Floral Hall portico

Thamk you for that I've put some more pictures on the web site

Well' probably be told it will have coloured lights ,at night ,hmmm that old scam

Can no one make a building look good during day light hours any more

I've had a refreshingly swift and open response from Simon Tattersfield - Director - Borough Market

"Trustees were concerned that the architect had chosen colour grey and debated matter at length at December Trustee's Meeting but in the end deputed the matter to Ptolemy Dean - a trustee who is an architect and he met with Ken Greig [project architect-LR] along with Rev Colin Slee [of Southwark Cathedral-LR] and it was agreed to leave matters as they were i.e. light alumininium grey and darker aluminium grey."

They will look at explain the reasons for the choice in the next Borough Market newsletter.

Having looked at it again in daylight, I can understand why they didn't go for a darker colour scheme.

hmmm intresting


A colour scheme woulden't have to be dark .Any pastel colours would be better than gray,white would be better than gray.

it looks corparit and dull

Great name 'Ptolemy Dean' - like something you get in a comic or cheap detective novel ...

"Ptolemy Dean knew she was going to be trouble the minute she walked into the office ... 'why do I get all the difficult cases' he mused to himself...

Oh, Ptolemy is a real person all right (is he still a local as well?) although elements of his CV are wonderfully off the wall:

"After leaving Edinburgh University, Ptolemy Dean won an ICOMOS scholarship to document mud adobe structures in New Mexico and Arizona."

You may remember Ptolemy Dean from the [dismally bad] t.v documentary about Borough of a couple of years ago. He was interviewed mouthing off about the threat to the market by the late [hopefully], not lamented, Railtrack Thameslink scheme - as if no-one else was as aware or could care as much as HE did about the area. He didn't acknowledge or appear to be aware at the time that locals had been campaigning against the potential destruction of the area ever since the first incarnation of the scheme years ago and that there had been a public inquiry about it! Hopefully, now he's managed to become a trustee he's up to speed - though there is a history of the market trustee opinions conflicting with those of local residents...perhaps the 'colour scheme' issue yet another.

For the record, I quite favour the grey combination if only because [more] green is not my favourite colour and it's all over the market already! However, I think the interior scheme for the new bit adjacent to the Floral Hall section looks great, and its a wonderful space. As a token gesture, the leaves of the pineapples on the roof of the Floral Hall are picked out in green...

was that cleopatras brother? ptolemy....king of two kingdoms or summat....

Didn't Ptolemy come up with the Ptolemic system for calculating the position and orbits of planets ? *

It was fundamentally wrong in the sense that everything orbited around the Earth but (aside from that little issue) his measurements were actually far more accurate than Copernicus' similar work some 1000 years later (where everything orbited around the Sun).

*Quick plug for the Greenwich Royal Observatory (not SE1, but close enough) without which I would not have such swot-like facts at my disposal.

Surely its an anagram?

jane I agree that the portico needs to be distinguished from
the market,but you don't have to paint it gray to do that.