The Owl Service

Niamh Lawlor on 12/05/2025

Alan Garner, 1967

Recommended by Jacob Hyde

In Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) three teenagers spend a summer together in a remote Welsh valley. Slowly they become aware that they are being pushed by forces in the landscape to act out a strange and bloody story from The Mabinogion, and the uncanny environment begins to give seemingly innocuous objects a terrible significance. An old book blown in the wind; a plate’s floral pattern; a stone with a perfectly circular hole bored through it: they somehow tell the same tragic story.

‘I think this valley really is kind of reservoir, […]’ says one character, meditating on the mythic power that has entangled them. ‘I think the power is always there and always will be. It builds up and builds up until it has to be let loose – like filling and emptying a dam. And it works through people’. We see how family history and national history, how hormones and class, and how the forces of a place work through us and use us. How much can we resist our environment? No easy answers are given. ‘She wants to be flowers,’ goes one of the narrative’s cryptic refrains, ‘but you make her owls’.

The Living Stones: Cornwall

Niamh Lawlor on 08/05/2025

Ithell Colquhoun, 1957

Recommended by Niamh Lawlor

Whilst the work of painter Ithell Colquhoun has attracted more attention in recent years, her status as a unique writer of place in the twentieth century remains largely overlooked. Perhaps the 2024 republication of The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957) by Pushkin Press and the soon to be re-released The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (1955) will lead new readers to visit these distinctive works and see the already vivid world of Ithell Colquhoun’s paintings enriched by the deeply sensory evocations of landscape across these two texts.

The Living Stones: Cornwall details the artist’s arrival at Lamorna, where she would come to set up her rural studio and characterise herself the ‘Bride of Quietness’ – safely nestled within the rural Cornish landscape away from the offensive and stifling noise pollution of London. From her new Cornish home – christened Vow Cave by the artist – Colquhoun offers accounts of her own first-hand interactions with the iconic landscapes of her paintings. The book’s episodic chapters see Colquhoun traverse the Cornish landscape, guided by the magnetic pull of the counties’ stone circles, holy wells and ancient crosses. As with many of Colquhoun’s paintings, these spaces are typically represented as uninhabited by any other human presence and in turn giving their most sincere and respectful pilgrims unadulterated access to what the artist believed to be their deeply numinous influence. Colquhoun’s Cornwall is an animist’s landscape – in which each tree, well, hill and stone tells a story which provides a palpable point of access to the foregone Celtic world the artist detected in every aspect of her surroundings. In The Living Stones, Colquhoun strives to give voice to the stories and wisdom embodied in this ancient and sacred environment in a unique piece of place-based writing that combines travelogue, folklore, memoir, local history, geological studies and early twentieth century mysticism.

Read about the ongoing Tate exhibition ‘Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds’ here.

Jenny Uglow: ‘A Year with Gilbert White’

Niamh Lawlor on 28/03/2025

Summer Weinrebe Lecture

Tuesday 17 June 2025, talk at 4pm, drinks reception 5.15. University of Birmingham Arts Building, First Floor, Main Lecture Theatre.

All are welcome for this public lecture, but we recommend that you register here to reserve your seat.

Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own.

We’ll be welcoming Jenny Uglow OBE to speak about her new book A Year With Gilbert White: The Story of a Nature Writer (to be published by Faber this September). Jenny is the author of highly acclaimed biographies and histories, including the classic of Midlands history The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future. The talk forms part of our ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking’ series.

“In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. He kept journals for many years and was now halfway through completing his Natural History of Selbourne – in print since 1789, paving the way for later naturalists. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and sympathy.

Often called ‘the father of ecology’, White noted the results of ‘watching narrowly’ in his Naturalist’s Journal. Through this we follow the seasons, from frost to drought, noting everything from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails, and the vagaries of village life – a determined local record, imbued with a profound sense of place.”

A former editorial director of Chatto & Windus, and previous Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, Jenny Uglow is a biographer and historian. Her books on scientists, writers and artists include The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars and Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, as well as Edward Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. Her book on Gilbert White will be published in September 2025.

Information for visitors to UoB. The Arts Building is in the red zone on this Campus map. Trains run regularly from Birmingham New Street to ‘University’ rail station, bringing you right onto campus. For drivers we recommend the multi-storey North-East Carpark, off Pritchatt’s Road. Visitors might like to leave time to explore the university buildings, for example the public sculpture on this trail.

Featured image: Eric Ravilious, The Tortoise in the Kitchen Garden, from The Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne, ed., H. J. Massingham, (London: The Nonsuch Press, 1938), Private Collection.

Description image: Engraving after Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, East view of Selborne from the Short Lythe.

Reading Group: The Lunar Men

Niamh Lawlor on 18/03/2025

Monday 19th May 2025, Arts Building, Lecture Room 5

2-4pm

Refreshments provided

The Arts of Place network would like to invite you to a reading group which will revisit Jenny Uglow’s group biography and classic of Midlands history The Lunar Men ahead of her upcoming summer lecture on 17th June.

The Lunar Men explores the lives and legacies of the many members of the Lunar Society, a group of curious and enthusiastic men on the cutting edge of discovery. From James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s exploits with steam engines, to James Keir and Joseph Priestley’s experiments in chemistry, collaboration was at the very heart of their work. Uglow’s group biography is the perfect way to chart this, intertwining details of their personal and family lives with their professional exploits. Birmingham became their hub, their home, and the Midlands on the whole provided the perfect backdrop for their work, from Erasmus Darwin’s medical practice in Lichfield to the group’s adventures exploring the minerals of Derbyshire’s caves. This group of men revolutionised Birmingham’s history, and their legacy should be celebrated.

In anticipation of Jenny’s summer lecture about her new book A Year With Gilbert White, we will be hosting a reading group exploring this earlier work so closely intertwined with Birmingham’s history. The afternoon will consist of talks from Birmingham’s Dr Louise Curran and Dr Malcolm Dick as well as The Lunar Society’s own Dr Peter Borg-Bartolo – experts from the fields covered by this expansive text and enthusiastic readers themselves. These talks will then be followed by discussion.

We invite you to read especially the ‘Prologue’ and the initial section: ‘First Quarter’.

Access the book via FindIt. Or access these PDFs for PROLOGUE and FIRST QUARTER. But no prior knowledge is required and all are welcome to take part!

If you have queries about this event please contact Lucy Snow: lrs103@student.bham.ac.uk.

Image: Anonymous artist, Birmingham by Moonlight, c. 1800, Birmingham Museums Trust

‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano

Niamh Lawlor on 12/02/2025

With guest speaker Professor Simon Bainbridge

Seminar

Wednesday 19th March, Arts Building, University of Birmingham, Arts Room 201, 3-5pm

Arts of Place is delighted to welcome Professor Simon Bainbridge expert in Romanticism, the politics of place and mountaineering in this seminar hosted in collaboration with the Nineteenth Century Centre at the University of Birmingham. Simon will give his talk during the first hour; followed by refreshments and conversation.

Simon Bainbridge is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Simon’s extensive work in the field of Romanticism has involved close research into the relationship between the movement and the historic contexts that surround it. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003). In this seminar we will hear about Simon’s recent research exploring global mountaineering in the Romantic-period, focusing on accounts of ascending Hawaii’s highest volcanoes.

Simon introduces his subject here:

‘This paper will examine the Romantic-period phenomena of global mountaineering through a focus on accounts of the climbs of Hawaii’s highest volcanoes (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea). These climbs by western travellers began in 1779 with attempts made by crew members of Captain Cook’s third voyage and culminated in 1840-1 with a 400-strong ascent made by the United States Exploratory Expedition as part of the first American government sponsored scientific expedition to the Pacific. As these contexts would suggest, the ascents were very much linked to the scientific and imperial agendas of the voyages of which they were a part. The paper will examine the extent to which the exploration of what were seen as physical, psychological, geographical and imaginative extremes in Romantic-period global mountaineering undermined or reinforced the climbers’ conceptions of the self, the aesthetic, the world and the divine. It will particularly examine the question of whether western climbers’ attempts to understand and appreciate the Hawaiian volcanoes were influenced and informed by the knowledge and beliefs of the indigenous peoples who played such a crucial role in their ascents or whether the western climbers used their ascent narratives to reinforce wider imperial and colonial power structures.’

Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1826, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Niamh Lawlor on 17/01/2025

Manchán Magan, 2020

Recommended by Niamh Lawlor

Writer, broadcaster and advocate for the Irish language, Manchán Magan’s Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape provides an engrossing introduction to the history of one of Europe’s oldest vernacular languages. Combining an exploration of the etymological origins of words that survive in new forms in contemporary spoken Irish, as well as those that have fallen out of use, Magan provides an insight into how words – regardless of the context they are used in today – continue to contain concepts that provide us with an insight into how people of the past understood the surrounding landscape.

Beginning with an exploration of the (at least) 32 words found in the language to denote a field – Magan demonstrates the specificity through which people understood their surroundings. For example, was the field in question a ‘Cuibhreann – a tilled field worked in partnership with a neighbour’, or a ‘Cluain’ – a meadow field between two woods, or ‘a bánóg, a patch of ground levelled out by years of dancing’? Exploring the richness of the Irish vocabulary through consideration of land, sea, weather, astronomy, and place names sees the landscape and the worldviews of those who knew their surroundings most intimately reanimated – offering a rare and valuable insight into the complex and nuanced worldview of the local people who shaped this unique vernacular.

Niamh Lawlor

Niamh Lawlor on 05/02/2022

Niamh Lawlor

Arts of Place Research Assistant and PhD Researcher – Department of English Literature

NXL744@student.bham.ac.uk

Throughout my reading life, I have often found myself as intrigued by an author’s apparently passing reference to the name of a town, village, church, landmark, road or field name as the events unfolding in the work itself. Over the past few years much of my reading has been accompanied by examinations of OS maps and regional history books in an attempt to discover the reality behind places they describe as well as the lives of the communities at their heart. Exploring the local histories and the evolving physical status of the spaces writers are drawn to rarely fails to offer unpredictable insights into their wider creative choices and has instilled within me an awareness of just how much local history has to offer in vividly enhancing examinations of place writing.

My PhD research foregrounds the localities that surround a selection of pre-historic and ancient monuments across the UK and Ireland. Focused on the first half of the twentieth century, my project employs a ‘ground up’ research approach which prioritises gaining an insight into the evolving physical and cultural status of specific monument sites throughout the period as well as how these landmarks were understood and interacted with by the local people living closest to them. This provides a starting point from which to explore how writers of the period creatively respond to these elusive and mysterious spaces in both fiction and non-fiction works. I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which enthusiasm for these antiquities gained momentum during the first half of the century and how contemporary writing was increasingly seen to advocate for the importance of embodied and self-guided interactions with the sites.

Louise Kenward

Niamh Lawlor on 23/01/2021

Louise Kenward

Writer, Artist, Psychologist
PhD Candidate, Centre for Place Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University

lmkenward@icloud.com

https://footnotepress.com/books/moving-mountains/

Louise Kenward is a writer, psychologist, and artist living in East Sussex with post-viral illness. She is currently a PhD candidate with the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her thesis is investigating the south coast of the Romney Marshes. As one of the most at risk areas in the UK for flooding, this stretch of shore takes Louise on 12 beach walks from Pett in East Sussex to Hythe in Kent, making monthly trips to beachcomb. Objects collected and observations made inform her writing practice, holding a lens of environmental and disability justice. This practice-based thesis is informed by the flotsam and jetsam that washes up, connecting place with person in the wider context of rising sea levels and post-viral illness.

She edited a first of its kind anthology, published in 2023 by Footnote, Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability. Moving Mountains includes work by writers Kerri Andrews, Polly Atkin, Sally Huband, Khairani Barokka, Eli Clare, Kate Davis, Hannah Hodgson, Louisa Adjoa Parker and Alec Finlay. It is a collection of 26 poems, essays, and prose exploring the small to the vast and is due out in paperback on 6th March 2025.

Louise was selected in the top 10 for Media and Publishing, in the 2023/2024 Disability Power 100. She is currently working on her first full length manuscript, A Trail of Breadcrumbs: a personal history of convalescence, a journey around the world accompanied by nineteenth century women travellers.