culture and history – Page 99

Royal animals

October 15, 2012October 15, 2012 Cindy at enclos*ure1 Comment

We visited the Tower of London during our September travels, and I really enjoyed these sculptures by artist Kendra Haste, representing the animals of the “Royal Menagerie,” who lived at the Tower for over 600 years.

The baboons, lions, elephant, and polar bear are remarkably life-like, especially considering that they are made out of chicken wire (with a steel armature within). Haste was commissioned to create the animals in 2010, and they were installed in 2011 as part of the Tower’s “Royal Beasts” exhibit. They will remain in place for 10 years.

There’s an interesting short video of Haste at work here.

The first animals at the Tower were lions (1210). An elephant arrived in 1255. In 1832, when attacks on visitors and staff could no longer be ignored, the animals were moved to the London Zoo.

The Story Museum, Oxford

October 11, 2012June 10, 2014 Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

My niece works in a really charming place in Oxford called The Story Museum. Last month, we took a day trip from London to pay her a visit, and she gave us a behind-the-scenes tour.

The Story Museum exists “to celebrate children’s stories and to share enjoyable ways for young people to learn through stories as they grow.” It has a very nice website here.

Although founded in 2003, the museum only recently found a permanent home in three 19th and 20th century buildings on Pembroke Street. In the 13th century, the site was the location of the first purpose-built college dormitory.

There is a lot of renovation work to be done, so the museum is not fully open to the public, but you can find out how to schedule a visit here.

It is currently hosting the exhibit “Tea with Alice: a world of Wonderland illustration” (but only until September 16).

Children can take part in a Mad Tea Party in the “Be it” room.

That’s mulch on the floor.

There is also an amazing exhibit called “Storyloom” that is hard to explain, but you can hear all about it in this interview with the creator.

I really liked the screen for their courtyard porta-potties.

Click here for information about how to donate to the museum — in sterling, euros, and dollars.

Tavistock Square

October 8, 2012August 4, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

Then one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush.
— Virginia Woolf

During our visit to London about a month ago, we stayed in a hotel in Bloomsbury, and on our last morning there, being a good former English major, I had to go looking for Virginia.

I found her small monument, inscribed with the above quote, in the south corner of Tavistock Square. From 1924 to 1939, she and her husband lived in a house located on the site of the hotel that you can see behind her head in the photo above.

Leonard Woolf has his own memorial in the square: a Gingko biloba tree, planted in 2004 to mark his work as a colonial administrator in Sri Lanka.

Originally laid out about 1800, the square today is bordered by a wide path shaded by both tall and pollarded trees. In the center of the park are flower beds and lawn, many benches, and a large sculpture. It is conventional, but pretty, and a very nice place to stroll and think.

On the day when Virginia Woolf conceived her great book, only residents of the houses surrounding the square would have been able to enter its gates. In an essay written during the hot summer of 1933, she approved “[t]he sensible and humane suggestion . . . that the squares should be opened … to those who would otherwise have no place to walk or sit but in the street.”

In 1940, Tavistock Square was temporarily opened to all when its iron fence was melted down for war use. (The park was officially opened to the public in the 1950s.)

The square is also associated with Charles Dickens, who lived in a house across from the north corner from 1851 to 1860. There, he wrote Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities. The residence was demolished in 1901 and was replaced by an office building designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It is now the headquarters of the British Medical Association (BMA).

Lutyens also designed a large monument to Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake, the first British woman to qualify as a surgeon, which was placed in the east corner in 1926.

From the 1960s, Tavistock Square has been known for its various memorials to peace and non-violence, including

a sculpture of Mahatma Gandhi by Fredda Brilliant (shown above) (1968);
a cherry tree planted in memory of the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima (1967);
a maple tree planted by the League of Jewish Women in honor of the U.N.’s International Year of Peace (1986);
and the Conscientious Objectors Stone, installed by the Peace Pledge Union (1995).

Four of the park’s planting beds also honor memorial subjects — two with plants from India and Japan, one with English shrubs for Woolf, and one with medicinal plants for Aldrich-Blake.

Several years ago, another memorial was added to the square, in the form of a small plaque affixed to the current iron fence. It marks the section of street in front of the BMA where the last of the four July 7, 2005, suicide bombers blew up the Number 30 double-decker city bus and killed thirteen of the fifty-two commuters who died that day.

Gordon Square

Most of the social and intellectual activity that we associate with the Bloomsbury Group took place about a block west of Tavistock Square in a row of houses on Gordon Square.

From 1904 to 1907, Virginia and Vanessa Stevens (later Woolf and Bell) lived in #46 Gordon Square with their brothers, Thoby and Adrian. The siblings held regular ‘at homes’ on Thursday and Friday evenings with such guests as Lytton Strachey, George Bernard Shaw, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forester, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and John Nash. (After their marriage, Vanessa and Bell took over the house from 1907 to 1916.)

From 1920 to 1925, Vanessa lived at #50 with her children and then at #39 with both her husband and lover Duncan Grant. Strachey and other members of his family lived at #51 from 1919 to 1956.

In the photo above, #46 is the first house on the left side (with the oval plaque), four doors down is #50 and then #51.

Perspective, western prairie

September 27, 2012May 2, 2017 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

Sweetwater Co., Wyoming, 1930s, A. Rothstein, Library of Congress “Highway U.S. 30, Sweetwater County, Wyoming” by Arthur Rothstein, March 1940, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Eternal prairie and grass, with occasional groups of trees. Frémont prefers this to every other landscape. To me it is as if someone would prefer a book with blank pages to a good story.

– Charles Preuss, Exploring with Frémont

Preuss was a mapmaker who accompanied John Frémont on two of his explorations of the American West in the 1840s. Together, they mapped the Oregon Trail and discovered Lake Tahoe.

Frémont — who was later the first Republican candidate for President — always played the iconic hero-explorer; Preuss, at least in his diaries, was a grumbling realist. “My pants are torn,” was the gist of his comments for the day the Frémont planted an American flag on what he believed was the highest place in the Rocky Mountains.

There’s a funny account of Preuss, here, on This American Life: “The Homesick Explorer.” And here.

Vintage landscape: tobacco flower

September 25, 2012April 13, 2016 Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“George Barbee, 13 years old topping. . . . Nicholas County, Kentucky” by Lewis Hine, August 1916, via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.