Category: 4. Thursday Doors

Doors 293 – Doors of Peterborough (Part I)

Last year, I made a work trip to Peterborough to run a workshop, and as ever when on my travels, I took the opportunity early in the morning before the workshop started to gather my thoughts and have a little wander around the place taking photographs and noticing things.

Peterborough is a Cathedral City in eastern central England, and although I have visited it before when I lived in Cambridgeshire, it was always on a night out or to an office, so I hadn’t really ever got to know the place. What surprised me the most wasn’t the incredible architecture around the cathedral or the clean and tidy streets, it was instead the levels of deprivation, and I was quite shocked. There were a lot of rough sleepers about the place and the tell-tale signs of a poverty-stricken society containing streets full of bookies, pound shops, gambling arcades and vape shops – ‘Aladdin’s caves’ of bright lights and hope.

I have to say I found the experience profoundly depressing, and a contemporary illustration of how the previous government of 14 years had failed people at the lower end of the economic spectrum. The first thing I saw as I stepped out of the station was a long queue of people with tatty clothes and plastic bags outside a foodbank. We should hang our heads in shame that foodbanks even exist in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, while the richest in our society just get richer.

On a brighter note, Peterborough had pockets of street art and, importantly to today’s post, plenty of interesting doors to admire. Let’s get cracking:

Plenty more to come from this trip to Peterborough next time. May I wish you a happy weekend.

If you have made it this far, you probably like doors, and you really ought to take a look at the No Facilities blog by Dan Anton who has taken over the hosting of Thursday Doors from Norm 2.0 blog. Links to more doorscursions can be found in the comments section of Dan Anton’s Thursday Doors post.

by Scooj