Revolutionary Dreams, Richard Stites

The sheer existence of the dreams, plans, projects and experiments enumerated above, flourishing in the years of revolution, Civil War and N.E.P - before and after the death of Lenin - sets this period off in a stunning way from the years of Stalinism. The utopias were like so many experimental teams in Lenin's gigantic laboratory of revolution, using materials and expending time and exuberant energy on projects that were marginal to the Party leader's own 'research design' for building socialism by means of tutelary state power and organization - from the top down. Lenin frowned on some of the experiments, barked at the experimenters, and sometimes even deprived them of their equipment and funds. But, unlike his successor Stalin, he did not destroy this vast laboratory, did not close it all down, did not arrest and exterminate its principle investigators.

Warsaw 2016, Landscapes of Communism, Owen Hatherley

The extreme spatial hierarchies of the jingoistic memorials, boulevards, palaces and secret policemen's castles of high Stalinism or of Ceausescu were grotesque, for all their occasionally compelling architectural qualities, and their claim to being in the lineage of any idea of 'socialism' is astonishingly tenuous. Yet the immense housing estates, however much they were a negation of the Marxist idea of the 'self-activity of the working class', were nothing if not egalitarian, if not a total attack on the notion of urban hierarchy, with all the architectural compositions based on the refusal to let any one object take primacy at any given time, and surrounded with a sea of completely public, free space.

unintelligable as any dream

Charles Dickens Dombey and Son (1848),

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond.

 

Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream.

Wot, no castle?!

Surely, the Sheriff of Nottingham lived in a castle, a proper castle with a moat, battlements and turrets - to look out for bands of outlaws roaming the murky underworld of Sherwood Forest? So when visitors come to Nottingham and have their photo taken with the 7ft, half ton bronze effigy of Robin Hood, they could be forgiven for thinking: ‘wot, no castle!?’

Because despite passing through an impressive medieval gatehouse, once inside the castle grounds the visitor is not confronted by imposing medieval fortifications; instead they are welcomed by a genteel Edwardian pleasure garden; complete with bandstand, finely manicured flowerbeds and granite war memorials.

To confuse matters further, there is a dense plantation of trees obscuring views to the castle itself, and when visitors climb the steep banks to reach the entrance, they may think they’ve stumbled uninvited upon the front door of a local Aristocrat. And that’s precisely what the current building once was; a Ducal Palace, built in 1679 for the Duke of Newcastle.

Overlooking the centre of Nottingham, on a near-vertical 130 foot-high escarpment of sandstone, the Ducal Palace sits on the site of one of the finest medieval castles in the whole of England - to rival those of Dover, Warwick or Bamburgh. However, in the 1640s, as a deadly focal point of the English Civil War, the castle suffered severe damage and was completely demolished in 1649 by Oliver Cromwell and his victorious Parliamentarians.   

Upon the restoration of the Monarchy, the First Duke of Newcastle purchased the site of the former castle from the Duke of Rutland. The Duke had earned the title through his loyalty shown to the King, fighting bravely for the royalists during the Civil War. In 1674, Henry Cavendish, the Second Duke, commissioned Samuel Marsh, a mason from Lincoln, to design and build a no-expense-spared mansion, of which the facades still remain today - a rare remaining example of a particular style of renaissance architecture known as ‘mannerism’.

The defining characteristic of mannerism is unpretentious style, yet with precise, ornate Roman detailing - Samuel Marsh actually based the design of Nottingham Castle on a set of architectural engravings by Rubens, a Dutchman who toured Italy in the 1670s to illustrate some of its finest buildings. Rubens’ book ‘Palazzi de Genova’  had a great influence on design in Northern Europe; the work focused on the great renaissance buildings of Genoa and the following engraving of the ‘Palazzo della Rovere’ looks remarkably similar to Nottingham’s very own Ducal Palace:

    

After its completion in 1679, for the next hundred years or so Nottingham Castle was an aristocratic party house, a luxurious Italianate mansion built for entertainment and nocturnal revelry, capable of hosting grand banquets and the crème de la crème of English society. The Duke of Newcastle was prime minister twice between 1754 and 1762, and Princess Anne, one day to become Queen Anne as the last ruler from the House of Stuart, took residence at the Ducal Palace while in hiding during a monarchical crisis.  

The first floor contained the state rooms, with a double height saloon and state chamber, along with a private family parlour and dining room. Each room was richly decorated with ornate plasterwork and panels bearing pictures, tapestries and hangings. The sedate atmosphere of the gallery rooms today betrays the building’s former life as Nottingham’s most exclusive nightclub; early evening soirees and light teas followed by lavish night time balls; women resplendent in silk stockings, heavily brocaded dresses and extravagant powdered wigs, the men in tight breeches and dark coats over brilliant white linen, sewn with jewels to sparkle under the crystal chandeliers.

Neither Russian oligarch nor Arab Sheikh stands up to the Georgian nobility on decadence – for all the grandeur of the Ducal Palace at Nottingham, it was only ever intended for occasional use– the Newcastle family owned huge swathes of London prime real estate, they had estates all over the country and used Clumber House in Sherwood Forest as their primary residence, sadly no longer standing after it was ravaged by a series of fires and eventually demolished in 1938.

The Dukes of Newcastle were no strangers to disastrous conflagrations; Nottingham Castle itself famously burnt down in 1831 – an episode in the castle’s history with its own story - after protesters reacted following the Fourth Duke of Newcastle’s decision to contest a parliamentary reform bill in support of the lower classes.

The interiors of the Ducal Palace were entirely destroyed, only the external walls of the building survived, to be carefully restored by local architect T.C Hine in the 1870s; the whole structure was completely remodeled to become the first municipal art gallery outside of London (another fascinating chapter in the castle’s history).

By the time of the fire in 1831 the Ducal Palace’s golden age as a lavish party house was over; the building had been in decline for some time and had been divided into separate tenancies by 1795, with a part of the building in use as a boarding school. By 1800, some of the grounds had been rented to locals who had built various summerhouses and grottos in them – a far cry from their medieval origins. A sale of the entire site was even contemplated in 1805 with a view to conversion into individual apartments until the raging mob sent the elegant renaissance building up in flames.        

The next time you see a visitor to Nottingham looking up after they’ve taken a selfie with Robin Hood to exclaim: ‘wot, no castle?’, you can point out the building’s tumultuous history as one of the most significant Ducal Mansions of Georgian England and primary residences of the Dukes of Newcastle – one of whom acted as Prime Minister and said: ‘I shall not think the demands of the people a rule of conduct, nor shall I ever fear to incur their resentment in the prosecution of their interest.’ Considering Nottingham Castle burnt down less than a century after he said this, when his son had incurred the resentment of the people, these may be considered famous last words.

  

oranges and buns

Nottingham Castle. Half hours among its art treasures. A guide for visitors and students. 1928

'The appeal of art is universal. How can we ensure that its gracious influence shall be made to shine in upon all minds? Much pity has been wasted on the rich man who has made himself the owner of art treasures to whose merits he is blind. The people are in much the same plight. Large expenditure of public money and boundless private generosity have gone to the provision of the treasures of our art galleries and museums.

However, if people are at present too apt to regard an art gallery as a convenient place for the consumption of oranges and buns, it must be admitted the fault is not entirely theirs. Their failure to appreciate what is so richly placed within their reach is to be charged rather to a defect in the methods of those who provide and mange the institutions in which the treasures are exhibited.'   

Live is life

a gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual

'If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose that every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.
When I talked about the woman at the pool, that 'the essence of her charm, independent of time, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me'. Yes, that's how I perceived it at the time, but I was wrong. The gesture revealed nothing of that woman's essence, one could rather say that the woman revealed to me the charm of a gesture. A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as their creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.'

from monologue to dialogue

technology decides everything

new times demand new forms

Dreams Old and Nascent

The surface of dreams is broken,

The picture of the past is shaken and scattered. 

Gentleman's Magazine 1886

       Filey

The white rocks, the extensive sands, the fine curvature of the bay, the snowy foam and ever interesting ocean, arouse excitability, cheering and tranquilizing..

On a mild summer's evening, while I have been towed along the smooth waters of the bay, and while I looked on the rocks and the coast, and the sea all tinged with the rich setting sun..

 I forgot for a time to envy the lot of the traveler who gazes on the superior glories of the Frith of Edinburgh, the Bay of Naples or the Port of Constantinople.

vida em fotos

Everything was going swimmingly

India, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Colombia

Byron Cinema, Hucknall, Nottingham

 The last word in cinema construction and comfort...Decorations will be modern and tasteful...



 

Daytona Beach, Florida 1904 / 1957

Goodbye to Berlin

Barbara K

“But seriously, I believe I'm a sort of Ideal Woman, if you know what I mean. I'm the sort of woman who can take men away from their wives, but I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all.” 

Smoke in the City

 

The Gare St-Lazarre (1877)

 

 

Nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed. There is a freedom to disappear into the city like a vapour. Amidst the anonymity of great urban spaces; all that is solid melts into steam.
 

Electrifying

Drinking Partners 1942

 

 

"I arrived to find Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and innumerable empty bottles....What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.....everything seemed to be as merry as a marriage-bell" 

Manor Road Garage

'We have died, we have slain and been slain,
We are not our old selves any more.
I feel new and eager
To start again'.

sweaty palms

Fiery yellow, burning orange, deepest purple and a midnight blue. 

A myriad of twilight colors above the ever blackening silhouettes below; an abiding contrast in a fleeting moment, a sense of completeness in a transient view.