a photo blog about everyday life
After dinner we walked back and Derek and Yoke Sum took us to see their garden. We made our way down a narrow corridor of stone and concrete that stretches behind their home and the adjoining neighbors’ to a small garden plot at the end. My eyes are always wide when I travel and on this particular evening I was quite taken with the beautiful colors I encountered each time I changed my glance.
After our stay in Manchester, we headed for Lancaster where our hosts put us up in the charming Sun Hotel, a traditional English pub and hotel with a history going all the way back to 1610. The Sun is located in the center of Lancaster, which is a vibrant university city with cobbled streets and stone houses filled with a wide array of shops, bars and restaurants. Allen and I were struck by the number of boutiques and specialty stores we saw featuring such high end brands as Barbour and Patagonia, and specialty items like binoculars, telescopes, bikes, model trains and fishing gear. With a population of about 46,000, Lancaster seemed rather small to us, but apparently it’s a constituent settlement of the wider City of Lancaster, which has a population of almost 135,000 and includes several outlying towns.
On our first night in Lancaster, Derek and Yoke Sum took us to their beautiful home in nearby Garstang, and I was delighted to finally meet their lively and affectionate Lucinda Dog, a standard poodle, who I’ve heard tell about on countless occasions but never met.
We walked to a neighborhood pub for a meal of fish and chips and other local fare. It turns out, dogs are allowed in pubs in England and Luci came along. She had some important business to tend to on the way, so Derek lead us through a wooden stile to a lush open field and Lucy did her thing, and got a little running in as well.
One of the many cool things we saw in Manchester was the allotment that Graeme and Bernadette are members of along with a small group of other people. It’s less than a block from their home and situated right on the edge of beautiful Chorlton Park. One evening we walked through the park, watched a group of young men playing cricket for a while, then stopped at their Allotment before heading back.
In the UK, allotments are small sections of land often owned by local government and rented to individuals usually for the purpose of growing food crops. They can also be self managed and owned by the allotment holders through an association. Some allotments are even owned by the Church of England.
– Original Allotments:
The history of allotments can be said to go back over a thousand years to when the Saxons would clear a field from woodland which would be held in common. Following the Norman conquest, land ownership became more concentrated in the hands of the manorial lords, monasteries and church. The reformation in the 1540s confiscated much of the church lands but they were transferred via the crown to the lords.
In the late 1500s under Elizabeth I common lands used by the poor for growing food and keeping animals began to be enclosed dispossessing the poor. In compensation allotments of land were attached to tenant cottages. This is the first mention of allotments. – from www.allotment.org.uk
These days, growing concerns throughout the UK about genetic modification, chemical pollution and contamination of food as well as the desire for the freshest possible local, seasonal food have caused a rise in the demand for allotment spaces, empty plots are filling fast and waiting lists are no longer a thing of the past.
– Some things in season now:
artichoke, asparagus, aubergine, broad beans, broccoli, carrots, courgette, fennel, lettuces & salad leaves, mangetout, new potatoes, onions, peas, radishes, rhubarb, rocket, runner beans, spinach, spring onions, turnips, watercress, cherries, elderflowers, gooseberries, kiwi fruit, strawberries, basil, chives, dill, elderflowers, mint, nasturtium, parsley (curly), parsley (flat-leaf), rosemary, sorrel
While we were in Manchester, Graeme took us to the beautiful Barton Arcade. I took some candid shots as we reflected on the days of Baudellaire and the flâneur, a literary type from nineteenth-century France portrayed in Baudellaire’s poetry as a man of leisure, an idler, an urban explorer and a connoisseur of the street. Allen lamented that the Barton Arcade seemed less grand than the arcades he imagines from Walter Benjamin’s beloved and unfinished Arcades Project (which is largely responsible for giving the meta concept of the flâneur scholarly importance). I guess this gives us an excuse to go searching, like modern day flâneurs, through the streets of Paris for something that resembles what Allen has in his imagination about Benjamin’s arcades – an impossible feat to be sure, but a journey that must be undertaken one day!
Barton Arcade in Deansgate Manchester is a beautifully restored piece of Victorian architecture originally built of iron and glass in 1871. The arcade was restored in the 1980s and now showcases high-end shops, and numerous office suites. There are three tiers of balconies inside with ornamental balustrades adorning the U-shaped shopping arcade and two octagonal domes rising from glass pendentives. It is said to be the best example of this type of cast-iron and glass-roofed arcade anywhere in England.
Benjamin writes about the creation of arcades in the city of Paris as an architectural change rooted in the rise of capitalism. Arcades consisted of passageways through neighborhoods, which were covered with a glass roof and braced by marble panels resulting in a kind of interior-exterior for vending purposes.
These passages were “lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world in miniature. Within these arcades, the flâneur is capable of finding a remedy for the ever-threatening ennui. He is able to stroll at leisure; one might even go to the extreme of allowing a pet turtle to set his pace, observing the people, the building facades, the objects for sale–entertaining and enriching his mind with the secret language of the city (Baudelaire). I can hear Paris calling for us.
Although I had fun playing with the Instagram ap on my iPhone during my recent UK trip, I have to admit feeling slightly apprehensive about taking the phenomenon too seriously within artistic practice. Aesthetically speaking, Instagram and it’s predecessor, Hipstamatic, seem to follow in the footsteps of the Lomo, the analog camera with numerous incarnations at the center of the Lomographic Society, which professes a motto of “Don’t think, just shoot.”
Unlike the Lomo however, Instagram produces digital images well suited for social media platforms whose users demand instant gratification. It’s easy to take a shot, apply jazzy, retro-looking filters and share the results over a variety of social networking services in seconds flat.
A recent New Yorker article has this to say about the Instagram phenomenon:
“Instagram’s “Most Popular” feed is filled with sunsets over cities and beaches and points in between. It might be said, though, that all Instagrammed photos emphasize photography as an elegiac or twilight art, one that rushes and fakes the emotion of old photographs by cutting out the wait for history entirely, and giving something just a few seconds old the texture of time. We are creating a kind of instant nostalgia for moments that never quite were.”