Tick Tock

While often dubbed "Angel's shabby twin", Holloway Road (which I now cycle along almost every day since we moved) still offers plenty of interesting details to rest your eyes on if you only bother to look above the ground floor shops.

What I noticed only after about a month, on a relatively short length from Nag's Head to Highbury Corner roundabout there are four buildings featuring clocks on them.

The first one (if we're walking southwards) would be the building next to the Waitrose store bordering The Coronet, the former Art Deco cinema opened as Savoy during the WWII and now an inexpensive Wetherspoon pub:

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Green clock face, golden hands, and accurate enough - what else to wish for? Also, the architectural details - aren't they looking good?

The last film shown at The Coronet when it still was a cinema was Blade Runner, a sequel of which is expected soon (finger crossed it won't be what Prometheus was to Alien).

The next clock down the street isn't a part of some ensemble and is more simple, as is the building itself. But unlike its neighbour there are two clock faces making it visible not only from across the road, but from the adjacent pavement as well. Sadly, they both seem to be broken (hopefully not for too long):

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Then one of the London Metropolitan University buildings (particularly The Rocket Complex) also features a small clocktower on top:

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The university formerly known as the University of North London is not amongst the valued ones and the reviews I've seen were average at best. But what we're interested in now is the clock. Readable from either side, this clock works and reads accurate time:

What is also interesting about this area is the university buildings standing next to each other but built in a very different architectural style: black concrete tower which would have surely delighted Brezhnev, stainless steel irregular deconstructivist Graduate Centre, glass cubes of office block appearance, The Rocket Complex mentioned above, and more.

The development continues - it was announced recently 12-storey student accommodation block will be erected across the road, once again not rhyming its style with other buildings on that junction.

The last one is the clocktower of St Mary Magdalen's church surrounded by a small garden but still clearly visible from the Holloway Road. This is the only set of clocks on the southern side of the road as the previous ones are all on the northern one:

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And it's not the end of it as we have only walked for 20 minutes or so, and only in one direction. But then Highbury starts which is quite a different story.

The major clocktower of the area by the way is to the south from there beyond Caledonian Road. Good news of the week is that its clock has also been restored.