Stalinist Bloomsbury...or the manifestations of unrealized wanderlust.

Last week, I submitted a visa application to UK Borders which involved surrendering my passport. The passport and I have never been parted for more then about 72 hours and I am not, to put it mildly, enjoying our estrangement. Even if I have no tickets booked, I love the possibility of travel, the sense that movement may be immanent. This in part explains my affection for central Europe, where you can train rapidly around Germany, Austria and Czech Republic at a moment's notice and the destination board at your local train station includes places like Moscow, Bucharest, Sarajevo...Sans passport and stranded on this island for the foreseeable future, I've developed a passing melancholia that seems to involve burning candles, drinking red wine, listening to endless Leonard Cohen (thank you, Spotify) and thinking dreamily about my former cities. It was in just such a mood that I noticed the following similarity.

This is the Palace of Culture, Warsaw:

And this, is Senate House Library at the University of London...

Both are massive and impossible to capture in a single photograph without inducing vertigo. The more I think about this comparison, the more apt it seems. Both take an eternity to walk around - P and I once spent 20 minutes circumnavigating the PoC and taking the wrong exit from the library can easily add 10 minutes to your journey home. Both have strange internal layouts and you have to go outside to get from one part of the building to another. I've been semi-lost in both and each time I was filled with a sense of unease irreducible to mere spatial disorientation. They feel wrong. It seems entirely plausible that both could house a population of feral cats in their basements and/or contain offices full of staff who haven't been outside in years and think the Cold War is still in full swing. Finally, and really, what greater confirmation could there be, both make excellent surfaces for projections:

Palace of Culture, January 2011

Senate House Library, January 2012:

I rest my case, and cannot help but wonder what other bits of Europe I will discover while wandering passport-less about London. Watch this space, and, in the meantime, here's some Leonard Cohen.