Tag Archives: Great Britain

Special Magazine Issues: Country Life “Victorian Houses- The Masterpieces”

From a Country Life online article:

Country Life Victorian Houses - The Masterpieces 2019First published in 1897, Country Life is itself a late-Victorian institution. What could be more appropriate, therefore, than to celebrate this anniversary with a collector’s issue of articles and photographs from the magazine’s archives?

An opening timeline offers an overview of the Victorian Age, but the focus of what follows is exclusively architectural. The coverage of country houses has always been central to the magazine, but it can also claim to have been a pioneer in the study of Victorian architecture through the work of two former Architectural Editors, Mark Girouard and Michael Hall.

This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, respectively in May and August, 1819. Their marriage 21 years later in 1840 was long arranged and, after a difficult beginning, grew to be unexpectedly happy. With perfect symmetry, it lasted 21 years, until Prince Albert’s early death in 1861.

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During that time, the couple established a completely new mode of Royal Family life and redefined the role of Britain’s constitutional monarchy. All of this happened as Britain developed at an astonishing speed into the most powerful nation in the world. When the Queen died in 1901, there was no question that a remarkable age of British history had come to a close.
Read more at https://www.countrylife.co.uk/news/focus-greatest-victorian-houses-britain-featu:red-magnificent-one-off-magazine-207774#cLqLhWZ6ouDLuAM1.99

Top New Travel Videos: “Albion” Is An Aerial View Of Great Britain (2019)

Filmed, Edited and Directed by: Alex William Helin

Albion Short Travel Video In England by Alex William Helin 2019

Albion, another name for the island of Great Britain, is a journey through foggy English countryside via rocky limestone scenery to Scottish highlands.

Albion Short Travel Video In England by Alex William Helin 2019

Music: Aeons 2 by Mark Petrie/ Andrew Phralow

Website: https://www.awhelinphotography.com/

 

 

World’s Top Exhibitions: “The Deep Listener” By Danish Artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Serpentine Galleries, London (2019)

deeplistener1Designed as an augmented reality and spatial audio work downloadable as an app for mobile devices, it is both a site specific public artwork and a digital archive of these species, using tools and platforms from a range of fields including video games, computer generated images and film. Inspired by ecological science-fiction and scientific research, Kudsk Steensen creates a form of ‘slow media’ that uses the technological to foster attention rather than distraction. 

...a journey to both see and hear five of London’s species: London plane trees, bats, parakeets, azure blue damselflies and reedbeds.

Kudsk Steensen has collaborated with the field recordist and sound designer Matt McCorkle to represent five species as sound. The audio and visuals within the project are drawn directly from organic source material gathered from a period of embedded research within Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. These organic materials are then transformed through digital processes to be re-embedded within the same context.

Download brochure: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/files/press-releases/the_deep_listener_tdl_a5_digital_v2_final.pdf

Website: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/exhibitions-events/serpentine-augmented-architecture

Top Literary Podcasts: Critic James Wood On The British, “Etonian Entitlement” And Brexit

London Review of Books PodcastsJames Wood: These Etonians

James Wood recalls his time at the college, with David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others.

Even at a place like Eton, it didn’t seem likely that anyone in my year would actually become prime minister. At school, everyone is ‘ambitious’, everyone loudly stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the Etonian’s uncanny ability to soften entitlement with charm. Mostly, he was defined by negatives: he wasn’t an intellectual or scholar, a rebel, a musician, a school journalist or writer, even a sportsman.

Website: https://play.acast.com/s/londonreviewpodcasts/6baeeb08-0fd4-4149-af9d-7074e15b6244