It was a busy weekend with the london open house and the Thames festival. Though i would have loved to have a clone as both of these events were happening in parallel (Missed the thames boat race :-( ). Though of sharing across multiple blogs...Here we go... Our expedition started with us sitting at the underground station (not to be thought of in the likes of Underground hideouts :-), we are no gangsters though we have a strong gang) and charting out the plan for the day.. It was unonimously (i think it was..) decided that we first start with the Meadlands classroom of the future. Its located off the busy locations in Richmond. The school did look elegant. The classroom was located in a secluded location from the Main building (maybe they thought of giving it a special ambience). It did resemble a space ship when seen from the outside. The interiors were also done very well. White boards (magnetic too) covered all the walls of this room. The seating arraingements were also bit unconvensional. A notable thing was that the classroom was self sufficient in all ways (it has a provision of a wash area and rest room within the room). Mr.Meakin (not sure if i got the name correct), the head teacher, explained us how the project took shape and the future direction of this project. It seems that 2 schools in the borough of Richmond are involved in this project. See below the pictures of the same. Another worthy mention was about the borough of Richmond, it looks quite green for an area in London. Its got a nice Lake, which we could see when were on the bus (will be explored by the gang soon :-) )

Next place to be invaded was the Tanaka Business school, Imperial College. Well, it was my first entry into a Business School so apart from the interests of new architectures, i was also curious how a business school looks like from the inside. True to our expectations, the bulding was truely facinating. Had a chance to talk with a student persuing his doctorate in the business school. He provided a lot of insight into doing masters in the Business school. MBa is quite a costly affair in the UK :-).

We hit the Channel 4 studios next and the first thing we see is ... the long queue waiting to get inside. Since we are used to longer queues in most part of our life :-). we continued not losing our heart. Fortunately for us, the queue indeed moved fast. After the routine security checks, we were let inside the studio building. We were initially shown the conference room and the adjacent open discussion area. Later, we went to the studio waiting area called 'Tandoori', not sure why it is named so.I now feel i should have asked someone around...
By the time we finished with the Channel 4 expedition, it was already 5.30 PM. Since all other places listed in this initiative closes by 5 PM, we decided to spend the rest of the day seeing other places in Westminster area. More on this in the next blog....

Labels: Outings