Go to Belfast – “Get here early and enjoy it before the rest of the world arrives”*

Well, we only touched the tip of the iceberg on our visit to Belfast. Our day was divided into three – time to look around the centre unaccompanied, a bus tour with a Blue Guide and the Titanic Experience – Belfast’s all new, all singing, all dancing visitor attraction!

Our coach dropped us off bright and early in the centre of Belfast on Great Victoria Street. We crossed the road and went to peer in the windows of the beautifully preserved Crown Liquor Saloon. This pub, right opposite the most bombed hotel in the world – The Europa Hotel – is now owned by the National Trust. In fact it was the first pub that the NT ever took over in 1978.

Of course, the pub wasn’t due to open until 11.30 by which time we would be well into our city tour but we were lucky enough to catch an employee who very kindly showed us into the side door for a quick look round and gave us each a leaflet on the history of the bar. Dating back to 1826 it was originally called The Railway Tavern but in 1885 the son of the then owner, being a student of architecture, decided to brighten up the old family bar. It was mainly due to skilled Italian craftsmen employed elsewhere in the city who supplemented their incomes by moonlighting at The Crown and who made it the prize gem of Victoriana that it still is today.

We decided to stay around the centre of Belfast in the area around Donegall Square in the middle of which is the City Hall. We discovered on the guided tour that it is possible to book a tour of the building, that it houses a decent cafe called Bobbin and that there is a  Titanic Memorial Garden  in its grounds.

Then we came across a real treasure. 17 Donegall Square North is the address of the soon to be 225 years old Linen Hall Library. Founded in 1788 it’s a subscription library like The Leeds Library but it’s doors are open to the public.

You have to subscribe as a member if you wish to borrow books. It houses a very nice cafe and has exhibition space. The current exhibition is called ‘Troubled Images’ :

“All 70 political posters from our ‘Troubled Images’ exhibition, documenting the years of the Northern Ireland conflict, have been hung five storeys high in our Vertical Gallery.
The exhibition has travelled throughout the world to inform and educate the general public about the turbulent years of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. It’s now ‘home’ again and available for all to see.”

Trouble Images in the Vertical Exhibition Space

An Oasis of Calm in the busy City Centre

We re-joined our coach at 11 and enjoyed a 90 minute guided tour of Belfast learning many facts about the city and seeing The Queen’s University, the Grand Opera House, the (leaning!) Albert Memorial Clock, the River Lagan which forms the boundary between County Down and County Antrim, St Anne’s Cathedral, the Botanic Gardens, the Falls Road and, most significantly, Stormont, the seat of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and its surrounding parkland.

Approach Avenue to Stormont

“And as the smart ship grew       

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.”

Thomas Hardy ‘Convergence of the Twain’

Our destination for the afternoon was the brand new, recently opened Titanic Experience. This fine visitor attraction was extremely well done with lots of variety and as much or as little information as you require but quite frankly I felt that I was suffering from Titanic overload after all the hoo-ha and media coverage that it has received over the last few months. It will be give a huge boost to the city which can only be good news and I wish Belfast well and all who sail her!

*Lonely Planet, 2012

“Seriously Wacky and Occasionally Mad” – The New Arcadian Journal

I first came across Patrick Eyres and The New Arcadian Journal a few years ago when I was studying the Open University Course “Heritage, Whose Heritage?”. There was a chapter in the book Sculpture and the Garden which is edited by Eyres that particularly interested me.

Then last week at the Leeds Library I noticed an advertisement for a talk at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds :

“Drawings and proofs for the New Arcadian Journal: “The

Blackamoor” Wednesday 7th March 2012

An evening with Dr Patrick Eyres at the Henry Moore Institute Wednesday 7th March

18.30-20.00

Drawings and proofs for the New Arcadian Journal: “The Blackamoor”.

An evening with Dr Patrick Eyres at the Henry Moore Institute.  Enjoy a glass of wine, a powerpoint talk, see the display, talk with the illustrators and look at the Institute’s Library.

This event is £5.00 a head – numbers are limited to thirty.  Please book your place with payment at the Leeds Library.  Contact us for more information.”

I bought my ticket and then by happy chance came across this article in Saturday’s Yorkshire Post : Jottings from the Journal.

Dr Eyres’ entertaining talk celebrating thirty years of the New Arcadian Journal centred on the latest issue entitled “The Blackamoor and the Georgian Garden”. The Blackamoor was the most popular of all lead statues made in Britain during the 18th century which, by coincidence, was the height of British dominance in the African slave trade. Probably very many of the statues were destroyed or melted down following the abolition of slavery and in more enlightened times. Dr Eyres has tracked down 20 including 2 in the Privy Garden at Hampton Court Palace, one in Lincoln’s Inn in London, another at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire and another supporting a sundial at Wentworth Castle in South Yorkshire which is currently under restoration and the topic of interpretation work. The talk was illustrated with photos of the various statues and reproductions of the beautiful drawings and prints (the work of artists Catherine Aldred and Howard Eaglestone who were also present this evening). It seems that the Blackamoor (African) along with the North American Red Indian were used to symbolise their continents of origin. There were emblems for Europe and Asia as well. These were also illustrated in the popular 16th and 17th century Books of Emblems.

After the talk we were shown the small exhibition in the Henry Moore Library where examples of drawings and copies of the Journal itself were displayed.

Catherine and Howard spoke briefly about their own work which as you can see is exquisite. Howard’s pictures also display humour as you can see from the above examples.

Antarctica in Leeds

Yesterday was the centenary of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s arrival at The South Pole on his ill-fated journey in Antarctica.

The day the boiler broke down at The Leeds Library just happened to be the day that they were hosting an Antarctica Evening!

Here is the programme :

Antarctica Evening – All Welcome

Tuesday 17th January 2012 at 17.00

17.00 Welcome, refreshments and a chance to browse the exhibition of books, artefacts and photographs 1911-1912

18.00 ‘Antarctica’ a talk with slide show by John Whitley (Leeds Library member)

19.00 ‘Why read books on Antarctic exploration’ a brief talk by John Bowers (Leeds Library member)

During the event there will be a chance to talk to the Leeds Library Staff about the Library’s holdings and their interest in the Scott-Amundsen story.

There will be a charge of £5 per person with proceeds being split equally between the United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust, The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and The Leeds Library.

The talk and slides took us on a wonderful journey where we could see the icebergs and the rough seas and only shiver slightly in the chilly room.  At the end John reviewed his trip in the light of what he had seen and pointed out his Top Five which included the penguins, the icebergs, the whales.

We came away from the second talk with our own annotated bibliography of Antarctica ‘must reads’ and a fascinating and revealing comparison of secondhand book buying and book prices between the late 1950s and 1960s when John and his wife were starting their collection and if one were to start a similar collection today. These days many of the books  turned out to cost less when purchased via Amazon mainly because there are more popular, cheaper editions and reprints available.

Of the books on the list I have read only one: Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s excellent “The Worst Journey in the World“. John rounded off his talk with a quotation from “Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer” by Margot Morrell and Stephanie Capparell. He said ‘Shackleton’s leadership was so exceptional as to be deemed a worthy subject by management specialists’.

But there’s one book I’ll be looking out for (I hope it is in the Library Catalogue!) and that is “Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat” by Caroline Alexander. She was the only female member of an Antarctic Expedition at the time.

An addition was made to the programme and another speaker, Jane Francis of Leeds University, talked briefly about her own expeditions to the South Pole (10 in all) and showed us sample fossils (glossopteris) that she had collected.

Finally there was a Q&A session when we were able to question the speakers and a member of the library team on all manner of related topics not least the differences between the Scott and the Amundsen teams and methods.

This evening reminded me again of my visit to the Scott-Polar Research Institute in Cambridge last February.

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life – The Leeds Library

Actually, the Leeds Library is my luxury!

I signed up to join The Leeds Library on 5 March 2008 and have never looked back. In fact I don’t know why I didn’t do so decades ago but there were several reasons for this. Membership was a bit more restricted in the old days, one had to buy shares. I thought I would never manage to get into Leeds every week or so. And I thought it would be outrageously expensive. But it’s turned out that none of those reasons apply now.

Each time I push the door open I enter a paradise – the smell, the smiles of the counter staff, the walls and walls of books, the lovely solid polished library furniture all combine to give me the most uplifting feeling imaginable. And I’m there almost every week.

I think there are rules but I have not yet fallen foul of them. I currently have 15 books on loan one of which is a 12 week loan and has been renewed 13 times! If another borrower requests it I’ll take it back straight away but I need time to read these huge tomes – there’s a time and a place for Orlando Figes’ ‘Natasha’s Dance’ and Edna Healey’s ‘Coutts & Co.: a portrait of  a private bank’. I’m still working my way through the 8 times renewed ‘Queen Mary’. I have another 2 books brought up from the depths of the basement stack especially for me: Joanna Cannan’s ‘Little I understood’ and Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘The Queen’s Twin and other stories’. Waiting patiently to be read are some brand new books (Jane Brown’s ‘The omnipotent magician’ and ‘The Maids of La Rochelle’ by Elinor Brent-Dyer) which I’m the first person to borrow. I have several other books, taken straight from the shelves, (‘Pushkin’s Button’ by Serena Vitale, ‘A literary pilgrim’ by Edward Thomas) or the waiting list has finally got down to me (‘We are Besieged’ by Barbara Fitzgerald, ‘Hidden Treasures of England’ by Michael McNay).

In addition to books we can borrow magazines and DVDs. I’m on the list for The New Yorker which has at least one long article well worth reading alongside a couple of shorter ones and I absolutely love the cartoons. On the back page there is a competition – a new cartoon with no caption, a cartoon with 3 selected captions for readers to vote for and finally the winning caption with its cartoon. Never a dud! The other weekly magazine I’m on the list for is Country Life. This is because they often feature old houses, buildings, gardens and sometimes Landmark Trust properties. It’s almost as entertaining looking at the property pages in Country Life as it is studying the cartoons in the New Yorker!

Who needs Lovefilm? I don’t. On Friday I will be returning ‘Mildred Pierce’. Over the years I’ve caught up with missed TV programmes like ‘Who do you think you are?’, ‘Any human heart’ and the complete ‘Pallisers’ and I see from my Reservations List that ‘Daniel Deronda’ is waiting for me to enjoy on a winter evening next week. Now how civilised is that?