vittoria junior school of arts and crafts, birmingham

I’ve just completed the last of three elevational drawings for my brother Alan (and his wife Lesley!). The first two were of Queen Square in Bristol, but the final one ended up being of Vittoria Junior School of Arts+Crafts, Birmingham (now Birmingham School of Jewellery). A slightly strange choice you might think – although I just love Brum’s Jewellery Quarter. In fact, this was our father’s school from the age of 13 until (we think) he was apprenticed to Dams and Lock (printers) at the age of 16. The new school had been opened in the (then) factory building at 84 Vittoria Street in 1890 as a school for the jewellery and silverware industry - housing up to 460 boys from the age of twelve and a half years.

We don’t really know how or why Ron (as a working class youngster) attended this school, but it might be linked to the fact that his father Fred had been a “jewellery worker” (according to the 1911 census). The Birmingham Jewellery and Silversmiths Association had been keen to set up a school for the industry and so perhaps they had encouraged attendance by boys (yes, just boys at that time!) of their own workers?
Who knows?
Photo: a poor quality image, I'm afraid, of the completed drawing (too big to scan!)
Background: The Birmingham School of Jewellery and Silversmithing was established in 1890 as a branch of the School of Art when Martin+Chamberlain converted a goldsmith's factory, built in 1865 to a design by J. G. Bland. The top storey was added in 1906 by Cossins, Peacock & Bewlay who also designed the south extension in 1911. The school was acquired by Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University) in 1989, along with an adjoining site.
The university commissioned Associated Architects who designed a further south extension which was constructed between 1992 and 1993. They also redesigned much of the interior, creating a full-height atrium with gallery access to workshops. The reception area can also be used as exhibition space. The project won the 1995 RIBA Architecture Award and the 1996 Civic Trust Award.

february 2014 books

More book stuff:

The Razor’s Edge (W Somerset Maugham): I’d never read anything by Somerset Maugham until the end of last year and, after this book (first published in 1944), I think I’ve become a bit of a fan. It’s the story of an American pilot, traumatised by his experiences in WW1, and his rejection of a conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while his more materialistic friends and acquaintances suffer reversals of fortune. I found it fascinating from a number of a viewpoints – comparing the circumstances/attitudes following the 1929 stock market crash with the 2008 financial crisis and also the main character’s search for life’s meaning through Eastern philosophy (well before the Beatles made such exploration popular!). I really liked Maugham’s writing style and his role in the book as a minor character (a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the book’s key individuals). Really enjoyable.
Behind The Scenes At The Museum (Kate Atkinson): Yes, I realise I’m a bit late getting round to reading my first novel by Kate Atkinson (some 18 years after it was published). It’s narrated by Ruby (born in 1952) and tells the story of her family from the end of the nineteenth century up to the mid-1990s… and constitutes a repressed-memory story. It’s both poignant and funny, and death and the bizarre never seem far away. Ruby’s not far off my own age and so it was good to be reminded of things from my own youth. Although I struggled at times trying to remember various family members (Ruby’s own current story is interlaced with tales of her family from the end of the nineteenth century/first+second world wars), I found it a very worthwhile read – confidently and skillfully written.
The Life And Death Of St Kilda (Tom Steel): St Kilda is the remotest of Britain’s offshore islands – lying some 40 miles west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic Ocean. People have lived there for over 2,000 years (but the population has never exceeded 200), cut off from the rest of the world. The book tells the moving story of the last St Kildans. In August 1930, the remaining 36 inhabitants were finally persuaded to evacuate the island by the British Government – a decision the community reluctantly accepted due to sickness and the lack of enough able-bodied men to continue working on the land. A truly fascinating and humbling story.
Empires Of The Dead (David Crane): You might think that a book about war graves would be pretty boring… but, actually, you’d be SO wrong! The book tells the extraordinary (and forgotten) story behind the building of the British+Commonwealth war cemeteries – largely due to the efforts of one visionary, 44 year-old, volunteer ambulance commander called Fabian Ware. He’d been horrified by the ignominious treatment of the dead in 1914 and began to record the identity and position of each grave. From arbitrary and adhoc (and purely voluntary) beginnings, Ware was able to become a driving force in the origins of the Imperial War Graves Commission. I have to admit that, whilst I’ve always been impressed and rather humbled by the images of immaculately-kept war cemeteries, I hadn’t actually given any thought to how they came about. But then you (suddenly, in my case) realise that, of course, there were thousands of soldiers dying and someone had to organise things in a proper and appropriate manner (in the event, there were over 580,000 British dead and the Commission had more than 23,000 burial sites under its control!). A brilliant book.
Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (Billy Collins): I really adored this book of poetry… we’d had it on the bookshelves for some time, but I just hadn’t got round to looking at it (Moira had loved it and recently suggested that I might like it too). It’s absolutely beautiful, funny, poignant, stimulating… all the boxes are ticked as far as I’m concerned. Michael Donaghy has described Collins’s work as “a rare amalgam of accessibility and intelligence. I’d follow this man’s mind anywhere. Expect to be surprised”. Yes. Indeed.

war graves… yes, war graves

I’ve just finished reading a book about war graves of WW1.

It was brilliant.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “sad café man hits all time low in his quest to find new interests”.
Actually, you’d be SO wrong!
In this centenary year since the start of WW1, I’d already done a fair amount of research into my grandfather’s war experiences and so this book provided wonderful, fresh insights into the devastated and grief-stricken world of that time.
My grandfather Frank Walker was just 17 when joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in April 1914 (the minimum qualifying age was 19). He transferred to the Royal Field Artillery on 1 July and entered the “Theatre of War” in France/Belgium on 19 August as one of the first members of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) – just a fortnight after Britain had declared war on Germany.
He survived.
The book (“Empires of the Dead” by David Crane) tells the extraordinary (and forgotten) story behind the building of the British+Commonwealth war cemeteries – largely due to the efforts of one visionary, 44 year-old, volunteer ambulance commander called Fabian Ware. He had been horrified by the ignominious treatment of the dead in 1914 and began to record the identity and position of each grave.
He was born in Clifton, Bristol (there’s a coincidence!). He was “a social radical in conservative clothing”; for five turbulent years he’d been the “erratically brilliant, ‘warmongering’ editor of the right-wing, imperialist Morning Post”.
I’m not so sure I’d have liked him (mild understatement)!
From arbitrary and adhoc (and purely voluntary) beginnings, Ware was able to become a driving force in the origins of the Imperial War Graves Commission. I have to admit that, whilst I’ve always been impressed and rather humbled by the images of immaculately-kept war cemeteries, I hadn’t actually given any thought to how they came about. But then you (suddenly, in my case) realise that, of course, there were thousands of soldiers dying and someone had to organise things in a proper and appropriate manner (in the event, there were over 580,000 British dead and the Commission had more than 23,000 burial sites under its control!).
Ware was a truly remarkable man. The book describes him thus: “For a fierce idealist and visionary, he was an unusually skilled politician; for a born autocrat, he was a smooth performer in committees… and a natural leader”.
Although I’ve seen a number of war memorials (in this country), I’ve never visited any of the numerous cemeteries in France and/or Belgium. After reading this book, I feel I need to do just that.
It’s hard to think of more potent advocates of peace and futility of war than the existence of the hundreds of thousands of massed graves of those who didn’t survive.
The author, Davis Crane, is an eloquent and very gifted writer (and passionate about the subject) and, at times, I found the story incredibly moving. The book contains some parliamentary extracts of the time (when politicians were arguing about policies for burying the war dead) and from various letters written by soldiers or grieving parents/wives.
I’ll end with this powerful extract from a letter sent home by soldier Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiancé:
“Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid faith as inspired the priest of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity, let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been his ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting, half crouching, as it fell, perfect but that it is headless… and let him think how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into foetid heap of hideous putrescence”.
Roland Leighton, himself, was dead by Christmas 1914.
Photo: Tyne Cot Cemetery, Ypres

joelle tuerlinckx exhibition at the arnolfini…

I have a problem with most of the exhibitions at the Arnolfini, here in Bristol.

Frequently, I find them obscure and impenetrable.
I feel very sad about this… because it’s a wonderful gallery space and somewhere I pass several times each week.
Now, I appreciate that this view is not shared universally – BUT it IS the opinion of a large number of talented, open-minded, perceptive arty friends whose opinions I respect.  
Even the name of her exhibition: “WOR(L)D(K) IN PROGRESS?” is a bit puzzling. To me anyway (I know what it means, but it’s contrived to say the least).

Joelle Tuerlinckx was born in Brussels in 1958 and her work has been shown widely on an international level.

If you haven’t already seen the exhibition, this blurb from the Arnolfini’s website will hopefully provide you with a flavour:
“Her work is distinguished by a unique sensual and transient approach and a precise use of materials, colours, and abstract shapes, culminating in expansive, complex installations. Film projections, video, drawings, collages, photographs and found objects are often combined with subtle alterations to the spaces and gestures that highlight the time and space of the viewing experience”.

Before today, I’d seen the exhibition twice. Well, I tried… really I did, but I’m afraid most of it just went over my head. To me, it really did feel like the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. So today, I went along to one of their exhibition tours (every Saturday at 2pm)… in the hope that someone REALLY would be able to make the “scales fall from my eyes”.

Eight of us joined the tour, given by an art lecturer at UWE.
She spoke for ten minutes or so about what was meant by the term “conceptual art” (actually, she read out most of it from her notes… which, for me, seemed only to suggest that perhaps she didn’t really understand Tuerlinckx’s work either!).
Actually, that’s unfair, but that IS how it made me feel.
We were then given 20-25 minutes to look round the exhibition and then to meet in the Reading Room for a general discussion.
In the event, only two other people turned up - in addition to the tour guide and me.
During the course of our discussion, I acknowledged that I found the work very difficult to appreciate. This was received sympathetically by my tour colleagues (although in a rather “we-feel-sorry-for-you” kind of way - they were both young artists and I THINK one of them was going to be a guide at another exhibition in Bristol)… effectively, I was told that “this IS what art is about these days”.
That may be so… but, if it is, then I think art is in great danger of becoming far too arrogant for its own good. I try to visit every exhibition at the Arnolfini but, sadly, most of them leave me feeling frustrated and irritated by this absolute concentration on art’s conceptual form (and, remember, this exhibition is on for more than THREE months – it finishes 16 March)
Is the Arnolfini trying to educate us into appreciating this type of art?
If so, I think it’s failing.
I suggested that they survey everyone who visited the exhibition (I would feel reasonably confident that less than 5% would say they appreciated or understood the work), but I know they won’t.

Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle’s review of the exhibition (December 2012) included this: “I am considering writing this in the style of Joelle Tuerlinckx whose work has been baffling me for more than a decade. Attempting to describe the Belgian artist's work, I'll have to keep all the words I've crossed out and put them in a pile to use later, along with all the commas, colons, semicolons and full stops I've dropped. Currently they're all under my desk, sprinkled among the pencil shavings and bottles that litter the floor. What's that length of rope doing there? I must have accidentally carted it home from Tuerlinckx's show at the Arnolfini…

At some point I'll have to paint my desk with white emulsion, then invert my laptop and shake out all the dead skin, hair, biscuit crumbs and dried tears I've somehow shed over the keyboard. All this stuff must mean something, possibly more than the things I commit to the page… Keep going like this and I might become an artist, but probably not, nor will I ever be Tuerlinckx.
I had to have a lie-down on the floor for a bit. Why has she stained a wall upstairs with tea, and prematurely aged some of her own catalogues and posters and gallery hand-outs? Is it to show what things look like when they age? Or that when they age in a museum, they do so differently? Tuerlinckx does such odd things, though there is a logic to them all, even if it is her logic rather than ours. Art that is only a puzzle is boring: solve it and it's over. Tuerlinckx continues to tease because her works resist solution. Mystery remains”.
For me, mystery certainly remains.

Photo: Gallery 1 at the Arnolfini.

PS: the video on the Arnolfini website is quite useful (enthusiastic… and informative to a degree).
PPS: I blogged about the Matti Braun exhibition at the Arnolfini (October 2012) and made similar comments about “inaccessible art”… their response was interesting (see the comment at the end of my October post).
Footnote: As a retired architect and someone who has had a life-long interest in art and design , I’d like to think that I’m NOT a philistine when it comes to art appreciation but I accept that my art preferences might be a little on the conservative side – they would certainly include work by the likes of David Hockney, Peter Blake, JMW Turner, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Andre Derain, Antony Gormley, Stanley Spencer, Henri Cartier Bresson, Paul Cezanne, Grayson Perry, Dorothea Lange, Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, John Everett Millais, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Katsushika Hokusai, Balthus, Grant Wood, Richard Long, Michelangelo and Rafael to mention just a few.

st kilda… and some more scottish coincidences

Last summer, I posted a blog about a book I’d been reading (“Sea Room” by Adam Nicholson) while on holiday at Drimnin, Scotland. There had been a number of slightly spooky connections/coincidences, including the fact that its author, Adam Nicholson, is married to Sarah Raven (gardener, writer, television presenter). Her brother Andrew Raven had studied with my architectural partner Matthew and later became “factor” of the Ardtornish Estate, Lochaline – just down the road from Drimnin and where (ie. Garden Flat at Ardtornish House) Moira+I plus daughters Ruth, Hannah+Alice had stayed back in the Easter of 1990(!).

What, you might well ask, has all this got to do with St Kilda?
Well, I’ve just read “The Life and Death of St Kilda” by Tom Steel. St Kilda is the remotest of Britain’s offshore islands – lying some 40 miles or so west of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in the North Atlantic Ocean. People have lived there for over 2,000 years (but the population has never exceeded 200), cut off from the rest of the world. The book tells the moving story of the last St Kildans. In August 1930, the remaining 36 inhabitants were finally persuaded to evacuate the island by the British Government – a decision the community reluctantly accepted due to sickness and the lack of enough able-bodied men to continue working on the land.
When these last islanders, and their few belongings, were transported to the mainland, twenty-seven of them disembarked at Lochaline – having accepted offers of employment on the estate at Ardtornish, Argyll.
Photo: typical men’s morning business “meeting”, St Kilda, 1886.
PS: Up until the mid-1800s, St Kilda’s inhabitants couldn’t read or write; they spoke only Gaelic; they had no knowledge of what was happening beyond their tiny islands; they didn’t know what a tree was (the islands were essentially a small group of towering rocks); the weather was unforgiving; communication with the outside world was virtually non-existent; they had some sheep, dogs and a few cows; although they were surrounded by the ocean, their main staple food is not fish (the waters are often too violent for fishing when they only had fairly primitive boats); they relied on the thriving birdlife for the bulk of their food… they were perhaps the only bird-eating community the world has ever had.
PPS: The irony is that the island’s lack of sustainability only came about after sporadic communications with the mainland had been established in the late nineteenth century/early years of the twentieth century… with occasional visits from tourists and the tentative beginnings of the postal service opened some people’s eyes to what they saw as “opportunities” to leave. Soon, it seemed they had only two choices: leave and survive or remain and perish from hunger, sickness and for lack of enough able-bodied men to continue working on the land, harvest the birds, mend the boats and do other chores “only men can do”. Many of them left willingly, some wanted to remain…

the man who saved bristol harbourside…

You almost certainly won’t have heard of Jerry Hicks.

He died, aged 86, earlier this month but, if you live in Bristol (or are just enthusiastic about the city’s many charms), I thought you might like to know that this man, along with his wife Anne, effectively saved the city’s floating harbour in 1969.
The docks were no longer economically viable and the City Docks Parliamentary Act proposed taking up of large areas by roads crossing the harbour (including an extension of the M32 into the city and, ultimately, linking with the M5), the construction of three bridges to carry motorways and the decking or filling in of parts of the docks themselves so that these could be given over to other uses.
When this became public knowledge, there was an outcry and the Bristol City Docks Group, of which Jerry Hicks was a leading member (he was also an executive member of Bristol Civic Society), was formed to fight the ratification of the Parliamentary act in order to maintain the use of the docks both by smaller vessels – yachts, dinghies and launches – and by tall ships coming up the river and tying-up in the centre of the city.
Strangely, I became aware of the motorway proposals during my last year as an architectural student in 1972/73 – when I was using Bristol as the geographical focus for my final-year thesis. I came across initial plans showing the proposed new motorway routes through the city centre and remember feeling absolutely horrified by what I saw. It was only a week or so later that I realised that these plans had in fact been rejected – thanks to a passionate and vociferous fight by a local campaign group (which obviously included Jerry Hicks).
To many people at the time, the road scheme no doubt made sense – an opportunity to purchase substantial tracks of land at relatively low prices. It was, after all, largely run-down industrial properties and land associated with the docks plus the large sections covered by water (which, of course no one would ever want again!).
I’m afraid it was another case of a city being re-planned by highway engineers (my own home city of Birmingham was another case in point in the 1960s).
These days, I occasionally take sixth form groups of budding urban designers/planners/architects/geographers around the city and highlight how the city has evolved during the course of its history and, particularly, since the final demise of the docks in the early 1970s. Needless to say, as we wander along the vibrant harbourside and try to imagine what MIGHT have been, it seems almost unreal that people could have been so short-sighted.
Thank goodness for visionaries like Jerry Hicks.
Photo: Jerry Hicks on Bristol Harbourside (acknowledgement: The Bristol Post).

dallas buyers club

I went to the Watershed this afternoon to see Jean-Marc Vallee’s film “Dallas Buyers Club” – based on the true story of accidental AIDS activist and homophobe, Ron Woodroof (no doubt with the occasional embellishments from the writers!). Set in 1986, in the early, very scary, days of the AIDS epidemic, the main character (quite brilliantly played by Matthew McConaughey) ends up in hospital following a work accident and discovers he’s HIV positive and that he has 30 days to live. He ends up “researching” alternative treatments (completely against the law and much to the annoyance of the authorities!) with his unlikely, transgender woman business partner Rayon (again, impressively portrayed by Jared Leto) and sets up a club where $400 membership comes with a month’s supply of medication. Needless to say, Woodroof didn’t cram all this activity into his final 30 days - he did manage to extend his life for a little longer…

It’s a brilliant, powerful, brutally-funny, sad, yet beautiful film and I think you should definitely see it if you can… one of the best films I’ve seen over the past six months or so.