London Q? 7th Wonder: Art Deco Beacon in Perivale?
 

Londonphobes: Need some help - TimeOutLondon e-mail carried this heading but my computer will not let me open the link - please what is this wondrous Art-Deco Beacon in Perivale? Thanks am very interested in knowing where.


TimeOut London said:
"Seven wonders of London Last week we kicked off our series showcasing London's most iconic buildings with St Pancras International. Now we unveil the second of London's finest man-made marvels, the awe-inspiring art deco beacon in Perivale"

???

You're going to love this.

It's the Tesco on Western Avenue. Once the Hoover Building, till Hoover committed suicide here with a truly loopy sales promotion that made them less popular than George W in a mosque.

So Tesco took it over and turned it into a supermarket.

Your trouble is, you spend too much time on those trains. Drive along the A40 like most of us, and you'd know a bit about London

I think it's Hoover Building which is now a Tesco supermarket. It's very visible when you drive from central London to Heathrow.

Must have passed that bldg a hundred times - every time we drove in/out of London over 5 years. Don't know about now since you say they "commited suicide" - but when I lived there the verb all my friends/neighbors used for vacuuming was "to Hoover" -

"I'll be over as soon as I finish hoovering" - even when they owned a different brand.

It's very funny, actually, janis. They had a promotion offering free or discounted travel if you got the right number of points, or something similar, and couldn't honour the commitment when too many people started taking advantage of it. I don't know what the person who dreamt it up is doing now: probably a traffic warden or something.

Oh - I remember something about that. Maybe there was a thread on here about it a few years ago. Or maybe I read it in one of the UK papers.

So that scuppered the company?

No. You can still buy Hoovers. But for about a decade, their name was mud, and some retailers actually wouldn't stock them because they thought Hoover would be bad for the retailer's image. I mean people were buying Hoovers they didn't want just to get the free tickets to the US: it was that dumb a promotion. And then finding they'd got hotels and cars booked, and no tickets

But in the meantime, others have moved in and Dyson's invented an interesting variant. So they're just another brand in a country where brands rarely have much clout anyway.

But - as "hoovering" (which is still common) shows - Hoover was once one of the very few brands n Britain that mattered. Like Cadbury's.

This is it:

http://www.hooverbuilding.co.uk/

If you like that you'll like the Black Cat building in Camden (an old fag factory)

I love the Carreras building.
Another wonderful building is the Gillette building on the A4 at Brentford.
I wonder if people will be so fond of for instance the Gherkin or Lloyds building in the future?

audere thanks for pix - what does the word 'beacon' mean - i was expecting some tall spire on top

thanks

and i read one reason Hoover went belly up was that it SUCKED! Not enough i guess.

Nice bldg but not sure one of 7 wonders of london?

It really is.

PalQ probably spends too much time on trains to see the real Britain.

Which has nothing to do with seedy seaside resorts or fish + chips, but is all about semi-detached houses. Endless rows of them, all over the country, and mostly where there aren't any trains (we've built scarcely a railway line since the semis went up)

And Western Ave's their spiritual heartland. You come into London, drive along miles of the things, then wallop! Like a beacon (they mrean it metaphorically) there's this huge, distinctive, needlessly overdesigned building.

Unimpressive possibly to an American, since so much of that genre still survives in the US. But we didn't put much up in the first place. and an awful lot of it got torn down before it became conservation-worthy

For once, T Out's arts bloke has got it just right. Try this link to understand it:
http://www.timeout.com/london/featur..._Building.html

If it ain't on a train line then i don't care. Wrapped or unwrapped?

flan: thanks for link but my antique computer won't open it either. I may go to the library this weekend as i'd like to see why this rather dismal looking factory is the 7th Wonder of London?

Though looking at architecture in London for years i could see why it may be considered so.

Thanks and i have drive the West Way route to Heathrow from Wormwood Scrubbs dozens and dozens of times but years ago when this Hoover thing probably was not considered significant.

Cheers - enjoy your lawn bowling this weekend

What's lawn bowling?

I'm spending most of the weekend propping up your ailing economy. Off to New York to inject some hard currency into your shops, then bore an audience with one of my witty commentaries.

If I can get bloody PowerPoint 2007 to save properly.

lawn bowling? I think they call the skittles in the Cotswold Hill you live on, allegedly.

Have a good time in the Big Apple, sincerely.

And check out both the immense Whole Foods Market emporium in Manhattan and Trader Joe's, which you may not be familiar with - a cross between Aldi and WFM and as i learned yesterday started by one of the two aldi founding brothers.

TJ has hundreds of stores now with good goods at low prices - surely will move into U.K. soon.

Lawn bowling has absolutely <u>nothing</u> to do w/ skittles . . . .

Skittles (sport) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaSkittles is an old European target sport, a variety of bowling, from which Ten-pin bowling, Duckpin bowling, and Candlepin bowling in the United States, ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skittles_(sport)

Wikipedia has a picture of skittles being played on a lawn

But the point about lawn bowls, and its variants, is that they're not about knocking down skittles.

They're about placing the bowling wood nearest a target (and possibly knocking contenders out of the way en route). Like curling.

Long ago in Canterbury when our bike tours camped there there was a pub nearby where locals said they played a version of lawn bowling that was just about only played there

i can't think of the name of it - does it ring a bell

i mixed up skittles with that and janisj is correct that skittles, mainly played in pubs, is nothing like lawn bowling

Lawn bowling is known as Bowls. There are two types, flat green and crown green. Crown green is mostly played in the north of England. It is like marbles for grown ups. The BBC insists on braodcasting what feels like decades of coverage of it every year. It is on now in the afternoons I believe.
Sadly Skittles Alleys are getting thin on the ground, as is Aunt Sally. We used to play both when we lived in Oxon.