A tripoint is a geographical location where three borders meet – most notably those of different countries, but also (to a lesser extent) counties, states, provinces, etc. While many of the world’s 157 national tripoints are located in the middle of lakes, rivers, deserts or mountains, those that are in populated areas are often marked with monuments of some kind.

The Swiss city of Basel is home to one of the most spectacular tripoint monuments at the location where it borders Germany and France.

Basel’s dreiländereck (literally “3 lands place”) is home to a soaring metal three-sided spiral which bears the flags of the 3 countries. It is located on a quay in the river Rhine, near a restaurant of the same name. The actual tripoint is located just to the north-west, in the middle of the river.

Germany also has a significant tripoint where it meets Belgium and the Netherlands. Vaalserberg features a number of tourist attractions including a viewing tower, cafes and a maze.

While Google Maps seems to show the tripoint in a tree, I believe the actual location is marked by the 3 small monuments visible by their shadows in the upper-left of this image.¹

Not all tripoints are marked as cohesively. The one where Austria, Hungary and Slovakia meet has a number of monuments scattered across the different borders – all quite small, so check Panoramio to see them in detail.

Where is your favourite location with one foot in one country, one foot in a second, and … perhaps your nose in a third?

For more like this, see our 2008 post about Complicated Borders. Thanks to AndrewAnorak and David Grenewetzki.

A short distance from Oslo city centre is Vigeland Sculpture Park – home to more than 200 granite, bronze and iron sculptures mostly depicting naked human figures in a wide range of artistic forms, focusing on the freedom, joy and eternity of life.

Artist Gustav Vigeland created each of the works in clay or plaster, then employed skilled craftsmen to create the final granite carvings or bronze or iron castings. The statues were mostly created between 1939 and 1949.

Most visitors arrive at the wrought-iron Main Gate, the first of five distinct areas of the Park which stretches for almost a kilometre in a layout also created by Vigeland.

The Main Gate leads to the 100m long Bridge which is adorned by 58 bronze sculptures – individuals or groups; men, women and children, including one of the most popular sculptures in the park – the little Angry Boy.

The circular area beneath the Bridge is the Children’s Playground – 8 bronzes of small children and one unborn child.

The Bridge leads to the Fountain, a large granite column topped by a group of men holding up a bronze bowl. This is surrounded by 60 bronze reliefs and tree statues depicting the life cycle of man.

Originally planned for the exterior of the Norwegian Parliament, the Fountain was one of Vigeland’s most monumental creations. It is surrounded by a mosaic floor which contains a 3km long labyrinth.

Beyond The Fountain is the Monolith Plateau. A set of circular stairs leads upwards to the centrepiece of the park, the 17m tall monolith carved from a single piece of granite and depicting 121 figures entwined and reaching toward the sky – intended to represent man’s need for the spiritual and divine.

Eight additional granite sculptures surround the Monolith and continue the depiction of human life’s eternal cycle, the theme that reaches its conclusion with the final section of the park, the Wheel of Life.

While specifically not erotic, that fact didn’t stop somebody attempting to censor the statues a couple of years ago. Fortunately Norwegians are generally of a more liberal mindset than that, and the park is celebrated as a cultural highlight; attracting more than a million visitors each year.

More information can be found at the Park’s website, and there are many excellent pictures at Panoramio.

Thanks to Steve Fernie and Gard Karlsen.

High on green hillsides overlooking the village of Fovant in Wiltshire, a dozen giant logos – some more than 50 metres across – can be seen carved into the chalk.

These designs date back to the first world war, when Fovant and the surrounding villages housed a transit camp for troops en route to and from the battlefields of the Western Front in France. In memory of fallen colleagues (and, no doubt, simply as a huge “Kilroy Was Here“), soldiers from various regiments painstakingly created representations of their cap badges.

Originally, there were many more badges, but nobody is quite sure how many have since faded away beneath the grass. Today, 12 remain, of which eight have been “adopted” for preservation by the Fovant Badges Society (due to lack of funds, four of them will not be saved).

The largest group of badges – nine of them – can be found on Fovant Down (they appear upside down on the aerial photos as they are carved on a north-facing hillside). They represent:

1. The Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry. 2. The YMCA (which was an important provider of welfare services in the transit camps).

3. 6th Battalion, The City of London Regiment. 4. The Australian Imperial Force badge (the “Rising Sun”).

5. The Royal Corps of Signals. 6. The Wiltshire Regiment.

7. The London Rifle Brigade. 8. The Post Office Rifles.

9. The Devonshire Regiment.

All these (with the exception of the YMCA) will be preserved.

Further badges, which sadly will be left to fade away, can be seen on nearby Compton Down and Sutton Down:

10. An enormous map of Australia, carved by unknown soldiers from Down Under. 11. The Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

12. 7th Battalion, City of London Regiment.

Although the transit camps are long gone, there are still signs of a military presence in the area. The excellent Secret Bases website reveals that these mysterious shapes among the trees are the Fovant Wood Ordnance Depot, a munitions storage area for the nearby RAF base at Chilmark. That base closed down in the mid-1990s, although rumour has it that top secret goings-on still occur in and around the disused quarries…

Read more at the Fovant Badges Society website.

The humble red telephone kiosk is a much loved British icon, thanks to a long history on the streets of the United Kingdom. Today there are a fraction of the number there once were, but they are still a common enough sight that we can find some interesting ones to visit.

K2 model telephone boxes behind Enzo Plazzotta’s bronze, “Young Dancer”, on Broad Street, Covent Garden, London

The first recognisably “modern” red phone box was designed for a competition that the General Post Office held in 1924 to find a kiosk deemed acceptable to those London Boroughs that had refused to allow the erection of the previous K1 kiosks.

The winning entry, the K2, was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott¹ and from 1926 was erected all over London. Scott had suggested they be built from steel and painted silver, but the Post Office decided to make the K2 in cast iron, and to paint it red.

K2 at Carfax Tower, Oxford

In 1929 the K3 was introduced, and although it was again designed by Gilbert Scott, this time they were painted cream. Like the K2 they were too expensive for widespread deployment, meaning that very few survive today, and as far as I can tell, there are none on street view. Instead here’s a picture of the only surviving K3 in Scotland.

The K4 model was designed by the Post Office, which isn’t surprising when you learn it had a post box and a stamp machine stuck on the back. Apparently phone users complained about the noise from the stamp machines so only 50 were ever made, and today only six of those survive. One of the surviving six is this one in Whitley Bay, Tyne and Wear, which despite being hidden under a tree, I managed to spot using Bing Maps.

The K5 was a plywood kiosk for temporary use, so it was for the K6 model that the Post Office returned to Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for his skills. Designed in 1935 to commemorate the silver jubilee of King George V, the K6 was the first red kiosk to be used extensively outside of London, and thousands were deployed in virtually every town and city. By the time production ceased on the K6, there were nearly 70,000 across the UK.

K6, Regent Road, Edinburgh. Grade II listed.

K6 (with traffic cone), Jowett Walk, Oxford. Grade II listed.

The K7 model by Neville Conder never went to production, so it was up to Bruce Martin to carry on the fine tradition that Scott had begun, and in 1968 the true successor to the K6 was finally launched. Used mostly for new locations, the K8 was a slightly different shade of red, had a flatter roof, and only one big window on each side.

According to The Twentieth Century Society, today only twelve of the original K8s remain in working order², two of which are installed on the east side of the Erskine Bridge, just west of Glasgow.

Coinciding with the privatisation in 1984 of the Post Office’s telephone successor, British Telecom, a more utilitarian design of telephone box began to be introduced.

The classic K6 was widely replaced with the frankly hideous KX100, and basically we’ve all been complaining about it ever since. In the late 90s, BT made an attempt to win the public over to the KX range by introducing the KXPlus which is basically a KX100 with a red bar round the sides and a domed red roof. It didn’t work.

With the introduction of the KX100, around 2,000 existing boxes were given listed status, several thousand others were left in rural locations, but many more were sold off privately.

Lots of K6s have recently been restored and reinstalled in key tourism spots, but even more have been put to other uses; ranging from shower cubicles in private homes, through to this massive sculpture in Kingston upon Thames made of 12 tumbling boxes, entitled Out of Order.

There are several companies who specialise in selling and restoring old phone boxes, including Unicorn Kiosks, who are responsible for this 12-foot-tall custom kiosk in Maida Vale, London.

So if you’re one of the many fans of the classic red phone box, you’ve now got no excuse not to come up with a creative way to save a piece of Britain’s heritage, you’d just have to do is decide what to do with it!

Of course there are many more phone boxes around the world… have you got one near you?

For helping me research this post, many thanks go to Robert Ore of redphonebox.info, headington.org.uk, and www.cvphm.org.

The world of gargantuan statuary has changed considerably since we published the original Very Large Buddhas post just over 3 years ago. The title of world’s largest statue is now held by the Spring Temple Buddha in Henan, China.

The statue alone is 128m tall, and it stands on a 20m tall lotus throne, which in turn stands on a 25m tall pedestal – giving the structure a total height of 153m.

The statue – including the lotus throne – is 128m tall. Its original 25m tall pedestal gave the structure a total height of 153m. However, recent information shows that the hill it was built on has been constructed into an additional pedestal. The total height is now believed to be 208m. Panoramio has several pictures, and this image in particular gives you a sense of just how immense this monument is (and shows the new pedestal under construction.)

Little is known about the Spring Temple Buddha in the West, so it likely wasn’t listed on Wikipedia when Alex wrote the original post. It was constructed in 2002 in response to Taliban bombing of Buddha statues in Afghanistan, as well as to thwart Indian plans to create the world’s largest statue.  I haven’t been able to find any vital statistics about it, but this image seems to show that the toes alone are close to 2m high.

The world’s second largest statue is the Laykyun Setkyar in Myanmar, which is so new (completed in 2008) that we only see it partially constructed on Google Maps.

At 116m on a 13.5m pedestal it is barely taller in total than the Spring Temple statue alone. Panoramio has a few pictures of the completed structure, which also show that it is, interestingly, located near a reclining Buddha which, at 90m in length, would probably be the world’s 9th tallest statue if it was upright.

As it is also located in a somewhat secretive country, detailed statistics are similarly hard to find. The regime consistently claims it is the world’s largest though, despite evidence to the contrary.

The world’s third largest statue is Ushiku Daibutsu in Japan. It was featured in the original Very Large Buddhas post, though there is new imagery that shows it in greater detail.

Thanks to Lukasz for the link to the reclining Buddha, and to Alex for letting me update his original post.