Call this a recession? At least it isn’t the Dark Ages

Bryan Ward Perkins wrote this piece in the financial times comparing the Dark Ages to our current recession.

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Call this a recession? At least it isn’t the Dark Ages

A social networking site for volunteers

This is a new social networking site for volunteers.

Welcome : i-volunteer.org.uk

Charity Builder UK - free health and safety and HR advice

This is a web site that provides free advice on HR and H&S for charities.

I've not tried it but it has been recoomended by MLA.
Charity Builder UK

Narrative space conference at Leicester

The home page gives outline details of a conference on narrative space at Leicester University.

Narrative Space

Leicester, 20-22 April 2010
Narrative Space is a 3-day international interdisciplinary conference exploring the creation of narrative environments in museums, galleries, historic sites, buildings and landscapes. Proposals are sought from museum practitioners, architects, designers, artists, filmmakers and others actively involved in the imaginative reshaping of museums, galleries and visitor experiences as well as academics researching in the areas of museum and gallery architecture, exhibition and display, both historical and contemporary.

School of Museum Studies - University of Leicester

Collections Trust has moved to SE1

Just heard that the Collections Trust has moved to just around the corner to No 1 London Bridge - maybe we can get some help from them with Museum storage?

Collections Trust - Collections Trust Homepage

To stop marketing Phonecalls

Just visit this site to stop annoying marketing calls: TPS Registration

Britain Loves Wikipedia

I have written to join in the 'Britain loves Wikipedia' campaign - hopefully the Old Operating Theatre Museum will be chosen as one of the Museums alongside the V&A.

Initiatives/Britain Loves Wikipedia - Wikimedia UK: "nick.pooleatcollectionstrust.org.uk"

Need Legal Help from an Online Lawyer ASAP? Ask Attorneys for advice with employer termination, discrimination, harassment, liability, overtime, severance packages & more! - Just Answer!

I got really useful advice from this online service when the local Housing Association knocked our wall down.

Need Legal Help from an Online Lawyer ASAP? Ask Attorneys for advice with employer termination, discrimination, harassment, liability, overtime, severance packages & more! - Just Answer!

Medicine & dickens

This is a recommended book on Dickens and Medicine - apparently he wrote over 200 articles on the subject

PETER LANG PUBLISHING GROUP

Email This! :: Add-ons for Firefox

This is a really useful add-on to firefox which allows you to email the web page your are looking at - it works well with Googlemail
Email This! :: Add-ons for Firefox

William the Conqueror's London Walk

I gave a walk around William the Conqueror's London on Saturday for London Walks - part of my series of walks on English Kings, following the publication of my book on the Kings and Queens of England.

The walk was essentially about Late Saxon and Norman London. I began with a brief introduction to Saxon London, and then we went to see the London Wall and the Tower of London. The route was:

Tower Hill
City Wall
Postern Gate
Tower Moat
White Tower
Tower Hill
All Hallows by the Tower saxon Arch
Customs House
Billingsgate
London Bridge
Dowgate
St Michael's
College Hill
Cannon St
Cheapside
Old Jewry
St Lawrence
Guildhall

You'll find an image of Will the Conq on the following page:

English and Its Historical Development, Part 18 (Norman Invasion and Conquest by William the Conqueror).

Tudor Walk for 90 Hounslow Children

I organised a walk for 90 children from a Hounslow Primary School.

It went really, really well. We had 4 guides and stopped half way round in St Bartholemew#s. Kids were really enthusiastic and the route well planned and with the stop at st Barts, their attention span was increased so that all 3 parts of the walk worked.

Part 1 Charterhouse, Smithfield
Part 2 - Drawing in St Barts
Part 3 - Smithfield to St Pauls Walk
Lunch
Part 4 short walk around St Pauls

John Rogers (Bible editor and martyr) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Local History Library in Southwark reopens

At last the Local History Library has reopened in Borough High Street - great place and sadly missed over the last year or so.
Hundreds flock to reopened John Harvard Library [25 November 2009]

Bright Star - Keats and the Old Operating Theatre

Culture 24 article which mentions the Old Operating Theatre Museum. Bright Star - on the trail of John Keats | Culture24

Sadly, it gets it wrong as Keats died justb before the Old Operating Theatre was built. Ofcourse, as an Apothecary apprentice he may have visited the Herb Garret ......

A 20-step starter’s guide to using Twitter efficiently | Blog | Econsultancy

If you should want such a thing this looks ok.

A 20-step starter’s guide to using Twitter efficiently | Blog | Econsultancy

Peterborough Museum has an old operating theatre

An old operating theatre is being used as the conservation room at Peterborough Museum - we hear that they are considering a grant application. Clearly, it would be sad if we were to lose our unique status - but I'm not sure there is anything we can do about it!

Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery | Culture24

Guys Power Station

I've been looking for more information on the Guys Power Station which was built in the early 20th Century for light, heat and to run an efficient Laundry.

The introduction of electricity has fascinated me since watching the Prestige which refers to the work of the great scientist, Nikola Tesla. London's first power station was in Holborn, and in Shoreditch there was a power station powered by rubbish.

The following page was found by Colin.

page256-volume34-1stapril1905.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Archaeology Walks in London

This is a listing of the archaeology walks I am doing for London walks over the next year.

Archaeology Walks in London conducted by London Walks

Tudor Walk for Children

I did a Tudor walk for a parents group from a West London School - entirely organised by the parents - led by Fay - one parent per child on average. The Walk went very well and was very enjoyable - only problem is to stop it becoming a gore fest - sites of executions!

The route was:

Barbican - view of the City from the Bridge above the Road
Charterhouse - execution of the Cathusian Monks
Smithfield - Market and Jousting Arena
St Barts - Hospital and Monastery
Clothfair - Trading, Market and Fair
Protestant memorial - Burnings at the Stake and Boiling in Oil
Wallace - Plaque to William Wallace - hanging, drawing and quatering
Statue of Henry VIII
Cock Lane - end of the Fire of London and Body Snatching and William Harvey
Holy Sepulchre Church
Old Bailey - trials and executions
Bell Savage - Pocahontas on Display
Ludgate - City Gate
Stationers Hall - Printing and Shakespeare
Temple Bar - Entry into the City
St Pauls - Cathedral and Market
St Pauls Churchyard - Catholic burning of the books, and Puritan preaching

Its becoming a great route.

For more information look at: http://www.chr.org.uk/pdfs/TudorLondonschoolswalk.pdf

Pure Finder

This is a ridiculous song about Pure Finders - Pure was essentially dog pooh - which was collected by the Leather industry for processing skins.

To see it click here:

Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist

This is an interview with the famous curator who is now at the Serpentine. Thanks to Evi for the link.
artfacts.net: News: Artfacts.Net Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Centenary of Bermondsey suffragette protest

This is a report of a piece of direct action by a Suffragette who attacked ballot papers in the local elections. She accidently poured acid over one of the tellers harming his sight.

Centenary of Bermondsey suffragette protest [28 October 2009]

Dickens 2012 Bicentenary

2012 is the 200th anniversary of Dickens' Birthday in Portsmouth. There is going to be a big celebration which I guess will encompass London, Chatham, Broadstairs, Portsmouth and all other Dickensenian places.

I hope I'm going to be doing a Dickens tour for Elderhostel/exploratas.

Facebook | Dickens 2012 Bicentenary

love letters Project by Asia Wong

300 loveletters written to strangers - lovely project by Asia Wong pointed out by Nicole

:
love letters

Interiors - Valeria Hedman - rising star

Design week has nominated an ex-student - Valeria Hedman as a 'rising star' of the design industry. She and her partner Falko designed my book 'In their Own Words'

Interiors - Valeria Hedman | Features | Design Week

Green spaces 'improve health'

A report suggests that a green oasis forms around a green space with improved health for those who live in the immediate area.

BBC NEWS | Health | Green spaces 'improve health'

London Festival of Architecture

Next project - London Festival of Architecture - this is the brief for the Student festival.

IASF_2010_Brief.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Open Museum at Glasgow

Glasgow has a reputation of excellent engagement with its community - see their open Museum site:

Thanks for the link, nicole

Open Museum

Phisick - Medical Antique web site

We had a visit to the Museum from an amazing group of octogenerians who used to work for Downs Bros - the medical instrument makers that was originally in St Thomas St, SE1.

They described the positively Victorian apprenticeship system and gave an insight into medical instrument makers. Two were still making bespoke medical instruments.

They reported that the brand Downe Bros was still in use.

The following site was discovered by Colin and has interesting images of antique medical instruments

Stitch Holder by Down Brothers - Medical Antique

Letter to Press about the Old Operating Theatre Museum

' The Old Operating Theatre Museum in Southwark is a cut above the Portland Anaesthesia Museum'

Julian Futter, London - I think in the Guardian? Also I think in the context of puns about names rather than being taken literately! Colin pointed this out to me.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST

This is the facebook page of art Curator HANS ULRICH OBRIST

He seems to have a lot of fans!HANS ULRICH OBRIST | Facebook

PostSecret web site

The Post Secrets site is a place you can anonomously post your secrets to the internet. Interesting blog.

PostSecret

In Their Own Words: now on Amazon.

At last my other book is available on Amazon - although I am still awaiting official notice from the publisher.

There is no picture or any keywords so I can't imagine anyone will find it!

But at least it is theree - they also have the price wrong as we agreed £5.99 not £6.99

In Their Own Words: Amazon.co.uk: Kevin Flude: Books

Book sales

I got a nice letter from the publisher saying they are selling 300 a week which is apparently good - and they expect sales to go up as Christmas approaches.

People have been kind enough to tell me they have seen in various shops and even that they have enjoyed reading it.

I see Amazon is retailing it at 6.99 and associates at 3.99 which is cheaper than I can get it at!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Divorced-Beheaded-Died-Britains-Bite-Sized/dp/184317362X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255599280&sr=8-1

Do Stamford Hill's Jews need integration?

This is a thoughtful Observer article about intergration Rafael Behr: Do Stamford Hill's Jews need integration? | Comment is free | The Observer

Predictioneer: How to predict the future with game-theory

This sounds very interesting.

Predictioneer: How to predict the future with game-theory

bookleteer by proboscis

Provoscis are launching their new paperbook publishing system.

bookleteer

10 Product Designs That are Inspired by Nature | Scienceray

Interesting web site on bio-mimetics - design inspired by nature.

10 Product Designs That are Inspired by Nature | Scienceray

History Cookbook - Cookit!

Want to enjoy a Prehistoric Feast? A Saxon nibble? a Victorian Blow Out.

Try this site -just remember to invite me!

History Cookbook - Cookit!

Mixed messages from new technology

I have had about 4 people following me on twitter in the last week from Shropshire - this must represent people who heard my radio interview on BBC Radio Shropshire.

On the other hand I received an abusive comment to this blog from someone claiming to be one of my students.

Staffordshire Hoard on show to 13th October at Birmingham

To see the staffordshire hoard go here:

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, West Midlands - Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

Open Archive for Archaeological documents

This is a new attempt to give access to documents from archaeological excavations - sometimes know as 'grey' publications.

looks ok but not much in it yet.

Open Archive > Home

Bluehenge - new stone circle found near stonehenge

The small henge of 30 bluestones was found where the Avenue from Stonehenge meets the River Avon.

Another triumph from the Stonehenge Riverside project

Henge with no stones: Unearthed, the site that could be monument's little sister | Mail Online

The following press release was put out by the CBA

Marcus Smith 5 October 2009 16:53
Reply-To: British archaeology discussion list
To: BRITARCH@jiscmail.ac.uk
This on behalf of Mike Parker-Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside
Project team.
(More details - plus photos from Aerial-Cam - on the Britarch website:
'http://www.britarch.ac.uk/news/091005-bluestonehenge')

------------------------------------------------------------
BLUESTONEHENGE: TECHNICAL DETAILS

The circle is just under 10m in diameter and was surrounded by a henge –
a ditch with an external bank – with an entrance to the east. The henge
ditch is 25m in diameter and sits at the end of the 1¾-mile avenue that
leads from Stonehenge to the river. Excavations in 2008 established
that this outer henge was built around 2400 BC but arrowheads from the
stone circle indicate that it is likely to be much earlier, dating to
around 3000 BC.

Nine stone holes were identified, part of a circle of probably
twenty-five standing stones. Only the northeast quadrant of the circle,
and a small past of its west side, were excavated. Six stoneholes (A-F)
were found in the northeast quadrant and three (I-K) were found in the
western trench. (Stoneholes G and H are putative stone sockets lying
between the excavated ones; their positions are extrapolated from the
known stones). The centres of Stoneholes A-F are spaced at an average
distance of 1.12m from each other. However, Stoneholes J and K are more
widely spaced. Given the arrangement and curvature of the known stones,
the maximum number of stones in the circle was 25. It may, of course,
have contained fewer.

The dimensions of the holes are too wide and too shallow for them to
have held wooden posts. The imprints of the stones’ bases and the
shapes of the sockets from which they were withdrawn indicate that these
were too small to have been sarsens. They compare exactly with the
dimensions of the bluestones in the inner oval at Stonehenge. The
stones were extracted whole and were not broken up (as was the practice
in the Medieval period). As a result, only two bluestone fragments were
found, both of spotted dolerite.

The bluestone circle was succeeded by a henge, comprising a circular
ditch 23.4m wide with an external bank. Little trace of the henge bank
remains except where it was pushed back into the ditch on its north
side. A date from the tip of a broken antler pick in its basal fill
places its construction within the period 2470-2280 BC. The henge had
at least one entrance – this was on its east side where the northern
ditch terminal contained a special deposit of antlers, an antler pick,
cattle bones and stone and flint tools as well as a burnt organic container.

We found the riverside end of the Stonehenge Avenue (previously only
traced to a spot 150m to the north). It consisted of two parallel
ditches, 18.1m apart. These formerly held upright posts, forming a
small palisade on either side. The Avenue was traced to within a few
metres of the henge ditch and presumably terminated at or close to the
outer bank of the henge. It and the henge may have been built at the
same time given their proximity and symmetrical positioning.

The western arm of the henge’s ditch silted up gradually during the
Bronze Age, with silts interspersed with flint cobble surfaces in the
ditch bottom. After the ditch had fully silted up, its northeastern
quadrant was re-cut. The henge’s interior was also re-used in the Late
Bronze Age with the digging of a small penannular ditch which terminated
at its northeast in a large timber post. This and two other posts
formed a façade or structure within the centre of the henge. A fourth
posthole on the west side of the ditch contained tiny fragments of clay
metalworking moulds.

The next phase of activity was during the Medieval period, specifically
within the 13th century, when a complex series of east-west and
north-south ditches were dug and filled. Ditches and pits continued to
be dug into the post-Medieval period.

Although there was no evidence for domestic occupation during the
Neolithic, the riverside was inhabited during the Mesolithic (8000-4000
BC) and during the Bronze Age (2200-700 BC).

Until radiocarbon dates on antler picks give us firm dates for
construction and dismantling of the stone circle, our best dating
evidence is from the two arrowheads found in the stonehole packing
deposits. These are ‘chisel arrowheads’ which were current between 3400
BC and 2500 BC. They are earlier than the ‘oblique arrowheads’
(2500-2300 BC) and ‘barbed-and-tanged arrowheads’ (2300-1700 BC), styles
found at Stonehenge and Durrington Walls.

In 2008, the Stonehenge Riverside Project’s excavation at Stonehenge
itself found evidence that the first phase of Stonehenge (3000-2935 BC)
consisted of a bluestone circle set inside the ditch and bank. These
stone sockets are the 56 Aubrey Holes that form the outermost ring.
Around 2500 BC the bluestones were re-arranged in the centre of
Stonehenge and numbered about 80 stones. Where did the extra 24 or so
stones come from? We think we know the answer!


Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Julian Thomas and Kate Welham
Stonehenge Riverside Project
------------------------------------------------------------

best wishes,
Marcus

--
Marcus Smith
Information Officer

The Council for British Archaeology


Salon IFA 221 adds:

'What of the source of the bluestones? Our Fellow Rob Ixer is engaged in a petrological study to gather evidence for possible quarry sites; as well as the known source in the Preseli Hills of Carmarthenshire, he has identified that some of the bluestones could have come from the Brecon Beacons. The intriguing possibility is being opened up that the bluestones of Stonehenge might have been brought here from a number of sources in what might prove to be the early settlement sites of early Neolithic farmers.

For there is an increasing body of evidence to show (despite the long-held assumption that all innovation comes to Britain via the south east) that farming spread from the north and west: the earliest securely dated assemblages of charred domesticated grain occur in northern Ireland and further dated examples suggest that farming spread eastward into England via Scotland and Wales. Mike hypothesises that pioneering Neolithic farmers travelled eastwards in search of treeless and easily cultivatable land; they found it in what is now the Salisbury Plain, which, from environmental evidence, seems not to have been recolonised by forest after the Ice Age. They chose to memorialise their landing spot in this new landscape by building ‘Bluehenge’; they may also have found the evidence of older forms of commemorative activity in the form of the Mesolithic posts sited in what is now the Stonehenge car park, as well as periglacial features that by chance are aligned on the winter solstice, convincing them that this was a special landscape.'

Museum Blogs - Museum News and Blog Directory

This is a list of Museum based Blogs.

Museum Blogs - Museum News and Blog Directory

Navigating the Amazon Sales Ranking | WebProNews

This is an article which analyses what the sales ranking system is on Amazon book sales. The system is very archane so this helps.

Navigating the Amazon Sales Ranking | WebProNews

The Staffordshire Hoard

Archaeologists think this amazing find will be as important as Sutton Hoo in redefining our Anglo-saxon past.

This is the web site.

The Staffordshire Hoard

Salon IFA 221 reports on the significance of the hoard:

As for the significance of the hoard, our Fellow and Council member Leslie Webster summed it up best when she said that the hoard is ‘the metalwork equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells; archaeologists and art-historians are going to have to rethink the chronology of metalwork, and think again about rising and failing kingdoms, the expression of regional identities in this period, the complicated transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork production — to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises.’

The bare fact is that this hoard represents a massive increase in pure numerical terms in the quantity of material available to study from this period: substantial books have been written on the development of Anglo-Saxon metalwork on the basis of examples that can be counted in the tens, rather than hundreds. This hoard has, at the latest count, 1,346 items, of which 655 are of gold and 504 of silver. Stylistically the material dates from between the later sixth and the early eighth centuries AD, though this dating is based on the existing stylistic chronology for metalwork from this period, and it is already clear that these finds challenge that chronology, with motifs and styles that were once thought to be late perhaps occurring earlier than was previously thought.

Hamptead - Walk for the Blind

I gave a walk around Hampstead for a group of visually impaired people, lead by June Bretherton. There were 2 guide dogs as well as two sighed people acted as guides.

Its quite different doing a walk for the visually impaired - a slower more interactive pace is required as we stop to feel street furniture etc, and to read out text in full from plaques and monuments. But it is also fun trying to provide a verbal description of the visual.

Elderhostel is renamed Exploritas: Welcome to the Exploritas Connection

Elderhostel, who I work as Course Director, have renamed themselves, Exploritas and lowered the age limit from 55 plus to 21!



Exploritas: Welcome to the Exploritas Connection

New book: 2,000 years of history at Southwark Cathedral

The archaeological story of St Mary Overie, St Saviours, Southwark Cathedral
New book: 2,000 years of history at Southwark Cathedral [11 September 2009]

New Charles Darwin film is 'too controversial' for American audiences | Mail Online

New Charles Darwin film is 'too controversial' for American audiences | Mail Online

The Butcher's Shop Live at the Old Operating Theatre Museum

Interesting event at the Old Operating Theatre, curated by Bad Idea a group of young journalists. They were discussing the idea of Future Human or Transhuman - the idea that human capacities will be improved in the future by biological or digital means, and exploring its consequences.

We had to turn people away and it was very successful with some interesting discussion.


Next day I gave a talk to 49 10 - 15 year old Liverpudlian girls - quite interesting that they all accept medical care is a human right.

Later I gave an after dinner speech to an American Elderhostel group using these ideas and my experience of the NHS to give them a British perspective for their debate on Obama's health reforms.

It makes me aware what a battle we have in front of us to keep health care as a human right - because as technologies evolve they are going to get more expensive and the struggle to stop medical advance from becoming a preserve of the Elite is going to be difficult.

Labour has spent a lot of money on the NHS but have they done enough to maintain the NHS through a period of severe cuts?


The Butcher's Shop Live

Divorced, Beheaded, Died...: The History of Britain's Kings and Queens in Bite-Sized Chunks: Amazon.co.uk: Kevin Flude: Books

Amazingly quickly the book I have been working on all year is now on sale on Amazon although officially published on 17th Sept 2009. Price is £9.99 but is being sold at just over £5 by Amazon.

It looks good (I like the little images they have added), reads better than I feared, and the fact that it deals with the legendary Kings, and early Kings as well as the ones from William the Conqueror onwards has something of a usp.

It will be interesting to see a review.


Divorced, Beheaded, Died...: The History of Britain's Kings and Queens in Bite-Sized Chunks: Amazon.co.uk: Kevin Flude: Books

White Skin evolved in the Neolithic

Research has been published suggesting white skin evolved as recently as the neolithic.

Society of Antiquaries of London - Salon

Amazing Neolithic Stone Structure on Orkney

A huge stone building incorporating standing stones and decorative stone work has been discovered on Orkney.

Evidence is also accumulating that farmer was first introduced to the West of the British Isles - Wales, Scotland Ireland before reaching the South and East

Orkneyjar - The Ness of Brodgar Excavations 2009

Fairy tales have ancient origin

Fairy tales have ancient origin - Telegraph

George III: A New Diagnosis : Recent research by medical scientists and historians suggests that George III had manic depression rather than porphyria.

George III was not suffering from porphyria as previously believed but from bi-polar syndrome and dementia says Timothy Peters, in History Today PG 4 Sept 0.

History Today - George III: A New Diagnosis : Recent research by medical scientists and historians suggests that George III had manic depression rather than porphyria. Scholars will need to take a fresh look at his reign, writes Timothy Peters.

Ancient predessors of Venice discovered.

Aerial photographs have revealed details of the ancient Roman town of Altinum, which was abandoned in favour of Venice in the early 5th Century as barbarians attacks impacted the inhabitants.

Excavate!: Ancient Roman City Rises Again via Aerial Photography

Google Mail - slow skype extension causes it

AFter a few days of agonisingly slow google mail. I found this forum discussion which identified the skype extension as the culprit!

Although it does show the problems of relying for something as crucial as email on a web based system.

Firefox 3.5 & Gmail slow - Gmail Help

Next Walk - Great Fire of London Anniversary 3rd September

Thursday 6.30 3rd September 2009
Great Fire of London Anniversary Walk
Start at Monument Underground Station

The walk traces the route of the Great Fire of London, from Pudding Lane to Cock Lane, via St Pauls and deals with the Plague, the Great Fire and the Rebuilding of London

Lead by Kevin Flude

In Their Own Words

Proof copy of 'In their Own Words' has arrived from the publishers. Falko and Valerie of Transfer Studios have done a great job designing it. It looks great!

I reread it and its ok - when you see it finished it still has a little bit of a meandering feel to it - which reflects the fact that it began as a multi-media Literary tour of London for the BBC Interactive TV Unit many years ago. Then I expanded it and used it as a course companion for my Archaeology and History of London courses, so it is a bit of a hybrid. But, actually, it has quite an up-to-date, if brief, history of London. I think it reads quite well and it does make a good introduction for someone who wants to know without reading a longer book.

I think I priced it wrong though - I was persuaded to up the price from my original thoughts of around £5, we agreed on £6.99 and I now wish I'd made it £5.99,

I am now thinking of all those other half finished articles and books and walks I have that I can now publish ......

Text Retrieval Software

I'm searching for a good text retrieval package - my ideal requirements

a. can search word, html, email and filemaker databases
b. highlights hits
c. has full boolean and proximity searching
d. allows launch of documents found in their application
e. ideally would allow open the document and finding first occurence of search string.

so far DTsearch is the nearest but it does not support filemaker or option e

• DTsearch

  text retrieval

  tags: Technology

• AFSearch in Action

  text retrieval

  tags: no_tag

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Burghley Archives visit

I went to Burghley House to give some advice on documentation systems. Always lovely to go to Stamford, and then into Burghley Park.

What a wonderful archive! I was able to look at the 9th Earl's Commonplace Book which contained his handwritten Cure for the Plague! And many other interesting and rare documents. The archivist, Rosemary, is doing a marvellous job working through them. It takes a specially organised mind not to be overwhelmed with the immensity of the task!

Burghley has developed since my last visit - it now has a nice new introductory suite with an audio visual in which past Earls, Marquis's and Lady's discuss their contribution to Burghley.

Jon took me for a walk through the amazing Garden of Surprises - inspired by Burghley's trick garden. The trick here is to see how easy it is to use water to let kids have a lot of fun!

Sculpture park is good too - all added value to one of the most amazing houses.

Burghley : Gardens & Deer Park : The Garden of Surprises

Silchester Preroman town

Salon 219 reports:

Silchester: the oldest town in Britain?
The Iron Age people of Britain tended not to go in for large town-like settlements on the whole, but our Fellow Mike Fulford has reached a point in his long-running excavations at Silchester where he thinks he has found evidence for something that looks like a thriving town laid out almost a century before the Romans occupied Britain in AD 43. In an interview with our Fellow Maev Kennedy published in the Guardian (), Mike says that Calleva Atrebatum (the Roman name for Silchester, meaning ‘the place of the Atrebates in the woods') had all the characteristics of a town whose arrival in Britain is usually credited to the Roman invaders: a regular grid of streets and narrow alleys dividing plots, supplied with water from wells and springs. The town was a wealthy place, minting its own coins and trading in luxury goods with continental Europe.

Of course, the town was not exactly ‘British’. Professor Fulford believes it was founded by Commius, leader of the Gaulish Atrebates, who fled to Britain after falling out with his former Roman allies in 50 BC. ‘The site he chose, in an area where his people probably already had links, was far enough inland to be safe from Roman galleys, on a low spur of defensible land which still has remarkable views in every direction, with ample water and surrounded by forests full of game’, says Maev. The site was subsequently redeveloped and surrounded by Roman walls in the first century AD, before being abandoned in the fifth century, its wells deliberately filled in, and never again occupied by anyone.


For boudiccan destruction of Silchester

Did Boudica destroy Silchester? � ARLT Weblog

One of the oldest Map in Europe discovered?

Stone carvings in Spain have been interpreted as an early map.

Found: A pocket guide to prehistoric Spain - science-in-society - 05 August 2009 - New Scientist

graffiti archaeology

Great site which shows graffiti walls as they change over the years.



graffiti archaeology

Roman Circus for Sale in Colchester:

Colchester: Circus gates site for sale (From Essex County Standard)

26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

• 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

  26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog

  tags: ICT, multimedia

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Testing Diigo interaction with blogspot

I'm trying out Diigo, replacing Furl, as a social bookmarking site which I am trying to integrate and make sense of blog, twitter, facebook, website.

Diigo can export easily lists of bookmarked sites to twitter, blogspot and facebook.

This is an example of the output.

• Vortigern Studies Index Page

  tags: Dark, Ages, History, archaeology

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Kew Gardens

Visit to Kew Gardens - one an amazing place - one of the world's precious places. I was pondering the interpretation - this is mostly done by labels and plaques - its very difficult to have any outdoor plaques that look good and Kew is no exception. The plaques are big and coloured as if for a trade exhibition. But some of them have interactives on them. They also had a sound intervention as you approach the Palace. The sound was of a carriage arriving but as it issued from the drains it really did nothing for the imagination and was just rather perplexing.

Kew Palace had a simple introductory display and video which was quite effective but really unbelievably Royalist. GIII what a good guy! Lovely kids! The rest of the house was interpreted mostly by room restored into period costume, although several empty rooms had ghostly images projected on the walls.

Lifts were cunningly built into the old guarde robe meaning they did not have to knock holes in a listed building.

Subtopia

Ian Nairn defined subtopia as 'the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuallity of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern'

Quoted in ' A Journey through Ruins - the Last Days of London by Patrick Wright Oxford Univeristy Press 2009 - an interesting book about Dalston and Mrs Thatcher.

The Old Operating Theatre gets support from Guys and St Thomas Charity

Really good news - the Old Operating Theatre Museum is to be supported by the Charity of Guys and St Thomas to purchase a long term lease!

Museum future is virtual says BM

Salon IFA reported the following:

The virtual museum

One Fellow has already suggested that the simple answer to the British Museum’s need for more exhibition space is to ‘move most of the museum to the Olympic site in 2013 — good access and all the rest, and just leave the favourites well spaced out in Bloomsbury’. But the BM’s own Director has come up with an even less space-hungry suggestion: in a debate on the museum of the future held at the London School of Economics to celebrate sixty years of the publisher Thames & Hudson, our Fellow Neil MacGregor said that the relationship between institutions and their audiences would be transformed by the internet and that museums would become more like multimedia organisations. ‘The future has to be, without question, the museum as a publisher and broadcaster’, said Neil MacGregor, a view that was shared by the Tate’s Director, Nicholas Serota, who said: ‘I am certain that in the next ten to fifteen years, there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more working as editors commissioning online material … the possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now.’

Even so, Neil MacGregor did not see an end to the challenges of transporting museum objects safely around the world. Speaking about the Parthenon sculptures, he said that the question of their return to Greece was ‘yesterday’s question’ and the real question is about ‘how the Greek and British governments can work together so that the sculptures can be seen in China and Africa’. ‘But the Greek government has a clear position that their removal [from the Parthenon] was illegal and therefore this conversation cannot happen, which is a matter of great sadness’, he said.

Internet predicted to transform museums' relationship with public | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Changes to The Wallace Collection

Took my University of Westminster Group to the Wallace Collection today - they are rehanging the collection to make way for a Damien Hurst Exhibition. Ouch! I had a really good route worked out, avoiding the 'dirty dutch' paintings which gave a good narrative of the Collection but now ruined as they have closed one whole wing down and you have to go through the Dutch paintings. It means the French paintings are now so well displayed and could not see any of the minatures.

I guess the ruination of my tour is a small price to pay for innovation but change is painful! Tea is still outrageously expensive here - more expensive than coffee - now why is that?


The Wallace Collection

London Architecture Walks | Home

Web site for those who want to take an architectural walk around London.


London Architecture Walks | Home

Medical Cupids at Guys

Colin at work discovered a database of sculpture which gave the following details re the Cupids on the Front of Guys. Strange how I had not noticed!

'The bas-relief panels are as follows: that on the left depicts a cherub holding a leech, the one in the middle, one with a tourniquet and that on the right, a cherub with a lancet in one hand and in the other a multi-bladed scarificator. The whole sculptural programme, including the two niche statues (see entry below) was intended to symbolise the art of healing.'

London BridgeCelebrates 800th Anniversary

London Bridge Anniversary Fayre celebrates 800 years of stone river crossing [12 July 2009]

The Old Operating Theatre Museum signed The pledge

The pledge

To support our strategy, we want to encourage a range of public, private and voluntary sector organisations to actively promote informal adult learning and its benefits.

To do this, we invite organisations to demonstrate their commitment by signing a ‘pledge’ to help improve the quality and quantity of informal adult learning.

Definition of the pledge

The pledge is a commitment by organisations signaling their intent to play a role in bringing the vision for informal learning to life. They will be important ambassadors and advocates for learning and a key driver for change and innovation on the ground.

Why have a pledge?

• informal adult learning helps to build communities of confident, curious, critical and creative people
• in pledging, your organisation becomes part of a wider movement and an ambassador for informal adult learning

What does the pledge involve?

There are seven overarching commitments. Organisations signing up to the pledge agree to:

• support the core principles of informal learning and encourage others to sign up
• advocate wider participation, especially for those who have benefited least from learning
• find flexible ways of using our existing spaces, or opening up new spaces, for learning
• encourage and support learning organised by people for themselves
• embrace new ways of learning, including the use of technology and broadcasting
• find and work with new partners to increase learning opportunities
• celebrate our successes

Who has signed up to the pledge?

Darwin Week

I spent last week running a course on Darwin to celebrate his 200th anniversay. It was really very enjoyable - I took three groups around Downe House darwinatdowne.co.uk

It was here that he did most of his work - they are applying for World Heritage Status as this area is essentially his outdoor laboratory. Its amazing that it is but 16 miles from London and yet so utterly rural. This is the reason Darwin stayed there. The house is well interpreted - using a pda system which is useful for the garden in particular. But I also organised a guided walk around the fields - really enjoyed it although would have been better if my natural history were up to my history.

I managed a one point to mention newton, darwin and dickens in one sentence and it made sense! I feel if my own education has been finished off as I can now include darwin in my world view while before he was in a separate scientific sphere.

I organised a tour to Oxford University Museum where we were given special entry to the Library where the Oxford debate took place between Huxley and Soapy Sam Wilberforce.


I also organised a Darwin in London tour and a tour of Darwin in Cambridge. I went around Darwin's rooms in Christ Church which were big!

Darwin is I must say very inspiring.

Bank of England Museum

I took my Westminster Uni students to the Bank of England Museum today.

I think they enjoyed it - they spent some time on an interactive which asked questions about the treasury committee. They had no interest in the answer except that the answer enabled them to open a safe via a proper safe lock of the type seen in heist movies.

So it seems rewards are important part of interactives.

Very disappointed to see that the Museum has put a crash exhibition in the Hall - so an elegant reconstruction of Soane's Banking Hall is now obscured by tacky exhibition design.

Its amazing how an exhibition designer can have such a lack of taste!

Archaeology in the City of London walk - western half

Yesterday I gave a guided walk for London Walks looking at the archaeology of the City of London - the western half.

I did this because my archaeology walks starting at tower hill never get far enough. So I started the walk at St Paul's - very excellent walk it was too - I learnt a lot from the research.

Image Noble Street Roman Fort Remains


Route

St Pauls
Newgate Street
New Change
St Pauls
Watling Street
Bow Lane
Temple of Mithras
Walbrook
Bucklesbury
Poultry
King's Street
Guildhall
Gresham Street
Wood Street
Noble Street.

Darwin at Downe Walk

I spent a very humid day preparing a Walk for Elderhostel around Downe House. Its a great walk mostly following the audio guide you can find at the url in the link below.

It was the day of the Biggin Hill Airshow so quite weird thinking about Darwin and being buzzed by World War 2 aeroplanes!


darwinatdowne.co.uk

Image - the Thinking Path

The Smalls - Creative and Filmmaking Forums

The Smalls - Creative and Filmmaking Forums

Science Museum unveils its 10 most important items

the Science Museum's top 10 objects choosen for their impact.

Newcomen's steam engine, V2 rocket engine, 1837 electric telegraph device, Stephenson's Rocket, X-ray machine, Model T Ford, penicillin, 1950 Pilot ACE computer, DNA double helix, Apollo 10 capsule.


Science Museum unveils its 10 most important items - Telegraph

Gang culture may be due to 'warrior gene'

This is a Telegraph article suggesting a particular gene which effects boys only may lead to a propensity to violence:

did the Vikings have it?

Gang culture may be due to 'warrior gene' - Telegraph

Death of MLA, London 2

This is my report to LMHM email list and the press release from MLa, London

Those of you were were at the LMHM meeting yesterday will probably have been confused by my report on the MLA, London situation. I enclose the MLA press release to clarify the situation.
The point I was trying to make was that the absorption of MLA. London into MLA was the final end 'the death' of the vestiges of the old bottomup membership based Area Museum services replaced by a top-down strategic body. London Museums Group had set up a very good working relationship with the Hub and MLA, London and that we would now have to try do the same with the changed structure. MLA, London had done a wonderful job for the London Museum community and it is a shame to see it go. In the circumstances it was probably inevitable that it went and the LMG representative on the board agreed that there was really no viable alternative.

Negotiatons are continuing as to how the 18 or so MLA, London staff are to be deployed. I think it is likely that the MDO's will be transferred to the Hub, who are funding them but this is not yet finalised. The core team which is and was funded by MLA will be transferred to MLA as the London team with a sub-board to manage it. This is I believe, 5 or 6 staff. Other staff are paid for from projects MLA, London has fund-raised for. Discussions are ongoing and details not yet sorted out, but wholesale redundancies are not expected as their funding is not from MLA. Andrew Holden will come back to LMG once discussions with the Hub have progressed on MDO network, and to give more information about MLA support to wider regional Renaissance programme in London.

There is good will all round to ensure the change does not affect Museums in London, and LMG will be doing its best to help maintain services. Changed circumstances bring new challenges.

Kevin Flude



PRESS RELEASE – Tuesday 9 June 2009



MLA to complete integration with creation of London team.



The MLA has announced that, following agreement with the Mayor of London's Office, it will complete its national transformation with the creation of a regional team for London to be operational from April 2010.



Trustees of MLA London have agreed to support the changes and move to wind-up the last remaining regional MLA agency.



The changes will enable MLA staff supporting the sector in London to focus on core functions of driving improvement, providing advice and brokerage, advocating on behalf of the sector and its users, and levering in additional funding, while enabling MLA to reduce further its overhead costs.



The changes have been agreed following an independent review of MLA’s investment in the capital, which recognised the Mayor of London’s statutory responsibility for culture and his power to appoint the chair of MLA London.



The review also recognised the successes of MLA London and its staff in developing the London Cultural Improvement Programme in partnership with the other cultural agencies, the London boroughs, Government Office for London, and Capital Ambition, as well as other innovative programmes on adult skills and economic impact, and its ability to draw in funding for the sector from key stakeholders including the London Development Agency.



The new structure also proposes a London sub-group of MLA’s Board to focus on the delivery of priorities for the Capital.



Following its reorganisation last year, the MLA is already operating across the country in three other area teams covering the North, West and East, each headed by a Director of Engagement, supported by a Regional Manager in each English region and a small team of Area Engagement Advisors.



Andrew Motion, Chair of the MLA said: “The MLA’s transformation was designed to deliver a single light-footed national organisation operating effectively in every English region to help local government drive the development and improvement of museums, libraries and archives.



“We are delighted that London has embraced our changes in such a constructive way and will become a full part of the new MLA. I want to pay tribute to the work of Geoffrey Bond and the trustees and staff of MLA London who are leaving such a strong legacy. We hope we can build on the many achievements of MLA London while preserving the unique features and opportunities of culture enabled by our Capital city.”



Geoffrey Bond, chair of MLA London, said: “My fellow trustees and I are enormously proud of the work which MLA London staff have done over the past five years to open up the Capital’s museums, libraries and archives to more people, to improve their services, particularly in learning and skills, and to be a powerful voice for the sector in London government. We recognise that the best future for museums, libraries and archives in London lies in having a team integrated within MLA, increasing efficiency, working closely with the Mayor’s Office, and making the full weight of MLA’s voice carry in the Capital.



London Mayor Boris Johnson said: 'London's museums, libraries and archives are an invaluable asset and I'm pleased with how MLA have worked with us. I look forward to a continued partnership that will ensure this critically important sector can be sustained for the benefit and enjoyment of future generations.'



In response to the statement, Jack Lohman, Director of the Museum of London and lead partner in the London Museums Hub, said:



“MLA London has been an essential partner in the successful delivery of the Renaissance programme in London and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the trustees and staff of MLA London for the contribution they have made in promoting the profile and sustainability of the sector as a whole. The London Museums Hub is committed to supporting sustainable museum development in the capital and we look forward to working closely with MLA to ensure that we set in place effective mechanisms for building on the progress made to date.”



An operational and staffing structure is still to be worked out and further announcements will be made following consultation with staff and unions, and with partners in key programmes, including Renaissance London and Capital Ambition.



Ongoing successful projects will continue, including the London Cultural Improvement Programme, which was recently awarded a further £125,000 by Capital Ambition to implement three projects within the London Library Change Programme strand. LCIP is managed by MLA London on behalf of the London Cultural Improvement Group.



For more information contact:



John Harrison, Head of Communications, MLA Council, 020 7273 1402, john.harrison@mla.gov.uk



Andrew Holden, Interim Director, MLA London, 020 7549 1700, andrew.holden@mlalondon.org.uk



Ben McKnight, Chief Communications Officer, Mayor's Press Officer, GLA

020 7983 4071 / communitydesk@london.gov.uk





MLA London

Tel: 020 7549 1700
Fourth Floor
53-56 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DG


MLA London (Museums, Libraries and Archives London) is the strategic development agency for archives, libraries and museums in London. For further information please visit the website at www.mlalondon.org.uk

Legal Disclaimer: The information contained in this e-mail message is intended only for the addressee. If you are not the intended recipient, please note that any dissemination, distribution and copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient please notify the sender immediately and then delete the message and any associated files from your system.

Security Warning: Although this e-mail and its attachments have been screened and are believed to be free from any virus, in all cases it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that the e-mail and any associated attachments are virus free. MLA London will not accept liability for any damage caused by a virus.



--

Death of MLA London

MLA London is to be merged into the greater beast the MLA. This is the end of years of interference with local area museum councils. These were bottom up membership driven organisations which provided much needed support for Museums. Over the last 10 years these have been attacked, transformed, shackled and changed into 'strategic bodies' and finally wound up. So AMSSEE, SEMS, LMA, ALM, London, MLA, London are now no more. Replaced by the top down structure that is the MLA.

MLA. London's work is being subsumed into a team of the MLA organisation, and other parts of the role are being hived off to the London Hub.

This means that the successful MLA,London, London Mub, London Museums Group combination is now replaced by a structure in which the Hub holds all the cards. Although the Hub is a benign beast, it does leave the body of Museums in London represented by the LMG in a weaker position.


NEWS Section

Ann’s OPERATING THEATRE blog

An interesting blog - with an innovative structure quite imaginative, though not entirely sure what it is for.

It has a page on the Museum.

Ann’s OPERATING THEATRE blog

Another Tall building for St Thomas' Street southwark

A plan for another big building near to the Shard of Glass in St Thomas Street.

28-storey ‘Quill’ student tower planned for St Thomas' Street [4 June 2009]

Help wanted to write book of life

A giant collaborative scheme to create the book of life on planet earth is being set up. It is the latest example in user-generated science.

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Help wanted to write book of life

Film day at the Old Operating Theatre Museum

We showed old film of the Old Operating Theatre Museum today. Alison, a volunteer transferred all our old VHS tapes to DVD and my daughter and I edited them into a couple of DVD's worth. They were projected using a new Optoma projecter which has a built in DVD player and speaker.

We set up a small corner of the Museum, with a few stalls and happily sat there watching films from about 1990 - 2002. Weird looking at the fashions - particularly old film of me. I gave the occasional comment to the audience to tell them who was in the shot and so on. It was an interesting afternoon.

I think I could now re-edit the film and make a pretty good introduction to the Museum - would it be too weird to have an introduction to a museum made up of excepts from a motley crew of documentaries or should I just get a new video shot?

At the same time a visiting lecturer gave 3 lectures on the history of Surgery - really heroic of him to do the same talk 3 times. But the Museum seemed really buzzing and what is interesting is that we get quite a young crowd at the Museum on Saturdays

Saturday 13th June, at 1.00, 2.00 & 3.00 pm
"Leeches, Lancets and Toothpulling"
with Colonial Surgeon Richard Kennedy

Richard Kennedy is an author and historian who will talk about the differences in the practice of medicine in the American colonies and the practice in London during the same era. He will demonstrate the use of leeches, saws and chisels for amputation without anaesthesia and the "latest" devices used for rotted teeth.

Peasants Revolt Walk

The Peasants Revolt Walk for London Walks went very well - not a huge turn out but enough to make it enjoyable.

We managed to get all the way from Aldgate East to Smithfield - quite an exhausting route but it had to be done!

I love doing John Ball's speech!

Elephant & Castle and Southwark Bridge to be linked by Cycle Superhighway

SE1 reports a superhighway for cycles from Elephant and Castle to Southwark Bridge.

It is certainly about time that a safe route over the Thames was created and the Elephant is very scary for the bike.

But they need to do much more much quicker if they are serious about it.

Elephant & Castle and Southwark Bridge to be linked by Cycle Superhighway [5 June 2009]

Dal Riata - excellent bbc web site

This is a really excellent summary of the history of Dal Riata - compare it to Wikipedia page which is,in comparison, a mess.

BBC - History - Scottish History

Map of Prince Phillip Gaffes by Aardvark Map

Here is a hilarious map of the gaffes of Prince Philip.

Map of Prince Phillip Gaffes by Aardvark Map

Archaeology in the City of London walk

Yesterday I did a walk for London Walk on the archaeology of the City - the Easter Half. Not a good title but a good walk. The route was:

Tower of London,
Cooper's Row Wall
Crutched Friars
Rangoon Street
Fenchurch St
Lime St
Lime St Passage
Whittington Avenue
Leadenhall Street
Gracechurch Street
St Peter Church
St Michaels Church
Lombard Street
East Cheap
fish Street Hill
Pudding Lane

I found various things out I had not realised - Customs House excavation were in the lot to the East of the Customs House. I found the site of the ankle-breaker ditches in Northumberland St and Fenchurch St.

I worked out exactly where the edges of the Forums were and how the Churches fit onto the site.

I found Plantation House - which I have read about but never quite pinned down - although exactly where the Boudicca compound was I'm not so sure.

Great Walk - about 20 people and the alleyways around St Peters are really quite lovely - had they been in any other 2000 year old Capital City they would be a major tourist attraction.

Copyright of images of works of art out of copyright

The copyright situation on wikipedia is quite interesting. They use images from artists represented in National Museums and Galleries and they claim them as public domain on the basis that the artist has been dead for over 70 years.
I'm guessing the Galleries would probably counter claim they are copyrighting not the original painting, but the photograph of it. The photographer is still alive and therefore copyright is valid.

But these images are still up on wikipedia. Is this because they turning a blind eye?

Or is it that they accept wikipedia's claim that copyright of a faithful reproduction of the original 2d image is not valid.

This is the page that explains it
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD-Art_tag

Of course some of the images on wikipedia use reproductions which were made long enough ago to be out of copyright.

However, reading on - reusing these images in the UK is risky as our courts will probably accept that copyright of a copy is allowed. So using these images on wikipedia is ok reusing them elsewhere in the uk is not.

reading
Commons:When to use the PD-Art tag - Wikimedia Commons

Sarah Brown at Florence Nightingale Museum as �1.3 million revamp plans revealed

Sarah Brown attended the Florence Nightingale Museum to launch their £1,3 redevelopment programme.

Sarah Brown at Florence Nightingale Museum as �1.3 million revamp plans revealed [13 May 2009]

Great Success of Surgery by gaslight at the Old Operating Theatre

We had an amazing night on the Museum at night evening. Here is a review on Culture24

Surgery by gaslight at the Old Operating Theatre: Culture24 on the road for Museums at Night | Culture24

Facebook | Twitter Grand Unification

This application allows your twitters to be exported to Facebook status and vice versa!

Makes life simplier now that I have been forced by work to join twitter.

Next is to discover how to integrate myspace and then will get the Museum set up accordingly.


Facebook | Twitter

WAVE - check your web page accessibility

Here is a free web app which will check accessibility of your site:


Go to wave

Rawiri Paratene - the Friar and the Herb Garret

We got a nice mention in the Globe by an actor who is performing as the Friar in Romeo and Juliet:

'I was also able to follow up an appointment with a herb-expert too. I went to the operating museum in London where they have herb gardens that would have been used in medicine, which was a huge help! I met this woman who was a herbal expert; I was at the stage of wanting to get some information about what it is that I give to Juliet, what this amazing drug is, and she was able to steer me towards suitable books. So I feel very happy about that.'

He is referring to the Museum's Curator, Karen Howell


GlobeLink :: Rawiri Paratene

Rare Roman glass bowl found in London

A very beautiful and very rare millefiori dish has been excavated in a East London cemetary site in Prescot Street.

Rare Roman glass bowl found 1,700 years after it's buried next to merchant in East London | Mail Online

Friend reunited - strangely prescient

Someone sent me a email from friends reunited today so I went to look at it - someone I was at the same primary school with but I have no recollection. But what was strange was the fact that Friend Reunited gave me a list of friends I might know and I have no idea how they made the guess as the person has no institutions in common with me and I did not think that many friends so how did they spot a possible friend?

I guess it must be something to do with mutual friends but as I don't have any friends listed on Friends reunited I can only guess that the way they do it is to compare the two lists of people at various institutions and if several overlap off the person as a possible friend.

Quite big brotherish

Museums - fact, fakes and fiction

Museums - facts, fakes and fiction

Julian Spalding has a few interesting things to say along the lines that museums pedal authenticity but looking into the history of many museum objects shows that they are on a continuum from - fact to fake

Julian Spalding 'The Poetic Museum: Reviving Historic Collections ' Prestel Publishing Ltd 2002

Take for example the Cutty Sark, it seems it sustains a major fire and still somehow remains genuine (because I believe it has a steel frame which is intact, while the timber work was and is often replaced). In the case of the Old Operating Theatre Museum, the Operating Theatre's shell is original, the standings are replicas, and the furniture is genuine but from other hospitals and are in a way set dressing.

So the idea that museum's embody true authenticity is not as clear cut as you might think. Despite this it is something that the Museum Curator cleaves too as the foundations upon which to repel all claims that money spent on a museum could better be spent elsewhere.

The debate on Fact v Fiction was warmed up when the Dennis Severs house in Spitalfields was opened up. Here was a genuine Georgian House which had been bedecked with a mixture of genuine, reproduction, fake and set dressing to look like a lived in Georgian House. It was visited only as part of a guided tour, in which the house keeper showed the visitor around as if the original Georgian inhabitants had just recently left the House - there was food still on plates, recently snuffed candles etc.

It was clearly a theatrical experience but how much of a museum experience was it? It partly depended upon the feeling that Severs must be a Georgian fanatic and so this spoke to an attempt to make the evening as authentic as possible. But I'm not sure everyone would have cared about that - they were there for the theatre.

Dennis Severs House became a forerunner of site specific theatre - Athena Vahla did a site specific Dance Project at the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Punchdrunk did their epic Masque of the Red Death in Battersea. The former a performance responding to an authentic space and the latter creating an entirely illusionary space where effect is of paramount importance and authenticity only one means towards that effect.

So fiction and Museum can go very well together. Fiction does not need the Museum to achieve the effect, as the Red Death shows, but fiction and theatricality can gain from being performed in an historical space. The advantage for the Museum is that it opens up another audience for the Museum. The 15 - 35 year olds are very difficult to get into museums and maybe fiction and theatre and opening in the evening is the way forward.

Recently, I visited the Sutton Hoo exhibition curated by the National Trust in Suffolk. The introductory film which explains the facts about Sutton hoo is combined with some rather stunning Anglo-Saxon poetry. I sat up and thought this stuff is marvellous why have I not been using it for my lectures. I asked and discovered it was pastiche - well done but written in the modern era for the exhibition. I was horrified, not by its inclusion but by its lack of attribution.

At the Museum of London in the Prehistoric Gallery there are short quotes saying something like

'we sat around the fireside, feeling the cold wind'

Underneath they are attributed to a named individual 'Fred Blogs' 1999. I happened to recognise one of the names as a London archaeologist and again I did not object to their use but my attitude to them was much changed when I realised they were just the idle fictional musings of the archaeologist, while somehow the bare date suggested to me a poet, or an anthropologist might have made them up.

But the point is fictions are made up and they have no place unattributed in a Museum. Clearly labelled fictions are fine.

Or are they - at the Museum of Docklands the Museum has commissioned short costume dramas to put in the Gallery to illustrate for example, the origins of Lloyds of London. Actors patrol Museums accosting the passerby with over-the-top performances of a life-time. This brings history to life - but what sort of life? Fiction, and theatre at this level often are cliched, the bad are baddies, and the good are paragons. The ship owners are filmed as fat complacent amoral people, while original documents might show them as good people, who gave generously to charity, who have this gaping hole in their moral compass as far as slavery is concerned. Fiction then as used in Museum displays can tend to present history as a finished artefact, rather than a complex and changing kaleidoscope of facts, theories, opinions, and prejudices.

So it is easy to reject bad fiction, bad drama for Museum displays, but good fiction, fiction that opens up debate can be positively beneficial as long as it is clearly signposted as simply one person's opinion and not actual history.

Radical London Walk

Radical London walk - the route was St Pauls, Cheapside, Guildhall, Smithfield, St Johns, Clerkenwell

I managed to get the group round right to the end - quite an achievement and did a fair look at the London people, riot and government - not so sure gave a good introduction to the development of radical politics - maybe that is another walk?

Myths and Legends Walk

Myths and Legends walk from Tower Hill (for London Walks) went very well - about 20 turned up and I got a bit further - to Walbrook, but still finding it very difficult to get as far as I want to - ideally, Guildhall or St Pauls

Also, I think I am making the walk far too complicated by trying to make it myths and the archaeology - really need to shorten the narrative and make it crisper.

But it is very interesting and I am at last getting to grips with Vortimer the Blessed and Belenus. Very interesting research currently being done which it trying to bridge the gap between the Anglo Saxon Chronicle and the Welsh tales which suggests Alle is Ambrosius Aurelianus

Malware cleared

I have cleared the malware listing on my site at the cost of deleting it all and replacing the designed pages with a bland place holder, now I have to reinstall it gradually without reinstalling the malware

www.chr.org.uk bland placeholder

Wouldn't it be nice review

One of the participants of my experimental Wouldn't it be nice tour at Somerset house has reviewed it: art

Diigo - end of an affair wit Furl

Furl is no more and I have been moved over to Diigo - I have had first go at it and seems not quite as good although easier to manipulate between it and blog. So maybe I need to give it a chance?


Dashboard | Diigo

Lady Jane Grey: Biography, Portraits, Primary Sources

• Excellent biography of Lady Jane Grey

• Lady Jane Grey: Biography, Portraits, Primary Sources

   

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Malware and Google

I received an email to say that my web site had malware and that Google were placing a warning on the google page. But they give no idea where the malware is and how to find it - they link you to an anodyne page which says a lot but without giving a clue how to go about it.

So I can see that if you depended on your web site this could put you out of business.

Shunt Vaults and British Commonwealth Museum in running for Potters Field

Southwark Council say that Shunt Vaults and British Commonwealth Museum in running for the new cultural venue in Potters Field

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/3836

Guys Tower reclad and the Shard

SE1 Magazine has a image showing what the Pool of London will look like when the Shard is built and the Guys Tower is reclad.

Meanwhile we are inundated by lorries working on the shard

New look Southwark with Shard and Guys Tower ttp://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/3841

First Quarter at the Old Operating Theatre

We have had a very good quarter at the Old Operating Theatre, not as good as last year, but second best, and good results for schools and groups. And some success with grants.

Google horror - importing Contacts using CSV format

What a terrible case of appalling documentation - Google's help in regard to importing contacts into Google using a CSV file is really absolutely appalling. I followed the instructions and found it did not import the data at all as you would expect it.

Eventually I found a blog which contained the information that enabled the truly appalling nature of Google's documentation to become apparent.

This is what you have to do

1 create a csv with a header line something like this

Name, E-mail, Section 1 - Description, Section 1 - Title, Section 1 - Company, Section 1 - Address, etc

The lines below have to be:

myname,myemail, Work, Mr, my org etc

of the emails are not work change work to personal, but this needs to be in every line or you are in trouble.

How can google have such truly awful documentation?

Synching mobile phones and google

Found an easy solution for the horrific change over from palm to nokia.

1. Sign up to Goosync to sync calendar with nokia e71 - this was simplicity itself as I managed it even with unfamilar mobile.

2. Download companionlink and set up to sync palm with googld

3. use goosync.

remarkable 3 ways world and I think it means i can then move back to pam when the Pre comes out!

Now the contacts .....

companionlink link below
Products

The Horrors of changing technology

Someone trod on my phone - it may look like a brick, and weigh like a brick but it's fragile like a flower. So, looked around for an alternative, really wanted something really light and modern, but found it very, very difficult to try any phones out in shops - they all said no. So in the end I implusively bought an Nokia E71 which has a querty keyboard and had good write ups, and is very slim and elegant.

Trouble is when I get it I find the calendar is not as good and does not have colour like my old Treo 680, the brick. And I find it absolutely difficult to get my calendar date out of palm and into nokia. Contacts too - same problem - its going to take about a week to set myself up with something not as good.

Or do I cut my loses sell the damn thing and buy a treo - the problem with the treo is that a new version is coming out soon which sounds fantastic, but not yet.

Here anyway is a work around to get from palm calendar to google.


Neff.ca - Syncing your Palm Desktop Calendar With Google Calendar

Sutton Hoo

We visited Sutton Hoo. Very strange because this and the BM exhibition are the opposite of complementary - they each need each other.

Sutton Hoo is an exhibition (book on the wall type) without a focus on real objects, while the BM Sutton Hoo exhibitions could do with some of the explanation you get at Sutton Hoo.

I was disappointed as some how the NT has managed to make it into a unmememorable visit - all too tame. The video was shocking as it had some very interesting quotes from Anglo saxon that made me think - why have I not read these before - they are so good! But they were unattributed made up modern quotes in the style of Beowulf.

Very misleading and the National Trust should be ashamed of passing off pastiche as reality.


National Trust | Sutton Hoo

Under the pier show arcade, southwold/alternative coin operated machines

Went to the Under the Pier Show by Tim Hunkin - best, funniest, grungiest, silliest interactives I've seen!

and what's nice is that the pricing also encourages use some just 40p others £1 or £2 but each funny but really well thought out and planned.

The Bathyscope - an underwater adventure, the automatic frisking machine, the no exercise exercise machines - all very funny.


Under the pier show arcade, southwold/alternative coin operated machines

Demonstrations in London and Transport for London

Four horses G20 demonstration tomorrow and absolutely nothing about it on tfl web site!

Planned engineering works for specific date | Transport for London

Its quite astonishing - imagine a tourist planning a trip to Bank for tomorrow. Is there noone with brains at TFL?

British Tours Ltd: Virtual Tours of England

Using 360 Degreee Panoramas

British Tours Ltd: Virtual Tours of England

Inspiring learning for all - Home

The government and the MLA are pushing, at last, a learning for all agenda. As a start they have upgrading the following web site:


Inspiring learning for all - Home

The Best Roman Joke

Mary Beard's favourite Roman Joke:

‘Three men — a scholasticos (an ‘egghead’), a barber and a bald man — went on a long journey and had to camp out at night. They decided to take it in shifts to watch over their luggage. The barber took the first shift but got bored. To pass the time, he shaved the head of the sleeping scholasticos — then woke him up to take his turn. The scholasticos got up, rubbed his head and found that he had no hair. “What an idiot that barber is,” he said: “he’s woken up baldy instead of me.”’


Classic gags discovered in ancient Roman joke book | Books | guardian.co.uk

Medieval Reference to Robin Hood found

A new reference to Robin Hood has been found placing him in the reign of Edward 1 in Sherwood Forest and a notorious Robber.

Medievalists.net � Interview with Julian Luxford

Developing and Evaluating Online Learning Resources

This is a useful publication re developing online resources.


Developing and Evaluating Online Learning Resources

darwin at downe Walks

Excellent walks around Downe House

darwinatdowne.co.uk

Virtual tour of lloyds

Interesting walk around Lloyds

TakeawalkaroundLloydsUnderwritingRoom.wmv (video/x-ms-wmv Object)

1. How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand - 1 of 6 - “Flow”

Very interesting documentary based on Stewart Brand's book:

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand (Paperback - Oct 1995)

1. How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand - 1 of 6 - “Flow”

The Snug

I like the idea of the snug

"The snug

The 'snug', also sometimes called the Smoke room, was typically a small, very private room with access to the bar that had a frosted glass external window, set above head height. You paid a higher price for your beer in the Snug, but nobody could look in and see you. It was not only the well off visitors who would use these rooms. The snug was for patrons who preferred not to be seen in the public bar. Ladies would often enjoy a private drink in the snug in a time when it was frowned upon for ladies to be in a pub. The local police officer would nip in for a quiet pint, the parish priest for his evening whisky, and lovers would use the snug for their clandestine visits."

Public house - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Why museums have become our home from home - Times Online

This is an interesting article by hugo Rifkind enquiring why Museums have become so popular.


Why museums have become our home from home - Times Online

Death of Furl

I've been using furl to organise my bookmarks for years. I also use it to export the web links to my web site live. It works very well but now - Furl is dead. It has sold itself to diigo, which I do hope has the same export system that Furl have.

This could be a very sad day or a more forward depening on diigo.


Furl | Your Favorite Bookmarked URLs, Fast. Furl.it!

Is this the true face of the Bard we see before us? Shakespeare painting is 'only surviving portrait painted from life' | Mail Online

Stanley Wells reckons this painting is of shakespeare.

Is this the true face of the Bard we see before us? Shakespeare painting is 'only surviving portrait painted from life' | Mail Online

Diigo - 'you are what you annotate'

Furl has sold its members to Diigo which claims to be social bookmarking 2.0.

Here is what it says about itself

YouTube - Diigo V3: Highlight & Share the Web! Social Bookmarking 2.0

Sex and scandal in the eighteenth century

**Sex and scandal in the eighteenth century**

The Hunterian Museum <http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums>
's spring season of evening lectures presents four authors whose
recently-published books explore stories of sex, scandal and
celebrity in Georgian London. To book please call 020 7869 6560 or
email museums@rcseng.ac.uk <mailto:museums@rcseng.ac.uk>
. Tickets cost £5. The Hunterian Museum will be open on the night to
lecture ticket holders from 6pm.

Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons

35-43 Lincoln's Inn Fields

London WC2A 3PE

**The surgeon, the countess, her husband and his lover**

Thursday 19 March, 7pm

Wendy Moore

John Hunter, the pioneering surgeon, and Mary Eleanor Bowes, the
eccentric Countess of Strathmore, were fellow science enthusiasts and
friends in the electrifying atmosphere of Enlightenment London. But
when the countess was tricked into marrying a wily Irish
fortune-seeker, Hunter was drawn into a murky world of clandestine
births, illegitimate babies and abortions. Discussing her new book,
Wedlock: How Georgian Britains Worst Husband Met His Match, Wendy
Moore reveals the seamier side of 18th-century London.

**In armour complete  or not**

Thursday 23 April, 7pm

Ian Kelly

Actor and historian Ian Kelly, author of the internationally
acclaimed recent biographies of Giacomo Casanova and Beau Brummell,
brings to the Hunterian a full and sexually frank account of the
underside of theatrical and demimonde life in 18th-century Europe.
Based on unprecedented access to the medical records of Beau Brummell
and the files of the Venetian Inquisition, the stories of these two
notorious dandy-libertines provide a unique insight into the risks
and rewards for the sexually adventuresome of another age.

**Making sex electric: Dr James Graham and his Celestial Bed**

Wednesday 20 May, 7pm

Lydia Syson

Lydia Syson tells the story of Britain's first sex guru, Dr Graham,
proprietor of the Temple of Health and Hymen. His unconventional and
flamboyant approach to medicine encapsulated the spectacular and
erotic Zeitgeist of the late 18th century. Grahams Celestial Bed
used electricity, magnetism, mind-altering gases and musical automata
to stimulate ecstasy and conception, and his infamous Lecture on
Generation taught Londons aristocracy to aim for nothing less than
the sexual sublime.

**The scandalous Worsleys: sex and celebrity divorce in the 18th
century**

Thursday 11 June, 7pm

Hallie Rubenhold

The trial of Maurice George Bisset for criminal conversation with
Sir Richard Worsley's wife made headline news in 1782 when details of
their private sexual arrangements were revealed. More surprising still
were the suggestions that Bisset had been only one of 27 lovers
enjoyed by Lady Worsley. Hallie Rubenhold, the author of Lady
Worsley's Whim, discusses the subject of her recent book.

Someone has commented on my book on Amazon

It has taken since 1990 but someone has actually posted a comment on Paul and my book, the Citisights Guide to London. Posted on amazon.com not .co.uk which is why I have not seen it before. They said, in 2004:

Pretty good and pretty handy, February 18, 2004

By A Customer

I actually took the "Victorian london" walk (from the older 1990 version), which was basically a "Charles Dickens' london" tour. It was really enjoyable, though, because all the major landmarks are augmented by a description from the writer!

The book is about the 900,000 best seller on Amazon!

I also enjoyed the "Dark Age, Saxon & Viking London" walk, all ruins, hidden plaques, ancient churches, old river markings, nascent city gates and age-old markets--very arresting!

Alan Vince - a life in archaeology

I was very sad to hear of Alan Vince's death.

I worked with him in the 1980's at the Museum of London where I set up the first computer facility. It was Alan and Paul Tyers who immediately saw the potential for pottery studies. We had great fun using the relatively primitive facilities the UNIX computer provided, creating simple programmes that helped Alan get to grips with London's pottery.

He seemed to have one of those minds which is not overwhelmed with detail and which can find a direction through a host of possible false leads to come to a very practical conclusion. He was instrumental in discovering that the saxon City was in the Aldwych and wrote an interesting book about the subject.


This is his obituary taken from SALON IFA 209

Obituary: Alan Vince, FSA

Friends of the late Alan Vince have combined their recollections to produce the following appreciation of his life and achievements.

‘Alan Vince (born 30 March 1952; died 23 February 2009, aged 56) was one of Britain’s leading experts on the ceramics of the medieval and early modern periods and also at the forefront of Anglo-Saxon studies. Eschewing the art-historical approach that had dominated studies of such pottery for so long, he rigorously applied the geological and archaeological techniques in which he was equally accomplished. Reduced to its essentials, his method was to examine the petrological composition of a pottery vessel, comparing its constituents with rocks from known geological deposits. Working from microscope slides, and later also with chemical analysis of the clay itself (for which he developed the application of ground-breaking new techniques), he could deduce the geographical origin of the vessel — and sometimes even the precise kiln that had produced it centuries ago.

‘Whereas in many hands such information would have been of limited, purely academic, value, Alan analysed and compared tens of thousands of potsherds, from dozens of sites of all periods across the United Kingdom and beyond, so transforming our understanding of social and economic conditions in English towns. Sometimes the results were surprising. In London, for example, it emerged that the Norman Conquest of 1066 made no significant difference to the supply of pottery, to the types of vessel in use or, by inference, to the domestic way of life of most Londoners.

‘Born in Bath in 1952, Alan was educated at Keynsham Grammar School. For eight years he studied at the University of Southampton, where he came under the influence of David Peacock, who pioneered the application of geological techniques to the study of Roman pottery. His doctoral thesis on the medieval ceramic industry of the Severn valley was a large-scale survey of the region of his birth and covered, besides pottery vessels, tiles and ceramic building-materials — a subject upon which he would become a leading authority.

‘Never purely a specialist in artefacts, however, Alan also spent time as a site supervisor both at the Eastgate excavations at Gloucester with Carolyn Heighway, FSA, and at St Albans Abbey, where Fellows Martin Biddle and Birthe Kølbye-Biddle were directing excavations prior to the construction of a new chapter house. Prophetically, as things were to turn out, that dig was notable for locating, for the first time, remains of early to mid-Saxon St Albans, on the hill slope between Roman Verulamium and the medieval town.

‘After a short period directing excavations in Newbury during 1979, Alan took up a post in the Museum of London’s Department of Urban Archaeology (DUA). There he remained until 1988, eventually taking charge of research and the publication of artefacts of all periods. At the time of his arrival, the DUA had already explored over fifty sites in the City of London and had devised a system for classifying ceramics that was based on geological principles. It required someone with Alan’s towering managerial skills, however, to tackle the enormous logistical problem of classifying thousands of broken potsherds and interpreting them in the context of the buildings and other remains that also had been discovered.

‘Fortunately, much of the pottery had been dumped in common household rubbish behind the timber riverside walls by which medieval Londoners reclaimed ever-increasing tracts of land from the Thames. The walls could be given a precise calendar date by the nascent science of tree-ring dating, and this enabled Alan to produce a detailed type-series of all the pottery that had been in use in London from the mid-ninth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. The results were published in a series of books and journal articles that remain, to this day, the essential foundation for medieval ceramic studies, not only in London but also in much of Britain and on the continent.

‘Delegating routine ceramic analysis to a team of able assistants, Alan was soon managing the production of books on other medieval artefacts, such as knives, shoes or clothing. Though largely written by specialists in the field, they followed his rigorous methods, paying attention to the details of the materials used, craft techniques and chronology; all have been reprinted several times. Perhaps his most memorable single contribution, however, relates to the discovery of Saxon London. Because the medieval city lay within the walls of Roman Londinium, it was generally assumed that occupation of the site was continuous — albeit at a humble level — during the four centuries from AD 400 to 800. Yet, despite numerous digs, archaeologists had failed to find the slightest shred of supporting evidence.

‘Then, in the summer of 1984, both Alan and Martin Biddle, working entirely independently, published articles proposing that previous scholars had been searching in the wrong place. Saxon Lundenwic lay not within the Roman walls but to the west, along the Strand and Aldwych, ‘the old wic’. Almost immediately, excavation proved them right. Whereas Biddle had marshalled much of the requisite historical and place-name data, Alan, typically, had drawn his conclusion from a meticulous study of the artefacts that had been dug up over centuries and largely disregarded. His book, Saxon London (1990), was a wonderfully readable reassessment of this fascinating episode in London’s history.

‘In 1988 Alan was ready for a fresh challenge and moved to Lincoln, where, as a key figure in the City of Lincoln Archaeology Unit, he mentored a team through a major programme of research and publication. The resulting volumes, on sites excavated between 1972 and 1987, are a fitting testament to Alan’s inspirational leadership. Lincoln’s archaeology provided him with the opportunity to explore the history of a city through multi-period activity dating from the Late Bronze Age, through Roman and Saxon occupation to the important medieval ecclesiastical centre it became, and even into the growth of the industrial town in the mid-nineteenth century. His enthusiasm for ICT applications enabled a team of archaeologists to work concurrently on stratigraphical, artefactual and environmental information, culminating in an integrated approach to archaeological research and publication. Alan could be seen at his happiest in front of a computer exploring desktop publishing programmes or talking with colleagues about the Saxon pottery of Lincolnshire. His joint publication The City by the Pool: assessing the archaeology of the city of Lincoln (2003) has been acclaimed as the last word in urban archaeological assessment.

‘In 1995, Alan took up a part-time post in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. He was one of the first to recognise that the personal computer would transform the day-to-day processing of archaeological data, and had created the Urban Archaeological Database for Lincoln, which was a model of its kind. Therefore it was natural that, from 1995 to 1999, he should serve as the first editor of a new on-line journal, Internet Archaeology. Insisting that traditional standards of scholarship must be upheld, but at the same time encouraging authors to make original use of the new technologies available, he laid the foundations for a series that now runs to twenty-five issues.

‘The need for scientific analysis and characterisation studies of ceramic fabrics was increasingly being recognised across Britain and beyond. It was therefore natural that someone with Alan’s unique gifts and experience should step into the breach to provide a much-needed service for the profession. In 1997, he founded his own company, Alan Vince Archaeological Consultancy, while continuing to work at York. As a ceramic petrologist, the demand for his specialist input into archaeological projects around the world had, by 1999, became so great that he decided to focus entirely on his flourishing consultancy work. In this capacity, he continued to play a crucial role in developing our understanding of pottery and building materials, as well as of their wider significance. His programmes of scientific analysis were of major importance in a wide and diverse array of projects from centres across Britain and Europe, even extending as far as Taiwan and Madagascar. Based on data collected from sites across mainland Britain, he established the AVAC Ceramic Chemical Composition Database, which provides an invaluable on-line resource.

‘Alan served as President of the Medieval Pottery Research Group between 1996 and 1999, and as Secretary of the Society for Medieval Archaeology between 1988 and 1993. His interests ranged widely beyond ceramics to include glass (he excavated a seventeenth-century glasshouse at Newent, Gloucestershire), clay tobacco pipes and decorated floor tiles. A superb teacher, whose critical acumen was mixed with extraordinary warmth, humour and generosity, he trained and encouraged a succession of assistants, many of whom have become distinguished ceramics experts in their own right. His list of publications is immense, but provides only a small measure of the far-reaching importance of a career curtailed far too early.

‘Alan was that very rare being, a man of vision who could see clearly the larger picture, but who was also intensely practical and knew how to achieve what he wanted. Alan’s loss to the archaeological world will be felt for many years to come. His wife, Joanna, whom he met on a dig in Coddenham, Suffolk, in 1973 and married in 1976, survives him, along with their three children, Leon, Amy and Kate.’

Alan Vince: Home Page

Make your own book with Blurb

This is a reasonably priced print on demand project that offers the opportunity of producing really attractive one-off coffee table books.



Make your own book with Blurb

Living Heritage Project at Hunterian

3 of My CSM students successfully gave a workshop with girls from La Sainte Union school in the Hunterian Museum today. The project was initiated by Camden Council, and was a very successful collaboration between Camden, Hunterian and CSM. Marina, Georgiana and Leegoo did really well and were given great support by Jane Hughes and Kim Biddulph.

The idea was to use the collection and to look at local architecture and using this inspiration to create a sculptural sign to display outside the Hunterian.

The ideas were really great!

Student visit to London Museums

I took my Worcester Students to London and took them around the V&A, Natural History Museum and the British Museum. Quite a whistle stop tour, but it gives them a good grounding in the major museum design styles.

Most interesting is that the old Geology Museum and the Science Museum has 'lost' their old building behind exhibition display, while the V&A and the Natural History Museum glorify in theirs.

V&A's new sculpture gallery is divine, I just love it!

Archaeology of Bermondsey Walk

I gave two guided walks at the weekend, one on Myths and Legends of London, the other on the archaeology of Bermondsey. I asked Alistair Douglas who has excavated extensively in the area to help me on this walk. It is another in the series of dialogue walks I first tried at the London Architectural Biennale. It works really well. We got about 50 people and despite the rain did a great walk around Bermondsey.

Route, was London Bridge Station, St Olaf's, Bermondsey Street, Leathermarket Street, Long Lane, Bermondsey Square, Abbey Street.

Roman London walk for schools

I gave a walk for 30 Primary school children based on Roman London. We started at the Tower, walked down to Billingsgate and onto the Guildhall where we went into the Amphitheatre. Good group, interested - slightly long walk, might be better to do the Walls around the Museum of London.


BBC - Romans - Roman Resources

Medicine through time web site

This is the new Science Museum medicine through time web site.


Home

Talks every weekends!

Dear all,

The Old Operating Theatre Museum is now hosting regular talks on
weekends.

Speed Surgery - A live demonstration of surgery before anaesthesia

Every Saturday at 2.00pm- And you can take the amputed leg away with
you if you want!

Herbs & the Herb Garret- A talk on the history of the museum and the
use of herbs in medicine

Every Sunday at 2.00 pm- And you can try some of the remedies at
home...the mother-in- law will be impressed!

And always check our ewbsite for the last minute events!!!!

www.thegarret.org.uk

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Today I sold out to advertising

I looked at my adsense page and found that I have earnt $17.10 in one year of having an adsense line on my blog!

Not that I have received any of it as I think they only pay you once you have $100. 5 Years time?

Hovever I did get an email from a mobile company asking me to add some text with a link to their site on my web page and they would give me $100 a year. So I thought I'd try it out and if you want to see it - look at the site below.

And Did Those Feet ... Guided Walks in and around London

On the other hand the Old Operating Theatre Museum has earned £70 from

http://www.everyclick.com/

Where you put their search engine as your home search engine and if you go to adverts you make some money. We've made £70 in about 2 years but have not pushed it to our members partly because it isnt as good as google.

Google Inadequacies

Much as I'm impressed by some aspects of Google - some things are just not quite good enough.

1. China - ruined their reputation in my eyes
2. Google Calendar - does not allow you to classify or label events, and no use of colour to code events visually. This makes it not as good as Palm's calendar programme and will stop me using it unless I have to
3. Google Mail - using it really has advantage of portability and the labelling system is quite good but Google Mail has the following problems:

a. Sometimes it is very slow, and sometimes it stops
b. No easy way of backing up emails to hard disc - making you reliant on a commercial system who may or may not look after your data.
c. Although labels and conversations are often a very good idea - sometimes they are not. Sometimes you do want to shunt a whole load of emails into a folder not just label them. Sometimes important mails are lost in a long conversations, making it hard to easily get to important emails.

Events Weekend of March 7th and 6th

I am doing two walks on the 8th March for London Walks These are:

Myths & Archaeology - the origins of London

Sunday, 8th March 10.45 am Tower Hill Tube

The Archaeology of Ancient Bermondsey
Sunday, 8th March 2.30 London Bridge Tooley Street Exit

This walk will be done in conjunction with Alistair Douglas
archaeologist who has done extensive excavations in Bermondsey and
therefore should not be missed!

Walks are £7 or £5 depending on whether you are a concession.

I also enclose details of what looks like an interesting event at Kew

Ethnobotany at Kew

Kew is hosting an open day to showcase current research and practice
in

ethnobotany. There will be about 20 displays on topics including wild
foods

and medicines, pharmacognosy of British medicinal plants, Asian
spices,

traditional herbs, British home gardens, basket-making, the baobab
tree, a

large display of ethnographic textiles and fibres, and a
mini-festival of

ethnobotanical films. There will be ample opportunity to handle plant

material and talk to researchers. The event is suitable for all ages,

families welcome.

The event runs 11am to 4pm and entry is FREE, so long as an e-ticket
is

pre-booked by emailing education@therai.org.uk
<mailto:education@therai.org.uk>
(still available as at the 27th)

Holders of Kew season tickets/Friends passes, or reciprocal national
museum

staff pass holders, can enter through any public gate and make their
way to

the Jodrell building - no ticket required.

It should be a fun day, so if you are within easy reach of London,
please

join us.

Website: http://www.kew.org/science/ecbot/

Mark

Dr Mark Nesbitt

Jodrell Laboratory

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Richmond, Surrey

TW9 3AB

Tel: 020 8332 5386

Economic Botany Collection: http://www.kew.org/collections/ecbot/

Sustainable Uses Group: http://www.kew.org/scihort/ecbot/

--

colour enters my working life, gogglemail

I've just realised that my working life has been changed if not transformed by the use of colour in recent weeks.

Firstly, I have been using Google mail and have learnt how to colour my labels. As I do so many different jobs I can colour code them and can spend an hour or so working on the OOT ones - and it is easy to see which they are and how much I have to do.

So it is one reason to use Google mail, the other, and the main one is to be able to have all my emails with me where ever I am and this is very useful. I have also changed over the OOt to google mail and staff seem to like it. It means we hardly need a network as can access emails upstairs or downstairs. Computing is about to change Cloud computing is being to bite.

Also I have been adding colour to my diary which is Palm Calendar -task can be given a colour, and it really helps I can now use the week view and for the first time it is useful as it shows me at a glance how the week is shaping - the colour makes it so much easier to interpret it visually.

The colours I used have come from the plastic coloured folders I buy.

Essentially

Yellow is the Old Op Theatre Museum
Red/orange is museum stuff
Blue is CHR and Elderhostel
Green is University stuff, various shades for CSM, UCL and Worcester

Slumdog Millionaire Narrative analysis

At CSM I used Slumdog millionaire to help think about use of narrative in my student's projects. At the time it was simply a starting off warming up excercise but soon became apparent the story structure had relevance to the tutorial group.

Slumdog has a plot which has a frame story based on the heroes involvement in 'Who wants to be a Millionaire'. the film begins at the time he has already won a substantial amount but is in prison being tortured as he is thought to be cheating. It flashes back to earlier questions, and ends shortly after Jamal has won 20m Rupees.

The story timeline begins when Jamal is a little boy in the slums of Bombay and ends in Mumbai when he is reunited with Latika the love of his life, after winning the 20 million rupees. This story is told as a set of episodes told in flashback but in sequence slotted in between questions he is answering in Millionaire. Each flashback explains how he, the slumdog, knows the answers to some sophisticated questions.

The themes the director explores are to do with poverty, the development of India, the battle of Truth against cynicism, truth against corruption. It is both a realistic film showing the terrible consequences of poverty, and a fairytale in which good confronts evil, and the principle that 'money can't buy you love' wins

Nuts and Bolts Lecture at UCL

Claire Sussums gave an excellent lecture on Data standards and organisation required for running major museum internet projects. She used as an example the Exploring 20th Century London project. The major technical problem is to get data from disparate sources and databases into a common standard acceptable to all. The major creative problem is to make the accumulation of data meaningful - this is partly done by creating 4 main ways into the data:

Timeline
Theme
Place
Search

Now there are 11 partners in the project - still this does create a still very partial data set for example I searched for clapton sport - hoping to find information on the first black professional footballer, but all I got were objects which had jewish affinities, simply because the jewish museum has a great collection of portraits of ordinary people

Open Archives Initiative and Dublin Core

Useful web site for interchanging data between web sites and interoperability.


Open Archives Initiative

Also look at the Dublin Core

Web design on a budget. Six free alternatives to Dreamweaver.

This was mentioned in the Guardian. Dreamweaver is quite easy to use but it is expensive unless you can justify and educational copy.


Web design on a budget. Six free alternatives to Dreamweaver.

Canon Printers monopoly practices?

I have just had a week without my printer courtesy of Canon.

I put in a new inktank, and the printer started telling me 'Cannot recognise inktank' and listed all 4 inktanks. Canon Pixma iX4000. The reset light lit up with 4 blinks.

So, this is the bloody annoying Canon attempt to force you to use their expensive ink rather than cheaper compatible cartridges - I guess.

I begin by replacing cartridges at first just the blank then them all. I buy about 8 new tanks from various suppliers including a refill yourself solution and get ink all over me and the desk.

Nothing solves the problem so I ring Canon and a continental voice tells me that the problem is that I am not using Canon original cartridges and he refuses to engage except to tell me that compatible cartridges can or have ruined my printer. I'm assuming it is simply a question of finding an override - the internet tells me that pressing the reset button for 5 secs might be the answer, or turning off and on while pressing the reset button.

Does not work.

So i put in a proper black canon ink tank black being the one I changed when the error arose. No improvement, I take it out and notice for the first time that there are 4 little copper prongs which obviously interface with the annoying microchip that it inserting in all canon inktanks, one of them is bent out of position. I carefully bend it back and low and behold the printer works again.

The problem was caused because I had purchased a black cartridge which was not the fat one but thin as the other 3 tanks, and I tried fitting it - this obviously did the bending.

Now the reason I have typed all this in - is that I now hate printer manufacturers as much as I hate banks, because firstly the built in obsolescence that killed my old canon, and b, the use of these chips which is obviously a clone buster and really does not give any useful functionality.

Why do they get away with selling printers that use ink which costs more in a year than the printer itself!

Old Operating Theatre Museum busy day

Amazingly busy day at the Museum - lots of people coming in for Half term and 2 groups - one UA3 and a group from More London - I gave short walk from More London to the Old Operating Theatre Museum via Guys. Sometimes seems better when I'm rushing - get more in more concentrated more animated.

Toilet blocked - the only problem - brand new toilet and plumber says blocked with concrete. Pub manager complaining that too many of our visitors are using his toilet.

Also had ICT visit which I think is going to be interesting - finding out how far behind I now am. The issues that came up were particularly around Data Protection. Here I am backing the system up onto a portable hard disc bringing home, putting it on the home pc - none of it encrypted.

I think the issue will be if I get run over by a bus ........

But what I wanted out of the free visit was advice on setting up a webcasting system and advice on setting up video points around the Museum for artists (and us to use).

Climate change and archaeology

Very interesting post by Mike Haseler in Brit Arch:

Essentially he is saying that methods of recording the past tend to attentuate temperature change, smoothing down the peaks, so a comparison of present (measured with modern instruments) compared with the past will tend to so wilder fluctuations now than then just because of methods of recording.


The post is as follows (with thanks to Mike for permission to quote it):



'Having studied the recent instrumentational record of global climate, half the change takes place in periods less than 10years and half over ten years. So it seems pretty clear that unless multi-proxy temperature reconstructions have an accuracy of better than 10years there will be a substantial reduction in the apparent variability of global temperature. To put that simply, there are many peaks/troughs that are 10, 30, 100 years long. If two proxies are offset by e.g. 10 years, the peak in one proxy will not coincide with that in another and therefore the size of the 10year peaks/troughs will be substantial reduced, however since 20 years of the 30 year peaks still coincide they will still show strongly. Similarly if the proxies are offset by 30, or 100 years, the effect is to reduce the apparent variability of peaks/troughs of these durations.

So, even if you have very sensitive proxies, if they aren't also extremely accurate in their dating, the apparent variability of historic climate will be significantly reduced, with the effect that if you compare a reconstruction of the historical global temperature using proxies with an instrumentational record (which all obviously have accurate dating) it will appear that modern temperature changes are far more dramatic than historic temperature changes.

In short, I'm really would like to find a way to reconcile the archaeological narrative of climate being a dramatic influence on human culture, with the modern "global warming" narrative of "unprecedented climate change" which appears to have had negligible effect on humans.


To put it bluntly, in the light of the current accepted narrative of a stable world climate and unless there is a way reconcile the archaeology and temperature reconstruction, any archaeologists talking of any change because of this or that warmer or cooler period (whether world or regional unless backed up with clear temperature records) is really opening themselves us to a charge of being a "fraud".

Have archaeologists been over-egging the effects of climate?'

Climate Change and archaeology

I'm finding myself out of step with Climate Change. I hate to be considered a climate chance denier but I think my archaeological background gives a different perspective on the subject.

This is the first time I have tried to articulate my position. Firstly, I believe that recycling and cutting down emissions are worthy of support but I think this is irrespective of Climate Change. We should be maker the world a cleaner more sustainable place in any case. So I'm not a burn coal and to hell with it type of chap.

But, as an archaeologist, it is clear that climate change is the norm - Chris Stringer in Homo Brittanicus shows that the British Isles have been made inhospitable to humans 5 times in the last million years by climate change. The last great climate change saw a 7 degree change in temperature in 15 years.

So, climate change is a normal part of the planetary cycle. And what seems strange to me is that the logic of the green position is to try and freeze our climate the way it is now. So those who say they love the planet, in a Gaiaesque viewpoint, are denying the very dynamism that makes the earth such a fantastic place it is a living, changing place and if we gain control of climate change we tame it if not kill it.

One influence is Foundation by Isaac Azimov which has an imagined central world called Terminus which is completely controlled by society, completely built over and in effect a dead planet? Another influence is Lovelock, who in one of his early books, said the worst thing for the world would be humans smart enough to control the planet and that if we managed that we are bound to fuck it up - the interactions being too complicated for humans to understand.

Another issue is that I gained some insight into Science when working at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology at Oxford, we were looking at reversals in the magnetic field. I seem to remember there was a so called Gothenburg Event which one scientist discovered, then it was corroborated by a host of others, until a definitive work proved it did not really exist it was just noise. The point being that when once identified, any result which would otherwise have been checked and doubled checked were not checked as they were validated by the original evidence. In other words the scientists were all jumping on a bandwagon. It is clear to me that the current situation really does not give a neutral scientific position, all the odds are in favour of Climate change.

To me it is manifest that even if we are absolutely sure that climate change is caused by modern industrial activity, we are not at all sure what the outcome will be - whether Gaia will right the situation, whether a new equilibrium will develop, whether the temperature will rise drop or stabilise.

Please be aware I'm not saying this means we do nothing - I'm saying that we should increase recycling, diversify energy resources, live on the planet in a sustainable way at the same time we should put our greatest efforts into providing clean drinking water, and reasonable standards of housing, nutrition and health care around the world - and we should leave Gaia to change the planet as she sees fit.

Triumphant upgrading of our Mailing List software - phplist

We have been using phplist as our mailing list software for some time, partly because it allows users to manage their own subscription, and partly so it can be used both from home and from Museum.

We had a bit of a disaster with it as two of us were using it at the same time and some glitch deleted Old Operating Theatre Museum membership - did not delete the emails but deleted membership. I 'fixed' it by joining up all those with no membership back to the OOT list. Rough and ready but not too much damage. I also uploaded people from our idealist database.

Having done that I decided to upgrade to the latest version as this plugs various security holes. I have been dreading doing this as it is a geek thing requiring knowledge of php potentially. But in the event it was a piece of cake AND the new version is an improvement - we can now see the icons for bold, underline, justify etc which were not visible on the old version.


phplist.com : Homepage : home

London Transport Lecture

* Selling the suburbs (London Transport Museum)

Talk about how posters were used to promote the idyll of Metro-land
in the early 20th century

on Tuesday, 10 March at 18:30:00

More details:
http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_lecture/5969?mail=y

Mailing list Breakdown

We had a problem with the Old Operating Theatre museum Mailing list
yesterday. If you may have been deleted from the list accidently, so
if you want to receive museum news as well as this list please email
me and I'll make sure you are put back on it

kpflude@chr.org.uk

Kevin

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Banners for the Old Operating Theatre Museum go up around Borough High Street

Our publicity campaign, funded by the Renaissance Hub, has begun with the erection of our banners in Borough Market. We have also had a leaflet printed which has been distributed around Southwark. We are planning printing some cards to give to Market Traders and an article in the Traders magazine.

I spoke to a couple of American visitors who were planning to visit but saw the Banners and they said it made it easier to find the museum.

Busy day Web 2.0, walk and crit

A busy day -had a very good session at UCL with a talk by Mark Carmall of the Grant museum looking at some of the implications of web 2.0. I think Mark is correct to point out that most museum web projects are pointing at an audience already won and not at new audience. Is he right though to believe hat maybe not yet the time for Museums to target world of warcraft and second life type of audiences?

Then to OOT to give talk on the operating theatre and walk on public health to norwich school. Finally to CSM for Living History Crit with Katharine from the BM projects progressing but aware of the difficulty of first time workshops for kids by students.

Tudor London - Schools Walk

I took a group of 8 year old children around the City on a Tudor Walk. Problem was it was really wet and the children so small and wet!

Hopefully, they got something from the talk - we walked around St Pauls to Smithfield and looked at rich and poor in Tudor London

Biographies: King John of England - by Mark Hopkins

This is an excellent essay on King John - I'm struggling to write my history of the Kings of England and much admire this one. But only read the first page because his first para is very similar to mine and don't one to copy!

Biographies: King John of England - by Mark Hopkins - Helium

Sick London at the Bishopsgate Institute

Talk Doctors, 'Delusions' and the Great Wen: Alternative Medicine's London
Roots

Speaker: Roberta Bivins

Tuesday 10 February • 7.30pm

Tickets: £7, concs £5; advance booking required

By the 1830s a wide range of alternative and cross-cultural medical
practices were already flourishing in London. From acupuncture to animal
magnetism, middle-class Londoners could take their pick of the latest
medical fads, fancies, and innovations from around the world. 'Regular'
medicine raged, newspapers scoffed and scandalmongered — but 'alternative
medicine' was nonetheless installed as a feature of London life. Drawing on
the accounts of doctors and patients alike, this talk will look at the long
history and enduring legacy of alternative medicine in London. Roberta
Bivins is an Associate Professor of the History of

Medicine at University of Warwick. Her work has examined the cross-cultural
transmission of medical expertise, and the history of alternative and
global medicine.

Walk Medical Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia

Guide: Diane Burstein

Sunday 22 February • 2.00pm (duration approx two hours)

Tickets: £7, concs £5; advance booking required

Join London Blue Badge Guide Diane Burstein for a walking tour around some
London areas with medical connections. You will find out about the first
female medical practitioners, a world famous children's hospital, a
hospital created specially for Italians, a nursing home run by a tea
heiress and the first family planning clinic in the UK.

Diane Burstein is a qualified London Blue Badge and City of London Guide
and author of London Then and Now.

Talk Hospitals of London

Speaker: Jonathan Evans

Tuesday 3 March • 7.30pm

Tickets: £7, concs £5; advance booking required

Jonathan Evans looks at the hospitals of London, as well as some further
afield, and touches upon their fascinating histories. The talk covers a
long historical period — from the early Middle Ages to the present day —
and draws upon archival records and historical illustration collections. He
looks at the evolution of hospitals, from Christian monastic and royal
foundations through to the emergence of NHS Trusts.

Jonathan Evans has been Archivist and Curator at The Royal London Hospital
Archives & Museum since 1989 and is Hon. Apothecaries Lecturer in the
History of Medicine to Barts and The London School of Medicine and
Dentistry. His publications include Treves and the Elephant Man and Edith
Cavell.

Talk Nicholas Culpeper: The Rebel Healer of Spitalfields

Speaker: Benjamin Woolley

Tuesday 10 March • 7.30pm

Tickets: £7, concs £5; advance booking required

Nicholas Culpeper's 1652 book The Complete Herbal is one of the most
successful English books in history, and has led to him being hailed as a
founder of alternative medicine. But Culpeper was also one of London's most
important radicals during the Civil War.

Through his practice as a writer and healer based just a few yards from the
site of Bishopsgate Institute, Culpeper not only challenged the medical
establishment by providing free healthcare to the poor, but helped spark a
revolution that laid the foundations

of modern democracy.

Benjamin Woolley is author of The Herbalist, the first full-length
biography of Nicholas Culpeper. He is an award-winning writer and
broadcaster, whose latest book, Savage Kingdom, tells the story of
Jamestown, England's first successful colony in America.

Talk Bedlam: London and its Mad SOLD OUT

Speaker: Catharine Arnold

Tuesday 24 March • 7.30pm

Talk The Roots of the Health Service

Speaker: Geoffrey Rivett

Tuesday 7 April • 7.30pm

Tickets: £7, concs £5; advance booking required

The NHS was built upon clinical services that had evolved over the
centuries and was shaped by political debates that were even older. This
talk considers the local east London population in the late 19th century,
its health and social problems. Geoffrey will explore the professional care
available from nearby doctors and hospitals and how these were financed. He
will also cover some of the debates, reports and controversies about
charitable and state health care in the run-up to the NHS Act 1946.

Geoffrey Rivett is a contemporary medical historian and vice chair of the
Council of Governors of the Homerton Hospital Foundation Trust. He worked
first as a general practitioner and later in the Department of Health and
has published two books on London's hospital system and the history of the
NHS.

BOOKING INFORMATION

• Concessions are available to senior citizens, registered disabled people,
full-time students, Bishopsgate Institute students and the unwaged.

• Advance booking is required where indicated. Places are limited so early
booking is advised.

How to book

• By post. Complete and return a booking form to Bishopsgate Institute
(available from www.bishopsgate.org.uk/events)

• In person. Book at Bishopsgate Institute Reception between 9.00am and
8.30pm, Monday to Friday.

• By telephone. Call our ticket line on 020 7392 9220 between 9.30am and
5.30pm, Monday to Friday.

We accept the following methods of payment:

• Credit/debit cards (excluding Solo or American Express)

• Cash

• Cheques (cheques should be made payable to Bishopsgate Institute)

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I submitted Annual Return for the Charity Commission

Very exciting day as I managed to submit our annual return to the Charity Commission on time - an improvement on recent years.

Afterwards I went to the Museum to give a walk to a group of doctors from all over the world - it was a small group but they were very interested so very pleasant. Ended up with a tour of the Museum.


Charity Commission Homepage

Gin and Vice in Georgian England

This is a good chance to see the Benjamin Franklin Museum

* Gin and Vice in Georgian England: Decadence and Enlightenment (Benjamin
Franklin House)
Education Manager Rob Taylor talks about the rise in Mother Gin and her
subsequent abuse in the alleys of London in the Age of Enlightenment.
on Monday, 26 January at 13:00:00
More details: http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_lecture/6354?mail=y

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Mayor of London - Story of London

This is the next big festival of history and a forerunner to Olympic cultural events.
Mayor of London - Story of London

Proof Reading

I am having a copy of my 'In their own words' reprinted. It is a 46 page
booklet on the origins of london. I'd quite like another proof read of the
document before I send to printer. Would anyone like to volunteer?

Kevin Flude

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THIS FATAL SUBJECT EXHIBITION 28 Jan-28 Feb

Work from
THIS FATAL SUBJECT
A WELLCOME TRUST ARTS AWARD FUNDED PROJECT
by Gordon Museum Artists in Residence, visual artist Susan Aldworth
wax sculptor Eleanor Crook, and Writer in Residence,
poet Valerie Laws

Confronting age-old taboos around the pathology of the body and its
dissolution, poet/performer Valerie Laws, visual artist/film maker Susan
Aldworth and wax sculptor Eleanor Crook explore and even celebrate the
terrible beauty of the dying process, down to cellular level. Uniquely,
they focus on the physiological events rather than the emotional or
psychological effects; paradoxically, they hope the result will inform both
medical professionals and the wider public and deepen understanding of
'this fatal subject.'

This is an exploration and description of the process and physiology of
dying. A collaboration between visual art, poetry and science that will
reveal the interdependence of living and dying at a cellular level and its
consequence for human identity. Science has many elegant descriptions of
"alive" and "dead" but reaches its limits at the experience of death and
dying. This where art and poetry offer insight beyond the limits of the
scientific method and where our interdisciplinary approach will give a
contemporary definition of death in its cultural context. Our innovative
approach offers an audience an original perspective.
This Fatal Subject is a very exciting and innovative project, in which the
three resident artists, with the help and support of Professor Susan
Standring at KCL and Bill Edwards at the Gordon Museum, are working with
scientists at KCL and elsewhere, researching the physical process of dying.

This show represents the climax of Phase One of the project, which has been
funded by the Wellcome Trust as a Research and Development Arts Award.
During this year, the artists made contact with scientists, forged working
relationships, and shared their research findings into this vital, and
fatal subject. They have been collecting material and information for their
work, and developing their artistic practices too. Aldworth, Laws and Crook
work as three individual practitioners, but are also developing
collaborative work which breaks down barriers between their different art
forms.
Phase Two of This Fatal Subject is planned to begin in 2009, culminating in
production of groundbreaking individual and collaborative work on the
science of dying, which will form public exhibitions in London and
elsewhere, as well as publication and performance. You will find updates
on Phase Two on the website, www.thisfatalsubject.org. See also
www.susanaldworth.com and www.valerielaws.co.uk.

This show consists of a few examples of individual and collaborative work,
some of which are works in progress. Some notes on what is on display
follow below.
FILM: CELL SUICIDE: A PLEASURE POSTPONED
Animated film by Susan Aldworth, animation and sound by Barney Quinton,
featuring a visual poem which undergoes apoptosis by Valerie Laws. This
collaboration, still in development, arose from our individual researches
into the topic of programmed cell death.
ETCHINGS by Susan Aldworth
Apoptosis 1&2: etchings inspired by microphotographs of apoptotic cells.
Original prints: etching and aquatint 35 x 50 cms
Dissollution 1,2&3: a triptych about the dissolution of identity from
changes in the brain for people with Alzheimer's. Original prints: etching
and aquatint 65 x 50 cm
POEMS by Valerie Laws, artwork by Susan Aldworth
Litter of Moons, (shown by kind permission of Mslexia magazine), and
Sirenomelia were inspired by specimens at the Gordon Museum. Benign and
Leang Yen are about Lam Qua's paintings, one of which is in the Gordon, the
other at Yale. In the Dissection Room follows visits to dissection at KCL.
From Fin to Fingers is on the theme of Apoptosis in the foetus.
WAX SCULPTURES by Eleanor Crook
The Failing Consciousness 2008. Work in progress – the sculpture will be
cast in silicone rubber and fitted with an animatronic mechanism making it
able to speak a deathbed speech written by Valerie Laws, then die.

The Old Operating Theatre Museum
9a St Thomas' Street
London SE1 9RY
6.00-8.30pm

28 January -28 February 2009
Monday-Sunday 10.30am-5.00pm
more info: 020 7188 2679 or 07732 987 786
www.thisfatalsubject.org

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Museum Survival Guide

This is how to beat the recession american style.

AAM: AAM Museum Survival Guide

Video of the Butchers Shop at the Operating Theatre Museum

Here is a short video of the editing evenings called the Butcher's shop that 'Bad Idea' Magazine are running at the Museum

James Nash Comics and Illustration - Home

London Museums Group

To the Society of Antiquaries for London Museum Group meeting. Mostly taken up by the Mayor's Cultural Policy. We are preparing our own response. Funny how the mayor is always first name:

Ken, Boris

Blair, Brown, Bush, Obama

Strange that.

Study London web site mentioned - This is a web site for those wishing to study in London - might be useful for Museums seeking to increase contacts with museums and gain more visitors

Study London: the OFFICIAL website for universities in London

In the morning I went to CSM to a Crit on the Lighting Project, interesting how the groups have all managed to hone down their projects into more or less practical projects.

Tourism, Museums and Visit London

Interesting meeting at MLA, London round table meeting on how to make Tourism work for Museums. Main issue for the museums around the table seems to be the fact that Visit London does not work for us - too expensive for too little return, we feel. What is astonishing is that only about 20 museums in London (and c 10 nationals) are members! This is a breath-taking, and must be fuel to ask Boris to make sure that Visit London does something to help outer London Museums.


Before that I went to UCL to give talk on basic design for web sites. Very good short talk by Donna Haugh who can pack a lot in in a short time!. Afterwards to CSM for education project I am managing for CSM in conjunction with Camden Council, Sir John Soane Museum, Foundling Museum, Hunterian Museum and the British Museum.

Quite a good crit, the museum staff all very good and the students have just done enough preliminary work to make it a success.

Upcoming Walks and Lectures

May 1 Myths and Legends of London - A May Day Special! 10.30 am Tower Hill
Tube

May 1 Radical London - Peasants' Revolt to Karl and Co. 2.30 pm St. Paul's
Tube, exit 2

May 30 Archaeology of the City The Eastern Half 10.45am Tower Hill

June 13 The Peasants' Revolt Anniversary Walk 10.45 am Aldgate East

June 27 Archaeology of the City - The Western Half 10.45 am St. Paul's
exit 2

Sept. 26 Archaeology of the City - Fleet Street and the Strand 10.45 am
St. Paul's exit 2

Oct. 31 Myths and Legends of the City - A Halloween Special! 10.45 am
Tower Hill Tube

* The Alfred Hitchcock London Locations Walk (Sandra Shevey Talks)
Sandra Shevey`s magical 3-hour tour of Alfred Hitchcock`s London
locations every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday year-round.
on Monday, 19 January at 11:00:00
More details: http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_lecture/6172?mail=y

* The Society of Arts and museums in the 19th century. The devious hand
of Henry Cole (Victoria and Albert Museum)
The Society of Arts and public museums in the 19th century
on Tuesday, 20 January at 13:30:00
More details: http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_lecture/6313?mail=y

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Hard Week !

This has been a hard week to get through - I'm coughing like a consumptive, still not sleeping properly, and have a savage sore throat - fed up with third week of illness. I've managed to get into work each day but its been hard!

Tuesday my turn as a UCL honorary lecturer began and first day of the Digitisation course went well. Then I met up to discuss the Hunterian project I am involved for CSM. Then to see my CSM students Work in Progress Show.

Next to the Old Operating Theatre museum for my Trustees meeting which took place in the Crypt of St Thomas Churc - all going well!

Exhausted at end of the day.

Wednesday to Crits to discuss Work in Progress Show - pretty good by and large and the crit method - dividing up into smaller groups works really well.

Football - score two goals

Thursday, can relax a little, but have to go to Bryans to finalise accounts for Cultural Heritage Information Consultants. Then to Dentist in Richmond, home for some work and to Simon and Martha's to hear first performance of Simon's concerto.

Friday, to the Operating Theatre Museum to do two guided tours of Public Health in Victorian Southwark for school from Romsey. I have been nursing my voice and it just survives, the walk is becoming pretty good and all joined up.

To Camden at the end of the day to fill in CRB check form for Camden project.

Home, knackered, hoping the cough is perhaps a little better - I certainly feel better.

But I am falling way behind on writing the Kings book

On Purpose Conceptual Guided Walk pdf

Here is a pdf of the On Purpose guided walk which I undertook at the Embankment Galleries on the behest of Abake.

AbakeOnPurpose.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Beware - copyright police are chasing you!

This article was shown to me by Suzanne Keene and gives a good reason for checking copyright of images that are used on the web.


Wendy M Grossman on the heavy-handed tactics picture agencies use when pursuing payment | Technology | The Guardian

King Lucius of Britain by David J. Knight

New book about King Lucius claims he was real. Oxbow Books - King Lucius of Britain by David J. Knight: "King Abgarus of Edessa"

Images of the Restoration Works at St Thomas Church

I set up a photo album of images from the restoration work at the Old Operating Theatre Museum.

I think I really should write a memoire of the long long saga of the building works and the Jubilee Line.

Restoration Works at St Thomas Church

Happy Christmas to the Old Operating Theatre Museum Mailing list

Dear List Member

This is to wish you a happy Christmas from the Old Operating Theatre Museum
and staff.

Just to share with you the news that the Museum is now clear of all
building works for the first time in many months. The interior is looking
wonderful, the Church has been fully restored and is now occupied by
friendly neighbours. Not only that but they have stopped digging up St
Thomas Street and the whole place is vibrant and feels like a million
dollars.

The building work made the year tough but despite this we managed to
provide for 25,000 visitors. We hope therefore to push on next year -
improving the displays, the education service, the museum's lease and the
working conditions for staff. We will be fundraising to make major
improvements. So we will need all your support over the coming year.

If you would like to help with the fund-raising I am running a survey to
help shape our strategy and I would be really delighted if you could take 2
minutes (honest, that is all it will take) to try it out.

If you can please click on this link
http://www.esurveyspro.com/Survey.aspx?id=ff1a0cde-5067-4caf-badb-0d41d9b7880d

I will be loading the Annual Report on the web site soon and will email you
news as and when it becomes available.

With best wishes

Kevin Flude

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Museum moves - Design Museum and Commonwealth Museum on move?

Southwark may be losing one museum and gaining another. The Design Museum is said to be considering a move to the former Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. The Bristol-based British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, is on the short list for the Potters Field site near the Tower of London.

how2fundraise web site

Useful fundraising web site.


how2fundraise.org | Home

Boris's Cultural Strategy for London

Here is a link to Boris's Cultural Strategy


cultural-metropolis.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Film of the Old Operating Theatre

As part of the medical london book there is a film of the operating theatre museum on the Wellcome web site:

Medical London: city of diseases, city of cures: video extras for the walk Life and Death by Water: A walk along the Medieval Thames

Reading an interesting piece in Conservation Bulletin which gives a set of criteria for redevelopment:

'Continuity and context in urbanism and architecture: the honesty of a living tradition'

by Hank Dittmar, Chief Executive, the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment

'...The Prince's Foundation has evolved a series of principles for building in an historic context. These principles were launched by HRH The Prince ofWales at a conference on New Buildings in Old Places. There are five core ideas.
• Recognition that sustainability means building for the long term — one hundred years, rather than twenty years.
• Because of this, building in an adaptable and flexible manner, reassessing and reusing existing buildings wherever possible.
• Building in a manner that fits the place, in terms of materials used, proportion and layouts and _ climate, ecology and building practices.
• Building beautifully, in a manner that builds upon tradition, evolving it in response to present challenges and utilising present-day resources and techniques.
• And finally, understanding the purpose of a building or group of buildings within the hierarchy of the buildings around it and responding with an appropriate building type and design. '


Conservation bulletin \ Issue 59: Autumn 2008

Gaffer Goodrich and Goody Maud

Nicknames of Henry I and his wife Matilda

Her Majesty's Tower Part One - Google Book Search

Renaissance Faces - National Gallery

I was really looking forward to this exhibition as it is one of the subjects I talk about on my National Gallery tours for Elderhostel, but I was very disappointed.

The exhibition has virtually no narrative, very little explanation and mostly it seems to bring in paintings you can see upstairs for free downstairs so you can pay £10 to see them.

There is very little in the exhibition about how the paintings were done, very little on technique, not much on why they were done and not much social history either. A few clues can be gathered from the film show after the visitors exits the exhibition but otherwise, apart from the great collection of portraits themselves very little is learnt.

The paintings are displayed thematically, this room for rulers, that for family, the other for friends but otherwise the labels give little away. There is no narrative for each room except in a free gallery guide, and the painting labels quite often are little more than verbal descriptions of the paintings.

I was left with the thought that perhaps the narrative is only given in the audio guides. The labels seem to have been very strictly rationed word wise - something like 10 6 word lines - to sum up for example Holbein's Ambassadors.

Another thing that was really annoying was the fact that all of the National Gallery's Holbeins were on display except the Erasmus. As I often visit the Holbeins at the NG this would be very annoying to be deprived of one of the great wonders of the NG. The one Holbein left for the general public is the Erasmus which was a very odd choice because in the Exhibition there is a painting of Gillis a friend of More which is a pair with the Erasmus as both men were friends of Thomas More and had the paintings done to send to More. Yet they had chosen not to include this one while including Ambassadors, Christina of Denmark, and Lady with a Squirrel all of which were not paired with another painting in the gallery.

Neither had they put the Titian portrait of the Unknown man in the exhibition when, for me, this is one of the most important of renaissance portraits.

So deeply disappointed, the opposite of an intellectual tour de force.


NG London/Exhibitions: Renaissance Faces

News and Event - gangland soho lecture

News.

I successfully completed my strange guided tour of the On Purpose
exhibition. This was a commission by avante guarde designers Abake who
asked me to do a guided tour of the Arnolfini On Purpose exhibition in
Bristol. The twist was they wanted the tour to do done inLondon at the
'Wouldn't it be nice?' exhibition at the Embankment Gallery, Somerset
House.

If you are interested how it went please follow this link

OnPurpose pdf

I also gave a guided walk on archaeology of the City. During my researches
I was happy to discover that archaeologists have now found evidence of
early military ditches suggesting that London'sorigins are indeed military.

Have a look at my blog for further comments on these ideas:

www.anddidthosefeet.blogspot.com
Tuesday 2 December 2008, 7.30pm

GANGLAND SOHO
A TALK BY JAMES MORTON

James Morton vividly portrays the crimes and criminals that have given Soho
its infamous reputation.

Behind the fashionable bars and clubs of Soho lies a fascinating history of
criminal activity, featuring some of London's most notorious gangsters.
From the razor gangs of the 1920s to the post-war gangleaders Billy Hill
and Jack Spot; from the pre-war French pimps and the Messina brothers to
the Albanian gangs, through to the thriving Soho of today, the area has
been a Mecca for thieves, conmen, drug dealers, notorious pimps and crooked
lawyers. James Morton vividly portrays the crimes and criminals that have
given Soho its infamous reputation, including the vicious Kray-Richardson
gang, a Second World War Jack the Ripper, the shooting in the streets of
Soho of gangster Jack Spot and the gangland murder of boxer Freddie Mills.

Behind the fashionable bars and clubs of Soho lies a fascinating history of
criminal activity, featuring some of London's most notorious gangsters.
From the razor gangs of the 1920s to the post-war gangleaders Billy Hill
and Jack Spot; from the pre-war French pimps and the Messina brothers to
the Albanian gangs, through to the thriving Soho of today, the area has
been a Mecca for thieves, conmen, drug dealers, notorious pimps and crooked
lawyers.

Contact: sohemian@yahoo.co.uk

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Brunel Museum - opens Tunnel to view

The Brunel Museum has pulled off something of a triumph - opening up the Shaft to the Tunnel for public view - a really great piece of negotiations.

I wrote to Richard Hulse the Director to offer him my congratulations. Richard was kind enough to remember that the idea for the expansion into the Shaft came about when I was running the Museum. But the idea is one thing the organisation of it into a reality quite another.


Brunel Museum - Home Page

Public Health

I began writing an article on the Museum's Public Health Walks and update wikipedia in the process.

Epidemiology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Garden Museum refurbished and renamed.

The Museum of Garden History has reopened with a new gallery providing more space, with new displays, new name and new £6 entrance fee.

Garden Museum opens with newly pruned displays [17 November 2008]

London Fire Brigade Museum gets temporary reprieve

A temporary reprieve was given to the London Fire Brigade museum. It seems that the crass remarks made by Brian Coleman have united people in support of the Museum.

His latest sally was to describe the Museum as shabby and not engaging with young people with interactivity.

Southwark’s "shabby" London Fire Brigade Museum debated at City Hall [23 November 2008]

The Butcher's Shop at the Old Operating Theatre Museum

Here are some pictures of the editing event organised by Bad Idea at the Old Operating Theatre Museum.

Idependent Review here.

BAD IDEA magazine | The Butcher's Shop: Photos

BM embraces the Modern

I see the BM is trying to steal a little of the Tate Modern Thunder, with Antony Gormley and Ron Meurk exhibits.

Invention at the Old Operating Theatre Museum

We had 90 5 - 6 year old children to the Museum today to do a session based on invention. In the Museum they did medical invention and on a walk we looked at public health and other inventions based on Victorian London. One walk worked really well, but the second was made more difficult by need to find toilets that did not need 20p.

Babylon at the British Museum

Really enjoyable exhibition at the BM - enjoyed it much more than either Hadrian or Chinese Emperor. No longer in the Reading Room - I hope they are putting the reading room back to its proper use, the Exhibition is essentially an essay on the idea of Babylon.

The narrative begins with Breughel's Tower of Babel and then shows star items from Babylon in the time of Nebucanassar and Belshazzar. Thereafter, the exhibition looks at the myth of Babylon interspersed with historical sections essentially based on the biblical stories of Daniel and the Writing on the Wall. There is a section of 'legacy' based on Babylonian science (use of base 60 and the Zodiac). At the end the exhibition comes right up to date with film clips such as Metropolis and Intolerance, and of the affect of the 2nd Gulf War on Babylon. There is a clip of an academic discussion a Rasta view of Babylon.

In many ways it is quite light weight and non - threatening. The examination of ancient Babylon is very light and fluffy - models of the Zigurat and Ishtar Gate, fabulous glazed tiled images of Lions and Babylonian dragons, marvelous cuniform cylinders and bricks, but really very little detail. The narrative is one which had you asked any well informed person what they know about Babylon, they could rough out the main themes on the back of a napkin, Tower of Babel, Biblical Story, Saddam Hussein, American soldiers. The technology is very traditional with some use of sound and a little film.

None-the-less it is a really enjoyable exhibition - possibly because it builds on the knowledge of the viewer. For example the biblical quote shown here - just imagine what sort of God that is - one who can't cope with his creation fulfilling their potential.


British Museum exhibition exposes modern tragedy of Babylon | Art and design | The Guardian

Roman London School walk

Following the success of my Archeology and the Origins of London walk for London Walks, I have revamped the walk I designed for schools based on Roman London. A pdf is available here:

'Londinium and Beyond' - Revealing Roman London – Birkbeck, University of London

Following discussion with Nick Bateman I purchased a copy of the feschrift for Harvey Sheldon which contains an article on London's population.

'Londinium and Beyond' - Revealing Roman London – Birkbeck, University of London

The Origins and Archaeology of London

Yesterday I gave an archaeology walk around London concentrating on the Origins of London. A lot to get into one walk and also I still had the myths and legends in my mind so a bit of that seeped in too. In the end only got to Guildhall and did not get to the intended end point which was St Aphage.

Most interesting thing I discovered is that one of the summaries of excavations from Walbrook House suggests that MOLAS found a large fortified enclosure around a Roman conquest period military zone. These were evidenced by N-S v-shaped ditches one had late iron pottery in it. The report goes on to suggest this could be the boundary of the early City. Not sure which side of the Walbrook the site was .

I emailed Nick Bateman about it and he tells me the date of the ditches are 43-50 AD so not necessarily 43 AD as the summary suggested, but it does seem to imply a defended early settlement on the Cornhill with its western boundary on the east bank of the Walbrook. I'd like to see a diagram of the proposed defenses - does it relate to the ankle breaker found, all those years ago in Aldgate? How does it relate to the ankle-breaker ditches found at New Change and what about the compound of round houses in Gresham Street?

Black Death book published by Museum of London

The excavation of the East Smithfield cemetary has been published by the Museum of London. It reveals that burial was organised and not rushed although the finding of coins in pockets suggests the family and grave diggers were too afraid to go through the clothes of victims.

Analysis of the burials shows that 40% are young people but there are few infants and hardly any old people. Men were more likely to be victims than women. Spread was probably human to human and not via rats - the report says.


Click here for details

Wouldn't it be Nice Conceptual Tour part 4

To recap: I am describing my guided walk of the On Purpose Exhibition at the Arnolofini in Bristol which was given at the Wouldn't it be Nice Exhibition at The Embankment Galleries, London.