Latest news with #Routemaster
Daily Mirror
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Mel B shares beautiful unseen wedding snaps after tying the knot in St Paul's
Newlywed Mel B has shared a touching behind-the-scenes photo from her wedding to Rory McPhee at St Paul's Cathedral Mel B has offered fans a glimpse into her wedding celebrations with Rory McPhee, sharing a candid photo from their elegant reception just one day after saying 'I do' at St Paul's Cathedral. The Spice Girls icon, 50, took to Instagram to post a behind-the-scenes image from the big day. Captured from behind in her gown, Mel stood with her back to the camera, revealing the words 'Just Married' delicately embroidered on her dress. Her bridal look featured a graceful long veil and pearl embellishments at the collar and cuffs, giving the ensemble a timeless and regal finish. Her husband Rory, 37, opted for a nod to his heritage, wearing a traditional Scottish kilt. The pair shared a romantic kiss on the steps of the cathedral before leaving the venue in a white, horse-drawn carriage - a fairy-tale moment for the newlyweds. Guests followed in true British style, riding to the reception in classic red double-decker Routemaster buses. As the carriage pulled away, the couple were spotted sharing another affectionate moment, smiling and embracing as they began married life. While fans were eager to spot fellow Spice Girls in attendance, only Emma Bunton, 49, was photographed at the event. Baby Spice arrived looking elegant in a soft pink dress paired with a coordinating hat and shimmering silver heels. She was joined by husband Jade Jones and their son Beau, 17. Victoria Beckham, who was notably absent, took a moment to acknowledge Mel's special day via Instagram. Posting a glamorous throwback of the two bandmates, Victoria captioned it with: 'Sending love to you @officialmelb! @rorymcphee is a very lucky man! xx.' Mel C, who was also unable to attend, shared her congratulations online. Posting a happy photo of the bride and groom, she wrote: 'So so happy for you both and beyond gutted I couldn't be there. Excited to celebrate with you really soon. Yipee!' While not all her bandmates were able to be there in person, Mel was clearly surrounded by love and celebration - both at the wedding and across social media. Fans flooded her post with messages of congratulations, and the bride appeared radiant and content as she began this new chapter of her life. Mel and Rory said their 'I dos' at St Paul's Cathedral after their three-year engagement. Mel and family friend Rory have known each other for years, and he has worked as her hairstylist. Things are thought to have turned romantic between the pair in 2018 and Rory proposed to Mel back in 2022. It isn't be the pop star's first time walking down the aisle as she has been married twice before. The celebration marked a joyful high point for the pop legend, who has often spoken candidly about love, heartbreak, and her healing journey before finding love again with hairstylist Rory.
Scottish Sun
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Mel B shares behind-the-scenes snap from wedding reception after beautiful ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral
Mel's new husband Rory popped the question back in 2022 special day Mel B shares behind-the-scenes snap from wedding reception after beautiful ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral MEL B shared a behind-the-scenes photo from her wedding reception following a beautiful ceremony. The Spice Girls legend, 50, married Rory McPhee at St Paul's Cathedral yesterday. 4 Mel B tied the knot with Rory McPhee over the weekend Credit: Getty 4 The two shared a kiss after getting married at St Paul's Cathedral Credit: Splash 4 Mel revealed a behind-the-scenes snap from the couple's wedding reception Credit: @officialmelb/Instagram Taking to Instagram, Mel unveiled a photo from the couple's reception. Wearing her wedding dress and faced away from the camera, the words "Just Married" are stitched onto the back. One fan commented: "Congratulations to both of you. "Wishing you a lifetime of happiness and love!" Another said: "Congratulations to you both." While a third added: "CONGRATSSS!!! as a long time fan seeing you happy is such a blessing." Mel stunned in a gown adorned with dazzling pearl detail around the collar and sleeves and a long flowing veil. Meanwhile Rory, 37, looked dapper in a traditional Scottish kilt as he kissed his new wife on the steps of the Cathedral. The newlyweds then beamed as they headed down the steps and off to their reception in a horse-drawn white carriage, while their guests were transported in tradition red Route master double decker buses. The couple shared a sweet kiss in the back of the carriage as they enjoyed their first moments as man and wife. Mel B stuns in white gown at star-studded St Paul's Cathedral wedding Fellow Spice Girl Emma Bunton led the star-studded arrivals, and was the only Spice Girl spotted in attendance, bar the bride herself. Baby Spice, 49, wore a pale pink frock and matching hat as she rocked up with husband Jade Jones and son Beau, 17. She finished off her summery look with glittering silver high heels. Victoria Beckham, 51, previously addressed her absence in a post on social media. She took to her Instagram stories to share a stunning snap of her and her bandmate looking all glammed up. Victoria added the sweet caption: "Sending love to you @officialmelb! "@rorymcphee is a very lucky man! xx." Meanwhile, fellow bandmate Mel C, who forged a solo career post-band with tracks including I Turn To You, addressed her no-show in a sweet message. She uploaded a snap showing the happy couple together with the words: "So so happy for you both and beyond gutted I couldn't be there. "Excited to celebrate with you really soon. Yipee!"
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
The crowning glory of Google's new, massive headquarters in London's King's Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant's 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies. At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building's lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google's problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1 billion, still appears to be a long way from being completed. Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, 'hidden' because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell. The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. 'If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,' one worker tells me. 'I don't think the people building it know what they are doing.' An electrician says: 'They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It's going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.' (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.) There is a sense of gloom among those working on site. One worker simply says: 'It's absolutely f---ed, mate.' Another, who only started working on the project on Monday, describes it as 's--t'. Some might say that Google bosses should not be surprised that building its landmark has not gone entirely smoothly. Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). The finished building – dubbed a 'landscraper', as opposed to a skyscraper – will have nap pods for weary workers, as well as a 25m swimming pool and a basketball court. Plus, of course, the garden. The final design is a collaboration between Heatherwick's eponymous studio and that of Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect. The team also worked on Google's (completed) California headquarters. Heatherwick was unlikely to design a run-of-the-mill office and always makes a point of doing things differently. He had a bohemian childhood as the son of a pianist father and jewellery-designer mother, and attended two private schools – Sevenoaks in Kent and the Rudolf Steiner School in Hertfordshire – before studying design at Manchester Polytechnic and London's Royal College of Art. It was at the latter institution that he met Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the Design Museum, whom Heatherwick impressed by building an 18ft-high gazebo out of laminated birch that sat in his garden. Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. More concerningly, a tip of one of the spikes fell off shortly before it was unveiled and, when others threatened to do the same, it was dismantled in 2009. Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors; the case was settled out of court. Other notable misses include Heatherwick's Routemaster buses, which were commissioned by Johnson when he was Mayor of London, which were much more expensive than other models and had a tendency to overheat in summer months, and the aborted plan for a Garden Bridge across the River Thames, which ultimately cost taxpayers £43 million without anything to show for it. Most destructive was the Vessel, a visitor attraction in New York's Hudson Yards. The copper-coloured network of 154 staircases and 80 landings was supposed to be New York's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but it was closed down in 2021 (after less than two years) after four people had killed themselves by jumping from it. Carla Fine, a local who is an expert on the matter, told The Telegraph at the time that it was a 'suicide machine'. It only reopened last October after netting was installed. 'The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to,' Heatherwick told the Financial Times in 2023. 'Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people's mental health.' His current projects include transforming the Kensington Olympia in West London and turning the capital's BT Tower into a high-end hotel. Not a trained architect himself (but the employer of large numbers of them at his studio), Heatherwick has said that we are in the grip of an 'epidemic of boringness', with soulless glass-and-steel buildings populating cities all over the world. Heatherwick's eccentricity, which has been a characteristic for decades, is almost designed to attract opprobrium or eye-rolls from others in the field. As he finished his postgraduate studies, rather than make a business card Heatherwick made ice lollies that had his phone number on the stick; on various occasions he has shipped a snowball to China so that somebody there could experience British snow, and taken a kebab to Italy for someone else. 'I'm not a fan, because I think he doesn't know the difference between a building and a CD rack,' says Ellis Woodman, an architect and the director of the Architecture Foundation. 'There's no sense of scale, no sense of an urban idea that the buildings are contributing to. They disregard architectural history or the character of the spaces in which they stand. [The Google building] is not a building that's interested in making relationships with things around it. The work is always the most important building on its site, whatever he's doing. There's never a sense that the role of a building might be to contribute to the definition of a space with other buildings.' Heatherwick has become a big brand in the building world, in the way that Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid did before him. Woodman says that, with the quasi-utopian ideals he set out in his 2023 treatise Humanise, Heatherwick is 'carrying on that 'architecture-as-a-marketing tool' tendency'. 'He's not seriously engaged with the problems of housing or sustainability,' Woodman adds. 'It's a succession of projects like the Vessel, which one might ask if the world ever really needed.' Others in the design world reckon that Heatherwick's regular criticism by architects stems from a resentment that an interloper could gatecrash their industry without having to go through the same formal training. 'I'm very 'pro' him. He's a very creative and inventive figure, but he's divisive because he was trained in industrial design in Manchester, not in architecture,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery who is a distinguished historian of art and design. 'Architects view themselves in a professional way, and so obviously have not been so enthusiastic about him being globally successful as he has been as an architect. I think that is at the root of it.' Saumarez Smith tells me that he thinks Heatherwick's Google building is 'mind-boggling' and 'vast, but in a way it manages to disguise its scale. I'm looking forward to seeing it in more detail when it's finished'. How long before the Google building is finished, and what it will be like when it is, is anyone's guess. 'You can't fully know whether something's going to work until it's finished,' Heatherwick told The Telegraph in a 2018 interview. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I get worried when my team aren't worried. Worry is a useful energy.' One wonders if Heatherwick feels worried about the Google HQ at the moment. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Time Out
02-06-2025
- Time Out
You'll be able to ride vintage double-decker London buses for free this weekend
London buses have come in dozens of different shapes and sizes over the last century or so. Before the red, air-conned, electric vehicles we know today, there were double-deckers painted green, brown or yellow, open platforms for hopping on and off and bus conductors (aka clippies) working alongside the drivers. Most of those old buses were sadly destined for the scrap heap once they finished service, but some were rescued and have been expertly preserved by the London Bus Museum. For one day in March, courtesy of the museum, regulars on route 19 from Finsbury Park to Battersea Bridge got the chance to step back in time and ride heritage buses from as far back as the 1930s. Now, the buses are venturing out again, this time on route 418 between Kingston and Bookham. Route 418's heritage day is happening on Sunday, June 8. The buses, ranging from the 1950s to 1970s, will be on the road from 9am to 5pm and will be completely free to ride. London Bus Museum says that there'll mostly be 'the iconic RT-type, which in the 1950s formed the largest standardised bus fleet in the world'. They'll be joined by Routemaster vehicles and other old-school buses that are privately owned. Look out for the vehicles stopping by Kingston, Surbiton Hill, Epsom town centre Ashtead and Leatherhead. All you need to do is hold out your arm and hop on. Passengers may even get a vintage ticket from the bus conductor as a souvenir. As the buses are so old-fashioned, they're not unable to accommodate wheelchairs or most modern buggies. But the London Bus Museum said 'our crews will make every effort to help the less able and those with small children enjoy a ride back in time'. Regular buses will still be running along the route on the day.
BBC News
20-05-2025
- General
- BBC News
'Ding ding' Routemaster bus sound trialled to reduce injuries
Transport for London (TfL) could be bringing back the original Routemaster sound to indicate when a bus is about to old 'ding ding' sound is also being trialled with other sounds to see which would act as the best prompt for customers to hold on to handrails or stay seated until the bus has iconic Routemaster bus was known for its red colour, open rear platform and its 'hold tight' bell. It was phased out in is hoped the sound will help reduce the number of injuries, particularly for older customers who may remember the sound from years gone by. Slips, trips and falls are the most common cause of customer injuries on buses, accounting for around 71% of all injuries, TfL small-scale trial started last week on route 183 travelling between Golders Green and second part of the trial is taking place this week on route 94 travelling between Piccadilly Circus and Acton the buses where the sound is played there will be teams on board the buses to gather feedback from feedback and wider behavioural analysis will then be used to determine if the trial was successful in prompting passengers to hold on while the bus moves off. The results will be reviewed before next steps are Mayor for Transport, Seb Dance, said: "London's classic red Routemaster bus is known across the globe and its 'ding ding' sound is instantly recognisable and nostalgic for many Londoners. "
