Barkway Blowdown

	The London Borough of Hackney decided to get rid of Barkway Court, a large block of flats near Finsbury Park Tube. It would have been ghoulish to make a journey to see someone else's building blown up, but I actually know this place. I think I've even slept there. My brother lived there for years. My niece's first birthday party was there. (We always knew no good would come of all that jumping up and down, April!) And it's not every day you get to see a tower blown up. Or "down" as they called it on the posters. Thanks to Hackney for the show. We all clapped. And thanks to Guy Kewney and family for the lunch afterwards - somehow a "cup of tea" turned into a lunch with Champagne and cricket.
Amazing sight. So fast (from the first movement to complete disappearance it took only about half a second) and so quiet. OK, it wasn't exactly quiet. But I thought beforehand that it would be like a bomb going off and it was nothing like that at all. A crumple rather than a bang. Now I know why I'm not a famous TV cameraman... as soon as the thing went off, instead of looking through the camera and keeping the blast in the shot I just watched it and said "Wow! That was fast!". So the picture you see is sliding out of the frame almost as fast as it hit the ground. The birds noticed though:
Less dust than I had imagined. But those places that did get dusted got snowed on - here are some shots of a garden about 100 metres downwind of the building. I like the ferns. This looks like my sort of garden. Also a sneak round a corner of the pile of rubble - about 5 metres high as far as I could tell, from as close as they would allow me to get.