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Sapling.info Bookstore (25)
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Sea Room
Adam Nicolson
(2002 - New Edition)
Paperback - 256 pages
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0006532012
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Biographies are supposed to deal with people, not places, but Adam Nicolson's lyrical new book, Sea Room, is best seen as a biography. Dealing with the geology, history, natural history, sociology, and emotional resonance of the Shiants--a trio of Hebridean Islands between Skye and Harris --Nicolson's book is an all-encompassing characterisation of this remote corner of the British Isles.
Nicolson begins by describing how, inheriting the islands from his father as a young man, the islands have come to have an unusually deep meaning for him. This comes out in his painstaking reconstruction of the geological formation of the islands, of their ancient bronze and iron age settlements, and of the harsh lives of the families that lived here until large-scale economies destroyed traditional Hebridean life.
There is much sadness and anger in Nicolson's account of these changes, but also joy--joy at the richness of life in such a place, and joy that these changes have allowed Nicolson himself to experience the Shiants' beauty. The precision with which almost every inch of the islands' physical and historical identities are described is, literally, marvellous; Nicolson eschews generalities, and writes with a love of detail that is increasingly rare. Although the book is a little maudlin at times, this is only the reflection of Nicolson's own sensitivity to the place. The Shiants are anthropomorphised, becoming a character in their own right, proof that the tiniest place can reflect the passage of time.
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The British Seaside Holiday
Kathryn Ferry
(2009)
Paperback - 128 pages
Shire Publications
ISBN: 0747807272
Synopsis by publisher:
Old-fashioned seaside holidays inspire a great deal of nostalgic affection among British people. Quintessential elements such as seaside donkeys and sickly sticks of rock are easily identifiable and memorable ingredients of a tradition that most people in this country have experienced.
Focusing on the hundred year period from 1870 to 1970, this volume takes a nostalgic journey through the promenades, deckchairs and sandcastles to discover how ordinary people spent their seaside holidays. Colourful photographs and images are brought to life with light-hearted commentary revealing the history behind these idyllic trips to the seaside - how did we get there, where did we stay, and how did we spend our days? Each captivating chapter explores a different aspect of holiday life to build a complete picture of the social and historical significance of the classic British seaside holiday.
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Liverpool 800: Culture, Character and History
John Belchem (Editor)
(2006)
Paperback - 416 pages
Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846310350
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Liverpool celebrates its 800th anniversary in 2007, and will be European Capital of Culture in 2008. As the city reinvents itself and looks forward, it is also learning from its past. Liverpool 800: Culture, Character & History is written by a team of experts, using the latest historical research to explore the citys distinctive culture and character. This is a path-breaking biography of the city, tracing its society, politics, economy and culture over eight centuries. Fully illustrated and powerfully written, it offers new perspectives on a true World City, as it works to make its future as extraordinary as its past. The books publication will become a centrepiece of the 800 the anniversary Liverpool Year of Heritage celebrations in 2007. Ranging widely over politics and government, famous and infamous personalities, domestic lives and global connections, and culture both high and low, Liverpool 800 offers a warts and all portrait of a city which has inspired contempt (a black spot on the Mersey) and adulation (the centre of consciousness of the human universe) but rarely indifference. Elegantly designed and including over 300 illustrations, many of which have never been published before, Liverpool 800 is a superb anniversary celebration of a great city and its people.
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Living in Dublin
Robert O'Byrne
(2003)
Hardcover - 208 pages
Thames and Hudson
ISBN: 0500511322
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
With its literary history and Georgian architecture, its modern art galleries and classic pubs, Dublin has become both an international tourist destination and a place for stylish, sophisticated lifestyles. This book explores a city that both embodies urban life in a previous century and represents European style in the new millennium. Dublin's social tradition is represented in the hotels and parks, shops and racecourses - all alive with the resurgent excitement of the city. The book also explores the city's relationship with the literary life, from Jonathan Swift to Roddy Doyle - not to mention Shaw, Yeats, Wilde, Joyce, O'Casey and Beckett. It is completed by listings of places to stay and eat and a guide to the sights of the city.
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Leonardo Da Vinci, the Complete Works
Leonardo da Vinci
(2006)
Hardcover - 640 pages
David & Charles
ISBN: 0715324535
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
This captivating book provides the reader with a unique insight into the life and work of one of history's most intriguing figures. All of Leonardo Da Vinci's work is presented in this compact volume - from his paintings and frescos, to detailed reproductions of his remarkable encrypted notebooks. As well as featuring each individual artwork, sections of each are shown in isolation to reveal incredible details - for example, the different levels of perspective between the background sections of the "Mona Lisa", and the disembodied hand in "The Last Supper". 640 pages of colour artworks and photographs of Da Vinci's original notebooks, accompanied by fascinating biographical and historical details are here.
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Urbanism in the Preindustrial World: Cross-cultural Approaches
Glenn R. Storey (Editor)
(2006)
Paperback - 560 pages
University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817352465
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
This work employs a subset of preindustrial cities on many continents to answer questions archaeologists grapple with concerning the populating and growth of cities before industrialisation. It further explores how scholars differently conceive and execute their research on the population of cities. The subject cities are in Greece, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Italy, Egypt, Africa, United States, Denmark, and China. This broad sample provides a useful framework for answers to such questions as "Why did people agglomerate into cities?" and "What threshold population size and settlement longevity constitute a city?" The study covers more than population magnitude and population makeup, the two major frameworks of urban demography. The contributors combine their archaeological and historical expertise to reveal commonalities, as well as theoretical extrapolations and methodological approaches, at work here and outside the sample. "Urbanism in the Preindustrial World" is a unique study revealing the variety of factors involved in the coalescing and dispersal of populations in preindustrial times.
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Consuming Cities
Malcolm Miles, Steven Miles
(2004)
Paperback - 216 pages
Palgrave, formerly Macmillan Press
ISBN: 0333977106
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Contemporary urban consumption touches the everyday lives of most citizens and permeates discussion of society and culture today. Consuming Cities looks at this topic from perspectives in both sociology and cultural theory, drawing together references from mainstream and also less obvious sources in both literatures. Each chapter includes a specific case of a city or aspect of consumption, ranging from a history of urban consumption, gambling to the consumption of culture and its place in tourism to the consumption palace of the cruise liner. This definitive and accessible book will be an invaluable resource to a wide range of students.
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Art Deco Interiors: Decoration and Design Classics of the 1920s and 1930s
Patricia Bayer
(1998)
Paperback - 224 pages
Thames and Hudson
ISBN: 0500280207
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
By the time of the Paris exhibition of 1925 from which Art Deco took its name, the idea that an interior and its furnishings should form a complete design - a "total look" - dominated the thinking of both designers and their clients. Studios began to emerge to serve the needs of a design and style-conscious middle-class. This text displays the flourishing design ingenuity through contemporary photographs and illustrations of selected interiors complemented with modern photographs of individual pieces. It traces the sylistic evolution and dominant motifs of Deco, the triumph of the 1925 exhibition and the pure "high style" of the Paris ensembliers; the growth of Streamline Moderne offshoots in the US; the international revival of Deco as a decorative style for a new generation of post-modern designers; and the restoration of many Art Deco interiors to their original state.
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Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs and Memories
Sally Westwood (Editor), John Williams (Editor)
(1996)
Paperback - 304 pages
Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd
ISBN: 0415144302
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
The city has always been a locus of research and discussion within the debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. This volume brings together work on the city from within sociology and cultural studies. The book is organized around five major themes: the theoretical imagination; ethnic diversity and the politics of difference; memory and nostalgia; and the complex and complimentary narrative of the city ways. While these representations bring the past and the present together, the final section of the book elaborates the present and future, in relation to the idea of the virtual city. Hence, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of space and commnication, but has a profound effect on the sociological imagination itself.
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How to Read a Church: A Guide to Images, Symbols and Meanings in Churches and Cathedrals
Richard Taylor
(2003)
Hardcover - 260 pages
Rider
ISBN: 1844130533
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
A unique, accessible guide to the common symbols and meanings in church art and architecture Churches and cathedrals play an essential part in our heritage. As community-centred places of worship and as important tourist attractions, they are visited by millions of people every year. But churches were originally built to be read, and so they are packed with images, symbols and meanings that often need explanation for visitors. How to Read a Church is a lively and fascinating guide to what a visitor to a church is likely to find there and how to interpret the common images and meanings in church art and architecture. It will explain how to identify people, scenes, details and their significance, and will explore the symbolism of different animals, plants, colours, numbers and letters - and what this all means. It will be an essential guide for anyone who has ever visited / is visiting a church or cathedral, and for those who want to know more about these incredible buildings and the art they contain.
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Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
(1998)
Paperback - 311 pages
University of California Press
ISBN: 0520209664
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
This volume takes the reader on a journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?", the author explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects - and people - are made to "perform" their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages. The analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketeted as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies and places. The book concludes with a commentary on the "good taste/bad taste" debate in the ephemeral "museum of the life world," where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converting life into heritage begins.
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Cyberspace Divide
Brian Loader (Editor)
(1998)
Paperback - 288 pages
Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd
ISBN: 0415169690
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
The global communications networks which make up cyberspace are claimed to be altering almost every facet of our lives. This work analyzes issues of agency, equality and autonomy as they are affected by global communications networks and evaluates national policies for the development of information superhighways. It also examines the changes in interaction, ethical behaviour, professional power relationships and academic discourse as a result of electronic communication.
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Arts & Economics: Analysis & Cultural Policy
Bruno S. Frey
(2003)
Paperback - 250 pages
Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. KG
ISBN: 3540002731
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Using the economic point of view for an analysis of phenomena related to artistic activities, this title challenges widely held popular views and offers an alternative perspective to sociological or art historic approaches. The wide range of subjects presented in this title are allrelevant for cultural policy. The issues discussed include: institutions - from festivals to "superstar" museums; different means of supporting the arts, including the question whether artistic creativity is undermined by public intervention; an investigation into art as an investment; and the various approaches applied when valuing our cultural properties, or why, in a comparative perspective, direct voter participation in cultural policy is not antagonistic to artistic values.
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Understanding the Urban
David Byrne
(2001)
Paperback - 240 pages
Palgrave, formerly Macmillan Press
ISBN: 0333724291
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
This interdisciplinary text examines the contemporary nature and possible futures of cities in a postindustrial and globalized world. Cities are considered both as complex systems and as the product of collective human action. The theoretical perspectives of urban history, geography and sociology, and empirical studies from the developed, developing and former soviet systems, are brought together to describe the crucial processes of the restructuring of urban employment, the creation of the built environment and the transformation of "culture" in cities.
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Tourists in Historic Towns: Urban Conservation and Heritage Management
Aylin Orbasli
(2000)
Paperback - 228 pages
Spon Press
ISBN: 0419259309
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
For the tourist industry, history has become a product that can be marketed, sold and even re-created. Historic settlements and urban areas have become products for consumers seeking an experience. This text examines the relationship of culture, heritage, conservation and tourism development in historic towns and urban centres, debating the impacts of tourism on historic towns and the role tourism plays in conservation and urban continuity. Discussing long-term planning and effective management, based on strategic decision making which is multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional, the book aims to provide guidance in tourism development and visitor management for historic towns, in support of sustainable development objectives and community development. The main focus of the book is medium-sized historic towns and historic quarters which are attractive to the tourist market, but historic quarters in large cities and smaller rural settlements are not excluded. The book covers historic towns that are established or emerging on the tourist market in both developed and developing countries. Alongside over a hundred examples of historic towns, five historic towns are discussed as case studies: Granada, Spain; York, England; Mdina, Malta; Antalya, Turkey and Quedlinburg, Germany. Aylin Orbasli is a trained architect and specialist on the subject of historic towns, tourism, conservation and development. She actively works in the field both as a practitioner and as a consultant, also continuing to research the subject. She works internationally as a consultant, advising on heritage management, tourism planning and development.
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Antonio Gaudi
Juan Bassegoda Nonell, Melba Levick (Photographer)
(2001 - New Edition)
Hardcover - 285 pages
Abbeville Press
ISBN: 0789206900
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926) is one of the best-known architects of the 20th century. Even today, some 75 years after Gaudi's death, his playful, exuberant buildings continue to influence architects, sculptors, and designers. Perhaps most identified with the dynamic, sculptural facades found on his structures, Gaudi is respected as much for his technological innovations as for his daring style. In this enlightening, portable volume, a concise, knowledgeable text by the director of the Catedra Gaudi at the University of Barcelona is brilliantly illustrated with 200 images by a gifted architectural photographer to provide a new perspective on Gaudi's remarkable career. The author traces the influences that led to the architect's definitive style, from his fascination with the Orient and Neogothicism to his love of naturalism and geometric forms. Here is the full range of his oeuvre, including the innovative residences for the Guell family; the daring new structural solutions at Bellesguard; architecture inspired by nature in the Park Guell; and finally his unfinished masterpiece, the Church of the Sagrada Familia, which occupied him until his death. This handsome overview of Gaudi's visionary work is ideal for those who delight in his architecture, as well as those who look forward to traveling to Spain to see his monumental legacy.
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The Creative City
Charles Landry
(2000)
Paperback - 311 pages
Earthscan
ISBN: 1853836133
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Cities have always been the crucible of culture and civilization and the hubs of wealth creation. But today they face enormous challenges. Over half the world's population already lives in cities and the proportion is set to grow rapidly. Compounded by infrastructural, economic and social problems, dramatic changes are taking place. If cities are to flourish, there has to be a paradigm shift in the way they are managed, to draw fully on the talents and creativity of their own residents - businesses, city authorities and the citizens themselves. This text is a call for imaginative action in the development and running of urban life and a clear and detailed toolkit of methods by which our cities can be revived and revitalized. Presenting case studies and examples of urban innovation and regeneration from around the world, it analyzes the crucial steps and disciplines involved. It shows how to think, plan and act creatively in addressing urban issues, and how to apply the methods described in any city.
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The Art of Looking Sideways
Alan Fletcher
(2001)
Hardcover - 1067 pages
Phaidon Press
ISBN: 0714834491
Review by Amazon.co.uk:
Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways is an absolutely extraordinary and inexhaustible "guide to visual awareness", a virtually indescribable concoction of anecdotes, quotes, images and bizarre facts that offers a wonderfully twisted vision of the chaos of modern life. Fletcher is a renowned designer and art director and the joy of The Art of Looking Sideways lies in its beautiful design. Loosely arranged in 72 chapters with titles like "Colour", "Noise", "Chance", "Camouflage" and "Handedness", Fletcher's book, which he describes as "a journey without a destination", is "a collection of shards" that captures the sensory overload of a world that simply contains too much information. In one typical section, entitled "Civilization", the reader encounters six Polish flags designed to represent the world, a photograph of an anthropomorphic hand bag, Buzz Aldrin's bootprint on the moon, drawings of Stone Age pebbles, a painting of "Ireland--as seen from Wales" and a dizzying array of quotations and snippets of information, including the wise words of Marcus Aurelius, Stephen Jay and Gandhi's comment, "Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea". Fletcher's mastery of design mixes type, space, fonts, alphabets, colour and layout combined with a "jackdaw" eye for the strange and profound to produce a stunning book that cannot be read, but only experienced. --Jerry Brotton
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No Logo
Naomi Klein
(2001 - New Edition)
Paperback - 501 pages
Flamingo
ISBN: 0006530400
Review by Amazon.co.uk:
We live in an era where image is nearly everything, where the proliferation of brand-name culture has created, to take one hyperbolic example from Naomi Klein's No Logo, "walking, talking, life-sized Tommy [Hilfiger] dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds". Brand identities are even flourishing online, she notes--and for some retailers, perhaps best of all online: "Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations".
In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. The global companies claim to support diversity but their version of "corporate multiculturalism" is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to "censor" the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster's policies, given that they are both divisions of Viacom?
Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a "living wage" wrote that "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment". Those clerks should probably just be grateful they're not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring "permatemps" who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the "Free Agent Nation" observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organise workers and advocate for change.
But resistance is growing and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programmes have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike's abusive labour practices but about the astronomical mark-up in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, "Nike, we made you. We can break you". But there's more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: "Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organisers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centred alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of co-ordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert". No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. --Ron Hogan
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Modern Garden Design: Innovation Since 1900
Janet Waymark
(2003)
Hardcover - 256 pages
Thames and Hudson
ISBN: 0500511128
Review by Amazon.co.uk:
Gardens in the 20th century reach back into the Victorian era and forward into the age of Land Art. This survey, from Europe to South America, and Japan to the US, takes in many familiar designers including Robinson, Jekyll, Jensen, Farrand, Sessions, Mawson, Church, Sorenson and Jellicoe. The book traces the revolutionary post-war period - the Harvard rebels, Eckbo, Rose and Kily; Noguchi, Burle Marx and Barragan - and the powerful influence of the Scandinavian landscape designers. The garden city is given close attention, from late Victorian Britain, through the Greenbelt Towns in the American Midwest, to the latest regeneration of urban centres worldwide. Notable artists and architects also feature here: Monet, Le Corbusier, Mondrian, Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Gaudi among others. Land artists have brought landscape and the garden into the 21st century and include Robert Smithson and Kathryn Gustafson in the US, and Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy and Ian Hamilton Finlay in the UK.
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Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Jessie Sheeler, Andrew Lawson (Photographer)
(2003)
Hardcover - 160 pages
Frances Lincoln
ISBN: 0711220859
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
Sir Roy Strong calls Little Sparta "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945". Ian Hamilton Finlay's unique creation in the Pentland Hills south of Edinburgh is a garden composed as an artwork in itself. It incorporates concrete poetry, moral polemic, philosophical reflection and a sparkling sense of humour. While Finlay's works and installations throughout Europe and North America are well documented and justly famous, this is the first book devoted solely to the garden at Little Sparta, which has been at the heart of his life's work. It offers readers a sense of the diversity and originality of the garden along with a text that unfolds the layers of meaning it contains.
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After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City
Michael Sorkin (Editor), Sharon Zukin (Editor)
(2002)
Hardcover - 240 pages
Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd
ISBN: 0415934796
Synopsis by Amazon.co.uk:
The September 11 attacks transformed all of New York City, not just the historic financial district of lower Manhattan. In "After the World Trade Center", the social critics Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin call on nineteen of New York's best urbanists to consider the attack and its aftermath in the broadest context. These essays provide a panoramic social portrait of the city at a new crossroads, one that both reflects New York's pre-eminent role as a financial and cultural capital and reveals the fault lines under the last few years of rapid growth. The essays point to a manifesto for a democratically planned New York, where all the city's communities from Tribeca to Chinatown and Jackson Heights count. But while the city still digs through the debris, contrary forces shaping its future are at work. Developers jockey to control the right to rebuild "ground zero". Financial firms line up for sweetheart deals. Architects and planners debate surveillance schemes over New York's boisterous public life, and proposals for memorials are gaining in appeal. Though these processes are taking form, none has achieved a political consensus. Through a multitude of perspective on the emerging city, "After the World Trade Center" provides alternative visions to the expected landscape of power.
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18 Folgate Street
Dennis Severs, Peter Ackroyd (Introduction)
(2001)
Hardcover - 286 pages
Chatto and Windus
ISBN: 0701172797
Review by Amazon.co.uk:
The innocuous-sounding address of 18 Folgate Street is here the book of the tour of Dennis Severs' extraordinary recreation of a Georgian household in Spitalfields, a piece of theatrical still life, mesmerisingly conjured. Severs died at the end of 1999, but this alternative written version, with the sympathetic editing of Jenny Uglow, a gallery of photographs and an introduction by London's literary curator and, indeed, biographer, Peter Ackroyd, provides a unique posthumous flat-pack tour, time-capsuled for the future curious.
Severs, a more-English-than-thou Californian, bought the house in a derelict street just outside the Square Mile in 1979, and set upon installing himself and his lifelong acquisitions. Friends called it a "restoration comedy", but it was to become a historical drama, with Severs' declaration that "my canvas is your imagination". He installed the fictional Gervais/Jervis family, Huguenot silk weavers, from whose affairs Severs himself weaves his narrative magic. Beginning in the basement larder and kitchen, he takes the visitor-reader on a parade upwards, though the parlour, dining room, drawing room, bedroom, boudoir and attic of the house, summoning drama and narrative from the strategically arranged and decorated rooms, heavy with the air of recent occupation. At its best, it resembles a talking book, each room an episode linking to the next, and with Severs' constant evocation of duality, symmetry and dimension as he finds art in balance rather than chronological fidelity. Taste, however, can be a cruel, haranguing thing, something Severs shares when his singular, proportionate vision of the "Space Between" takes pleasure in reading too much into things. Does it work as well on the page? Inevitably, not fully; the effect is reductive, and contrary to the very principle of Severs' ambition. However, this quirky externalisation of this eccentric Anglophile's life, and its epoch-tripping celebration of etymology, social history, hearth drama and cultural and philosophical commentary, allied to tantalisingly brief snatches of autobiography, serves as the final will and testament of Dennis Severs, who rejuvenated the soul of a house with his own charged, imaginative kindling. Ultimately, the house's motto stands as the book's--"Aut Visum Aut Non": you either see it or you don't. --David Vincent
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