A giant eight-metre dragon swept around the Tower of London in a dramatic display. The mythical beast was marking a spin-off from popular show Game of Thrones
Dragon soars over the Tower of London
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.
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.
Photographs of Greek poets line the walls of Cafe des Poètes. Photograph: Sofka Zinovieff
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.
Cine Trianon, Athens’s historic arthouse cinema. Photograph: Amalia Kovaiou
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.
Petek, a patisserie owned since 1964 by the same Istanbul Greeks. Photograph: Sofka Zinovieff
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.
