The Thinking Hotel - Prototyping weekend @ The Loft in Soho

On Saturday, between 3.30 and 10.30pm and on Sunday between 10.30am  and midday, I popped in and out of the The Thinking Hotel prototyping weekend event at the Loft in Soho which started midday Saturday and went on with barely a break until midday Sunday.

Initiated by Maria Ana Botelho Neves and assisted by Monika  Hestad and a slew of other helpful people it was an enjoyable and uplifting experience.

 Over the period, maybe 50 or so people contributes in a variety of ways, using a mind boggling range of techniques, games and systems to develop the business plan and aims of this exciting new concept to provide spaces, techniques and methodologies for thinking and creativity.

At one point several left the space to seek inspiration locally and discovered the Soho Hotel, which is a fresh example of how some hotels are developing to cater for specific needs.

I took my trusty Leica M8 and you can see how I saw the event during the periods I was there in a slideshow.

There were a truly amazing bunch of people there, with a wide range of interests and skills all giving of their time and knowledge to create something new, which is to be shared with people all over the world in a variety of ways.

A visit to The London Water Tower on Shooters Hill regarding The Thinking Hotel

On Tuesday 22nd, I headed off East with Maria Ana Botelho Neves founder of The Thinking Hotel project and Sarah Farrugia to meet Catherine Shovlin, owner of The London Water Tower to see it for ourselves and decide whether it might suit a planned prototyping workshop for the Thinking Hotel.

It turns out to be an amazing vertical house created by an Australian couple with around £3 million of building works with wonderful ground floor reception areas and a "secret garden" ideal for chatting in groups, five bedrooms each on a different level and a super top floor bar with surrounding balcony 130ft up with breathtaking views of London in all directions.

As we walked around it, climbed up and down it, stopping for a chat on the top deck, then a coffee in the garden, I snapped away with my Leica M8 and 15mm F4 Voigtlander lens and you can see the results in this slideshow.

Due to its very vertical nature, the space is only suited to certain types of workshops and events, but is absolutely fabulous for a super get away from it all break with family or a group of friends.

Definitely a place to tell people about who are looking for a unique experience in London.

Thinking about the Thinking Hotel - Visually

I have been watching and partaking in the development of Maria Botelho Neves's ideas for the development of a Thinking Hotel on Linked in in a recent post she asked

Images for the website: I am looking for 6 fantastic images to be combined with this sentence:

WOULDN'T BE GREAT IF WE COULD HAVE THE BEST PLACE FOR THINKING IN THE WORLD, NEAR US, AND OPEN 24/7? 

I have put together a selection of nearly 100 photos from my files based on the idea  Thinking about the Thinking Hotel - Visually

I am not suggesting that the six images are there already, but they may help inspire others to contribute more on a similar theme, or to fill in the spaces between what I had to hand.