Canary Wharf

I spent some time yesterday wandering around Canary Wharf. It occurs to me that, in its contrast to the old buildings of City of London, it offers a powerful reflection of all the disadvantages of progress that we now seem to experiencing. It feels almost dystopian. I don't think I would like to work there (although I sometimes wish that I had a really comfortable modern office in a clean, smart building) but I really like visiting the place. Things that I noticed:

• street sweepers and private security guards in abundance
• areas between buildings designated as non-smoking
• crowds of smokers outside buildings in designated areas: passing among them, the smoke was almost tangible. One might have expected conversations to be taking place but these were all solitary individuals who did not appear to be enjoying their cigarettes. Have sociologists explored the implications of this strange corralling of addicts and its impact on corporate culture, I wonder? (Having written that, I'm very tempted to spend the rest of the afternoon searching online instead of getting on with coding interviews which is my main task for today...)
• coffee shops full of people having meetings: don't these huge office blocks have meeting spaces? I suppose that there must be something about the neutrality and informality of Carluccio's (where I noticed that people were also eating huge bowls of pasta at 10.30 am: presumably jet setting executives still operating in different time zones? I really wanted to ask) that is conducive to business meetings. But there is outside seating and it was very sunny at the time. 
• the shopping malls: up-market retailers like Tiffany cheek by jowl with high street chains and the same disorienting sensation I get in large malls in N. America, the oppression of things I have no need or desire to own demanding my attention
• signposting: extensive but confusing, especially to the DLR and underground stations
• people pushing prams: many of them, which seemed odd in a space that is predominantly devoted to work

It is not difficult to imagine that in this carefully designed, artificial environment it would be very easy to behave quite differently, to forget the ethical norms of civilised society outside the financial sector and to view the traditional and tried and tested as old-fashioned.

Then I went to Greenwich, to the gracious Wren buildings in which the university is housed and learned something about the conflict that has to be managed on a daily basis between the demands of a modern university and the constraints of the preservation of ancient buildings which were not designed for students.

And I rounded off a day of thinking about different sorts of space with a visit to a fascinating exhibition:

http://www.rmg.co.uk/visit/events/visions-of-the-universe

Some very beautiful displays to look at, although none quite as compelling in my opinion as Commander Chris Hadfields' tweeted pictures from the International Space Station over the last few months. I had never before realised how far space is filled with explosions of matter: it's just as well we can't hear it all happening.

Now back to coding interview transcripts...