vidarh

Croydon Airport was the UK's only airport in the interwar period, and opened in 1920, and featured the worlds first Air Traffic Control tower, and the worlds first airport terminal.

This model is hanging in the terminal, near the tower.

Unfortunately the building was converted into offices at some point after it closed in 1959, and much of it looks the part, but the museum is open once a month and gives you a chance to see what was once the worlds first fully purposebuilt commercial airport.

Heracles, the plane, was one of a number of Handley Page planes operated by Imperial Airways in the 1930's. Heracles flew from 1931 to 1940, when it was destroyed in a gale. By 1937, it had accumulated 1 million miles of service.

Sometimes I swear I'm interrupting something important.

Taken from next to Warren Street tube station.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.stad.social/post/14284

It went well. They stared at each other for a bit, and then the cat left. I have more pictures from that encounter which I might post - the cat was creeping along the top of the garden fence to try to sneak up on the fox, and got about to where she is in this picture before she was spotted but the fox clearly just wanted to go back to sleep and didn't do much more than lift its head and stare her down.

These exist elsewhere too, but nowhere I've seen as many dedications on park benches as in the UK. This is one of my favourites:

"Nina Theresa Jenkinson 4th of May 1959 - 5th May 2017 She took pleasure in annoying the fisherman by feeding the ducks."

It perfectly encompasses the best of British passive-aggressiveness - the bench is near a private fishing-pond inside Crystal Palace Park (which is public). Couldn't do anything about a nice pond being walled off in the middle of the park, but she could sabotage the fishing by getting the ducks all worked up...

Crystal Palace Park in South London has a number of "dinosaur" statues constructed from ca 1850 onwards. They are great, but not with modern eyes looks more like Pokemon than dinosaurs, as they the science of what dinosaurs might have looked like hadn't exactly gotten very far.

If you zoom in on the background, you can see a couple of the other statues.

Here's more on the Crystal Palace dinosaurs

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.stad.social/post/12169

In a South London park.

In a South London park.