Far-Away Phone Call

In addition to all the usual criteria - room size, comfort, nice bathrooms, quietness, heating/cooling controls etc. - I've now started to judge hotels by the quality and availability of their broadband services. Working in the room is always a given and, thanks largely to the usurious rates hotels charge for their phone calls, Skype has also now become an essential tool, especially if calling from overseas. I mention all this because the hotel I use in Stockholm - Radisson SAS by the train station - recently went from wired to wireless, which is good, but in the process screwed up both access and reliability a treat, which is very bad. I keep getting a duplicate IP address warning; signal strength is very variable depending on where your room is; it times-out overnight meaning you don't wake up with a nice fresh stack of messages ready to go; and they outsource the whole shooting match so are less than helpful if you call down to complain.

Everything else about the place is great, but not enough. This one issue now dominates what I need from a hotel and so I'll have to look elsewhere if this doesn't improve.

Time to come, time to go

Paddington station remains a wonderful testament to Victorian architecture and engineering. Built by one of England's greatest engineers of all time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it's soaring roof, broad span and cathedral-like proportions never cease to amaze, especially given the necessary innovation in the structural use of cast iron required in order for his vision to be realised. To quote from the man himself (and thanks to http://www.greatbuildings.com/ for this bit.)

"I am going to design... a Station after my own fancy; that is, with engineering roofs, etc. ... such a thing will be entirely metal as to all the general forms ... ; it almost of necessity becomes an Engineering Work, but, to be honest, even it if were not, it is a branch of architecture of which I am fond, and of course, believe myself fully competent for, but for detail of ornamentation I neither have time nor knowledge ..."

(Isambard Kingdom Brunel, in a letter to Matthew Digby Wyatt inviting collaboration on the design of Paddington Station, as quoted in Randall J. Van Vunckt, ed., International Dictionary of Architects and Architecture: Volume 1, Architects. Detroit: St. James Press, 1993.)

The - relatively - new Paddington Express from Heathrow to London goes into this station but I'll swear that 99% of travellers never even look up as they move from train to Tube. They miss so much; it's almost criminal in my book how little attention this gateway to London and London's past gets from those who use it. When it was built in the middle of the 19th century, this place epitomised all that London had been, was and would become. The power of Britain as the extant only world superpower at that time made manifest, all in a single monument.