Peter Saville was the in house graphic designer for Factory Records back in their heyday. He is best know for his iconic album covers for Joy Division and New Order. Now he has partnered with Umbro to design these soccer jerseys for the England national team.
England lost a game they should have won this Saturday due to a poor play by goalie Rob Green. You can see that fatal mistake recreated here in Lego form (plus England's goal).
Zhe155 is a UK based artist whose "China Girls" stencil pieces have been making ugly urban landscapes across Europe a little prettier. David Bowie would be proud. You can see more of his work at Flickr.
London's iconic double-decker buses are getting a design upgrade (and greener powerplants), as revealed today on the city of London's website. Scheduled to go into service in 2012, the new bus boasts a more "light and airy feel inside the bus" due to extensive use of glass, including along the staircases (there's two), and a "hop-on, hop-off" platform has been added to the rear.
The structure is pierced by 60,000 transparent rods that will illuminate the interior of the pavilion with natural light during the day. At night, the 25-foot (7.5 meters) rods will transport light from the inside to the exterior, allowing the structure to glow. Inside the transparent rods, the pavilion will house the largest collection of wild plant seeds in the world - Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership. Visitors will be able to access the "Seed Cathedral" by a series of walkways, which will depict the role of nature in UK cities in the past, present and in the future.
These last few days in Austin have been the coldest that I can remember with temperatures dropping into the teens. On the bright side my birth place in England has become a frozen wasteland. Due to the Gulf Stream Great Brittan is unusually warm considering its latitude. Well this week the Gulf Stream has been redirected to Greenland leaving the UK looking more like Iceland in this photo from NASA.
Holy shit that is some serious air that these two kite surfers are getting. After waiting for years for the wind to be powerful enough they finally got their chance to leap over this pier in Southeast England. Reaching heights of over 100 feet they soar high above the pier below. It will be interesting to see where they take the sport from here.
The dubious source of this list is a cross promotion to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the British Lottery. Of course gamblers who throw away over $40 million a week took the top spot.
Interesting article the U.K. paper Telegraph about the city of Bristol's plans to let it's citizens vote on whether to keep or remove graffiti. The idea is that people can go online and vote to keep the graffiti if they like it. Bristol is home to the street artist Banksy whose exhibit at the Bristol Museum has attracted over a quarter of a million people. If this works it would be great to see this catch on in other cities with a history of great street art.
Last January the Royal Mail released a collection of stamps based on 20th century British design. The ten stamps feature British design icons from 1930 to the 1960's including the mini skirt, Concorde, the double decker bus and London Underground map.
Located in the North Sea off the coast of Suffolk, England is Sealand the worlds smallest nation. Originally built as an antiaircraft platform to gun down Nazi planes during World War two it has been re inhabited for over forty years. The Nation has it's own flag, currency, coat of arms and even passports.
