If Brexit is the result of a backward-looking nostalgia, the Swinging London of the Chelsea Set was the opposite: it marked a determination to move on from the devastation and austerity left by World War II.
history
In 1962 The Westinghouse Corporation made a documentary film exploring the state of the nation as Britain continued to register the aftershocks of war, adjusted to the loss of empire and witnessed the erosion of its status as a world-class industrial nation.
Neil Fulwood considers Edward Mackinnon’s forceful poetic dissection of 75 years of war
If you can get along to Bethnal Green in the next three weeks, I highly recommend a visit to this exhibition of photographs. They document a dramatic period in the history of the East London.
Lucca, Italy, was the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini in 1858 in an apartment that is now a museum to the last and most famous of generations of Puccini maestros, restored to its Second Empire glory, down to a bed, surrounded by columns, that replicates the one in which Puccini was born.
The Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin once declared “Nothing is too Good for Ordinary People”* and as a founder of the radical Tecton group he designed municipal housing which combined the creation of healthy spaces, where people could live healthy lives, with the expression of his modernist aesthetic.
Domesday Book, William the Conqueror’s 1085 survey of his recently-won kingdom, merits an exhibition in its own right.
In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. In the world of fashion, shoulders broadened and the iconic 1930s shape became established.
A new municipal HQ for the Borough of Tower Hamlets is being built on the site of the old Royal London Hospital, and it’s due to open in 2022.
There’s no other way to say it – we were in a different world – one with a clock tower and two oast houses, paved with cobble stones.
The museum in Doughty Street, London, has a temporary exhibition to revisit the established view that Dickens had no truck with science, presenting the discipline not so surprisingly as an extension of his concern with social justice and reform rather than abstract theory.
Although Jon Bloomfield intended “Our City” for a general audience, I think some of our elected representatives could learn a lot from it.
By Jane McChrystal • books, history, politics, society, year 2019 • Tags: books, history, Jane McChrystal, politics, society