James Hamilton on Culture, Technology and Art
Introduction: The Garreteer Guide is intended as a weekly list of “Third Programme” level art and literature events taking place in UK towns and cities, on BBC radio, and online. If you are organizing an event, especially if you are doing so outside the main urban centres, please let me know on james@garreteer.co.uk and it will…
In 1985, aged 16, I fell in love with a girl who lived 80 miles away. I didn’t know what to do, so on a free day between O-level exams I took my NHS glasses off and cycled down through Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Surrey to her home town in the off-chance I’d run into…
It has always bewildered me that Great Western Trains – the private franchise running services from London to the West of England and Wales – has never availed itself of its astonishing aesthetic inheritance. Perhaps there are copyright issues – I don’t know, or they wanted to make their own modern mark. But at any…
On November 22nd 1963, conductor Erich Leinsdorf of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was in mid-performance when he received the news of Kennedy’s assassination. On the other side of the Atlantic, Kingsley Amis was having dinner with the journalist George Gale. Gale took a telephone call in another room. Amis heard him shout “No!”, and then…
The earliest book I was given as a child and still own is a first edition of Reginald Turnill’s Observer’s Book of Manned Spaceflight. Space, and all that went with it, was important to me in my boyhood, and that made men like Turnill and Sir Bernard Lovell important figures. That whole space world, of…
Discovering Morgan Since early in the summer, I’ve been spending one day a week at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, digitizing their extensive audio collection. It was a taped interview with Liz Lochhead that tipped me off: it was just after the Wall came down in ’89, and she’d tried to record it in…
Heft is a shepherd’s term: a herd of sheep learns their heft, their territory, the boundaries within which they are to spend their lives, and pass that knowledge down from ewes to rams. In his Everytown, Julian Baggini found that it was the same for humans. We too have our place and our people. The only…
They’ve started using Victorian photographic processes again. Here’s a tin type by Joshua Black Wilkins: It’s not just tin types: skilled photographers are also revisiting the calotype, the daguerrotype and the whole raft of Victorian formats that took photography from being a rich man’s extraordinary hobby in 1848 to everyone’s with the arrival of the…
They cleaned Edinburgh’s buildings many years ago. The odd notable exception, such as that between India Buildings and Edinburgh Central Library, on the difficult turn between Victoria Street and George IV Bridge, only highlights how much has been done. We’re used to them anyway. The eye treats them as scratches in the record and skips…
Yesterday afternoon, I found myself at the Scottish Poetry Library listening to the poems of George Bruce. An interesting man, Bruce: he lived long enough to be offered a contract by Herbert Chapman at Arsenal, to be a pioneer BBC radio producer and to launch arts television in Scotland. He was fluent in Doric…
The faces of the friends you were meant to have, but were born too late to meet, gaze warmly at you from old photographs. Outside, there’s nothing but grey skies and traffic. On the South Bank of the Thames stands a memorial to the British volunteers who went to fight for the Republic in the…
“..we hope, too, that through all the noise and excitement you’ll glimpse a single golden thread of purpose – the idea of Jerusalem – of the better world, the world of real freedom and true equality, a world that can be built through the prosperity of industry, through the caring nation that built the welfare…
