Geography and How We've Lost It

The Mendips seen across the Somerset Levels

I used to love Geography as a subject when I was at school. It seemed so practical and useful. I learned how to read maps and what map features signified, which came in valuable later when I joined the TA. We learned where places were, and why they may have been built there.  We leaned things about the weather; but not too much. We knew the capital cities of every country - even the trick ones like Australia and Canada - and many of the general knowledge questions which we had to answer as part of our annual test at prep school were based on geographic knowledge. And when I began work dealing with people and ships in every part of the globe, I found myself well-prepared to find the tiny ports that no one has ever heard of but where some problem had occurred, and deal with geographic singularities such as the huge and dangerous troughs that form where the Aguhlas current meets the Indian Ocean and into which ships' bows can fall, as well as the astonishingly swift currents that run in Japan's Inland Sea around Imabari and the incredible tides of Bhavnaghar.

Much later, I became astonished at the decline in basic geographic knowledge among the young and then began to realise that despite the beauty and facility of Google Earth and their maps, the rise of the Sat Nav was also causing an apparent loss of interest in the features of the journey. I even wrote on Facebook, 'I wish that my Sat Nav told one the history of the country through which one is passing'.

Now a book has been written - 'Never Eat Shredded Wheat' by Christopher Somerville, which captures my unease. He writes: 'So why don't we see what is there any more? Is it bad teaching of the basics? No teaching of the basics? ...Half a dozen theories:

1. Children don't get out and wander about their local streets and countyryside as they used to, because this generation of parents, bewitched by health and safety, harbours irrational fears about traffic, or stranger danger, or accidents by flood or field. Therefore children never learn to absorb the landmarks, unimportant in themselves - a tree, a gate, a bend in the lane - that make up their own personal geography.
2. We are all frantic to get where we are going quickly as possible. Work pressures, social arrangements, I-can-be-there-for-a-meeting-if-I-leave-home-at-4am - our fast cars and 125mph trains and Edinburgh-in-forty-minutes planes force the pace, and we blindly follow.
3. We don't need to look out of the window at the outside world, because the outside world is now inside the car or bus or train carriage with us: the boss on the mobile, the Stock Market on the mobile internet, the e-mail bleeping on the Blackberry, the news on the laptop.
4. In spite of being more contactable by the outside world, we are more insulated from it. What do the rainy hills, the budding trees or the sun-driend fields, the smell of the earth or the crunch of an icy puddle have to do with the cosy cut-off world we inhabit as we flash by - a world whose sounds, smells, climate, light and shade we can select to suit ourselves at the touch of a button.
5. And that applies to foot and bike travellers too, iPods plugged in, shades on, insulated by Gore-Tex and Neoprene, pumped up by adrenaline advertising, staring ahead and burning calories, using the countryside as a gym - To the Max! Go for it! Rippin' Up the Ridgeway!
6. Planning a journey, and then doing it, have been reduced by GPS, Sat Nav and Google Maps and other positional and directional tools to a matter of a) where to start, and b) where to finish.
Everything in between is taken care of by 'someone else'- namely the little personal servant goblin who lives in the gizmo and tells us exactly where to turn left and how far it is to the next service station. So we read Ordnance Survey maps and road atlases less; we have less peripheral context about any given place because we're missing the wealth of superfluous but civilising and enriching detail inherent in maps, so plump with facts and knowledge, so redolent of our huge heritage of national culture and history. To move through a GPS landscape of grey blanks knitted together by spider lines is to negate the very notion of Stevenson-style travelling. Lay the Google and the OS 1:25,000 Explorer maps of the Stonehenge area side by side. On Google, roads and a ghostly hint of buildings. That's it. On the Explorer, all round the mighty henge itself: ridged and billowing downland, ancient trackways, processional paths, long barrows and tumuli where our distant lordly ancestors lie buried, the mysterious banking of the Cursus track, copses and spinneys bounded by unexplained earthworks.

So we actually need all this stuff to go from Amesbury to Winterbourne Stoke? No, we don't. Should we delight in it and feel grateful to be part of it, and smack our imaginative lips over it and be inspired to come back and explore it with a flower book and an archaeology book on a sunny day soon? Absolutely.'

How much I agree - though I still love the Tom Tom when I'm late and lost!

Leonard Cohen The Master

Leonard Cohen at St Margarethen

I first heard Leonard Cohen when he was playing his songs on a beach in the South of France in 1964. Ever since he has been the most interesting and influential of singers and songwriters to me and many of my generation.

He disappeared from public life in 1993 and entered a Buddhist monastery. In 2000  he encountered Ramesh Balsekar and spend six months with him before realising the master's teachings for himself. 

Incredibly after almost 50 years, his career now appears to be at its height. From 2008 onwards, he has undertaken on an almost non-stop concert tour of the world. He's now 75) He's singing in Sydney in November and will give a final concert  in Las Vegas in December (he has avoided singing in the USA until now).  


So powerful are his concerts that when the tour arrived in New Zealand in January 2009, Simon Sweetman wrote in The Dominion Post "It is hard work having to put this concert into words so I'll just say something I have never said in a review before and will never say again: this was the best show I have ever seen." 

His has also been voted the best performance of everyone who has headlined at Glastonbury.



His tour repertoire is roughly the same at each performance and has been beautifully captured in the DVD 'Live in London' recorded at the O2 in November 2008. When he appeared in the 2nd century Roman stone quarry amphitheatre at St Margarethen in Burgenland, on 5th September 2010, the concert was equally stunning, but the performance was the more remarkable in that the temperature that night was only 11C (see the scarf he is wearing in the photo above).


In addition to his songs, his stage performance is characterised by the reverence he shows for his fellow musicians, introducing each of them with gentle laudatory words and often kneeling before them as they perform solo riffs. They have been the same throughout his world tour - a backing trio of Sharon Robinson and Hattie and Charlie Webb,  accompanied by Roscoe Beck (bass, vocals and musical director),  Neil Larsen (keyboards & Hammond B3 accordion), Bob Metzger (electric, acoustic & pedal steel guitar), Javier Mas from Barcelona (bandurria, laud, archilaud, 12 string acoustic guitar), Rafael Gayol (drums, percussion) and Dino Soldo (sax, clarinet dobro – keys) all of who are nothing less than the finest virtuoso musicians in their own right. It says much for his personality and character that the entire group has travelled the world playing countless concerts with him for over two years. If you can't now get to one of his final concerts, do order the DVD. 


Click here for a recent New York Times article 

Postscript: Following his death in November 2016, there has been an outpouring of love and appreciation for his unique talent. Some wonderful eulogies have been written, this one in The Big Issue:

"There are people, a small number of people, who are navigators. They see things, plot the course, and we hitch up behind them. The very best of these people are with us on lifelong trips. They find ways to communicate in ways that the rest of us can't. They are associated with certain memories that are buried deep and hardwired. The great ones, like Leonard Cohen, are also very funny. Without a sense of humour, whether it lands darkly or in crapfalls, we really are lost. The sadness felt at someone like Leonard Cohen dying is really a complex thing. A permanence eroded, the world feeling a little darker, intelligence dimmed. And I have yet to find a Cohen fan that I didn't like.' Paul McNamee.

Favourite Places

Arundel Castle. Click for a larger view

Coventry's Awe-Inspiring Cathedral II

I was fortunate enough to make another visit to Coventry to hear a talk at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and have time to visit the new Cathedral when the sun was shining. Not everyone likes the new building's exterior, but no one can fail to be moved by the awe-inspiring atmosphere within it. I have mentioned some of the modern masterpieces that beautify the interior elsewhere - the Sutherland Tapestry, the Baptistry Window, the Beyer tablets and others, but with sunshine was able to see them again in a fresh light. Click the heading for some more photos.

See Coventry's Awe-Inspiring Cathedral
Coventry Cathedral

An Inland Voyage at The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum

Stephen Pochin with members of one of the canal families

Robert Longden was a machinist at Alfred Herbert's main Edgewick works in Coventry while pursuing photography as his hobby as a member of the Alfred Herbert Photographic Society (which later became the Coventry Photographic Society),  particularly photographing the canal boats and families who lived on them around the Hawkesbury canal junction. Many of his fine black and white photographs, developed in his darkroom under the stairs of his house, were thrown out by his wife after his death in 1957, and the rest were lost until his great-grandson, Stephen Pochin (himself a photographer) found and restored them from the original slides.

Stephen gave a fascinating talk on Robert Longden's work in the gallery at The Herbert displaying some 40 of his best surviving photographs, explaining their history and the scenes depicted. Particularly moving was the presence at the talk of several of the children shown by Longden as living on the barges, some of who spoke of their hard but happy lives on the water before the canals were nationalised and their way of life ended.

Click here for a description of the exhibition by a canal enthusiast and the heading for some more photos from the talk

Travels in Hampshire and Berkshire

Bill Reed at the Lychgate into Litchfield Churchyard

On Sunday, I met an old friend, Father Frowin Reed and his father Bill, who had come over from Tennessee to stay while Frowin looked after the Roman Catholic parish of Didcot. Bill Reed and I drove down to Newbury, a town he had visited last in 1965 when he was serving in the US Army, and then on to Litchfield and Dunley.

Bill Reed examining gravestones in Litchfield Churchyard

Bill's family has ancient connections with Litchfield. He had a particular interest in one Nicholas Webber who was vicar of Litchfield and died in 1657, and had a copy of his will which contained familiar local names such as Kingsmill and Cold (now Cole) Henley. Bill searched the graveyard for signs of him and we found one gravestone marked NW, but the date - 1706, was a generation or two too early to have been his. But another ancestor by the name of Biggs who had eluded search so far, turned up in the church itself when we opened a newly presented book of Psalms and inside was the inscription 'In Memory of Lilian Biggs 1917-2007'.

Bill Reed with the present vicar, the Rev Hamilton Lloyd

Lucie Winterson's Exhibition

Lucie Winterton is an artist who bases her work on natural materials like sand and water which she directs to flow over photographs of rivers and landscapes. She says: 'Over these I work pigments, earth and acrylic wash - tipping and tilting the surface of the canvas and using big brushes and mops to move the paint around. I watch and partially control the bloomings of colour, sedimentations of sand and the tide lines that dry at the edges of pools'.

 

She has a fine exhibition at 60 Threadneedle St in the City. Click the heading for more photos.

Click here for some more of her paintings

Favourite Blogs - The Master Draper Blog

The current Master of the Drapers' Livery Company, Maj-Gen Adrian Lyons, describes his blog thus:

'I think Master Draper Blog is the first time that any master of a London Livery Company has ever tried to describe his/her year leading one of these fascinating organisations.

The Drapers' Company is one of the older livery companies and because of the importamce of the finished wool cloth trade to London, and the wider English economy, five hundred years ago we are ranked as the third company in seniority.

Today there are over a hundred livery companies in London focussed on an extrordinarily wide range of trade related and charitable activities.

Our website www.thedrapers.co.uk gives a good overview of what we do across a wide range of charitable activities.

I hope my blog will describe a year where ancient ceremonial, promoting a wide range of charitable activity and maintaining a great organisation to continue its proud traditions into the future will blend together to create an interesting insight into one of London's great institutions'.


I am proud that the Master of 'my' Livery Company has taken up this very modern challenge. Already his posts are revealing details of the Company's work that the Liverymen themselves have little current knowledge about and are very glad to learn. He should also help to dispel some of the unwonted mystique surrounding these purely charitable institutions as well as encourage deserving beneficiaries to find willing sources of funding in these straitened times. But it's going to be a hard act for his successors to follow!

Click the heading to read the blog itself

Rainbow

Seen from the garden

Favourite Blogs - Spitalfields Life

Dennis Server's House at 18 Folgate St

Spitalfields Life is a captivating blog by an unnamed 'gentle author' who introduces himself evocatively thus:

'In the midst of life I woke and found myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London.

Over the coming days, weeks, months and years, I am going to write every single day and tell you about my life here in Spitalfields at the heart of London. How can I ever describe the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture in this place to you? This is both my task and my delight.

Let me disclose to you the hare-brained ambition I am pursuing, which is to write at least ten thousand posts about Spitalfields life. At the rate of one a day, this will take approximately twenty-seven years and four months. Who knows what kind of life we shall be living in 2037 when I write my ten thousandth post?

I do not think there will be any shortage of material, though it may be difficult to choose what to write of because the possibilities are infinite. Truly all of human life is here in Spitalfields.

It is my custom to walk everywhere in London and I discover things on my walks, so you will also find stories here from the many places that are within walking distance of Spitalfields.

The days go by quickly and I am always eager to discover more stories. It is through meeting more people and learning more about this place that my understanding will grow and this project will evolve. I am open to all approaches.

Every Sunday, I get up early and walk to Columbia Road Market, buy some plants and write a weekly report to create an account of the seasons at the flower market. Knowing that I must not disappoint you enables me to get out of bed and fills my garden with plants too.

Like Good Deeds and Everyman in the old play, let us travel together. I promise to keep writing to you every day and it will be an eventful journey we shall have together.'

The 'gentle author' - who I believe to be a man, although that simple fact is never made clear - has made good on his promise; a new post arrives each morning - beautifully drawn stories of people, shops, streets and buildings, filled with sympathetic insights into the lives of those he describes. I doubt whether any part of London has been so closely observed. For me, it's a mixture of Gilbert White and the prose of the unnamed writer who used many years ago to pen a weekly column for The Field. And although it began only in August 2009, it's already a masterpiece.

On Spitalfields, this piece by Raphael Samuel in July 1988, will explain its significance and history

Spitalfields is the oldest industrial suburb in London. It was already densely peopled and “almost entirely built over,” in 1701 when Lambeth was still a marsh, Fulham a market garden and Tottenham Court Rd a green. It owes its origins to those refugee traditions which, in defiance of the Elizabethan building regulations, and to escape the restrictions of the City Guilds, settled in Bishopsgate Without and the Liberty of Norton Folgate.

Spitalfields is a junction between, on the one hand, a settled, indigenous population, and on the other, wave upon wave of newcomer. Even when it was known as ‘The Weavers’ Parish,’ it was still hospitable to many others – poor artisans, street sellers, labourers among them. In the late nineteenth century Spitalfields was one of the great receiving points for Jewish immigration and the northern end of the parish provided a smilar point of entry for country labourers. There was a whole colony of them at Great Eastern Buildings in the eighteen eighties, working as draymen at the brewery, and another at the Bishopsgate Goods Station. This ‘mixed’ character of the neighbourhood is very much in evidence today.

Spitalfields Market – threatened with imminent destruction by a coalition of property developers, City Fathers, and conservationists – is almost as old as Spitalfields. It was already in existence when the area was still an artillery range. In John Stow’s ‘Survey of London’ (1601) it appears a trading point “for fruit, fowl and root.” A market sign was incorporated in the coat of arms for the Liberty of Norton Folgate in Restoration times, and the market’s Royal Charter dates from 1682. The market, in short, preceded the arrival of the Hugeunots and has some claim to being Spitalfields’ original core. The market continued as a collection of ramshackle sheds and stalls until it was transformed, in the 1870s, by Robert Horner, who bought the lease of the land from the Goldsmid family in 1875. Horner was a crow scarer from Essex who, according to market myth, walked to London, became a porter in the market and eventually got a share in a firm. Ambitiously, he set about both securing monopoly rights for the existing traders, and replacing the impromptu buildings with a purpose built market hall – the “Horner” buildings which today is the oldest part of the market complex.

The older, eastern portion of the market is the direct product of Robert Horner’s vision of his own situation. It is built in the manner of the English Arts & Crafts movement. On its own terms, the old market is a pleasing piece and a worthy addition to the diversity of Spitalfields. Its rusticated archways on the Commercial St facade and the repeated peaks of the roof with their smallish sash windows lend a clearly Victorian flavour to Commercial St, which was largely a Victorian venture anyway. Inside the market it is a vintagely Victorian hall of glass and iron of unassuming beauty, even more so when at work, then its true worth as a genuinely functioning piece of Victorian space is revealed. Like St. Pancras in a different way, it has an element of the museum and an aesthetic that overlays the original construction upon utilitarian principles. Most of all the old market appears as a peculiarly English space. An effect that is heightened by the lavish use of ‘Wimbledon’ green. It is that deep traditional green that characterises English municipal space and that, in this case helps to marry the market to the discordant additions of the late 1920’s and to give distinction to the territorial boundaries of the market that have been historically more fluid.

The old market is a celebration of trade, a great piece of Victorian working space, not only of great historical value itself, but contributing to the visual manifestation of the historical development of the whole of Spitalfields. It is a worthy layer in an area that grew by a sort of architectural sedimentation. Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, the Huguenot fronts of Artillery Passage, the Georgian elegance of Elder St and the smaller houses of Wilkes St and Princelet St, the mid-Victorian utility of the Peabody Buildings, the rustic character of the old market, the twentieth century neo-classicism of the Fruit Exchange and several examples of a more unspeakable modernity are some among many accretions which contribute to make Spitalfields what it is. The most perfect example of a palimpsest in which diversity rather than Georgiana or Victoriana represent the true nature of the area.

The character of a district is determined not by its buildings, but by the ensemble of different uses to which they are put, and, above all, by the character of the users. It should be obvious to all but the self-deceived, that to stick an international banking centre in the heart of an old artisan and market quarter, a huge complex with some six thousand executives and subalterns, is, to put it gently, a rupture from tradition. The whole industrial economy of Spitalfields rests on cheap work rooms: rentals in the new office complex are some eight times greater than they are in the purlieus of Brick Lane, and with the dizzy rise in property values which will follow the new development, accommodation of all kinds, whether for working space or home, will be beyond local people.  The market scheme will mean a social revolution, the inversion of what Spitalfields has stood for during four centuries of metropolitan development.

The fate of Spitalfields market illustrates in stark form some of the paradoxes of contemporary metropolitan development: on the one hand, the preservation of ‘historic’ houses; on the other, the wholesale destruction of London’s hereditary occupations and trades and the dispersal of its settled communities. The viewer is thus confronted with two versions of ‘enterprise’ culture: the one that of family business and small scale firms, the other that of international high finance with computer screens linking the City of London to the money markets of the world.

Raphael Samuel  22nd July 1988