Daily photos no. 43: That There London

A floating population of colleagues and their partners/friends form The Escape Committee which organises an occasional foray to other cities for cultural refreshment. I can no longer remember what this particular trip was about but we saw Grayson Perry's Alan Measles show - a tour he undertook on a customised motorbike carrying an effigy of the teddy bear at the heart of his mythos.

Oddities like this always catch my eye. It's in Bloomsbury on the University of London campus. While UL and/or its constituent colleges own the buildings, some of the land is still the property (no doubt via tax-efficient trusts and offshore shell companies) of the landed aristocracy, like an enormous swathe of central London. The university had legal rights of compulsory purchase but cut a deal that the Russell family would have approval rights over the design of any building facing their remaining holdings, including Russell Square. For some reason this didn't happen in this case, and the Russells' lawyers exacted this petty revenge, determining the wording, design and placing of the plaque. The university's counter-revenge was to install the award the building won immediately below the apology as a silent rebuke to the noble duke's lack of taste. 

It's not a particularly good or bad building so I guess it's an aesthetic score draw, but the controversy makes it one of my favourite curiosities.