Nice Uk Property photos
A few nice uk property images I found:
UK Police History – Scotland Yard’s “Black Museum”
Image by brizzle born and bred
The Black Museum of Scotland Yard is a famed collection of criminal memorabilia kept at the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in London, England. The museum came into existence sometime in 1874, although unofficially. It was housed at Scotland Yard, and grew from the collection of prisoners’ property gathered under the authority of the Prisoners Property Act of 1869. The act was intended to help the police in their study of crime and criminals. By 1875, it had become an official museum of the force, with a police inspector and a police constable assigned to duty there. The first visitors for whom records exist came in 1877. The first known reference to the museum as the "Black Museum" came that year as well.
Despite being intended primarily for use by the police, the public could see it by special arrangement. The name "Black Museum" was a nickname; the collection was formally referred to as the "Crime Museum."
The term was also applied to a museum of failed engineering components collected by David Kirkaldy at his testing works at 99 Southwark Street, Southwark, London. The latter museum was destroyed in the London Blitz. The artefacts included fractured lugs from the Tay Bridge disaster.
The exhibits included many death masks made of executed criminals, as well as collections of weapons, tools used by burglars, and items that had been evidence in crimes.
In 1951, British commercial radio producer Harry Alan Towers produced a radio series hosted by Orson Welles called The Black Museum, inspired by the catalogue of items on display. Each week, the programme featured an item from the museum and a dramatization of the story surrounding the object to the macabre delight of audiences. Often mistakenly cited as a BBC production, Towers commercially syndicated the programme throughout the English speaking world. The American radio writer Wyllis Cooper also wrote and directed a similar anthology for NBC that ran at the same time in the U. S.; called Whitehall 1212, for the telephone number of Scotland Yard, the program debuted on November 18, 1951, and was hosted by Chief Superintendent John Davidson, curator of the Black Museum.
The Museum was moved to New Scotland Yard in the 1980s and was subject to substantial renovation in recent years. The Crime Museum, as it is now called, currently resides in Room 101 at New Scotland Yard and consists of two sections. The first, a replica of the original museum contains a substantial selection of melee weapons, some overt, some concealed, including shotgun umbrellas and numerous walking stick swords. This room also contains a selection of hangman’s nooses including that used to perform the UK’s last ever execution and letters allegedly written by Jack the Ripper. The newer section of the museum contains many exhibits from 20th century crimes, notable inclusions include the fake De Beers diamond from the Millennium Dome heist and Dennis Nilsen’s stove. The museum can be visited by Police officers from any of the country’s police forces by prior appointment, though not without difficulty due to its popularity.
The Black Museum of criminal artefacts also hosts over 500 items preserved at a constant temperature of sixty-two degrees, a special place is reserved for a set of printing plates, a remarkable series of forged bank-notes, and a cunningly hollowed out kitchen door once used to conceal some of them, once belonging to Charles Black, the most prolific counterfeiter in the Western Hemisphere.
www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/4803874483/
www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/4804504830/
www.flickr.com/photos/brizzlebornandbred/4803874647/
Open Scotland Yard museum of crime, says London mayor Boris Johnson
For more than a century, Scotland Yard’s “Black Museum” has catalogued artefacts from the most gruesome crimes of London — and the exhibits have been considered too horrible to be shown to the public.
Generations of police officers have been granted access to its dimly lit rooms, to see the ghastly relics. For almost everyone else, it has remained off limits.
This restriction in the name of public decency may be about to end. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is backing a plan to turn some of the exhibits into a tourist attraction, a museum to celebrate the capital’s emergency services.
The Black Museum includes objects from the Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen cases — Crippen was in 1910 convicted of murdering his wife and disposing of the body in a bath of acid — and a horrible pair of binoculars.
Brian Coleman, the chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, is working with the mayor on a plan for the new museum. “The police are quite jealous of some of the information they are allowed access to,” Mr Coleman said. “And to be quite truthful, some of the items are just too gruesome for members of the public — but if we had a Black Museum, we would have tourists queueing round the corner.”
In 1869 Parliament gave the police the authority to retain certain items of prisoners’ property for instructional purposes. An Inspector Neame initially gathered together a collection for training purposes, and the first visitors — the top brass at the Yard — inspected the museum in 1877. When that same year a journalist was denied access to the collection, he named the collection the Black Museum in his subsequent report. The name stuck.
It is currently housed in two rooms on the second floor of New Scotland Yard, overseen by Alan McCormick, a retired police officer. The lighting is dim to avoid bleaching exhibits.
The oldest exhibit is a pair of handcuffs used in 1841 to restrain a mutineer. There is weaponry, including swords concealed in walking sticks — and the poisoned umbrella used in 1978 to kill the Bulgarian writer and dissident Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge.
A briefcase designed to fire a poisoned dart into witnesses on the steps of the Old Bailey — former property of the Kray twins — is also in the collection. They never got to use it.
Then there are those infamous binoculars: when the lenses are screwed into focus a pair of spikes shoot out to blind the user.
Among the more recent exhibits in the museum is the bloodstained uniform worn by PC Keith Blakelock, the officer killed in the Broadwater Farm riots in Tottenham in 1985, and a section on the serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Parts of the bathroom in which Nilsen hid bodies are in the Black Museum.
For the moment, such artefacts are seen only by police officers and associated professionals as part of their training. MPs and ambassadors have also visited.
The idea is that items would go on display in a “Blue Light Museum”, alongside artefacts from the history of the London ambulance and fire services.
Yesterday Andy Hayman, former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, broadly endorsed the mayor’s plan for an exhibition, describing the museum as “the Madame Tussauds of the Yard”.
Mr Hayman said: “I was rather apprehensive the first time I visited the museum. I wondered if I was being voyeuristic and disrespectful to the victims and their families.
“After a few moments, however. those concerns were replaced with fascination and interest.
“This museum presents such well-kept artefacts of significant historical value it seems a shame the general public do not have the opportunity to have this experience.
“The mayor’s bid to give access to the general public should be encouraged, providing we do not lose sight of our respect for the victims and their families.”
Citigroup Centre and Canary Wharf Tower in London, UK.
Image by FromTheNorth
Skyscrapers in Canary Wharf / London, UK in June 2009.
Canary Wharf is a large business and shopping development in East London, located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, centred on the old West India Docks in the London Docklands.
Rivalling London’s traditional financial centre, The Square Mile, Canary Wharf contains the UK’s three tallest buildings: One Canada Square (sometimes known as the Canary Wharf Tower) at 235.1 m (774 ft); followed by 8 Canada Square and the Citigroup Centre, both at 199.5 m (654 ft).
Canary Wharf is built on the site of the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs. From 1802, the area was one of the busiest docks in the world. By the 1950s, the port industry began to decline, leading to the docks closing by 1980.[2]
Canary Wharf itself takes its name from No. 32 berth of the West Wood Quay of the Import Dock. This was built in 1936 for Fruit Lines Ltd, a subsidiary of Fred Olsen Lines for the Mediterranean and Canary Island fruit trade. At their request, the quay and warehouse were given the name Canary Wharf.[3]
The Canary Wharf of today began when Michael von Clemm, former chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), came up with the idea to convert Canary Wharf into back office. Further discussions with G Ware Travelstead led to proposals for a new business district. However, Travelstead was unable to fund his project[4] and sold it to Olympia & York.
Construction began in 1988 with the first buildings completed in 1991 which included One Canada Square that became the UK’s tallest building and a powerful symbol of the regeneration of Docklands. Upon opening, the London commercial property market had collapsed and Olympia and York Canary Wharf Limited filed for bankruptcy in May 1992.
