Town With Nicholas Crane - and "remote" Ludlow

I've just watched BBCs "Town" (click to link) presented by Nicholas Crane. Twice he said Ludlow is "is small, landlocked and remote".

Well most places in the midlands are landlocked, it "goes with the territory". However, it is far from "remote" - in fact I've never heard such rubbish. Ludlow's on a train line, it has excellent road connections. Compare for instance London. Going from one side of London to another, by tube, mainline rail and car, more-or-less takes two hours. Yet -for instance- car from my home of Kingswinford to Ludlow (much further away than the other side of London) takes about an hour. It's doable for a curry and a stroll around on a summer evening. Not only that - you can stop off at Brdgnorth or Bewdley (get some Troach from Teddy Gray's)

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Google says it's a round trip of 66.9 miles and 2hrs 2mins

Of course, not everyone is going to start from Kingswinford - but thousands and hundreds of thousands live within a similar distance.

City of London, asymetric power relations and the geography of a surveillance society

Throughout the City of London there is a forest of CCTV surveillance cameras - and rightly so given the importance of the area and the potential for terrorist attacks. However, when ordinary photographers try taking even landscape photographs they have been stopped by security guards of neighbouring buildings. There is no legislation, not even a byelaw, that prevents people taking photographs in a public place - it seems some security officers have become overcautious, perhaps because they're confused by repeated alterings of "threat levels", or perhaps their cheap-and-nasty firms have too little skills within them to train them in legislation or the limitations of their power and responsibiity. Either way,

ordinary photographers have a right to take ordinary photographs in public space without harrasment.

See also  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/apr/28/july7.uksecurity

http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?28182-Security-situation-in-London 

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23776068-bbc-man-in-terror-quiz-for-photographing-st-pauls-sunset.do

http://www.panoramio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23090&highlight=paternoster

they can't all be wrong

The area where photographers have been repeatedly stopped is the historic City of London, centred on the walled area of the Roman and medieval cities (see map below). Particularly affected Paternoster Square, which is owned by the Mitsubishi Estate Company or perhaps by the Church Commisioners and just leased to them. This area is regarded as a private estate by the security guards. I would be interested if anyone has had similar experiences in the wider metropolitan area - or whether this is a specific City of London issue. Also, if a photographer is being intrusive and you don't want your picture taken, by all means ask them not to take your pcture - no-one supports the excesses of freelance press photographers (who seem to get police escorts to positions the public can't get to)

map

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Hackney Wicked

Next Weekend: Friday 29th July – Sunday 31st July 2011 pop down to Hackney Wicked festival - between Victoria Park and The River Lea Festival website


festival map


It is framed in an area bounded by Victoria Park, the River Lea, the A12 (fast road) and the Old Ford across the River Lea.  And centred on Hackney Wick rail station.The south border is the Old Ford, the main river crossing from the Iron Age, Roman and medieval times afore queen Matilda almost drowned and had Bow Bridge built - to ease her route to Barking Abbey.

Oh and you might just have noticed the Olympics site on the opposite bank of the river (& cut)


Laura Oldfield Ford has a poster site at White Post Lane, her drawings are always stimulating for people interested in Landscapes and the world around them


AND, You can't get anything more appropriate than a  Coracle Regatta for a festival on the site of the Iron Age river crossing on the main road between Camulodunum (Colchester) and Calleva (Calleda/Coed) Atrebatum (Silchester). Both were Pre-Roman towns and capitals of minor states. Even if the coracles start a we bit upstream of the crossing point.

[View at Tenby, Wales] (LOC) looking like a Japanese woodblock print

[View at Tenby, Wales] (LOC), a photo by The Library of Congress on Flickr.

compare with http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O85787/woodblock-print-fan-views-of-the-usui-pass/

and

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O86126/woodblock-print-fan-the-origins-of-the-kinryuzan/

These influenced the aesthetic movement and much interior decoration of the Edwardian era, including Aubrey Beardsley

The Pool of London, England

The Pool of London, England, a photo by Striderv on Flickr.

The Pool of London included the area upstream of Tower Bridge, upto London Bridge, where cargoe ships could dock alongside river wharfs with warehouses directly loaded from the ships. This area has been transformed by the ugly grey boring brutalist offices of More London, one or two warehouses have been converted to add a smidgen of Heritage-d landscape. However, the character has changed utterly, from a Historic Landscape Type of river port wharfs to one of comercial offices - as the economy has been subsumed into an aspect of financial services. London's role as the omphalos of a world empire to offshore banking centre sui generis has been the driver of these changes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_London

Welsh landscape photochroms in the Library of Congress Flickr collection

[Roman bridge I, Bettws-y-Coed (i.e. Betws), Wales] (LOC), a photo by The Library of Congress on Flickr.

I was astonished to see a great many photochroms of Wales in the Library of Congress Flickr collection. They come from either an American or German company, both used a photolitho print process in the 1890-1910s. The colours and ways of seeing influenced landscape painting through the Great War and up to the 1950s. This photochrom shows the so-called Roman Bridge over the Afon Machno, near to Penmachno and Betws, an 18th-century bridge which just might re-use a Roman bridge location. Although the matter is obscured as the welsh for bridge is a Latin loan word, pont = pontus.

There are plenty of Scottish and Irish landscapes but -and this is probably a 21st-century sensibility- I assumed that Wales was less well known internatioonally, despite the country and landscape being close to my heart, as it was the holiday destination of choice for Blackcountry folk when (and where) I grew up.

Compare with a modern digital photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamishfenton/4205088231

See alo Percy Shakespeare Oil on Canvas "View from Artist's window" of Kates Hill from the Wren's Nest from http://www.lissfineart.com/display.php?KT_artists=Percy+Shakespeare  a painting style influenced by photochroms

Via Flickr:
[Roman bridge I, Bettws-y-Coed (i.e. Betws), Wales]

[between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900].

1 photomechanical print : photochrom, color.

Notes:Title from the Detroit Publishing Co., catalogue J--foreign section. Detroit, Mich. : Detroit Photographic Company, 1905.
Print no. "10533".
Forms part of: Views of landscape and architecture in Wales in the Photochrom print collection.

Subjects:Wales--Betws-y-Coed.
Wales--Snowdonia National Park.

Format: Photochrom prints--Color--1890-1900.

Rights Info: No known restrictions on reproduction.

Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Part Of: Views of landscape and architecture in Wales (DLC) 2001700652

More information about the Photochrom Print Collection is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.pgz

Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.07380

Call Number: LOT 13408, no. 044 [item]

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park

Panoramio photos (handy map / aerial photos)

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, a set on Flickr.

East End Lives

A film about people near to where I live - the landscape link is that the area is near to London's historic docks and so has been a gateway community to waves of immigrants. Also, some immigrant communities who are recent arrivals elsewhere in the UK are well established here as they arrived as merchant seamen and shared lives here with time at sea. This would include those from Somaliland in particular. It also included the author  Joseph Conrad(Pole) who lived in a hostel on Brunswick Street  .

As a consequence the area has been threatened by xenophobia from elsewhere and various Fascist or Nazi organisations have attempted to destroy community cohesion. They invariably fail. The film is 30 inutes long

East End Lives by studio31wchapel

Morecambe: after the cockle pickers, reeling under cuts, but will there be a revival?

Morecambe Bay Cockle Pickers, a photo by Ian Bramham on Flickr.
I listened with horror to the radio in february 2004, as 18 Chinese cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay. My mom grew up there and had taken me there as a child. The landscape had helped form her brusque manner, we were out on the bay and I remember her just grabbing my arm and shouting "RUN!", no questions, arguments, explanations, just do as your told, run. we ran through water to get back to beach, the tide had surrounded us. So I knew what was happening as radio reports came in...

The Chinese were perpetuating a trade that dates to the formation of Morecambe itself; an amalgam of villages united by the coming of the railway, which could then take the cockles to the growing towns of Lancashire or bring the workers to the seaside for a treat. Cockling was then often (but not exclusively) an occupation of women and older girls, as memorialised in this mural in Poulton. 
The resort of Morecambe has been in decline for a while now - for multiple reasons - but the latest blow is particularly harsh as it arrests recent attempts to revive the town.

These latest cuts are on top of earlier ones which robbed the town of its lido and took away many of the facilities enjoyed by visitors. Is there a future for resort towns? Maybe, fuel price rises mitigate against air travel and even car journeys. Rail  - as a fuel-efficient mode of transport -  may become increasingly competitive. Whilst the present round of cuts are hard I would not bet against a revival of the town that gave us Eric Morecambe, Brucciani's ice cream and cafe and Albert Modley .  My grandpa pronounced - after seeing Thora Hird acting aged 14 - that she would never make a professional actress because of her strong Lancashire actress. How wrong could he have been. Her Lancs inflected tones mellifluously floated performances which became more poignant and powerful though time. Her career grew from strength to strength the older she got. She should be the patron saint of Morecambe -her home town- inspirational

Visitor Information

Morecambe in 1901

Landscape and memory

The significance of Alessia Avellino's art - apart from a mastery of drawing technique - is that they are of memorised landscapes. Images may be twisted or deformed but they capture the CHARACTER of the place, as in Lloyds Building

and St Pancras (2) London  

 

Landscapes are ineluctably bound up with memories - as part of how we order and rationalise our memories. They provide a card index to events, names, people, as well as an environment to interact in. Kristiina Sandoe's art makes explicit the ordering of the landscape by human intervention, particularly the linear, and (consequently) narrative form of trackways through landscapes. Laura Oldfield Ford's psychogeographic method means that her images are always within a multilinear narrative context. Whilst they have many currents the main flow is always one of a critique of the growing inequality of access to good quality environment and "confronting the polite veneer of redevelopment spectacle" .  Take a good look at the world around you - these artists are.

Cornwall to get a Landscape Observatory, in advance of London.

It is a truism that major metropolitan centres consider themselves to be fast-paced and at the cutting edge of "what is happening", and universally they're the most parochial, small-minded and behind-the-times sort of places. Rather than surging forward, they act as sheet-anchors for a culture that is disappearing elsewhere. 
So too in the case of Landscape Observatories, where Cornwall is going to get one ahead of London - sometimes the advances take place in the periphery, (including the marginalised) and work there way by degrees to the centre. Not only is the Cornish Observatory from the geographical periphery of England, but also it is an initiative to integrate formerly marginalised youth into the process of landscape policy making. "The Cornwall Landscape Observatory is an exploratory project working to understand and implement the idea of appreciating landscape as an asset to help children and young people integrate into their disadvantaged neighbourhood; and secure access to their social rights" 
http://www.catpaisatge.net/docs/cornwall.pdf A seminar will launch the fledgling Observatory on Wednesday 30th November 2011 "Students from a variety of disciplines and age groups will introduce their perspectives on landscape followed by plenary sessions at this one-day seminar. The outcomes of the seminar will be placed on a dedicated website and we will work to develop a Cornish Landscape Observatory through our European connections."
Sponsored by The Centre for European Research within
Cornwall (CERES) and hosted by Truro College register your interest by email to Mr. John Fleet of the CERES secretariat at: johnfleet1924@btinternet.com

West Midlands "Heart of Landscape" and London?

An interesting example of attempts to implement the European Landscape convention is the West Midlands Heart of Landscape website , which facilitates public participation in landscape policies by allowing folk to highlight aspects that they like. There's also a "Heart of Landscape" booklet  to accompany the website and provide policy background.

Where are the opportunities for Londoners to express their priorities about the London Landscape?  Are not the 7million+ Londoners denied their treaty-rights to participate in Landscape Policies, by law? and mightn't this be actionable by court action in Europe?  London better get it's act together.

Meanwhile, Laura Oldfield Ford's Psychogeographic Blog provides one of the few inciteful commentaries on the London Landscape  

dreaming of a council flat - from the traveller camp, Bow Triangle

dreaming of a council flat - from the traveller camp, Bow Triangle, a photo by david sankey on Flickr.

Every landscape is made of pockets, localities, and places. They contain histories, ethnicities, and unique character. They also define individual perspectives, we perceive the world from a point of view... In this case, a triangle of three railway lines has made an island of a small industrial estate and a traveller (gypsy) camp. An Irish traveller mum with a disabled child confided in me that she looked everyday at the nearby council high-rise flats (housing scheme apartments, if your American) and she fervently dreamed of a new and better life high off the ground. How many of us would regard moving to these flats with such glee. I hope she got there

Anne Frank. The Landscape of Loss, and Altab Ali Park

The fact is, that it is people who make landscapes. Their names and life stories attach themselves to places and territories until the rest of us share a culture by which we define and know our environment. So the sickening murder of Anne Frank reminds us that places are poorer and impoverished by genocide and hate crime. Anne's children and grandchildren should have welded their lives to these places.


 Film from http://www.worldwrite.org.uk/londonbehindthescenes/bricklane/altabalipark.html walk

So too, the murder of Altab Ali, a young Sylheti-born factory worker in nearby Adler Street in the 1970s by racist skinheads motivated by the hate-propaganda of the "National Front", has now leant the name Altab Ali Park, to the former "St Mary's Park". Adler Street was itself named after a prominent German-born Rabbi. Altab Ali Park was formerly the site of St Mary Matfelon, once a stone-built whitewashed chapel - hence the local placename Whitechapel: click Excavations on the site of the "White Chapel" for more. But the murder of Altab Ali has robbed us of the pleasure of seeing his family grow in the area, their laughter gracing our park.

The above weblog was written on16th July 2011, before a "Christian-right" terrorist, motivated apparently by perverted Islamophobia murdered 90+ Norwegian Labour Youth at a summer camp. I grieve for my international comrades  families - the lost potential futures, the children and grand-children through generations. We can only oppose ignorance with knowledge, darkness with light. -David Sankey.

Guy Debord and the Olympic Route Network

Guy Debord mapped the mental unities of areas  of Paris, the distance between them and the routes between them, in the 1957 Guide Psychogeographique de Paris . The mental disjunction between areas, the dislocation to city life and the consequent alienation of citizens from their hometown were often the result of Baron Haussman's boulevards deliberately driven through districts, and then the growth of traffic making passage between areas difficult, dangerous and time-consuming.

So now, Olympic chiefs are demanding the removal of pedestrian crossings on the  (Ratcliffe) Highway, as part of the Olympic Route Network. See GLA-member John Biggs press release on Transport for London's callous disregard of Wapping residents concerns for the safety of children and old peple, in particular John Bigg  . These proposals will effectively cut Wapping off from the rest of London for pedestrians (and prevent my access to the river from Stepney/Whitechapel areas). Can the Olympic Games be so divisive, desructive, negative, dangerous, so ignorant, reckless, so smug, so CAR-BOUND! Prisoners of their privilege their stop-free glide in limousines at the expense - potentially - of children's lives. See also 100 days on Wapping Island 

Blood libel, urban quarters and ethnicity: What BBCs "History Cold Case" -Bodies in the Well - Norwich - failed to say

BBC2, History Cold Case, on the Bodies in the Well presented the evidence of a group of bodies with DNA evidence suggesting a Jewish lineage, found with cats down a well. The cats were thought to possibly be related to medieval tanners found in the area. Historical research showed that there were many properties nearby owned by tanners. Tanneries are notoriously smelly and dangerous, and tanners consequently dehumanised and often pariah occupations.

But, the significance of this small area of tanners in the 12th or 13th centuries was not explained. Truth is amongst this group of people originated the first ever story that, later, grew into the "blood libel" that was to unleash murderous pogroms against jews throughout "Christendom". That was the tale of  St William of Norwich   (pictured), a 12-yr old apprentice TANNER tortured and killed in 1144. The locals blamed the Jews, in the first ever instance of what has become known as the "blood libel", that Jews took Christian blood for ritual observance. A tanner mob is known to have been on the rampage and the Sheriff intervened to save jews from them. The Blood Libel was later to be repeated and used to incite violence by poor Christians against Jews, throughout Europe.

So a tiny ghetto of Tanners, opposed by an equally small neighbourhood of Jews, was the scene of the germ of am idea that was to ultimately lead to the genocidal Holocaust.

That is why mixing social classes and occupations in the  same social space - squares, pavements, schools and colleges - is essential to avoid introverted ghettos ansd the breeding of hatred. The so-called "Blood Libel" unleashed anti-Jewish pogromss through europe, spread as a contagion from this small, dehumanised, brutalised community...

English Channel undersea earthquake and tsunamis in British Isles

Click Here to see the British Geological Survey report of an undersea earthquake in the English Channel (la Manche). This is a reminder that several Tsunamis have struck the British Isles. A tsunami following the Lisbon Earthquake severed Aughinish from County Clare, making an island that is now linked via a causeway to County Galway (see Wikipedia entry on Aughinish ) and catastrophic wave erosion noted in the Bristol Channel has been related to a possible tsunami in 1607 2007 paper .

ENGLISH CHANNEL
July 14, 2011
Time: 06:59:10.9
Lat./Lon.: 50.122 -0.743
National Grid: 489.8 km E, 25.5 km N
Depth: 10.0
Magnitude: 3.9
Intensity: 3
FELT S COAST ENGLAND

Update - another underssea quake in the Southern North Sea

SOUTHERN NORTH SEA
July 21, 2011
Time: 14:21:18.6
Lat./Lon.: 53.573 2.243
National Grid: 680.9 km E, 416.9 km N
Depth: 11.8
Magnitude: 3.5

BGS recent events

The Building Exploratory: Canal Sounds - Saturday 16th June. An event for young people

Canal Sounds, Building Exploratory weBlog

Canal Sounds - Saturday 16th June. An event for young people.

On Saturday 16th July the Building Exploatory are holding our first ‘Imagine Hackney’ event for young people to explore the built environment.

Canal Sounds is a workshop where you will explore the life and history of the Regent’s Canal and think about how it is used today through creating a soundscape. During the workshop you’ll learn about music production and how to use digital sound recording equipment, as well as learning about the history of Regent’s canal. All of this knowledge will enable you to make recordings that will be used to create the soundscape. So you’ll be learning new skills and exploring the world around you in a creative way, all at the same time!

Canal Sounds takes place at the Building Exploratory (and along Regents Canal) from 2pm-4pm on Saturday 16th July. If you can make it and would like to book a place, please contact the Building Exploratory by email mail@buildingexploratory.org.uk, or by phone on 02077292011.

The City from Parliament Hill

Compare Parliament Hill in 1965 


with a similar view today

flickr link
note the tall buildings grouped left (north and east) of St Paul's ; The Barbican Estate was opened in 1969, they're the darker buildings in the cluster to the left. The Gherkin is the latest in that old trend. Behind the docks were still open in the 1960s, surrounded by warehouses, St Katherine's closed in 1968. And banking was then still all contained in the relatively low-rise City of London, as were the offices of of the merchant shipping fleets (in Leadenhall). The docks were destroyed as a matter of policy from 1969 to 1980, and from then replaced with a mixture of media and finance/banking towers. To me the pollution looks visibly worse and the environment less human, but then I'm over 50... The people on Hampstead Heath are notably more varied, and crowded