, belts and bags made from tube seat fabric.

belts and bags

An old wooden escalator
After the Kings Cross Fire in 1987, the wooden escalators have been more or less removed and replaced with safer metal ones. And of course smoking on the underground has long been banned.




Other nonsense

Quote of the day

‘They tuck you up your mum and dad...’
Anon - after Larkin

“Philately will get you everywhere”
WEM

“It’s not the despair, I can handle the despair. 
It’s the hope I can’t deal with”
Clockwise

“Each new friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
Anais Nin

‘Come on Dover move your bloomin’ arse’.
Eliza Doolittle