Despite being one of the most aesthetically pleasing methods of covering a surface, zelij seems hardly to have moved out of it’s main sites of origin of Morocco and southern Spain.
Certainly I never see anything in London that resembles it in public spaces – we get stuck with very ordinary tiling patterns on the whole – but this morning I spotted an interesting manhole cover, with a pattern not unlike the central stars of many a zelij pattern:
Borough High St, London, SE1
I don’t think the Moroccans would stick a rather awkward square in the middle though…
Excitingly you can even see it on Google Street View:
Tags: Borough High Street, Manhole cover
