THE abandoned BT tower is set to be turned into a fancy hotel – and the first images of what it could look have been revealed.
The London attraction first opened in 1964 as the Post Office Tower, and was the city’s tallest building until the NatWest Tower opened in 1980.
The BT Tower then closed in 1981 to the public, bar some private events.
It has since been bought by MCR, an American hotel chain who also owns the High Line Hotel and TWA Hotel in New York, for £270million in 2024.
And new images released by architect Orms (behind The Outernet and The Standard Hotel) show what to expect from the 177m tower when it reopens.
The main attraction will be the rooftop swimming pool on the fifth floor, and open to both hotel guests and the public.
The ground floor will be used for retail and food and drink spaces, while the hotel will take over the first and second floor.
The Howlands Building will get a three to four storey extension upwards, which will be the hotel space as well.
Levels 24-30 are unconfirmed as to what they will be used for but could become art or culture areas.
And a public space will be part of the exterior as well, to make it more easily accessible.
Designers Orms are behind the renovation, who has replaced Heatherwick Studios.
They said in the application: “While maintaining the overall structure, we will remove unsightly modern additions to the 1960s exterior on the ground floor.
“We will then introduce retail on the ground floor and add a modest pavilion structure on the roof.”
A planning application will be submitted in September, although works cannot start in 2029 due to BT decomposing on equipment inside.
Expected opening dates of the hotel are in 2033.
The tower was once known for its rotating restaurant, although this was forced to close after an IRA bombing.
Kirill Stytsenko/iStock via Getty Images
Tower Semiconductor (TSEM) said it plans to invest about $3B to expand its advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity in Japan, backed by about $1B in grants from the Japanese government. The expansion is aimed at meeting rising demand from AI and data center
05:40, 12 Jul 2026Updated 08:05, 12 Jul 2026
The bridge is the tallest in the world(Image: Achim Thomae/Getty)
The world’s tallest bridge is so high that an entire skyscraper could fit underneath it. While many would expect the highest bridge to be in the likes of China or the US, it is actually in France.
The Millau Viaduct is part of a motorway that connects Paris to the Mediterranean. It was designed by British architect Norman Foster and is in Southern France.
Work completed in 2004 and the cost of construction was approximately €394 million (£345 million). It has an impressive height of height of 343 metres (1,125 ft), which is higher than the iconic Eiffel Tower.
The Paris skyscraper stands at 330 metres (1,083 feet). Millau Viaduct is 2460 metres long and touches the bottom of the Tarn valley just nine times along its length.
Le Shuttle said: “Plans for a road crossing to alleviate the traffic through the town of Millau date from the 1980s.
“British architect Sir Norman Foster was among the team that designed the viaduct, which was considered the most viable solution to cross the valley and river, with the least ecological impact on the area. Construction of the viaduct began in 2001.”
There is no pedestrian access to the viaduct as it is a high-speed motorway. However, it does attract tourism and there are guided informational tours.
Tours include taking a designated nature path to a viewing platform below the bridge and even inside one of the tallest pylons. A marathon takes place every year over the viaduct, and the Tour de France has passed under the viaduct a number of times.
The viaduct features a slight curve that extends up to 20km on the road on either side. It helps drivers settle the feeling of “floating” when driving on a long, straight bridge.
Enjoy Travel explained: “It has two lanes in each direction and interestingly, the bridge is not straight as this could induce a sensation of floating for drivers.
“To remedy this, the architects designed the bridge to have a slight curve, which is 20km in range. Another design feature that improves safety, is the road’s slight incline of 3%, which improves visibility and reassures the driver.
“The bridge is exposed to strong gusts of up to 151km/h, so designers installed side screens that cut the wind’s impact by 50 per cent.”
Visitors have left positive reviews about their experience of the viaduct on TripAdvisor. One said: “Love bridges. This is one not to be missed. Be sure to take a look at it from below to get a real sense of it. Real engineering feat.”
Another added: “An absolutely superb place! The viaduct and the surrounding landscape are so beautiful that you feel like you are part of a painting or drawing! It is truly a work of engineering of the highest level.”
Someone else commented: “Visited today after it been on my bucket list. Great visitors centre, cafe and toilets. Parking is free and you can walk up a 470m path to an awesome view point. You can see the viaduct and surrounding areas. Drove over the bridge with stunning views.”
A MASSIVE travelling attraction is set to return to a seaside hotspot next week – and it’s perfect for the whole family.
The popular spot will be open for more than a month throughout the summer.
Cardiff Bay Fun Park will descend on the Welsh capital once more, as the family-friendly destination is set to return to Roald Dahl Plass next weekend (July 18).
This year also marks the attraction’s newest arrival, Skyfall – the tallest travelling drop tower in the UK.
At 262 ft (80 metres) high, thrill-seekers will be treated with 360-degree panoramic views of Cardiff and the Bristol Channel, before plunging down at speeds of up to 75mph.
The tower even dwarfs the tallest roller coaster in the UK, Hyperia, which stands at 236 ft (72 metres).
Remaining in the city until August 31, visitors can also ride fun fair classics including Dodgems, Funhouse, Bungee Trampolines and Water Walkers.
The summertime staple is also set to host magic shows, princess sing-a-longs and character meet and greets for younger guests.
The destination will be open on Sunday to Thursday from 11am to 8pm, and on Friday and Saturday from 11am to 9pm.
Residents have shared their excitement online about the return of the much-loved fair, with many saying they “can’t wait” until next weekend.
One enthusiastic user said: “This looks so much fun! I definitely need to check it out.”
Meanwhile, another shared their reservations about the attraction’s newest arrival, commenting: “Omg, this looks terrifying.”
PHOENIX — For decades, all that separated the U.S. from Mexico was barbed wire.
Now, after a massive infusion of cash from Congress, President Trump’s administration is swiftly building what it has dubbed a “smart wall,” a combination of 30-foot-tall steel fencing and an array of sophisticated technology like sensors, cameras and towers allowing Border Patrol to surveil the territory.
The wall is under heavy scrutiny for the billions of dollars being dedicated to it when border crossings are at their lowest in decades. Critics say the U.S. is militarizing the border as it increasingly deploys sophisticated surveillance technology to the area, impacting local communities.
“We are seeing a massive expansion of surveillance and surveillance technology across the borderlands,” said Ricky Garza, border policy counsel at the Southern Border Communities Coalition, an advocacy group. “The wall in all its forms is harmful to communities.”
Officials say the technology is complementary to the physical wall and frees up agents for other tasks.
“It’s a smart wall. It’s not just a barrier,” Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said during recent congressional testimony. “It maximizes the use of our most valuable resource, which is our agents.”
The wall has been a top priority for Trump, a Republican, since he first ran for president.
During the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, the border emerged as a flashpoint, with thousands of people seeking to cross into the country each day. Those numbers started to taper off shortly before Trump returned to office last year and then slowed to a trickle, with his broader immigration crackdown serving as a deterrent for would-be migrants.
Flush with $46 billion to finish the wall after an infusion by Congress for immigration enforcement, CBP is inking tens of billions of dollars in contracts to build the wall and push along the president’s signature project.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said recently that a preliminary part of the wall will be finished by “this time next year.” Scott said his agency is putting up 6 miles of wall a week.
Hundreds of miles had already been built before Trump returned to office. As of mid-June 2026, CBP has erected another 74 miles and aims to build hundreds more. There is no wall planned for roughly 535 miles of the roughly 2,000-mile-long border, because rugged terrain already serves as a barrier. Ground sensors and towers will be used instead.
CBP is also going back to hundreds of miles of already built wall and adding more technology, lights and roads. Along the long stretches of river in Texas that mark the border with Mexico, they’re deploying 12- to 15-foot-long cylinder-shaped buoys meant to keep migrants or smugglers from crossing the border.
Technology is playing a greater role in the Trump administration’s effort to make illegal crossings along the border more difficult, part of a broader transformation of CBP in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, into an intelligence operation with a mass surveillance network whose reach extends far beyond the nation’s frontiers, according to reporting by The Associated Press.
And critics say the border technology poses a threat.
The Southern Border Communities Coalition says surveillance technologies can push migrants into more dangerous routes to avoid being detected.
Garza, the group’s policy counsel, warned that surveillance technology infringes on the privacy rights of border residents and that locals have found ground sensors used to detect smuggler or migrant traffic placed on their property without their consent.
Nayda Alvarez and her relatives own land along the Rio Grande roughly 125 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. She has found cameras placed on her family’s land, and just last week she spotted a surveillance tower about a quarter of a mile down the river from her house.
“Are we expecting a war or something?” she said. “It doesn’t make me feel safer.”
Dave Maass, director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on civil liberties related to digital technology, said the technology has made the border area “a hostile environment” for locals and would-be migrants.
The foundation has published a guide on the various types of surveillance towers in use along the southern border designed to help local residents.
These can range from fixed towers with video, infrared and radar technologies that have a range of roughly 8 miles to remote video surveillance systems that have cameras and a spotlight fixed on top. Some are mounted on the backs of trucks so agents can drive them to different parts of the border.
Increasingly, these towers are autonomous. They can scan an area, analyze what they’re seeing using artificial intelligence and alert Border Patrol agents to something suspicious. Proponents say this helps keep Border Patrol agents out in the field instead of sitting in front of computer screens watching for activity. But it also increases AI decision-making along the border when experts have warned about the technology’s potential for bias or other problems.
The big GOP tax cuts and spending bill passed by Congress last summer requires that CBP buys only the autonomous towers, and the department is deploying an additional 95.
Underground, buried fiberoptic cables can sense movement, capturing data that is also then analyzed by AI.
“We follow the contour of the land. We go through trees. We go down into the river banks. We can go absolutely everywhere,” said Magnus McEwen-King, CEO of Sintela, which has a contract with CBP to install the cables. He spoke at a recent border security expo in Phoenix, where some of the technology was on display.
CBP also uses ground sensors and trail cameras to detect smuggling routes.
The nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense has questioned both the huge amounts of money for the wall-building and whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.
In 2011, under Democratic President Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano pulled the plug on a project to build a “virtual wall” of integrated technology like radars, sensors and cameras across the entire border after it ran over budget, faced technological glitches and was behind schedule.
Josh Sewell, director of research and policy at Taxpayers for Common Sense, said the organization would like to see more “robust evaluation” of the technologies being used to avoid similar scenarios. And he criticized the Trump administration for lack of oversight on how the money is being spent, a charge CBP has denied, citing “oversight mechanism.”
In the Big Bend area of southern Texas, opposition to the department’s wall-building plans gathered strong bipartisan support especially in the most sensitive areas that run through a state and national park and a wildlife area.
CBP now says it is not planning to build a 30-foot-high bollard wall in those areas. Its recently announced plans include installing patrol roads and some barriers designed to stop cars and using detection technologies.
Clara Benson, who is one of the founders of the No Big Bend Wall coalition, says bright lights in the area designed to illuminate the border could pollute the skies in an area renowned for having some of the best views of the stars. Even without a 30-foot-tall steel wall running through the land, there is concern about CBP’s plans.
“There’s still a lot of fear and dread that the plan is still going to be quite damaging,” she said.
Santana writes for the Associated Press.
A giant eight-metre dragon soared above the Tower of London to mark the launch of the third series of Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon on HBO Max. An eight‑metre model of Syrax was brought to life using production scans from the hit show.
Built by German aeronautics firm Airstage, the dragon features 23 moving parts and moved using impellers built into its legs to create lifelike motion. The model weighs 13kg and took three months to build by a 14‑strong team using foam, carbon fibre and aluminium. The dragon was crafted from vacuum-formed Depron foam around a carbon fibre and aluminium frame.
The model was finished with detailed airbrushing for a lifelike look and took the team nearly 3,000 hours to complete.
A special evening reception following the flight was hosted by Harriet Rose and attended by stars of the show Kieran Bew, Tom Bennett, Clinton Liberty, who play Dragonseeds Hugh Hammer, Ulf White and Addam Of Hull, recruited as Dragon Riders by Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) in the series, and Abubakar Salim, who plays Alyn of Hull.
Nils Schlenther, chief operating officer at Airstage, said: “This is one of the most intricate flying models we have ever created.
“After months of R&D and complex construction, the team studied the movement of Syrax and underwent over seven test flights to ensure her flight was as close as what we see in the show as possible.
“We have been constantly refining and getting the motion as realistic as possible and so the crowd’s reaction was amazing to see as we know we got it right for the fans.”
The event celebrated the return of House of the Dragon after nearly a two-year wait.
The show is based on George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood and is set 200 years before the events of the hit show Game of Thrones, telling the story of House Targaryen.
The eight-episode season will air new episodes weekly on HBO Max, leading up to the season finale landing on screens Sunday 9th August.
Anna Kimber OBE, deputy governor of the Tower of London, said: “The Tower of London has stood at the heart of some of the most dramatic chapters in our history for nearly 1,000 years.
“While dragons may belong to the world of fantasy, the themes at the heart of House of the Dragon – power, ambition and the struggle for the throne – have strong echoes in the stories that played out within these walls.
“We’re delighted to welcome this spectacular stunt to the Tower, where history and fantasy will meet for an unforgettable moment.”
Ben Gibbard remembers late 2023 as a time of competing realities.
Onstage, the frontman of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service was thriving as his two bands toured together to mark the 20th anniversaries of Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism” and the Postal Service’s “Give Up.”
Behind the scenes, Gibbard’s personal life was in shambles.
“I was getting off phone calls — very difficult phone calls — 20 minutes before going on in an arena,” he says. The singer and his wife, photographer Rachel Demy, were in the middle of an agonizing breakup that would eventually lead to divorce. Yet audiences in the thousands were turning up nightly to see Gibbard reanimate the peak-millennial classics that made him one of indie rock’s defining stars.
“I’d just tell myself, You’re a professional — you’re gonna go out there and do it, and no one’s gonna know,” he recalls. “It was all waiting for me when I got offstage, of course. But for two hours I was able to disconnect and be a performer, which was incredibly …” Gibbard, 49, trails off into a laugh.
“I don’t know if it was healthy,” he says. “But it was helpful.”
Two and a half years later, that split-screen experience — “this idea of how we compartmentalize our pain or our grief or our trauma,” as Gibbard puts it now — forms a through line of Death Cab’s ruminative new album, “I Built You a Tower.” Due Friday from Anti Records, where the group landed after leaving its longtime home of Atlantic amid a corporate shake-up, the LP sets thoughts of broken fences and never-ending storms against tuneful arrangements that can churn, shimmer or chime.
“I pledge myself to your misery / I kneel at its throne,” Gibbard sings in his still-boyish tenor over the sleek new wave groove of “Trap Door,” “Respecting your proclivity / To languish on your own.” In the fuzzed-out “Envy the Birds,” the frontman recounts an argument between two lovers “spraying bullets of grievances”; the driving “Riptides” is narrated by a guy “too tired to end the war.”
“This record is definitely the result of a divorce,” Gibbard says plainly during a recent visit to Los Angeles from his home in Seattle. “But I didn’t want to make a score-settling record or an angry record. This wasn’t an opportunity to defame someone or make this about how I’d been wronged. People drift apart — relationships don’t work. And I think how that’s affected me at almost 50 is a very different mindset than I found myself in when I was 33 or whatever the last time it happened.”
Gibbard means his first divorce, in 2012, from the actor and singer Zooey Deschanel — a split that inspired Death Cab’s 2015 album “Kintsugi,” on which one song asks, “Was I in your way when the cameras turned to face you?” and another chides an unnamed celebrity: “You’ll never have to hear the word ‘no’ if you keep all your friends on the payroll.”
“There’s some gnarly stuff on that record,” says Gibbard, who’d moved to L.A. to be with Deschanel then promptly left as soon as their marriage collapsed. “It’s not exactly a kind album.”
Bassist Nick Harmer, who formed Death Cab with Gibbard in the late ’90s after the two met as students at Western Washington University, agrees that “I Built You a Tower” represents a shift in perspective. “There’s so much more self-examination — and so much more self-indictment,” he says. (Death Cab’s other members are drummer Jason McGerr, guitarist Dave Depper and keyboardist Zac Rae.)
Which isn’t to say that Gibbard entirely resists placing blame. In “Trap Door” he sings about “a trap door in your heart and a button on your desk well-worn from being pressed.”
The frontman says that in recent years he’d “tried to get away from using the word ‘heart’ because that had been a touchstone for so many of our early records.” Yet this line seemed worth holding onto when it came to him.
“I Googled it to see: Did I already write this?” he says, laughing. “Or is there a very popular song called ‘There’s a Trap Door in Your Heart,’ and now I’m just rewriting it? We’ve made a lot of songs at this point — you gotta check your work.”
Indeed, “I Built You a Tower” is Death Cab’s 11th studio LP. After the band’s previous album, 2022’s “Asphalt Meadows,” fulfilled its deal with Atlantic, Death Cab reupped with the major label for one more record, Gibbard says, based on its strong relationship with the company’s then-CEO, Julie Greenwald.
“Julie was our shepherd and our protector the whole time we were there,” the singer says of Death Cab’s nearly two-decade run at Atlantic, which began with 2005’s Grammy-nominated “Plans.” Yet just days after they reached an agreement for “Tower,” Greenwald was fired and replaced by a new leader, Elliot Grainge, about whom the band felt less than optimistic.
Ben Gibbard
(Cielito Mercado Vivas / For The Times)
“We weren’t given the impression that Elliot had spent a lot of time with ‘Transatlanticism’ in college,” Gibbard says of the 32-year-old exec, who made his name signing rappers like Ice Spice and Trippie Redd. With Greenwald’s help, Gibbard says, Death Cab negotiated an exit from Atlantic with ownership of the new album.
Did Grainge try to persuade the band to stay?
“Never heard a word,” Gibbard says.
In an email, Grainge (whose father is Universal Music Group Chairman and Chief Executive Lucian Grange) said that Death Cab’s music “has meant a great deal” to him.
“Working together may not have been in the cards for us; however, that does not lessen my enthusiasm for the band,” he wrote. “They have delivered an impressive body of work over their decades-long career, and I am looking forward to their new music.”
Death Cab’s Harmer says he and his bandmates “talked for half a beat” about putting out “Tower” on their own before thinking better of the idea.
“We’re not businesspeople,” Gibbard says. “Music is the only thing we know how to do.”
At a friend’s wedding in 2024, the frontman had been seated next to the musician Allison Crutchfield, who was then heading up Anti’s A&R department; early this year, Death Cab announced that it had signed to the indie label, whose other acts include Fleet Foxes and Madi Diaz.
This summer, the band will tour behind “I Built You a Tower,” including two shows in August at L.A.’s Greek Theatre. After the “Transatlanticism”/”Give Up” anniversary outing — not to mention a subsequent tour on which the group looked back at “Plans” — Gibbard is “very ready to play some new material,” he says.
Doing the hits was fun. “But at a certain point,” he adds, “it’s really about moving ahead.”
Members of Extinction Rebellion France, an environmental and social activism group, scaled the Eiffel Tower on the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, displaying a Palestinian flag in protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Published On 15 May 202615 May 2026
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After my father’s will banned me and my siblings from his funeral, I wrote a novel about some brothers and sisters stealing their dad in his coffin. The emotions were drawn from my painful experiences, but I invented the characters and the tragi-comic narrative in Stealing Dad. Despite growing up in England, I’ve lived in and written about Athens for 25 years, and it came naturally to create several Greek characters. Alekos is a wild sculptor who dies in London, and his daughter Iris (one of seven dispersed half-siblings) lives off Victoria Square – one of Athens’ most fascinating corners.
In the 1960s, Plateia Viktorias was a fashionable neighbourhood with the fanciest restaurants, shops and theatres. Townhouses from the interwar period were being demolished and Athenians were occupying the new six-storey apartment blocks so fast that construction dust and the constant drilling were the main problem. Today, through wrought-iron and glass doors, elegant, marble-lined halls reveal concierges’ desks and traces of a vanished bourgeois life.
After the 1980s, middle-class families started leaving the polluted centre for the suburbs; students, migrants and others seeking cheap rentals moved in. The 2008 global economic crisis was disastrous. Older businesses faded, drug use became increasingly visible, then around 2014, refugees started arriving. Afghans and Syrians fleeing war already knew about Victoria Square and went straight there on reaching Athens. It became an encampment, with sleeping bags and tents surrounding the imposing bronze sculpture Theseus Saving Hippodamia. Desperate, traumatised people lived on the street with no facilities, queueing at soup kitchens already catering for elderly and unemployed Greeks devastated by the crash.
Brought up in Victoria Square during its heyday, Maria-Liza Karageorgi runs the alluring Café des Poètes. Photographs of Greece’s poets, including CP Cavafy and Nobel laureates Giorgos Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, line the walls. Karageorgi allowed the refugees to wash and use the toilets, then, as numbers grew, she admitted only women and children. Today, though, a balance has been established in the leafy square. “It’s a real neighbourhood,” she says. “People look out for each other.” Her devoted clientele of ageing Greek intelligentsia clearly agree, and gather every morning. “It’s like Buena Vista Social Club,” quipped a younger customer.
Now the most multicultural area in Athens, Victoria Square honours the 19th-century British queen, recognising her empire’s return to Greece of the Ionian islands, including Corfu, in 1864. British foreign policy also lurks in the histories of some newer arrivals. Victoria, the Afghan-Persian restaurant, bakes delicious roasted vegetable briam; Lebanese-born George at Enjoy Just Felafel produces jars of homemade delicacies and preserves; and Bangladeshi grocers stock the African staples sought by Nigerian, Somali and Congolese residents. The area is scented by the Georgian bakery with its flatbreads cooked in a stone oven.
Refugees and migrants are supported by various NGOs that sprang up after 2014. Nadina Christopoulou runs the Melissa Network, a flourishing organisation for women and children housed in an elegant 1920s villa. “Refugees follow the paths of the older refugees,” says Christopoulou. “This area had many Greeks from the diaspora, who came from Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey. You can see their shops, like Petek [honeycomb in Turkish], the patisserie owned since 1964 by the same Istanbul Greeks.” They are still making their delectable galaktoboureko custard pie. Also on 3 Septemvriou is Arkeuthos, another Istanbul-Greek shop overflowing with herbs, spices, teas and honeys.
Older Greek establishments are also flourishing. Krouskas, a traditional, no frills restaurant favoured by locals since the 1970s, still serves the same recipes cooked by the family matriarch. On pedestrianised Elpidos (Hope St), Ouzeri tou Laki (Laki’s Ouzo Taverna) has served excellent seafood since the 80s at tables under bitter orange trees that are intoxicatingly scented in spring. The gay-friendly Diva Café, owned by former dancer and singer Michalis Razis, holds live events and standup comedy.
Victoria’s longstanding theatrical traditions are thriving. On Kodrigktonos (Codrington Street, named after a British admiral) is the renowned Trianon cinema. The Greek romantic comedy Never on Sunday premiered there in 1960 with Melina Mercouri in attendance, and on summer nights the roof opens. Next door, cafe-bar Foyer D’Athènes is packed with theatre and cinema memorabilia.
Newer attractions include Montreal, a gallery-hairdresser where you can admire the art before the charming artist Lambros Vouvousiras cuts your hair. Opposite, Café Apoteka is popular with a young crowd who gather in the nearby Kypseli – well established as a more hipster multicultural neighbourhood. There, Airbnb is already pricing out locals, following the example of the Acropolis-adjacent neighbourhoods, now overwhelmed by tourists.
When my friend, the journalist Katerina Bakogianni, relocated six years ago to a fifth-floor flat in Victoria Square, her suburban friends thought it daring. However, she wakes to the sunrise over Mount Hymettus, a bird’s-eye view of mulberry trees, and she’s one minute from the 1940s Victoria station on Metro Line 1, with its gorgeous sage-green tiles.
Katerina takes me and her dog Robbie for a stroll. We cross Patission, the bustling boulevard once compared to Paris’s Champs-Élysées and with a breathtaking vista to the Acropolis. The revamped park Pedion tou Areos (Mars Fields) has transformed from the days when Athenians feared to cross it, especially after dark. It is now one of Athens’ loveliest green spaces and we stroll past heroic marble sculptures and admire athletes training and pampered dogs sporting bandanas. We end up at Green Park, a stylish restaurant-cafe in an art deco 1930s building.
“When Green Park reopened a few years ago, after years of decline,” says Katerina, “we read it as a small but telling sign that Victoria – long dismissed – was beginning to reclaim its dignity.”
It is not a cheap place but there are weekend musical shows, and on Sundays the garden fills with families ordering ice-creams and club sandwiches. Green Park offers a taste of the “golden days” about which Victoria’s older residents reminisce. And it’s not alone: various theatres, cinemas and live music joints have been resurrected after nearly not making it. After everything else, Covid hit hard.
The streets below the square have a rougher reputation. Graffiti reflects local preoccupations: “Cops for Dinner”; “Refugees Welcome”; “Support your local sex worker”. Fylis street is lined with white door lights identifying its notorious brothels. Customers come and go, day and night. Squats open and close, some organised by community-minded activists, others by homeless migrants. “Do you live here?” asked an appalled taxi driver dropping me off. “But you look like a nice lady.” Fylis has seedy elements, but locals dispute the idea that you’re not safe; just behave as in any inner city.
On Wednesdays, the fabulous farmers’ market on Fylis provides excellent seasonal fruit, vegetables, fish and flowers, along with household goods and clothes, including giant, no-shame underpants. Musicians serenade shoppers with bouzouki songs, mobile canteens roast souvlaki and the air resounds with a Babel’s Tower of languages.
The area becomes less well off as you go westwards downhill, eventually hitting the railway tracks. Tasos Chalkiopoulos creates excellent short videos (@Athensville) of these changing Athenian neighbourhoods: the convenience stores on Acharnon where Bangladeshi and Pakistani owners sell goods to new arrivals, from mobile phones and blankets to Asian shampoo. Or farther north, where Syrian patisseries vie with Iraqi kebab shops, shisha cafes and fancy barbers. Athenians love their souvlaki as street food, but now also debate who makes the finest falafel. Despite steep competition, Tasos votes for the tiny Tarbosch on Acharnon.
I loved writing about Victoria Square in Stealing Dad. Like so much of Athens, one needs to gaze up, peer inside and glance back to understand the intricate tangle of its history. Look closely, and you appreciate the beauty, sympathise with the chaos and relish the energy.
Stealing Dad by Sofka Zinovieff (Little, Brown, £10.99). To order a copy for £9.89 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
