Museum of London asks: was Charles Dickens full of crap?
I paraphrase. Their language is more restrained.
“Taking these images into consideration, do you think the portrayal of Victorian London by Dickens and his contemporaries was realistic?”
I do like a blog post that ends with an essay question. The Museum of London peeps have come up with a nice one here to promote an event next week in which renowned establishment figure Iain Sinclair, among others, will interrogate Dickens and no doubt decide he was an unreliable good for nothing who was making it all up anyway.
Or perhaps not, you’ll have to go along to find out.
The pictures selected on the blog are fascinating. It’s almost impossible to look at images or read stories of Victorian life without romanticising the period, but that impulse should be resisted. For the vast majority of people, surely, life was much like Dennis Wise – dirty, hard and short.
Tickets for the event, on Wed 25 April at 1900, are available here from £6. I’m going, so if you come along Tweet me up.
Image: Copyright Museum of London, used with permission
18 Apr 2012
Video: Someone's made GTA Streatham
Not that new, but new to me. Like!
Creator Anthony Staines’ website
Via @Streathampulse
18 Apr 2012
Zulu WInter - (No Ceremony Remix)
Here’s a nice echoey reworking of Zulu WInter’s “Silver Tongue” by No Ceremony. It mixes trilling electronics and heavy reverb that makes for a dense fog of sound that leans more towards the gravitas of TV On The Radio than the lighter-than-air insubstance of, say, High Places.
17 Apr 2012
London agenda for Tuesday 17 April 2012
1. Watch ‘the UK’s most exciting performance poet’ Kate Tempest at the Albany [Run Riot]
2. Listen to Hatchum Social at their album launch party at Cargo [Don’t Panic]
3. Work out how to have sex in space [Ian Visits]
4. Learn to sail on Island Barn Reservoir [Tired of London]
17 Apr 2012
Enjoyed - Teeth
Here’s a beautifully warm, immersive dance track from fast-rising producer Enjoyed. He’s apparently a synesthesiac – from both the look and sound of this delicious single, we reckon there’ll be many more exciting, prismic tracks to come from him in 2012. One to watch, and no mistake.
17 Apr 2012
Annoying habits of Londoners #7: working in a coffee shop
Two types of people sit in front of laptops in coffee shops. Those who are there to work, and those who are there to pretend that they are working.
The first group can be recognised by their smart clothing, their determined mien, their choice of coffee (like their souls – small and black), and the fact that they are in and out within an hour. These people are productive, successful, and gainfully employed. The coffee shop is to them a caffeine pit stop on the way to or from some more formal professional appointment. They favour the mass market, impersonal efficiency of Starbucks or Costa. The coffee is fuel in a well-greased machine.
The second group, by contrast…the second group are an altogether lamentable class. Freelancers, semi-freelancers, pseudo-freelancers and working-for-free lancers. Students, dreamers, wasters and pet-projecters. A procrastination of idlers, pretending to toil.
They drink all manner of outré concoctions, the complexity of which are inversely proportional to the amount of work they manage to get done. For you cannot tell me that someone who orders a large cappuccino with flavoured syrup and chocolate topping is about to make serious progress with anything.
These ne’er-do-wells frequent a different sort of place. For them, distraction is not a danger, it’s a secret desire. Hence the decor must be interesting, the clientele varied, the music novel. I’ve seen coffee places in Dalston with a DJ playing at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, for christsakes. On a Tuesday. And people were sitting round pretending to work.
Work they weren’t! I should know, because I wasn’t either.
Image – Stebbi póstur on Flickr under Creative Commons
See also:
Annoying habits #6: Finding people dry
Annoying habits #5: Moaning about the sex after a one night stand
Annoying habits #4 – Dancing along to your own headphones
Annoying habits #3 – Holding the door open
Annoying habits #2 – Being annoyed when strangers gawp at you
Annoying habits #1 – Applauding at the cinema
Follow Mike
Twitter: @MikPollitt
Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com
17 Apr 2012
Sansa - Black Brick Wall (Live Session)
Here’s a nicely-shot live session by emerging Finnish songstress Sansa.
17 Apr 2012
According to Shoreditch, it's now cool to be a flag-waving monarchist
The Diamond Jubilee on June 3rd draws near, and a press release arrives from The Book Club, one of the busier Shoreditch hangouts.
“Bunting, beer, baking, bowler hats and brass bands. It can only mean one thing – The Book Club’s Diamond Jubilee Street Party is coming to Shoreditch and it’s time to party like its [sic] 1952!”
The event is then described as “affectionate, irreverent, patriotic and very cool”.
Now I grant that “alcohol shop uses public holiday to sell more alcohol” won’t raise many eyebrows.
But it’s another nail in the coffin of Shoreditch’s counter-culture credentials.
After all, the The Book Club is just giving young East Londonites what they want (a party), with the framing they think will be most attractive to them (unironic monarchism).
Republicans must despair, and well they might. If even these kids are choosing to get pissed in honour of Queen and country, then the future of the cause already seems lost.
16 Apr 2012
Why does the Shard intimidate us?
Optimism, shock and awe
When the tired, pollution stained Southwark Towers was demolished by a 100,000 lb wrecking ball and workmen started laying the foundations for Renzo Piano’s Shard of Glass in 2008, many Southwark residents felt a surge of optimism on seeing the image of Europe’s tallest building, half a kilometre from their doorsteps.
Over the last four years that optimism has alternated with architectural pride, a forced and tested trust in technology, incomprehension of its scale, a sense of material inequality, awe, not to mention momentary paralysing vertigo.
The bold, simple and futuristic lines of the building championed London as the home of cutting-edge design: especially as it embodied architectural values which Britain has historically shied away from. It marked a possible paradigm shift.
Some environmentalists and most urban planners also champion it for encouraging vertical development, which reduces urban sprawl and reduces the resources, needed to transport consumers to out-of-town business parks.
Gusty winds and vertigo
Towards the end of 2010, St Thomas’ Street, at the foot of the tower, had noticeably been transformed into a virtual wind funnel. Awe alternated with nervousness as local workers contemplated 5-ton concrete crane counterweights suspended above their heads, whilst rushing to work.
Anyone looking closer would have noticed that the cranes themselves were clamped onto the sides of the Shard, stretching our trust in the construction sectors capacity to innovate, literally to new heights.
As gale force winds blew grown men over in January 2012, construction was paused. Even then, the Shard was terrifying against the freezing winter sky, reflecting the surrounding electric glows and twinkles, like the Terminator’s sunglasses.
As I introduced it to my five-foot tall mum, I was reminded of the hobbits beholding Mount Doom. Personally, I couldn’t look at the tower without feeling a bit sick and easy to crush. I felt some relief when the rain gave me an excuse to put my umbrella up, like a shield against its looming presence.
Appreciable from a distance
In Spring 2012 construction of the outer shell of the building draws to a close. Londoners may take pride in the Shard from the many vistas it commands around South East London. From here the full shape and effect of the development can be appreciated.
As the London region is the shape of a bowl, the Shard easily stands out from outer London boroughs, as far away as Harrow-on-the-Hill, 50 kilometres away in West London. Here it pinpoints London Bridge Station like a Monopoly piece. At night, from the warren-like side streets of Elephant and Castle, it functions as a helpful Northern Star.
Bolstering London’s two-tier housing market
However, the idea of the tower growing, like a column of bar chart indicating the level of economic regeneration to the London Bridge area, now seems more far fetched. As the upper floors of Europe’s tallest building are transformed into world-class hotel suites and pent houses, Southwark will now become one of the worlds most unequal neighborhoods for house prices.
Homes in the Shard are forecast to sell for £30 to £50 million each, demonstrating that the development is more likely to bolster the gulf between London’s two-tier housing market, for the foreseeable future, rather than bring tangible benefits to the local community. Unless partnerships are organised to develop supply-chains with local businesses the tower risks becoming an isolated bubble of wealth.
Material inequality, which one aspect of the Shard represents, may be tastefully out of sight so many floors above us. As it looks down its nose at us, how can this inequality not be tangibly sensed, when the building which contains it so jarringly reminds those at its base how tiny we are?
Follow this writer at @sssukiii
16 Apr 2012
UKIP set for return to the London Assembly
A rise in support for the United Kingdom Independence Party could see them re-taking seats on the London Assembly, a new poll out today suggests.
The poll by YouGov for the Evening Standard puts the party on 5% which would see them gain one seat on the Assembly.
UKIP held two seats on the Assembly between 2004-2008.
The results also suggest that The Green Party and the BNP will lose all of their seats on the Assembly, polling at just 3% and 1% respectively.
This would represent a big collapse in Green Party support after taking 8% in 2008.
The BNP’s support also appears to have all but disappeared from their high point of 5% in 2008.
The Lib Dem Assembly candidates meanwhile are polling ahead of their Mayoral candidate on 9%, to Brian Paddick’s 7%.
This would be a relatively good result for the Lib Dems, representing just a 2% drop from their 2008 result.
Today’s poll also puts UKIP’s mayoral candidate Lawrence Webb in fourth place to be London Mayor, at 3%.
The Green Party’s candidate Jenny Jones is now down to joint fifth place with independent candidate Siobhan Benita. Both are polling just 2%.
Benita’s campaign today claimed that opinion polls are “not a fair measure of her support.” Another poll last week put her on <0.5%.
However the biggest turnaround in today’s poll comes for Labour who are set to take 46% of the votes to the Conservative’s 35% on the London Assembly top up list.
In 2008 Labour received just 28% of the vote to the Conservative’s 35%.
However, despite this surge, Labour’s Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone is still trailing Boris Johnson, albeit by a smaller margin than last month.
If today’s poll is replicated at the ballot box next month, then Labour are set to lose the Mayoralty, despite making significant gains on the Assembly.
16 Apr 2012
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- Peter Bayley has worked for 50 years as a cinema projectionist in East Finchley
- Nice map of London's fruit trees shows you where to pick free food
- Diary of the shy Londoner
- London has chosen its mayor, but why can’t it choose its own media?
- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Silencing the Brick Lane curry touts could be fatal for the city's self-esteem
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Nice Interactive timeline lets you follow Londoners' historic fight against racism
- Summer Camp: Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days
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