local history – Arts of Place

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

Jessica Fay on 14/01/2021

Jan Morris

(Faber, 2002)

Jan Morris’s book on Trieste is a lyrical history of the city. It is a description of Trieste and its past; it is also an attempt to work out what Trieste means to Morris, and to understand how one’s relationship with a place changes through time. It shows how to appreciate a place’s sadness, ‘the allure of lost consequence and fading power’. It’s a great book on place because it doesn’t just tell you about a place, but shows you how to enjoy it. The best place to read it is outside a bar off the Piazza Unità d’Italia, sipping a Campari and soda, gazing out into the Adriatic for a glimpse of the ghost of Browning’s Waring.

Mr Roscoe’s Garden

Jessica Fay on 13/01/2021

Jyll Bradley (Liverpool University Press, 2008)

Recommended by Martin Stott

I came to this book as a photographer. But it is much more than a photo book. Published as part of Liverpool’s Capital of Culture celebration in 2008 it is a book about a place, Mr Roscoe’s garden in Liverpool, that no longer exists. Through words and pictures Bradley recreates the garden, and charts its life and afterlife, from its foundation in 1802 through its time as a public Botanic Garden from the 1840s to its eventual destruction in 1984 when it closed, the victim of a political storm that mirrored the cataclysmic decline of Liverpool itself. Told through the eyes of a skilled photographer, and the words and memories of Liverpool’s gardening community, the ‘garden’ almost defies definition: does its specialness lie in the plants, the gardeners, the sites, or the greatest orchid collection ever amassed in municipal Britain and rediscovered intact despite the vicissitudes of time? Drawing on history, memory, politics and place, it is a book about why we need gardens and what gardens mean.

Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories (first published 1904)

Alexandra Harris on 03/11/2020

Old West Surrey: Some Notes and Memories - Gertrude Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll (1999, The History Press Ltd)

Recommended by Hattie Walters

Unlike Gertrude Jekyll’s numerous other “garden books”, which are predominately dedicated to the planning and maintenance of a garden over the year, Old West Surrey was intended to memorialise the elements of rural working-class life that she saw rapidly disappearing from her beloved late nineteenth-century stomping-grounds. Roving from the architectural features of specific properties to characters remembered from childhood church sermons, fragments of dialect, dress, custom, and house ornament; and peppered with her own photographs and illustrations, Jekyll’s text is devoted to recording her impressions of local culture, used to promote her own Arts and Crafts sensitivity to place. This work is an important example of the twentieth-century reclamation of the distinctiveness of local village life, and Jekyll’s prime concern is the countryside included in her personal definition of Old West Surrey.

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village by Eamon Duffy

Eamon Duffy (New Haven, 2001)

Recommended by Alexandra Harris

A revelatory example of what happens when the great movements of national and international history are explored from a particular on-the-ground vantage point. Morebath is a small village on the edge of Exmoor; the priest there in the mid seventeenth century kept detailed parish records, and these form a core around which Duffy builds up a portrait of rural Catholic life and how people responded to the changes they faced. It’s a good starting point for exploring the varied field of historical writing in which skilled and painstaking archival work is made to yield precious clues about the experience of rural and working people whose lives have been otherwise forgotten.

The History of Myddle

Alexandra Harris on 19/07/2020

Richard Gough, ed. David Hey (London, 1981)

Recommended by Alexandra Harris

A pioneering work of local history. Richard Gough was a Shropshire yeoman who wanted to write about his parish community: its past and its present. In 1701 he published a study of the antiquities in Myddle, following more or less the newly established conventions for antiquarian place studies. But he wanted to write about more than the pedigrees of manorial lords and the relics of monastic houses, so he invented a form to suit him and embarked on his ‘Observations concerning the Seats in Myddle and the families to which they belong’. By ‘seats’ he meant pews in the church. He drew a plan of St Peter’s, labelled the pews, and wrote a portrait of each member of the congregation, seat by seat. Though he was imagining them all in church, he was writing lives that strayed far from the orderly Sunday formation, into fields and towns, into bedrooms, backrooms, affairs, and quarrels. It was a simple and evocative method of group biography; no-one seems to have used it before, or since.