Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

One of the great things about buses is that you can peer over everybodies fences when you sit upstairs. Actually, I’m not sure I can think of many other great things about buses.

It helps that they’ve cut down all the trees around the Napp Castle. It doesn’t, as I suspected it might, have a moat all the way around – its just on the town-ward side of the building, neither does it have a drawbridge. Maybe that’ll come with the next round of extensions.

Better still, once you get into the centre of the city there are walls you can see over. These walls, impenetrable from ground level, hide buildings and spaces you wouldn’t expect to be there. Places closed to the public. I wonder who uses these transformed churches and warehouse buildings, what are they used for these days? How many of them stand derelict, waiting for some legal battle over their ownership or extension to be resolved? What kinds of secrets do they hide inside?

Like the bookshop in Oxford which looks like a normal shop building on the front, but inside you descend into a cavenous library containing books on any subject you care to think of. How many rooms like that does Cambridge contain? How can I find them?


Categories: Memories.

/ 7 Comments

7 comments

  1. ewx

    You can read on buses, which you can’t when driving a car or riding a bike. (Well, I’ve seen someone doing the former and I’m sure people try the latter too, but these are obviously loonies).

    Reply
    • neilh

      Thats true of most other public transport too….but yes, my few attempts at reading while driving have lead me closer to disaster than I would like to be.

      Reply
    • neilh

      Tokyo has a lot of that, its such a multilevel city, its common to go upstairs to shops, where, in England at least, we’d only have shops on the ground floor, or maybe the shop on the ground floor would have an upstairs too, but you’d never go upstairs to find another shop. Each of these places has its own advertising on its windows….indeed there are a number of places where there are raised motorways running through the city, advertising by those can, I imagine, be very lucrative ‘cos theres a lot of traffic problems on some of those roads.

      Reply
  3. neilh

    Theres a whole secret world in there, isn’t there? Its the spaces inside the buildings that hold more fascination for me, the walls hide so much, you can’t tell what its like inside.

    Reply
  4. neilh

    No, but I can speculate about the contents of some of those structures, guidebooks aren’t much use since the spaces I’m interested in are the private spaces, those that you get to see by invitation, not by just turning up and walking into it.

    Reply

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