CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

Yesterday I flew down to London for a memorial to celebrate the life of a friend and colleague who died suddenly before Christmas.  Travelling in from Heathrow Airport I arrived in central London 90 minutes before the start of the event at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall so I decided to go for a walk down to the Embankment.  I ended up outside the Ministry of Defence building and standing in front of the Battle of Britain memorial.   I served 14 years in the Royal Air Force from 1982 to 1996 and the Battle of Britain is as important to every past and serving member of the RAF as the Battle of Trafalgar is to anyone who has served in the Royal Navy. The memorial is to the people who took part in the battle in 1940 that stopped the German invasion after the fall of France and ultimately led to the defeat of Germany in 1945 due to the fact that Britain was able to continue the war and become the staging post for the Normandy Invasion in 1944. ...

I  have been spending a lot of time travelling to Paris and Le Mans in the past few weeks and this has meant spending time in St Pancras train station in London. It is a beautiful building that was renovated in 2007 and featured several sculptures in and around the concourse.  I did a blog on the John Betjeman statue last year but the most striking and imposing sculpture is the 9m high artwork by British artist Paul Day entitled 'The Meeting Place'. In 2008 a high-relief frieze was been added to the base of the Meeting Place sculpture as part of refurbishments at St Pancras, featuring images from the history of the Tube and train: people queuing on platforms or travelling in carriages; soldiers departing for war and returning injured, and repair works following the 7 July 2005 London bombings. This morning I took some time to take some close up images of the different panels. All images taken on a Fujifilm Finepix X100 and 23mm f2 Fujinon...