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.

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]