while walking home the other day....

I passed the Great Eastern Hotel on Duke St, I've passed it everyday for the past year and have always found it interesting and loved the idea of what might be inside. It was famous for being the largest homeless mens hostle in Britain but it was closed down around five years ago with big plans to turn it into something else but nothing has been done yet. It looks like nothing will be done in the near future either as in January this year a huge storm blew the roof off and theres been no sign of any restoration being done or even any protection from the elements? I imagine it will eventually just be another building left to rot and then easy to knock down.


But back to my walk home.... as i was passing it about two weeks ago i noticed that the ground floor side door was not only unlocked but sitting open. this temptation was just to much to resist so i went to explore. I dont doubt that it was stupid and a bit dangerous but it was fantastic inside!


the ground floor was full of odds and ends like chairs, traffic cones, old kettles and mugs. it smelled terrible and im sure there must still be quite desperate people spending the night there, its the most wind and water tight of the whole place and is probably a more comfortable alternative to the street. Going up to the different floors was much more exciting though, the floors higher up are so bare and as huge as ballrooms now that they've been cleared of all the tiny dormitories. The higher up we went the less floor there was and the more you could see the sky peeking through the holes in the floors above but we where "safley" taking pictures from the concrete side stairwell. by the time we made it to the fourth floor i was well and truley spooked and too scared to chance the very very narrow dark stairway to the higher even ricketier floors, particularly when we became sure we heard someone moving around higher up.


So narrowly escaping with my life (or at least thats how it felt at the time) and a few pictures it feels like another little bit of the city thats not such a mystery anymore.

ok... so...

I did manage to do a little bit of making over the summer, but only a little. I wanted to try just making for the sake of it and for the enjoyment of it instead of always trying to find a meaning in everything.

so i started knitting.
Knitting is something that i sort of enjoy anyway, I'm not great at it but you can do anywhere and once you get into the rhythm of it, it becomes almost meditative and very addictive... which is nice. Again i was trying to stick with the making for the sake of it and not to try to hard, so i practiced on certain bits and experimented with stitches and materials on others and when i was finished they began to look a lot like big creeping webs.


With this in mind it seemed natural to put them outside, so i did.

I though it would be interesting just to leave them there and see how they change. so far... nothing but its early days!! it would be nice if it started to become overgrown in the way that rope bindings round trees sometimes become swallowed up by the tree, but we'll see.

ive had a few coments on what they remind people of, one friend suggested it would make a nice homefor a lazy spider and another said it was like weaving a yarn. Like i was telling a story but in a physical way and they told me a little about Anansi the Spider who was The King of Stories in ashanti culture.