Drawings reveal Victorian proposal for London’s own Grand Central station

The vaulted arches of New York’s Grand Central station are recognisable even to those who have never taken a train into the Big Apple. But they could very easily have been a sight visible in central London.Shelved 172-year-old architectural drawings by Perceval Parsons show how he envisioned a new London railway connecting the growing number of lines coming into the city to a huge main terminal by the Thames.The drawings of London’s own Grand Central Station, which are being put on open sale for the first time to mark the 200th anniversary of the first public passenger railway, show a scheme that would have given the capital of the UK a very different look today.The station was to be located at Great Scotland Yard, close to the modern-day Embankment tube station, and would have boasted an ornamental frontage about 800ft (245 metres) in length

Blur’s Dave Rowntree: ‘People think music was better in the old days, to which I say: bollocks!’

You’ve just put out a coffee table book of photographs of your early years with Blur. I imagine you didn’t have too many expectations at the time. Why had you stopped taking photos by the time the band blew up?I told myself that I was not experiencing life, that I was looking at it through the lens of the camera. But what really happened was, after a few years, things stopped being bright and shiny and new and exciting. It was pretty clear that we were going to have a career, that this wasn’t just a 15-minute Warholian burst of fame

Gems review – dazzling technique elevates LA Dance Project’s contemporary ballet trilogy

Australia sees so little international contemporary dance – considered too far and too expensive a journey, with too small a dedicated dance audience to make it worthwhile. What does appear is mostly in Melbourne and Sydney. So it’s a curious coup for Brisbane festival to land the second visit to Australia by L.A. Dance Project – the troupe founded by the former New York City Ballet principal Benjamin Millepied – after the Sydney Opera House’s presentation of his contemporary, genderqueer Romeo and Juliet Suite last year

The Guide #207: How Britain embraced The Simpsons, America’s true first family

Mum wouldn’t have Bart Simpson in our house. When, 35 years ago this month, The Simpsons first drifted across the Atlantic and on to UK screens, they brought with them a bad reputation. In the US, Matt Groening’s peerless animation had quickly become a ratings sensation after it debuted in 1989, but it was also a controversy magnet, particularly over its breakout delinquent star. The Simpsons was seen by the more conservative end of the US media as a bad influence on kids (a viewpoint famously echoed by President George HW Bush a few years later with his call for American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons). Plenty of US schools banned a massive-selling T-shirt with Bart declaring himself an “underachiever and proud of it, man”

From On Swift Horses to David Byrne: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

ChristyOut now Following a prize-winning premiere at the Berlinale, this Irish drama starring Danny Power has been feted as an auspicious feature debut for director Brendan Canty. Telling the tale of two estranged brothers in Knocknaheeny, Cork, it’s a social-realist breakout hit.On Swift HorsesOut now Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) are newlyweds who move from Kansas to California in the 1950s, with Lee’s brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi). A bond emerges between Muriel and Julius – however, this isn’t a typical love triangle, but an exploration of same-sex attraction in a time and place where that could be life-threatening.The Conjuring: Last RitesOut now Something wicked this way comes: the ninth and (allegedly) final instalment of the Conjuring franchise, based on the (alleged) exploits of paranormal experts Lorraine and Ed Warren, played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, who are investigating the Smurl hauntings of Pennsylvania

Metropolitan gatekeeping has kept Marlowe marginalised | Letters

The Guardian’s call to re-read and honour Christopher Marlowe is welcome (Editorial, 29 August). But in Canterbury, his birthplace, that work was already done and misrepresented by the Guardian’s review last year. In 2022, I produced The Marlowe Sessions: the first complete performance and recordings of his plays in over four centuries, staged at the King’s School, where Marlowe studied, with award-winning actors, immersive spatial audio and high‑definition filming.This was no vanity project but a bold, community-rooted undertaking in the shadow of the pandemic, paying above-union rates to dozens of creatives when work was scarce. Audiences embraced it, some travelling from abroad