Gumbo’s gone from France, where he visited an 11th-century church in Vernon. He’s here, now: at the corner of Pleasant and Ordinary…except for that puzzling object. Your task, hopefully not an Impossible Mission, is to collaborate with your fellow guessers and figure out just where Gumbo is.
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So, where is Gumbo today?
Still in France? it is near a river?
Might that be the old decommissioned World War II naval mine, probably located at 108 Old Brompton Rd, London SW7 3RA…??
Streetview shows the building, The Royal British Society of Sculptors, but the object is gone. It certainly does look like a mine, and while Mac sounds sure, despite it being politely presented as a question, I’d be disappointed if a society of sculptors would just drop a piece of “found” material by their doorstep without using it as a basis for further artistic exploration.
I was a little concerned that this one wouldn’t last…and it hasn’t. But the conjunction of the pleasant South Ken streetscape with the seemingly abandoned mine was not to be resisted.
However, the mine is in its way less incongruous than it might seem, if compared to the view today, ten years after I made this picture. The mine is gone, but look at the neighbor to the right in this 2012 Google Maps clip:
Of course, the question now is: If the mine was to be taken as art, are we to take the long plank in the more recent pictures as evidence of art, or of renovation?