Jenny advised me once to look for something beautiful, every day, and appreciate it.
I'm a person of simple tastes, and it doesn't take much to impress me. And in a city like london I needn't look far and wide.
So I set off on my Monday morning trek into work, deliberately in search of beauty. I snapped photos here and there, of landmarks and site and of ordinary, everyday things that suddenly sprung into view.
Then, I arrived at Elephant & Castle. It is one ugly roundabout, surrounded by 70s style block buildings of cold, colourless concrete and always ridden with congested with buses, bikes, taxis and cars. There is a pedestrian subway under the roundabout that allows me to escape, but briefly, the tumult of traffic overhead. The subway walls are painted in murals, offering a colourful retreat. Colourful is an understatement. The walls are kaleidoscope-like, dizzying if you don't blink with enough frequency. Beautiful would be an overstatement, at least in my eyes. The depictions are simple - festival parades, elephant trains and city scenes. The artwork is sloppy in places and balanced (unbalanced?) against multi-coloured tiles that serve to augment the toilet-stink of the subway corridors.
But one thing I'm learning is that familiarity breeds beauty. The more and more I walk through the subway, the more I appreciate its charm and the relief it offers from the less charming view above. It's all relative, perhaps. Behold?
