Do you think some one should tell this stage assistant that Marilyn Monroe passed on some time ago - also interesting that her name is totally mispelt but it takes several glances to notice this.
At the end of the run we crept into the Smithfield poultry market to gaze at the amazing roof ...
Horace Jones' original Poultry Market was destroyed by fire in 1958. The replacement building was designed by Sir Thomas Bennett in 1962–1963. The main hall is covered by an enormous concrete dome, shaped as an elliptical paraboloid, spanning 225 feet by 125 feet and only 3 inches thick at the centre. The dome is believed to be the largest concrete shell structure ever built in Europe by that time.
More research on getting home revealed that during World War II, a large underground cold store at Smithfield was the theatre of secret experiments led by Max Perutz on pykrete, a mixture of ice and woodpulp, alleged to be tougher than steel. Perutz's work, inspired by Geoffrey Pyke and part of Project Habakkuk, was meant to test the viability of pykrete as a material to construct floating airstrips in the Atlantic to allow refuelling of cargo planes in support of Lord Louis Mountbatten's operations. The experiments were carried out by Perutz and his colleagues in a refrigerated meat locker in a Smithfield Market butcher's basement, behind a protective screen of frozen animal carcasses. These experiments became obsolete with the development of longer range aircraft and the project was soon abandoned.
Looks like they finally found a use for pykrete ...
P.S. New Smiths of Smithfield restaurant in Spitalfields now open - called The Luxe probably because they couldn't call it Spit of Spitalfields...
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