Today is apparently Alexander Calder’s 113th Birthday and to celebrate, Google have replaced the usual search logo with one of their frequent commemorative logos (doodles), in this case an interactive 2d representation of one of Alex Calder’s famous mobiles.Also, note the shadow below the search box and buttons, and on some laptops, if you rock the laptop from side to side, the mobile moves and swings, making use of the inbuilt accelerometer (Not on iPad though)Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogAmazing Alex Calder Logo on GoogleRelated posts:SearchWiki from Google is LIVEAt last google reader has a search boxGoogle vs Yahoo
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Amazing Alex Calder Logo on Google
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/22/amazing-alex-calder-logo-on-google
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July 22 2011, 2:04am | Comments »
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Arts venues band together to fund new festival of finest radical theatre
Not Edinburgh or London but a Nottingham international arts and theatre festival. Nottingham’s Neat 11 theatre festival opens on 26 May 2011.
This article titled “Arts venues band together to fund new festival of finest radical theatre” was written by Vanessa Thorpe, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.06 UTC It might not seem the right time to launch an international arts festival, but Nottingham is to take this fearless step. Later this spring the city will hold neat11, the first Nottingham European arts and theatre festival, to prove the way to beat the cuts in the arts is to pool resources. Nottingham Playhouse has joined the city council, the regeneration body One Nottingham and many of the city’s other arts venues – including the Theatre Royal, Lakeside Arts Centre, and the Broadway Cinema – to present a range of radical theatre, music, film and visual art from across Europe between 26 May and 12 June. The festival will showcase the work of leading foreign companies such as Det Norske Teatret, Deutsches Theater and Theatre Nowy alongside the work of British companies including Cheek By Jowl and Gob Squad. In the face of reduced grants from Arts Council England, funding of £98,000 has been earmarked for the project. “This is work you would not be able to see anywhere else in the country,” said Giles Croft, the artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse. “Audiences will be able to see great performers from Kosovo, Bulgaria and Denmark. And for me, key highlights are Deutsches Theater’s productionq of Woyzeck by Georg Büchner, using the songs of Tom Waits, along with the only UK performance this year of Cheek by Jowl’s Three Sisters, performed in Russian. I am also really looking forward to Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther by Det Norske Teatret from Norway.” Croft argues the festival will emphasise the “strong cultural life” of Nottingham. “Bringing this kind of work here will also demonstrate that it is a European city. We are hoping we can bring the festival back in two years time and establish it as a bienniale. I am absolutely confident we can make it a success.”
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May 3 2011, 5:29am | Comments »
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Tesco protesters charged after second night of violence in Bristol
Police appeal for informants to identify others involved in violent disorder surrounding Tesco opening in Bristol Stokes Croft riots area
This article titled “Tesco protesters charged after second night of violence in Bristol” was written by Jamie Doward, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.06 UTC Two people have been charged following a second round of violent protests against the opening of a Tesco shop in Bristol. Stephen Carroll, 32, was charged with assaulting a police officer and criminal damage. A 17-year-old, who cannot be named, is accused of violent disorder and theft. The two were among 30 people detained after violence in the Stokes Croft area of the city saw officers and protesters injured early on Friday. A further 13 men and two women remain in custody, while 12 men have been released on bail pending further inquiries, police said. The violence, which saw stones, bottles and other missiles thrown, came a week after high-profile demonstrations followed the shop’s opening. CCTV images of more than 80 people were issued by police following the first eruption, which came after officers raided a flat in search of petrol bombs they believed were about to be thrown at the shop. “I am appealing to the community, to residents, and traders and other people whose lives have been severely disrupted, whose property may have been damaged and whose personal safety may have been put at risk by the violence,” said assistant chief constable Rod Hansen. “I urge people to study the photographs, and if you think you know any of these people and where they might be, please contact us.” Police said Thursday night’s demonstration began as a “good-spirited event” attended by eight neighbourhood beat officers. But the crowd grew from about 250 to more than 400.
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Related posts:Bristol Stokes Croft Riot Bristol 1831 Mural Artist compares Arab Spring 2011 and Bristol Stokes Croft Riots UK Uncut accuses police of politically motivated arrests
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May 2 2011, 9:33am | Comments »
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This week’s new exhibitions
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/30/this-weeks-new-exhibitions
Ian Hamilton Finlay | Rob Churm | Young British Art | John Salt | Amanda Ross-Ho | The Count Of Monte Cristo | Norfolk & Norwich Festival | Kit Craig & Andrew Lim
This article titled “This week’s new exhibitions” was written by Robert Clark & Skye Sherwin, for The Guardian on Friday 29th April 2011 23.06 UTC Ian Hamilton Finlay, London Swamped by a tide of fleeting tweets, it feels good to be reminded of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish artist and poet who made language a thing of concrete beauty. Finlay was obsessed by classical culture and ideals but not in the fusty academic sense. He mined the epics for pressing themes like sex, death and violent revolution. “Zimmerat-haunting wood nymph”, reads one of his works in leafy green neon. To specialists in military history, a zimmerat’s a protective coating used on second world war-era tanks, but for Finlay it becomes a magnet for the hotties of Greek myth. A selection of his sculptures are being offset by “definitions” stencilled on the wall, using his own peculiar dictionary. Victoria Miro, N1, Thu to 1 Jun Skye Sherwin Rob Churm, Glasgow Rob Churm explains the title of this exhibition, The Exhaustion Hook, thus: “The hook looks like a leminscate but it feels like a ball bearing.” Clear? He deals in deliberate graphic bewilderments. A central figure of his etchings and wall drawings in Tipp-Ex and Biro is his alter ego Prame, a character who apparently dates back to Churm’s zine comics The Thirteen Flashbacks Of Prame and My Visions. This would all add up to pseudo-surreal wackiness if it weren’t for the artist’s subtle ability to mix dreamworld doodling with compositions of geometric precision. So Death wields a bladeless scythe amid a congregation of hardly credible angels and dragons as, elsewhere, good old Prame paddles across the River Styx in a toy canoe. Sorcha Dallas, to 27 May Robert Clark Young British Art, London As an artist, Ryan Gander’s known for his love of mystery and chance, peppering his sculptures, films and lectures with personal anecdotes and oddball cultural references. Here he turns curator, bringing together work by 38 young artists whose only point of connection is – in the words of the press release – that they’re “exceptionally talented”, and that every work selected is in black and white. The rest is left to merry happenstance. Look out for work by last year’s Cartier Award winner, Simon Fujiwara, who transformed sections of the Frieze Art Fair into an archaeological dig uncovering a fantasy bisexual, amoral and thoroughly hedonistic ancient city dedicated to art. Then there’s The Hut Project, a collective with a self-deprecating take on artworld conventions, as with their self-organised retrospective at the ICA a few years back, rascally titled Old Kunst. Limoncello, E2, to 4 Jun SS John Salt, Birmingham With this first retrospective, John Salt returns to his city of birth, where he was the first artist to exhibit at the Ikon in 1965. With a typically meticulous airbrush and stencil technique, Salt has painted pictures of American cars, plain and simple. Yet these on-the-road images follow the American capitalist dream as it has stretched from the cars dumped under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge in the late-60s through to the cars abandoned outside 1990s trailer parks. It’s the deadpan focus of these paintings that affords them a chill air of psychological tension reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s earlier deserted cityscapes. But, unlike Hopper, Salt leaves out the protagonists. Ikon Gallery, Wed to 17 Jul RC Amanda Ross-Ho, London This LA-based artist’s work is a puzzle mixing personal history with 21st-century flotsam. Her sculptural assemblages and photo collages have included such disparate items as chunks of her studio wall, her old shopping bags and cat litter. And while she also uses family photographs, the history isn’t always obvious: coming from a tribe of professional snappers means these have included parental portraits and coolly close-lipped product shots. Here, a needlepoint diagram bearing the words “Time Waits For No One” is the jumping-off point. The Approach, E2, Fri to 5 Jun SS The Count Of Monte Cristo, Manchester Alexandre Dumas’s 19th-century tale of unjust imprisonment, treasure hunting, role playing and revenge provides the subject for present day reflections by five contemporary artists: Annabel Dover, Hayley Lock, Cathy Lomax, Alex Pearl and Memei Thompson. The angle is pretty ironic, as a project is proposed to use Arts Council money to assassinate thousands of artistic rivals (surprise, surprise: the Arts Council declined the funding application). Posters of aristocratic heartbeats are painted with utterly swooning brushstrokes (Lord Wilmore: “As rich as a goldmine and eccentric almost to insanity.”) The formal classicism of French garden design is digitally transformed into spaced-out hallucinations. Elsewhere, reproductions of aristocratic party scenes are defaced with viral rashes, and a spy camera is covertly used to investigate the V&A’s collection of miniature eye jewels.
Rogue Artists’ Studios & Project Space, to 6 May RC Norfolk & Norwich Festival The Norfolk & Norwich Festival has a pedigree that pre-dates Glastonbury. Begun as a music fest back in the 18th century, it now runs the gamut from circus acts to ballet and theatre. Kicking off this week, it ushers in a month of stand-out exhibition openings. Highlights include Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s show dedicated to Jean Genet, the gay French author beloved by the existentialists, with an unexpected connection to Norwich: Genet’s fascination with rebels and petty crims took him to the city for the wedding of his lover’s car-thief stepson. Later there’s a show featuring Hubert Duprat’s exquisite hybrids of precious gems and metals with caddis fly larvae at Nottingham Castle (14 May-29 Aug). A collaboration between man and fly, this work features larvae of just 2–3mm creating protective sheaths for themselves from gold, opals, pearls, rubies and diamonds. Chaimowicz: The Gallery at NUCA, Fri to 21 May SS Kit Craig & Andrew Lim, Manchester A complementary show of sculptural and graphic enigmas. Craig draws diagrams of contraptions seemingly designed for experiments into human perception or the inner machinations of the psyche. They tend to have mystic or mysterious titles such as Hermit’s Lampshade and Holomonic Model. Lim’s sculptures are precariously balanced abstract structures with titles as self-explanatory as Pressed Against One Another or as declamatory as O, OU, OUT. Together they’ve come up with an apt collective exhibition title: On Measuring Uncertainty. Castlefield Gallery, to 29 May RCguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
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April 30 2011, 6:38am | Comments »
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A misplaced May Day dream for the masses
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/29/a-misplaced-may-day-dream-for-the-masses
May Day by John Sommerfield describes a society on the edge. The parallels with today are obvious – but it’s the differences that make it worth reading.
This article titled “A misplaced May Day dream for the masses” was written by Sam Jordison, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 29th April 2011 14.15 UTC It might have associations with people in funny clothes performing arcane rites and with Oxford students getting smashed off their gourds, but most us don’t think about Tories when we think about May Day. As several union leaders have already pointed out, the party’s current desire to replace May Day with Trafalgar Day (supposedly to “lengthen the holiday season”) is not practical so much as ideological. May Day might feel like a natural part of the calendar – but it has only been marked by a bank holiday since 1978, introduced by a Labour government to mark international workers’ day. And that, of course, is why the rightwingers don’t like it. They’d like it even less if they picked up the book that I’ve just been reading: May Day by John Sommerfield. This was written in 1936, but has just been reissued, with excellent timing, by London Books. It describes a society on the edge. The rich are getting richer and the poor are paying for it. The authorities clamp down on protest with the cynical use of force. Someone on a march is killed in an “accident”. The success of a march leads someone to comment: “I don’t think there’ll be so much damned squeamish argument against arming the police.” The parallels with our current troubles are obvious – but it’s the differences that make May Day worth reading. Sommerfield describes a few days in the lives of dozens of different characters across London, showing them at work, at play, down the pub, in bed, making love, feeling regret the day after, giving birth, dying, plotting to overthrow the bosses, plotting to undermine the workers. It’s a broad, ambitious sweep, but it’s all heading in the same direction: the inevitability of a general strike and the exultant victory of the Communist point of view. By the time Sommerfield was writing, Stalin had embarked on one of the biggest murder sprees in human history, but Sommerfield pants for Soviet Britain. So much so that he frequently loses all restraint:
“Then into this sudden pool of quiet splintered an alien voice, a hoarse shout of ‘Workers, all out on May Day. Demonstrate for a free Soviet Britain!’ … This rang in a million ears. Eyes remembered the chalked slogans on walls and pavements. The slogans, the rain of leaflets, the shouts and songs of demonstrators echoed in a million minds.” He also gushes:
“The printing presses were spinning themselves dizzy. There had never been so many leaflets before. They fell like rain, they were scattered like machine gun bullets.” Sommerfield loved his leaflets. He was also absolute in his convictions. For him there are two races in the world – rich and poor and that is where all conflict will lie. “Soon a lot more people will be having to take sides,” he wrote. They did indeed – but not in the way he thought. They would be fighting against fascism, not for “Soviet Britain”. There are plenty of things to be said in the book’s favour, particularly in the ambitious way he looks into so many lives around London, explores their living conditions, and lays bare their pleasures and pains. There’s also plenty more to be said against his writing which veers from the ridiculous to the not-too-bad and never really gets close to the sublime. Yet it’s as an attempt at social realism that it is most fascinating – and most flawed. In 1984 Sommerfield wrote a new forward for the book acknowledging how few favours time had done for his “1930s Communist romanticism”, but also said he hoped the book could be read as “an historical novel – worth reading, now, I hope, in relation to our own times.” To an extent it can. But I read it more as a reflection on a lost past and an exercise in folly. Possibly, it is harsh to judge Sommerfield’s May Day, for getting things so spectacularly wrong. It’s a novel, after all. It deals in fiction, not fact. But then again, while I was reading May Day, I couldn’t help thinking of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novella with the same title. It’s just one mark of Fitzgerald’s genius that his reflections on the day – although written in 1920 – still apply. The protests he describes seem hopeless, futile, distorted by absurd mobs on both sides: “all crowds have to howl”. The rich are oblivious at best, unforgiving and condescending the rest of the time. The tragedies he depicts are universal – but also painfully personal. His lead, Gordon Sterett, is a penniless, struggling artist who has never found his feet since returning from the First World War, but who has found booze and bad company. He is drowning in the tide of history, but his problems are more individual than any Sommerfield manages to describe. He is more real. So too is the world around him. The clothes are smarter, the dancing is more formal and the drinks sound more exotic. No one has a smart phone and radicals print their views on paper. Otherwise, Fitzgerald could be writing about today – or forever. His despair and defeat for the small man rings far more true than Sommerfield’s misplaced dream for the masses. May Day is a crushed dream. It makes the Tory vendetta against the holiday seem even more than usually petty.
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April 29 2011, 9:47am | Comments »
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Bristol 1831 Mural Artist compares Arab Spring 2011 and Bristol Stokes Croft Riots
Bristol Riot by Scott Buchanan Barden A blank wall on Bath Road in Bristol has become host to a massive mural depicting one of the most horrific events in the city’s history. Now in a nearly complete state, the almost cartoon-like mural underlines what a precious gift democracy is and how difficult it is to attain. The artist, Scott Buchanan Barden, says his motivation to undertake this massive work was not simply to highlight a very important but largely forgotten milestone in the history of British democracy. In fact, he sees a clear parallel between the Bristol riots in 1831 and the current situation in North Africa and the Middle East where extreme brutality to suppress legitimate protest always seems to be the first instinct of the ruling classes. “At a time when attention is focussed on North Africa and the Middle East where ordinary people have been asserting their rights to greater democracy and an end to corruption, I feel it’s important to remind ourselves that the brutal treatment being meted out to them is not much different to what many citizens of Bristol were subjected to in similar circumstances just 180 years ago,” he explained. “We look on at current events in the Middle East with a degree of unwarranted arrogance and feeling of moral superiority, often forgetting that our own path to democracy was just as bloody. “What brought people onto the streets of Bristol was the fact that reactionary elements in the House of Lords had thwarted a parliamentary bill that would have enfranchised many more people in Britain. Public demand for this had been growing ever since the French Revolution 40 years earlier. “Out of a population in Bristol of some 104,000 at that time, only about 6,000 were eligible to vote and most of these were part of the establishment of property and business owners. Political corruption was endemic throughout Britain, with many MPs representing ‘rotten boroughs’ that had little or no electorate to speak of.” The artist went on to explain that it is interesting to note that military commanders are not always willing to carry out the kind of draconian measures against their own people often demanded by their political masters at such times. “The Egyptian army’s refusal to be Mubarak’s pawn a month or so ago was crucial in saving thousands of lives. Unfortunately the same doesn’t seem to have happened in Libya. In 1831, a local military commander – an Irish guy called Brereton – was initially reluctant to use force against the Bristol protesters and it was only after extreme political pressure that he did so. As a result, hundreds of people were butchered by his dragoons in and around Queen’s Square. “He was subsequently court-martialled, amazingly not for the massacre he had committed but for his initial leniency. He shot himself before the court-martial ended. “The Bristol event is a sad reflection of the fact that, no matter where it may be in the world, we seldom seem able to overcome oppression without innocent blood being spilled on a massive scale.” Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogBristol 1831 Mural Artist compares Arab Spring 2011 and Bristol Stokes Croft Riots
Related posts:Bristol Stokes Croft Riot Arab youth: the tipping point Artist Anish Kapoor warns arts cuts are ‘rolling us back to the Thatcher years’
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April 22 2011, 5:43pm | Comments »
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London walks podcast: Poetry and literature in Kensington Gardens
Sarah Crown strolls through Kensington Gardens, the Serpentine and the ponds, an enduring source of inspiration for authors and poets
This article titled “London walks podcast: Poetry and literature in Kensington Gardens” was written by Presented by Sarah Crown, produced by Francesca Panetta and Lucy Greenwell, with field recordings by Pascal Wyse, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 23rd February 2011 12.08 UTC London’s parks have been a source of escape and inspiration for centuries. Kensington Gardens has seen the likes of JM Barrie, Matthew Arnold and Ezra Pound scribbling lines in pads of paper as they sit on the park’s black benches. Sarah Crown explores the city sanctuary with Nick Lane, the park’s education and community engagement officer. They set off from the ornate Italian Gardens where the fountains play their own sort of music. To test the old adage, “inspiration doesn’t come by appointment”, poet, and Costa Book of the Year winner Jo Shapcott takes a parallel journey on her own through the gardens – with notebook in hand – to get her creative juices flowing. Sarah and Nick meander along the Serpentine towards the statue of Peter Pan, worn down over the decades by the hands of little children. JM Barrie erected the statue in the dead of night as a surprise for the park’s young visitors, to remind them that Peter Pan was dreamt up here, under the bows of the huge plane trees. Author William Boyd values the escape that London’s parks offer and explains why parks are so important to urban writers like him. Ever since he was a child, and especially after his wife died, poet Dannie Abse has sought sanctuary in London’s parks, and reads a poem that reminds him of his own park life. The bridge over the Serpentine is a good spot to survey the Lido, where the Serpentine Swimming Club members plunge into the waters every morning of the year, even if they have to bash through the ice first. Sarah stops by the Serpentine Gallery and then onto the Round Pond, where Paul Cavel, circle-walking meditation expert, takes us round and round the pond as a means of calming our minds, and healing our bodies. They finish in the shadow of Kensington Palace, where you can stop for a cup of tea in the Orangery. You can enjoy this documentary at home by listening here or you can download it on to your phone or mp3 player and take it out as a walking tour. Click here to download. And there is a map to go with the audio too.
Many thanks to: Nick Lane, education and community engagement officer for the park William Boyd Dannie Abse Jo Shapcott The Serpentine Swimming Club The Serpentine Gallery Paul Cavel of Circle Walking
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March 25 2011, 2:01pm | Comments »
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Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/24/douglas-adamss-doctor-who-story-to-be-novelised
The lost Doctor Who episodes serial by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams will be published sometime in March 2012
This article titled “Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who story to be novelised” was written by Benedicte Page, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 24th March 2011 14.58 UTC A novelisation of the “lost” Doctor Who serial Shada, scripted by Hitchhiker’s Guide author Douglas Adams in 1979, will be published next year. Adams wrote three series of Doctor Who in the late 1970s, when he was in his twenties and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first airing as a BBC radio comedy. Shada was intended as a six-part drama to finish off the 17th season, with Tom Baker in the role of the Doctor. The story features the Time Lord coming to Earth with assistant Romana (Lalla Ward) to visit Professor Chronotis, who has absconded from Gallifrey, the Doctor’s home planet, and now lives quietly at Cambridge college St Cedd’s. (The Doctor: “When I was on the river I heard the strange babble of inhuman voices, didn’t you, Romana?” Professor Chronotis: “Oh, probably undergraduates talking to each other, I expect.”) Chronotis has brought with him the most powerful book in the universe, The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey – which, in a typical touch of Adams bathos, turns out to have been borrowed from his study by a student. Evil scientist Skagra, an escapee from prison planet Shada, is on its trail. Large parts of the story had already been filmed on location in Cambridge before industrial action at the BBC brought production to a halt. The drama was never finished, and in the summer of 1980 Shada was abandoned – although various later projects attempted to resurrect it. Douglas Adams’s Doctor Who series are among the very few which have never been novelised, reportedly because the author wanted to do them himself but was always too busy. Gareth Roberts, a prolific Doctor Who scriptwriter, has now been given the job. Publisher BBC Books declared the book “a holy grail” for Time Lord fans. Editorial director Albert De Petrillo said: “Douglas Adams’s serials for Doctor Who are considered by many to be some of the best the show has ever produced. Shada is a funny, scary, surprising and utterly terrific story, and we’re thrilled to be publishing the first fully realised version of this Doctor Who adventure as Douglas originally conceived it.” Ed Victor, the literary agent representing the Douglas Adams estate, said: “The BBC have been asking us for years [to allow a novelisation of Shada] and the estate finally said, ‘Why not?’” Having Roberts novelise the Adams script was “like having a sketch on a canvas by Rubens, and now the studio of Rubens is completing it,” he added. The book will be published in March 2012 as a £16.99 hardback. Adams died in 2001, and a posthumous collection of his work, including the unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, was published the following year. A Hitchhiker’s Guide followup, And Another Thing…., written by Eoin Colfer, was published in 2010, but Victor said there were “no plans at the moment” for more such sequels.
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March 24 2011, 10:15am | Comments »
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Regional theatre should take more risks
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/23/regional-theatre-should-take-more-risks
Programming Barrie, Noël Coward or Daphne Du Maurier is understandable when times are tough. But if regional theatre wants to safeguard its future, it must look beyond plays of the past
This article titled “Regional theatre should take more risks” was written by Lyn Gardner, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 22nd March 2011 11.57 UTC A couple of years back, in a passionate post on this blog about regional theatre, the Royal and Derngate’s artistic director Laurie Sansom observed that “Regional artistic directors used to behave as if they were on Countdown: ‘I’ll have a Coward, please, a Shakespeare, a new play in the studio, and another Coward, please, Carol.’ These days, I can only imagine producing Noël Coward if an artist has a personal connection to the material and a burning desire to give it fresh theatrical life.” Two years is a long time in theatre. Since Sansom’s post on the vibrancy of programming in regional theatres, we’ve had an election, the formation of a coalition government that has no understanding of the crucial role theatre can play in its community both economically and socially, and the prospect of funding cuts. But it is clear that, long before the axes have fallen, many theatre programmes have taken on the look of a nervy Countdown selection. Perhaps it’s hardly surprising: just as hemlines go down in a recession, maybe artistic directors are inclined to look backwards rather than forwards. Perhaps even more importantly, it is a reminder how much confidence and psychology plays a part in creating the conditions necessary for a theatre to take risks, then reap the rewards. Back in 2001, the fact that there was money on the way (in the form of the £25 million that was injected into theatre after the Boyden report) created a sea-change in British regional theatre that was apparent long before theatres saw a penny of the cash. In the circumstances, then, perhaps it is no surprise that the seasons currently gracing our stages – in many cases programmed more than a year ago – reflect a certain nervousness about audience attendance, and suggest a headlong retreat into pre-Look Back in Anger drama. That impression may be somewhat skewed by the Rattigan centenary, not that I begrudge him his moment in the sun: Thea Sharrock’s timely (and award-winning) After the Dance at the National made as good a case for Rattigan’s rehabilitation as the Almeida’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea in 1993. But, even if you take Rattigan out of the equation, we’re still seeing a rash of Cowards and Priestleys, even the odd Du Maurier and W Somerset Maugham. Or how about Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton? Restoration comedy seems to be making a come-back too. I can’t recall so much interest in The Rivals since the 1980s. Of course there’s wrong with directors rummaging around in the theatrical attic and finding plays that glimmer in the dark. There are also horses for courses: Salisbury Playhouse, which recently saw a fine revival of The Constant Wife, may actually be the only theatre in the country where you could still do Somerset Maugham, and there is no one more qualified to do it well than Philip Wilson – who knows how to mine beneath a brittle surface and who, incidentally, has previously has proved himself a superb director of Coward. Sansom was right two years ago and he is still right now, in suggesting that it is a burning desire to give a play new theatrical life that makes it worth doing. The results can be transforming, as we saw in the 1990s with Stephen Daldry with An Inspector Calls, or have seen recently at the Finborough with a rare revival of Emlyn Williams’s Accolade. And David Grindley’s touring revival of Journey’s End demonstrates that even an old war horse can have real vigour and relevance. So I certainly don’t want to write off the plays of the past, but do want to point out that if regional theatre wants to safeguard its future it can’t play things too safe. It’s risk-taking that keeps theatre alive.
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March 23 2011, 6:22pm | Comments »
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Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor donate works to Cambridge gallery
Top British artists – including Barbara Hepworth, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor and Bridget Riley – contribute to fundraising sale at Kettle’s Yard
This article titled “Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor donate works to Cambridge gallery” was written by Maev Kennedy, for The Guardian on Monday 21st March 2011 18.54 UTC Work by some of Britain’s best-known 20th-century artists, including Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Barbara Hepworth and Bridget Riley, has been donated by the artists, their estates or collectors to raise funds for an extension to Kettle’s Yard, a small gallery and museum in Cambridge with an international reputation out of all proportion to its size. Hirst has donated a skeleton sculpture, St Avertin Syndrome Charity Spin, and work by Anthony Caro, Maggi Hambling, David Hockney, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Augustus John and Eric Gill is also included. Kettle’s Yard was the home of the late Jim Ede, a curator at the Tate in London who acquired a startling collection of contemporary work, including pieces by Henry Moore, Hepworth and many members of the St Ives school, as gifts from artist friends, or bought cheaply from their studios. He placed the paintings and sculptures among natural objects including driftwood, pebbles and shells, and kept open house every afternoon of the university term, guiding visitors around the works of art which filled every room of his home. One of the visitors was an economics student called Nicholas Serota, now director of the Tate, who has credited Ede with converting him to a life in the arts. In 1966 Ede gave the house and all its contents to the university, and in 1970 an exhibition gallery was added, but a fuller expansion is now planned, including for the first time museum-quality shops, an education centre and a cafe. All the donated works are for sale and are on display at the gallery until 8 May, in an exhibition entitled Artists for Kettle’s Yard.
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Related posts:Artist Anish Kapoor warns arts cuts are ‘rolling us back to the Thatcher years’ Olympics Anish Kapoor tower hopes to attract 1m visitors a year No Weekend Engineering Works
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March 22 2011, 10:06am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Divine decadence
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/21/divine-decadence
Glass of absinthe in hand, Jonathan Glancey takes the Eurostar to Paris to explore the art nouveau movement’s sinuous roots.
This article titled “Divine decadence” was written by Jonathan Glancey, for The Guardian on Saturday 11th March 2000 17.51 UTC In 1900, curators from the Victoria & Albert Museum took themselves to Paris to shop at the great Exposition Universelle held that year in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and along the banks of the Seine. The V&A team was not alone. More than 48m came to see the show that year. It was a marvel, featuring dual-speed travelators to take the millions around the expansive site and the African villages that with their exotic peoples and artworks inspired the young Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques. Cubism was on the way. But, what the V&A team came to see and collect for their grand pantechnicon of the decorative arts back in South Kensington, that most Frenchified part of London, were examples of art nouveau design. As a result of their trip, the V&A boasts one of the finest collections of art nouveau. This, and much more drawn from other collections, is about to go on show in what promises to be a superb blockbuster, Art Nouveau 1890-1914, curated by the V&A’s Paul Greenhalgh on its own highly decorative turf from April 6. The V&A’s role was important in the development of this florid, serpentine, self-consciously “aesthetic” style. We know that, among art nouveau designers, Emile Galle, Victor Horta and Odon Lechner visited the museum in search of inspiration. Art nouveau is loosely associated in British minds with Paris Metro entrances, the Biba fashion stores of 1970s London, and perhaps something to do with Oscar Wilde, absinthe, Aubrey Beardsley, lilies, sexy ladies writhing around lampstands and poor Ernest Dowson, the “decadent” poet whom everyone loved but of whom W B Yeats said he could imagine no world at any time in history in which Dowson would have been a success. In fact, art nouveau was an international phenomenon that raised its serpentine head in many of the great and, if not great, then industrious towns and cities of Europe, from Paris and Brussels, via Lille and Nancy, to Barcelona and then across to Turin, Venice and Vienna, back up through the Low Countries to Scandinavia and Finland. In Italy, the style was known as Stilo Liberty, in Austria and Germany as Jugendstijl, in Barcelona as Modernista. We can also include the styles known variously as National Romanticism in Scandinavia and, to a limited extent, Arts & Crafts in Britain. There is, though, very little full-blooded indigenous art nouveau in Britain. Did I hear you sigh with relief? But, if you are inspired by the V&A exhibition, where might you travel to see more? How can you pick from such a wide range of places? Let’s make it easy(ish). Sit down for a glass of absinthe or ask for a weak hock and seltzer at the Black Friar, the delightfully unspoilt art & crafts pub (H Fuller Clark, 1905) at 174 Queen Victoria Street near Blackfriars Station in the City of London. Suitably fortified, a bracing walk across the Thames will have you on board a Eurostar train bound for Paris and Brussels (and Nancy too) and on a long weekend’s tour of art nouveau architecture. You will have seen the objets d’art at the V&A. Now for the buildings. Don’t worry. This tour doesn’t have to be a marathon. It can be gently decadent. There is not a building coming up in the next few paragraphs that isn’t within a louche slouch from a café or bar. In fact you couldn’t do better than taking coffee at the Café Falstaff (E Houbion, 1903), 17-19 rue Henri Maus. Now you are within reasonably easy reach (no problems with public transport in Brussels) of some of the finest art nouveau houses of all. There’s the Solvay House, 224 Avenue Louise, built between 1895 and 1900 to the design of Victor Horta. This is the art nouveau master’s best house. Carriages once drove through the sinuous doors into the grand lobby where a top-lit stair ushered family and guests up into a suite of highly-decorated rooms, each last square millimetre worked over by the architect. A strange and impressive interior with its vegetable-like ironwork, pale orange and green paintwork, its swirling organic forms framed with a disciplined plan, the Solvay House is at the heart of art nouveau consciousness. Nearby, you’ll find the more restrained, though equally impressive, Horta House, 23-25 rue Americaine (1898-1911), designed by the architect as his own home and studio. The dining room with its shiny white-glazed tiles (the sort we associate with Victorian public lavatories) and snaking ironwork is a very strange place to sit, more like a station waiting room than a place to eat en famille. Other Horta buildings are the Waucquez department store (1906) and the Van Eetvelde House (1895-97). Back to the station. But before boarding the Paris train, pass by the nutty Saint-Cyr House, 11 square Ambiorix (Gustave Strauven, 1900). Children like this one. It is four storeys high but just one bay wide, in other words very thin, and quite bonkers. Each floor is a visual riot of swirly-whirly ironwork and gloriously over the top detailing. Richer than a Belgian chocolate. Paris. Take the Metro to Porte Dauphine (1898-1901). This station has the best of the surviving art nouveau Metro entrances that were for many years taken for granted and have now all but disappeared. They were commissioned in 1896 from Hector Guimard, a disciple of Victor Horta. Each boasts snaky graphics, The Day the Earth Stood Still ironwork and glazed canopies that resemble butterfly wings. They are painted an if-you-go-down-to-the-woods-today green. Odd but utterly, ‘ow you say, charming. Into town now for le shopping at, well, how about La Samaritaine, rue de la Monnaie, the great department store designed originally by Frantz Jourdain in art nouveau style in 1891-1907? This delightful courtyard building remains a pleasure to shop in, and you can climb to the roof for a view of tout Paris. Lots of twiddly ironwork. Yet, if it’s importantly-earnest ironwork you seek after lunch, let me recommend you the superb offices of Le Parisien Libéré, 124 rue Reamur, (Georges Chedanne, 1903-4), a handsome pile of iron and glass with flourishes of art nouveau decadence in the upper floors. Pevsner would have said that this is a precursor of the Modern Movement. As for you, you shrug your shoulders, take a pastis and carry on unconcerned. Aux Parisiennes. If you had a spare couple of days, a serpentine TGV would speed you due east to Nancy and back. Here, there are many art nouveau villas, but these have the look of Gaudi more than Horta about them, and so are well worth the trip. Antoni Gaudi, secular patron saint of Barcelona, was one of the most original architects of all time. He was certainly no decadent and is rather a different decorative kettle of fish from the “aesthetic” art nouveau designers of France and Belgium. His influence in Nancy can be seen in the wonderful, Hansel-and-Gretel Villa Marjorelle, 1 rue Louis Marjorelle (Henri Sauvage, 1901-2). The Addams family would have loved it. The weird balconies waving from the body of the house, the witch’s hat roofs, the tall, vegetable-like chimneys. The craftsmanship is superb. If you like houses with fairytale looks, don’t fail to pass along rue des Brices. This is the Villa des Glycines (Emile Andre, 1902). Underneath the beetling brow of its deep eaves, it has eyes, a nose and a big nord-et-sud. The “glycines” or wisteria, by the way, grows up around either side of the big mouthed window like a pair of sweet-smelling moustaches. There are plenty more art nouveau houses in Nancy, and anyway it’s good to have the excuse to stroll around a city that few tourists bother with. Just before we return to Paris, remember to pass by the Hermant House, 25 rue de Malzeville (Jacques-René Hermant, 1904) and the Villa Marguerite, 3 rue du Colonel-Renard (Gutton and Hornecker, 1905). Back in Britain, there just isn’t much art nouveau to see. Architecture, I mean. There are a few oddities such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery (1899-1901), east London and the Horniman Museum (1896-1900), south-east London, both by Charles Harrison Townsend, but the interiors are muted even though what you’ll see on show at both is never a disappointment. Back to the grand corridors and galleries of the V&A. And dreams of future trips planned to perhaps Vienna (the works of Klimt, Olbrich, Hoffmann), Barcelona (Gaudi), Prague, Budapest, Moscow… The tentacles of art nouveau spread far and wide. Enough to keep those with a taste for Lalique, Daum Frères and Tiffany glass, Mucha posters, Hoffmann cutlery and chairs by the decidedly decadent Rupert Carabin deep in timetables and maps for the next few years. And should you, like so many Brits, find art nouveau a little hard on the eyes, a small tincture of the right stuff might help you to see its fronds and curls more kindly. Absinthe, after all, makes the heart grow fonder. The practicals Magic Cities (020 8728 7575) offers city breaks travelling on Eurostar. One night in Paris at the 3 star Hotel Veronese from £99 (extra night £20). One night in Brussels at the 3 star Van Belle from £115 (extra night £25).
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March 21 2011, 4:40pm | Comments »
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London Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/20/london-orbit-tower-rises-at-olympic-park
Video show the construction well underway of the Orbit Tower at the London 2012 Olympic Park site in Stratford East London. Click here to view the embedded video. The 115m tall art sculpture with a public viewing platform is formally named the Arcelor Mittal Orbit, and will be 22m higher than New York’s Statue of Liberty when completed, which looks like a matter of weeks as the pr-constructed iron pieces can be seen waiting on the site ready to be welded into place. Further pictures and videos of the growing installation will be uploaded over the coming period. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Orbit Tower Rises at Olympic Park
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March 20 2011, 5:26am | Comments »
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Goodbye to a beauty, hello to Asda’s eyesore
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/10/goodbye-to-a-beauty-hello-to-asdas-eyesore
The world gets uglier.
This article titled “Goodbye to a beauty, hello to Asda’s eyesore” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Thursday 10th March 2011 09.00 UTC Big business and small towns . . . they mix really badly. Standing outside the horrible behemoth of a white cube that is Motherwell’s Asda last week, I stared at the beautiful half-demolished building opposite, wondering why it had come to this. Built as a school in the Victorian era, the building was being knocked down because it was too expensive to maintain, or so said the local gossip. Goodbye honey-coloured stone, and graceful astragal windows; hello, whatever the blank walls of the Asda stores are clad with. I couldn’t help feeling that if just some of the people who made a profit from that huge shop, and the townspeople who use it, had had a presence in the community and a will to save its remaining beauties, then my view and that of citizens for many years to come, could have been different and so much more lovely. Not that the few remaining small shops of Motherwell are not stimulating. I was very taken by a novel item I spotted in one window – a blanket with sleeves! At first I sneered: “Hey! Like a coat! Except totally shapeless and would fasten up the back if it had any fastening!” Then I remembered how miserable it was to sit in the cold watching telly with your coat on, and counted my many blessings.
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March 10 2011, 3:06am | Comments »
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Artist Anish Kapoor warns arts cuts are ‘rolling us back to the Thatcher years’
Anish Kapoor is the artist commissioned to build the Orbit Tower for the Olympics Stadium in Stratford
This article titled “Artist Anish Kapoor warns arts cuts are ‘rolling us back to the Thatcher years’” was written by Maev Kennedy, for The Guardian on Thursday 3rd March 2011 17.14 UTC The Turner prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor has accused the Tories of having a “castration complex” about the arts, warning that it will take decades to recover from the damage caused by current cuts. “Already they’re rolling us back to the situation of the Thatcher years, and that took 15 years for the arts to recover,” he said. “I despair of this government, they just don’t get it, they just don’t understand that citizenship, community spirit, all the things they’re talking about, can come from art, can come from a sense of cultural belonging.” “I’ve given up on them, I’m afraid. To me it seems that it is neo-rightwing policies being forced through under the pretence of being middle of the road and reasonable.” Kapoor, in uncharacteristically angry and political mood, was in Manchester for the opening of his first major exhibition outside London in 12 years. He fears that no young artist today will have the career boost from a public institution that he received when at 25 the Arts Council Collection, organiser of his current exhibition, bought some of his earliest work. The collection paid £3,500 for his 1982 piece White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers, which used intricate shapes and raw powder pigment. The money was enough to keep him working as an artist for many months at a time when most of his contemporaries despaired of earning a living from their art. The exhibition – at the free admission Manchester Art Gallery, now losing staff to voluntary redundancy and struggling to make major savings for a second year – includes loans from other public collections. Her Blood, three enormous reflecting discs which took two lorries to transport, is owned by the Tate but has never been exhibited in the UK before; a major mirror piece came from Bradford, and another very early pigment piece is from Liverpool, and has not been displayed for years. “The value of having these pieces in public collections is immense,” Kapoor argued. “Not just in money terms, though they are all worth far, far more than these institutions paid, but in being where people can see them freely, be inspired, believe that this is possible.” Kapoor is on a roll. His giant twisting red tower is already rising on the 2012 Olympics site, and he became the first living artist since Henry Moore to be exhibited in the royal parks when several of his mirror pieces were installed in Hyde Park last year. He mounted a huge twin city show backed by the British Council in India last year, his first in his native country, and he is also working on commissions for the Venice Biennale, as well as a site specific piece for the gigantic 13,500 sq metre nave of the Grand Palais in Paris. Surprisingly, although Kapoor is responsible for giant public art installations in cities across the UK, his last exhibition outside London was in 1999. He helped choose the works for this show, which include loans from his studio of new pieces in alarmingly blood-red wax. This is the second Flashback exhibition drawn from the Arts Council Collection, showing off some of the curators’ most inspired hunches, artists now world-renowned whom they backed in their earliest days: the first show was of Bridget Riley, and the next will be Gary Hume. The collection, now run by the Hayward Gallery at the South Bank arts complex, was founded in 1946 – “two years before the National Health”, as director Caroline Douglas points out – to support emerging artists, and holds work by Henry Moore, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Antony Gormley and Tracey Emin. At a time when most cash-strapped public collections have pared acquisitions to the bone, it still has an annual acquisitions budget of £180,000, and adds around 30 works every year. As well as mounting exhibitions, the collection makes loans to institutions such as hospitals and schools. Kapoor looks fondly at the brilliant colours of the piece he made and sold just two years after graduating from Chelsea School of Art. “It made a huge difference. That a public institution had enough confidence in me to put its money where its mouth was, that meant everything.” Anish Kapoor: Flashback. Manchester Art Gallery March 5 – June 5, then touring.
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March 3 2011, 11:59am | Comments »
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Drowning on Dry Land – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/27/drowning-on-dry-land-review
Theatre review of Alan Ayckbourn’s Drowning on Dry Land at the at the Jermyn Street theatre.
This article titled “Drowning on Dry Land – review” was written by Michael Billington, for The Guardian on Sunday 27th February 2011 17.58 UTC Long before it became trendy to attack celebrity culture, Alan Ayckbourn satirised it brilliantly in his 1988 Man of the Moment. He returned to the theme in this play, which had its Scarborough premiere in 2004: the year that The X Factor made its debut. And, even if the fame game is now madder than even Ayckbourn foresaw, it’s salutary to be reminded that comedy, at its best, can have a moral purpose. Ayckbourn’s hero, Charlie Conrad, is a TV celebrity who has charm but no talent: he has risen to the top by his persistent failure, first as a middle-distance athlete and then as a hopeless quiz contestant. But Charlie’s world unravels when he is caught in a compromising position with a female clown at his son’s birthday party. Even if Ayckbourn takes time establishing Charlie’s epic incompetence, he is very good at showing what happens when the bubble bursts. While Charlie’s wife, agent and the sexually impetuous clown all benefit from his humiliating downfall, he himself retreats into a shrunken private life. Although Ayckbourn ends with a faint gesture of hope, the play burns with indignation at the way fame is now divorced from hard work and achievement. Christopher Coghill makes Charlie a little too blandly apologetic. Otherwise, Guy Retallack’s production nails all the key points. Mark Farrelly is buoyantly funny as a vain celebrity lawyer who helicopters in to destroy the charges brought by the litigious clown, played by Helen Mortimer with a touching solemnity. Emma Swain as Charlie’s resentful wife and Les Dennis, who knows a thing or two about the whirligig of fame, as his agent also lend weight to a play that may not be major Ayckbourn but is one that effectively harpoons our society’s elevation of the untalented.
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February 27 2011, 12:18pm | Comments »
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Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/24/can-scandinavian-crime-fiction-teach-socialism
I don’t know if it teaches anything at all, but DI Lund and co do make compulsive viewing over 20 episodes shown in ten weeks on BBC 4. Great stuff.
This article titled “Can Scandinavian crime fiction teach socialism?” was written by Deborah Orr, for The Guardian on Thursday 24th February 2011 09.00 UTC Who killed Nanna Birk Larsen? The question grips the relatively small, but avid, band of people who are following The Killing, a Danish crime series being screened on BBC4. The Killing throws up plenty of other questions, too. One even feels a strange tug of interest in Copenhagen’s local political scene because the abduction, rape, torture and murder of a 19-year-old student seems inextricably linked to a number of people fighting a city election. Alliances between various political parties ebb and flow, as the turns of the plot hurl suspicion at different candidates. One of the many things The Killing asks is this: are political coalitions really healthy? It is no doubt coincidence that the query is so particularly pertinent in Britain right now. But there is a definite reason why a slice of Scandinavian crime fiction should be actively concerned with framing socio-political debate. It is part of what is expected of the genre in this part of the world, and has been since Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö started publishing what came to be known as the Martin Beck series, in 1965. The couple, former journalists, conceived 10 crime novels that would provide a deliberate critique of what they viewed as the degeneration of Sweden. Marxists themselves, they intended to use the crime genre to illustrate the advantages of socialistic approaches to social problems. That sounds unbearably didactic and worthy. But the tremendous thing is that the books work first and foremost as crime fiction. In fact, they are reckoned by the cognoscenti to be among the finest and most influential crime novels ever written. Essentially, the pair challenged the convention of the lone genius private detective, replacing him with a group of police officers, led by the low-key Beck, who depended on each other to solve cases – and also, as a matter of course, put up with, or worked round, colleagues who were not so gifted. Maverick individualism was out, patient and humane people management was in. Thus, the ever-shifting group ploughed through many and varied crime scenes – crime scenes that usually in some way or other questioned the permissive values espoused by the liberal left so successfully at that time. It seems to me that in the pages of these Swedish police procedurals, all those years ago, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were examining contradictions that the British left even now refuses properly to acknowledge. The socialist left and the liberal left have little in common, with Blairism a shining example of how difficult it is to “triangulate” them. Hard work and compromise is needed before social freedom and state welfare can be shackled together. Even then, perhaps, the resulting beast is an impossible chimera. Is it too much to speculate that the current huge vogue for Scandinavian crime fiction is somehow a tacit acknowledgement of the need to have this debate, and the fear of what conclusions it might draw? Henning Mankell, in his Wallander series, now televised in two versions in Britain, makes no bones about the fact that he is continuing in the Martin Beck tradition. Stieg Larsson, who meant his phenomenally successful Millennium trilogy to be a 10-part work when he first started writing it, has succeeded in igniting exactly the sort of debate, among feminists anyway, that Sjöwall and Wahlöö expected. Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo, with 5m sales worldwide and film deals in the works, similarly uses sexual crime as an expression of the extremes of discord among men and women. This “metaphor” is somewhat unanswerable, on the face of it. But the details are quite controversial. The women who are killed in his novel The Snowman, for example, stand accused of denying men their paternal roles, and messing up their children in the process. Discuss that thesis in sexually and politically mixed company, and passions can run high quite fast. Nesbo is not a reactionary, despite the “traditional family values” cast that can be placed on his bestselling novel’s storyline. Like his peers and predecessors, he deals with problems inherent in social democracy, problems that are not that usefully divided between “left” and “right”. It is often said now that the two opposing terms have become “meaningless”, since both left and right contain a range of values from libertarian to authoritarian. In truth, the political tension is between freedom and regulation, often between whether the social realm should be regulated in order to benefit the economic realm, or the other way round. Social democracy, if it is about anything, surely, is about constantly striving to get that tricky balance right. The British are used to believing that the Scandinavians, especially the Swedes, have social democracy cracked, while Britain is far from being a socially democratic country. The truth, however, is much more nuanced. Britain shares many of the values and difficulties of the Scandinavian states, and of other European states that Britain tends to view as being much more socially democratic than we are. That was emphasised in a depressing report yesterday from risk analyst Maplecroft, which ranked Britain the 10th most likely country of 163 to undergo another economic crisis. Sweden is fourth, and Japan is the only non-European country to make it into the top 10, at nine. The shared challenges are “ageing populations, substantial levels of debt and high public spending on health and pensions”. Each of these, of course, is already high on the national agenda, the subject of raucous, sometimes hysterical debate. The logical solution – if there is a solution at all – is for everyone to live very healthy and disciplined lives, expecting to look after more vulnerable members of the family whenever necessary, and seeking only specialist or temporary help from a well-ordered state as a last resort. It is a vision that unites authoritarian left and right, but scares the bejesus out of free-marketeers and social liberals. All of these groups, however, can probably find something compelling in a chunk of Scandinavian crime fiction, which possibly owes its great popularity to its ability to offer sensationalist escape, but of a kind that is grounded all too recognisably in the real world.
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February 24 2011, 4:41am | Comments »
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Pub of the year award goes to a London local for first time
The Harp is still Central London’s best Cider pub too. The Harp - London Cider Pub
This article titled “Pub of the year award goes to a London local for first time” was written by Ben Quinn, for The Guardian on Wednesday 16th February 2011 00.05 UTC With its reputation for glitzy musicals and crammed weekend shopping, the bustling tourist magnet that is Covent Garden might seem an unlikely location for the latest official place of pilgrimage for beer purists. Yet in a first for London, a cosy bolthole in Chandos Place, near Trafalgar Square, has been named Britain’s pub of the year.by the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra). It was standing room only at what Camra described as a “true gem” where a cross-section of local workers, including musicians from nearby theatres, mingled in a narrow bar area adorned with mirrors and theatrical memorabilia. Undisturbed by either television or music, staff handed patrons samples from a range of eight real ales and imparted taste advice with all the authority of a master sommelier. “They look after their regulars very well – that’s the secret,” said Martin Knowles, a tubist from the English National Opera, sipping a pint of Darkstar Hophead with colleagues under the whir of a fan. Upstairs, a handful of drinkers relaxed in a small carpeted lounge area as the owner, Bridget Walsh, praised “good staff” for The Harp’s 17-year-old reputation. “They are the backbone, but we also pride ourselves on the range and quality of our real ale,” said Walsh, a real ale pioneer, who fretted slightly about the potential upsurge of interest in her pub, which outshone rivals from some of the more traditional real ale heartlands. Runners-up in the national pub of the year competition were Taps in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, the Beacon Hotel in Sedgley, West Midlands, and the Salutation Inn in Ham, Gloucestershire. Julian Hough, Camra’s pubs director, said the most impressive aspect of the Harp was its appeal as a true local, “even though situated in the tourist heart of the capital”. He added: “What makes a great pub is the ability for it to welcome both regulars and first time customers alike and this is something it does to perfection.” Situated close to Charing Cross station, the pub has been no stranger to awards in the past and has long been regarded with fondness by ale connoisseurs seeking a refuge to quench their thirst in the heart of the city. Beer choices generally include a mild or porter, Dark Star and London micro-brewery seasonal while real ciders, perries and malt whiskies also feature strongly. Completing a package that won over the notoriously choosy real ale drinking fraternity are award-winning real sausages in baps. Kimberly Martin, Camra’s London regional director, said: “I never ceased to be impressed or surprised by the continuing success of a pub staffed by individuals so passionate about the real ale industry. The Harp is a perfect example of how the London cask beer scene is reaching out to new drinkers.”
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February 15 2011, 6:29pm | Comments »
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