Subterms
While you have to fight your way through crowds in Cambridge to see the gothic splendour of King’s College Chapel, in the countryside around the city you will most likely find the parish churches that served Cambridgeshire’s medieval villages deserted. But – to take one example – the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at […] More
In his book, The Family Silver, the photographer and writer Michael Collins has published a selection from the thousands of colour slides he has collected over three decades. He talks to Fatema Ahmed about looking through other people’s family albums and what these images might tell us about the medium of photography. I’ve always been […] More
When Ara Güler, for many the greatest photographer of modern Turkey, died last month at the age of 90, the city he devoted his life to photographing came to a standstill. Thousands of admirers, young and old, gathered to pay respects before the funeral service of a man historians and fellow photographers have called the […] More
Naughty postcards and toffee apples, knees-up songs and double entendres, rollercoasters and gang fights: a trip down the pleasure pier offers up a ragtag bunch of British memories. Gaudy and vulnerable, these spindly old structures are important parts of the island’s cultural memory, artefacts of a form of leisure that seems completely anachronistic in the […] More
The passing of time tends to mellow architecture, so that buildings that might once have seemed startlingly new or original appear politely respectful to us today. We are no longer shocked, for instance, to see a Palladian building next to a gothic one or an exuberant Victorian extension to an elegantly proportioned Georgian house. The […] More
For those growing up, as I did, in Glasgow in the 1980s and ’90s, the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) felt omnipresent, a part of the fabric and texture of the city. The stylised rose motif, like a tray of sweet cakes, the impossibly high-backed chairs, and of course the modern typefaces based on […] More
In 1905, the Architectural Review stated that ‘the architectural historian of the distant future may well be excused if he formulates a theory that there were two Decimus Burtons’. Literally speaking, this was remarkably prescient, for today we associate Burton’s name not only with various inventive classical revival buildings around Regent’s Park and Hyde Park […] More
The procedure for protecting buildings of historic or architectural interest is now 70 years old. What are the flaws of the current listing system and how can it be improved? England’s listed building system celebrated its 70th anniversary this year (the system varies across the UK) with a clutch of additions, such as a London […] More
Between 2014 and 2016 the documentary photographer Martin Parr turned his wry gaze to the University of Oxford. The resulting exhibition and book present a photographic portrait of the university today; laying bare its hidden stories and eccentricities. Speaking at the launch of ‘Martin Parr: Oxford’ in the Bodleian Weston Library, the artist expanded on […] More
