“Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap…”

Alexandra Harris on 28/03/2022

The Place of the Churchyard

Monday Conversation, 30 May 2022, 5-6pm, online.

The meanings and resonances of churchyards are multiple and deep. They are a sanctuary of peace at the centre of the community; a focus for local history; a place for prayer, mourning and memorialization. In the eighteenth century they inspired a group of poets looking for new ways to connect with the land and with the past.

We met for a discussion of exciting new research on churchyards, history and poetry. Ruth Abbott (Cambridge) took us beyond and behind Thomas Gray’s Elegy, introducing the poet’s unpublished Commonplace-Book notes on historical graveyards, tombs, and sepulchres. James Metcalf (King’s) offered a new reading of Robert Blair’s The Grave as a piece of land work.  

James Metcalf: ‘This ado in Earthing up a Carcase’: Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) & Eighteenth-Century Churchyard Georgic

“The churchyard is a place where it is impossible to forget the body. It is a place where bodies continually press upon the consciousness of the solitary figure wandering its enclosure, however abstracted their thoughts might aspire to be in contemplating the afterlife.”

James Metcalf works to rethink the eighteenth-century school of poets and thinkers often known as the Graveyard poets, refocusing our emphasis from graveyard to churchyard based on the study of particular places filled with physical and imaginative resonances. The burial site thus becomes part of a wider landscape in the long eighteenth century. James’ talk for Arts of Place offers an exciting glimpse into his upcoming book, Written in the Country Churchyard: Place and Poetics 1720-1820, where James examines how the georgic is a particularly useful mode for thinking about the poetry of the churchyard. 

Ruth Abbott: Churchyard and other Common Places in Thomas Gray’s Antiquarian Scholarship

Ruth Abbott works on the particularly challenging questions of how people make notes and organise their ideas; has recently worked to edit an online edition of Thomas Gray’s Commonplace Book; and is editing an exciting multi-disciplinary volume about Gray composed from a myriad of scholarly perspectives. In this talk, Ruth thinks about churchyards as common places in the mid eighteenth century. She moves backwards from Wordsworth’s writing on epitaphs, which are defined as 

“not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all […] it is concerning all, and for all”.

For Ruth, Wordsworth articulates a particular way of thinking about churchyards that appears to originate, in some part, in Gray. Bringing his Antiquarian scholarship into conversation with Elegy, she provides an enlightening reading of the common place of the churchyard in poetry and beyond. She highlights how eighteenth-century antiquarian research frequently depended on common access to sites such as churchyards as it did the sharing of textual resources, suggesting that such processes of historical, poetic, and place “openness” were as important to Gray as they were to Wordsworth when he was musing fifty years later on the epitaph. 

Daisy Hay: Stories of Romantic Birmingham

Alexandra Harris on 25/03/2022

Arts of Place and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing Annual Lecture: Joseph Priestley, Joseph Johnson, Ruins and Riots

Tuesday 3 May 2022, 5.30pm, the University of Birmingham

We were delighted for Daisy Hay (University of Exeter) to give the second OCLW and Arts of Place Annual Lecture. Daisy’s book, Dinner with Joseph Johnson, is an extraordinary account of writing, publishing, and friendship in a revolutionary age — and Birmingham is central to the story. 

“The crowd ran riot through Birmingham, and its surrounding towns and villages, for four days. Four dissenting chapels were damaged or destroyed, along with twenty-seven private houses”.

Daisy returned us first to Joseph Priestley, Unitarian intellectual dissenter; to Birmingham in the midst of industrial transformation; and to the night of July the 14th, 1791 and the beginning of the Birmingham riots, where Birmingham dissenters, Priestly among them, paid a high price for clashing with church and state:

“The Priestleys bundled into the chaise with nothing but the clothes they stood in, leaving their grown-up sons to defend the house. They drove to the house of their friend and fellow dissenter William Russell who lived a mile away. From Russell’s windows they could see the meeting house was on fire, and as they struggled to comprehend what they were seeing news arrived that the crowd had arrived at Fair-hill, and that the crowd was threatening to destroy Russell’s house too, so they got back into the chaise and were driven on another mile to the Hawkes’ at Moseley Green. Hawkes’ house was on higher ground and from his windows Priestley could see Fair-hill in the distance […] hearing shouts of exaltation as the crowds arrived at his house and his defences gave way. Priestley’s sons had extinguished all the hearth fires before they made their own escape, so the crowd had to make do with weapons and fists as they set about destroying Priestley’s home. […] In their rage they destroyed all of Priestley’s scientific apparatus, as well as his manuscripts and his library, which was completely invaluable. They ransacked the cellars and drank themselves into a further frenzy, before finally setting fire to the ruins. For the whole of the next day, July the 15th, the rioters roamed the city, destroying the houses of dissenters at will.”

Daisy speaks on the consequences of these incendiary riots. The circle around Johnson and Priestley deliberate upon the politics of dissent; publicise the manipulations of state; and lead us through ruins literary and allegorical.

The ruins of Birmingham stand for the realisation of a dissenting nightmare, a long-anticipated physical substantiation of state aggression. But they also stand as symbols of unity: between different contemporary dissenting groups, and between the present, and a socially remembered and recorded past of dissenting unity and persecution.

We are finally brought to consider the potentials of the safe harbour of friendship for fostering intellectual freedom: a potential manifested in Johnson’s dining room at 72 St Paul’s Churchyard, London. Rather than just a place of refuge, Johnson’s sanctuary becomes emblematic of a new kind of home: a “capacious, generous space from which people could come and go” and from which cultural movements could be born.

Listen to Daisy’s wonderful lecture below:

One print published in Johnson’s 1792 The Riot’s of Birmingham, July 1791, illustrating the ruin of Russell’s Showell Green house.

Images:

Robert Dent, ‘Destruction of Old Meeting Chapel’, in Old and New Birmingham (1879); William Ellis, ‘The House of William Russell Esq. Showell Green’, from The Riots at Birmingham, July 1791‘, published by Joseph Johnson in 1792.

In Search of the Essence of Place

Harriet Walters on 23/03/2022

Petr Král. First published as ‘Enquête sur des lieux’ (Flammarion, 2007); translated by Christopher Moncrieff (Pushkin Press, 2012)

Recommended by Jon Stevens

Petr Král was a Czech writer, who died in 2020. ‘In Search of the Essence of Place’ was one of his last books, published in 2007. Král was born in German occupied Prague and grew up under Communism. After the ‘Prague Spring’, like many writers and intellectuals, he fled to Paris where he spent the next thirty years, apart from a short period in North America. He returned to Prague in 2006.

‘In Search of the Essence of Place’ is an elliptical and fragmented journey through Král’s life. It is a tale of exile and of displacement, in which primacy is given to the places he experienced rather than the people he met.  Král was a member of the Czech surrealist movement and, on his first visit to Paris, he wanders the streets searching for the home of André Breton (who he refers to obliquely as ‘the prophet’). Following the example of Breton’s autofiction Nadja, Král’s text is interspersed with commonplace black and white photographs; and like Breton he is preoccupied by the ‘strangeness of things and places’.

The most unsettling aspect of places is their lack of clear boundaries…even their frontiers are hidden from our eyes by their deceptive drifting motion…(as in) the distinctive way in which the decoration of the most ornate palaces breathes in and out…and then suddenly ceases, when we study it too closely, leaving us with an inanimate lump of masonry.

Sean Ketteringham

Sean Ketteringham on 05/02/2022

Sean Ketteringham

Research Associate, University of Birmingham
Postdoctoral Researcher, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

I am the Research Associate for ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking, 1740-1820’, Arts of Place’s British Academy-funded project. Between October 2023 and May 2024 I will be contributing to all aspects of Arts of Place and helping Alex and Jessica shape our new programme of events. We are setting out to explore the creative minds of those artists and writers who revolutionised how place, locality, community, and the natural world were observed and understood in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British culture.

My research interests are centred around artistic, architectural, and literary articulations of English national identity in relation to the terminal decline of the British Empire during the twentieth century. My doctoral research, completed at Oxford in 2022 under the supervision of Rebecca Beasley, explored these ideas through the cultural crucible of domestic space between 1910 and 1948. It spanned suburban developments, the picturesque, modernist homes, and architectural preservation. I’m currently turning this work into a monograph for Oxford University Press titled Architectures of Identity: English Modernism, Domesticity and Imperial Decline. My new project at the Henry Moore Institute, titled ‘Postwar Folk’, extends these concerns to the period after 1945 through an examination of the triangular bond between postwar sculpture, English folk art, and so-called ethnographic museum collections.

Thinking around deep time, heritage, place and locality is marbled throughout my research and I have regularly worked in the heritage sector and on research residencies including at the National Trust, the Twentieth Century Society, the John Latham Foundation (Flat Time House), Grizedale Arts, and the Charles Moore Foundation, Texas. Prior to my doctorate I received my BA in English at the University of Liverpool, and my MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute.

Niamh Lawlor

Niamh Lawlor on 05/02/2022


Niamh Lawlor

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

 

NXL744@student.bham.ac.uk

 

 

 

Throughout my reading life, I have consistently found myself as fixated 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 the close study of 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.

On Place Value

Ellen Addis on 13/01/2022

Monday Conversation 7 February 2022, 6-7pm online.

Why do we value the land? Is it for agriculture and the production of food? For harbouring rich biodiversity? Or for the beauty of the landscape and the opportunity for recreation? These long-debated questions and interests gained urgency at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, but what role can literature and the arts play in determining the answers?

We had two exciting speakers joining us for a discussion of Place Value:

Dr Christopher Donaldson (Lancaster University) reflects on the racial politics inherent in representations of the British countryside, focusing on the English Lake District

Dr Pippa Marland (University of Bristol) considers the emergence of a ‘new georgic’ in farm writing of the twenty-first century.

The Natural History of Oxfordshire

Alexandra Harris on 18/12/2021

Robert Plot, 1677

Recommended by Martin Stott

Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire examines and describes the flora, fauna, palaeontology, geology, and landscape of the county; it includes a large map, which Plot claims is more comprehensive than those of ’Saxton, Speed &c’, as well as describing unusual features of the area. Controversy about the origin of fossils was growing at the time, and Plot engages with the subject in some detail. He believed that experimentation was essential in understanding the natural world and gives a rational, evidence-based description of the objects and phenomena he comes across, including the first known picture of a dinosaur bone, Plate VIII, which he incorrectly concludes to be the bone of a giant. The impact of the book was immediate and far reaching, and he was elected to the Royal Society on the basis of its publication. It may also have confirmed Elias Ashmole in his belief that Oxford was the appropriate place for his collection. He persuaded the University authorities both to accept the collection and provide a fine building in which to house it. Plot went on to become the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in 1683.

The Making of the English Landscape

Alexandra Harris on 18/12/2021

W.G. Hoskins, 1955.

Recommended by Martin Stott

I discovered this book as a teenager while studying for A levels in geography and geology. It opened my eyes to the landscape of my childhood, the north Oxfordshire Cotswolds, and gave me the tools to explore what became with its publication a new discipline: landscape history.  Through it, over a distance of a few miles, it was possible to chart centuries of England’s history by close observation of the landscape. Hoskins’ attention to the significance of ancient hedgerows, water meadows, green lanes, copses, and deserted medieval villages challenged the received wisdom that contemporary landscapes had  been shaped largely by the great eighteenth-century landowners and their technologies. The Making of the English Landscape is not so much about the geography, local history, or landscape archaeology of a particular place, but rather the intellectual underpinning of a way of seeing, interpreting, and integrating the interaction between human activity – sometimes over millennia – and the landscape of every place.  Its publication almost 70 years ago was revolutionary, and its impact on our understanding of the English landscape remains profound.

The Heart of the Country

Jessica Fay on 30/11/2021

By James and Robin Ravilious, foreword by Ronald Blythe (Scholar Press, 1980)

Recommended by Martin Stott

The Heart of the Country captures — in the words of Robin Ravilious and the photographs of James Ravilious — a slice of rural north Devon between the Taw and Torridge rivers. Structured around four themes (The Land, Farming, Village Life, and Occasions), each with a short introduction by Robin, James records in over a hundred photographs what Ronald Blythe calls ‘the poetry of the commonplace’.  Taken over a six-year period in the 1970s within a ten-mile radius of Beaford (covering three towns and about thirty villages), the photographs have an immersive quality which Blythe describes as ‘saying something very memorable about the deeper actuality of rural experience’. Forty years later, they evoke a romantic, almost wistful, air of a community where the threads of people’s lives—the Post Office, the village shops and pubs, hedge laying, foxhunting, the village forge, and winter snows with all the challenges they brought for farmers and their livestock—entwine to create a record of a rural society to which the authors themselves belong, connecting a lingering yesterday to the present.

Fire and Ochre: Films by Julie Brook

Ellen Addis on 26/10/2021

Artist Julie Brook pictured near her home on Skye (Jane Barlow/TSPL).

Over this past summer, Alexandra Harris talked with our Artist-in-Residence Julie Brook about her motivation, her materials, and her methods. Brook is a British artist who creates large scale sculpture. She uses a variety of natural materials and incorporates photography and film to combine wild terrains with classical formalism. Drawing from, with, and in the landscape, Brook has lived and worked in the Orkney Islands, on Jura and Mingulay, and in the Libyan desert. She currently lives on the Isle of Skye. She often travels wide and far for her work, using what she finds in particular landscapes to create new forms and works within those spaces.

In this post we showcase two sections of the conversation, focusing on Brook’s ‘Firestacks’ and ‘Japan’. These, and a further section of the conversation, ‘Labour’, will be screened in-person at the University of Birmingham on 22 November at 5pm. Please do join us if you can. Register here. Come and see Julie’s spectacular images on the big screen! We’ll be making the swish new Teaching and Learning building as much like a cinema as possible…

Firestacks

Firestack, Julie Brook. Jura, West coast of Scotland.

In the early nineties, Brook moved to the remote island of Jura on the west coast of Scotland to paint and draw. Living beneath a natural stone arch, the solitude became part of her art which she then translated into her ‘Firestacks’ series, a body of work which uses rocks to build cairns on the shore, and wood to set fires in them. Eventually, as the tide comes in, the stacks topple and Brook captures the whole transient process on film.

In this video, Brook and Harris explore the rock cairns that Brook now builds every season in the same place; they discuss the process of documenting how each day and each season affects the firestacks differently. 

Firestacks: Julie Brook in conversation

“I first conceived of this work really as the beginning of my sculptural work as well. I was living in a natural arch, I was collecting my water, I was making a fire everyday to cook on. After doing functional building in the arch to make it habitable, I wanted to use those skills and that sensibility to make work.”

Julie Brook

Japan

Ascending, Julie Brook. Kanagaso, Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan.

The second video concerns Brook’s project in Japan, entitled ‘Ascending’. ‘Ascending’ is a 2019 sculptural response to the ancient working quarry of Kanagaso in the Ishikawa Prefecture. Working on a huge scale in the space of the quarry itself, Brook used the material nature of the stone to give ‘Ascending’ its weight, mass, colour and sound. 

In the video, Brook and Harris discuss how Brook’s artistic work within spaces reaches out to the surrounding landscapes, highlighting their own sculptural likeness and giving new life to the space.

Japan: Julie Brook in conversation

“I couldn’t compete with the cliff but I wanted the work to be about the cliff… I wanted the steps to feel like they’d always been there, that they’d simply grown up overnight. It was almost like I was revealing them rather than making them… It’s the whole experience of the environment and the way in which you can ascend the piece to experience that natural amphitheatre that quarries often create, whereby, you change your sense of scale by being able to walk on it.”

Julie Brook