all images courtesy the artist | used with permission Erica Ward is a California-born ink and watercolor artist who has called Tokyo her home for over 10 years. Inspired by Japanese designs and imagery, as well as the ever-changing landscape of Tokyo, Ward reinterprets everyday sights and objects in surreal ways within her artworks, asking […] Related posts: The Tokyoiter Presents Diverse Visions of Tokyo Louis Vuitton Tokyo City Guide &TOKYO: City of Tokyo Announces New Logo

The London Lens In today's edition we investigate art, science, conspiracy and just what did the councillors know? It looks important, heavily signposted in gleaming red letters from both Greenhill Way and Station Road. A chain of blue and green lights beckons through an alleyway between a cake shop and a chicken shop, while a sign on a lamppost lures you in with promises of STREET FOOD ART AND MORE. But beyond the skips all we found was a silent cluster of lockable units, adapted containers and pseudo-greenhouses, all connected via a chain of timber ramps because this tumbleweed corner is nothing if not accessible. Who precisely is accountable for whatever hasn't happened here? special activities hitching onto the coattails of the London Festival of Architecture. Our bet is that the live music and local food was better appreciated than the panel on incremental urbanism, especially on a Thursday evening. And yet a month later nobody is here, not unless they're walking through from the adjacent street market, and the empty units echo with the sound of misplaced investment. Subscribe! But first — a quick look at the big London stories this week: Welcome to The London Lens. We're the capital's essential news magazine, delivered exclusively by Substack and online. Sign up to our mailing list and get free editions of The London Lens full of tantalising titbits you need to know about the city, although for the in-depth proper journalistic stuff we want your money because we have mortgages to pay. Please consider becoming a backer of The London Lens at just £7.95 a month, which is quite small if you think of it in terms of 'three coffees' and definitely not nearly £100 a year if you do the actual maths. The Cultural Lens Thirst! It's all about water and the lack of it, because we love to bring you the exclusives. Please subscribe!! Thirst! continues until February 2026 which is basically forever, so it'll be worth a visit on a glum winter Saturday when you've run out of interesting things to do. This article was published by The London Lens, a new quality Substack channel prioritising all things London. Several times a week we'll share with you a carefully curated story, plus our best recommendations, at least until we start to lose interest due to lack of subscriptions. We prioritise quality over quantity and delight in hiding all the best bits behind our paywall, tempting you in with dangling cliffhangers and hoping you'll cough up dosh to discover how things end. Please subscribe! Art Park continues unabated. map of the Art Park framed on the wall whose key is entirely empty, all the way from Units 1-14 to Galleries E-G. And yet it all started with such high hopes. Meanwhile Space on behalf of the London Borough of Harrow, the aim to "establish itself as a creative and social catalyst for Harrow's future". Beancounters should have run a mile when they read that the Art Park was to be "a hub of curiosity" but instead they paid up and this deadzone is the end result. Subscribe right now!! told the London Lens that the project highlighted Harrow Council's inability to plan and co-ordinate effectively, also that "hundreds of pounds in taxpayers' money is likely being wasted on keeping the lights on all day every day” which we're pretty sure is a ridiculous exaggeration. In response the Conservative council leader admitted it would take a few months to reach full occupancy as you'd expect with any new venue, then blamed Labour councillors for being too downbeat. "The Council is learning and adapting as we go along," he added, which to be fair did sound like a confession it was a bit rubbish at the moment. The remainder of this post is for paid subscribers only. Subscribe to The London Lens to read the second half of this and every newsletter going forward, because trust us we are really good at making the second half sound like it must be really interesting. £7.95 a month is nothing in the grand scheme of things, especially if you're the kind of Londoner who'll spaff twice that on a five-minute Uber journey, so why not share some of your disposable income with us? Please subscribe to the London Lens and keep the flames of proper newsgathering alive. It's better than doing a real job, especially now that so few real jobs for journalists remain. We implore you to subscribe!! Already a subscriber? Please sign in.

45 45 Squared 25) MARKET SQUARE, N9 Borough of Enfield, 70m×50m Market Square in Edmonton. New not old, enclosed not open, basic not aspirational, blouses not yogawear, also you can't drive a vehicle into it which I think is a first in this year-long series. Come with me to the heart of Edmonton Green Shopping Centre, N9's sinuous concrete stripmall. fairly typical town centre until the late 1960s when the newly-formed Enfield council decided to bulldoze the majority in favour of full-on retail redevelopment. Frederick Gibberd & Co (of Harlow fame) came up with an innovative brutalist concoction mixing tower blocks with shopping opportunities and car parks, while Edmonton Green was substantially remodelled for through traffic. A new bus station replaced the old marketplace and all the stalls were moved into a large covered square at the core of the new development. North Mall bears off from one corner, South Mall from the opposite corner and a lowlit connector to the outside world from one side, all feeding shoppers into Market Square. Five parallel bands of glass let the light in. The original stalls are long gone, replaced by brighter permanent units with standard fascias. Some are small with space for key-cutting, engraving or a nail bar, a few are substantially larger and the majority appropriate for medium-sized traders in luggage, Caribbean groceries or dried nuts. The three prime corner units are all occupied by greengrocers, such is the demand for low-priced fruit and veg hereabouts, all neatly arrayed in bands of red, orange and green across hundreds of plastic bowls. Why walk all the way to Asda or Lidl when Letherbarrow's has all the loose tomatoes, peppers and grapes any family could need? Then there's Crystal Meats who are from the shrinkwrapped tray school of butchery, any three for £10, also Fashion Express who sell those huge checked bags ideal for taking washing to the launderette. It's all impressively tidy. outer edge of the square, the remaining beacons including JD Sports and William Hill, although the draw was considerably higher when Superdrug was still a Tesco. As for the Railway Tavern this claims to be a traditional pub, and indeed the original did stand by the level crossing on the Green for years, but this glum replacement has all the character of a dingy unit in the corner of a postwar market. Oh and there's also an upstairs, assuming you can get there. For some impractical reason it's only accessible up a single tissue-strewn staircase, or an adjacent lift, so first floor businesses must suffer terribly from low footfall. That said if you want the Turkish accountants, the special needs theatre or the local MP's office, you're more likely to be on a mission than just ambling by. What's unexpected is that after you've walked round the balcony a separate passage heads out onto the open roof... and into a street in the sky. A lot of councils tried mall-top living in the 70s, notably in Wood Green, but it's still surprising to see a row of eight townhouses on top of Clarks and Cardfactory, complete with washing hanging on the line and a lady sipping coffee in her front garden. My initial conclusion was that Edmonton Green Shopping Centre was a postwar success, still very well used and with a minimum of empty units. Then I remembered that there is essentially nowhere else for Edmonton's shoppers to go, the exterior retail offering having been so comprehensively extinguished, so of course tumbleweed has been held at bay. At least Market Square itself remains a cut above what most towns of this size offer, still appealingly blessed with everyday essentials, so long as you don't look round the edge or go upstairs.