This is the tube train mural, which was located adjacent to the Loc8me student estate agents offices at Ashby Square. It was painted by Buber Nebz around 2013 or 2014, and used to be one of my favourite murals (because I like trains!). The particular type of tube train depicted is a 1973-stock deep-level train, which was introduced to the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground between 1974 and 1977. When Buber Nebz's early works, such as the tube train and the Lego Men of Leopold Street first appeared, the murals were controversial, and the Lego men were later scrubbed away in 2015. The tube train mural was replaced in 2017 by Buber Nebz's Giant Orange Tree Illusion .  This mural by Masah Azar appeared on the front of Radmoor House, Radmoor Road, in October this year. This technically isn't street art in the purist sense, but I think it's funny. This text was scrawled on the back of the public toilet block in Queen's Park (wall facing the Granby Street car park),...

 It is amazing how things can change in a decade or so! Here we are at Brocks Hill Country Park in Oadby, south of Leicester. I found a picture that was taken by a relative in October 2010, and I visited there again earlier this month! October 2010 March 2022 A game of spot-the-difference? Well, in the pictures themselves, some external elements of the building have been repainted from dark blue to grey or black.  There also seems to have been an extra bench added in the second photo, as well as a sign behind the first bench being removed. Outside the frame of view, a sandpit has been removed, as has a zipwire. Another piece of equipment is also out of action, probably because of you-know-what. Even so, some things have stayed largely the same. The visitor centre is still there, even though it's not quite so busy anymore. I think it was well worth a visit.  One thing that amuses me was that when I was younger, I used to think that the visitor centre was the EcoHouse showh...

 Whilst visiting the Grange Park estate last year, I encountered something rather curious (to me, anyway) - a raised kerb. These are used at bus stops to raise the height of a pavement to make it easier for people to board and alight buses. The thing is, though, there's still isn't a bus service through the Grange Park estate. That's actually why I gave this post the name of 'relics of the future'. The two raised kerbs are on Highland Drive, between the two entrances of Knox Road. I found one in April, but the next time I visited the estate, in June, I noticed another on the other side of the road (but failed to notice the one I found first; hence, it is only of this one that I have a photograph). And, by the way, I think they definitely should put a bus service there, but if I went into all the details and possibilities of how this could be realised, I would probably bore you out. For now, enjoy my photo of a relic of the future.

As a youngster in the mid-2010s, I thought that electric cars were some new-fangled inventions that came from books from the nineties that didn't have the range or otherwise weren't very powerful. In those days, electric cars (and other electric vehicles) were not nearly as advanced as they are now. I had ridden on electric vehicles a few times, specifically riding on the Centrelink, the ill-fated electric free bus service that once connected the Broadmarsh and Victoria shopping centres in Nottingham, as we weren't familiar with the streets. However, I thought that electric cars, and other alternatively powered vehicles, couldn't really challenge conventionally powered vehicles. In those days, probably the only charging station I knew of was up at Holywell Park, and it was where these photos were taken in July 2014. The parked car is a first-generation Nissan Leaf, a weird-looking hatchback with, apparently, an only eighty mile range; owned (at that time) by Cenex, a co...

 Here are two Dennis Dart buses, both with Paxton Pointer bodies and both on two services numbered 13, in completely different places. The first picture shows Paul S. Winson Coaches' 113 (XX56 PSW) on the route 13 between Loughborough town centre and Charnwood Water, in  2014. This was new in October 2006 to SM Coaches, Harlow, as MX56 HYB, before being sold to Alliance & Leicester, and eventually winding up in the Winsons fleet by 2010. By 2016, it had been sold to Astons, Worcestershire, reverting to its original registration, before being sold to Farleigh Coaches, Kent, around 2019, where it remains in service. The other photo was taken at Southampton railway station in  2014. I was waiting for a bus to take me to the pier to catch a ferry to the Isle of Wight when First Solent's 42524 (R424 WPX) turned up at the station on a service 13 to Harefield. I presume, given its age, it later ended up in a scrapyard somewhere.