Brighton Society - new website launched

In honour of the continuing work of Selma Montford and the Brighton Society, a local benefactor is providing a new web platform valued at £1,800, developed at no charge.

The new web platform is smart phone ready, comprising all the areas of the work of the society, presented in a state of the art visual interpretation which will be the best in Brighton (and Hove actually) for any amenity society in the city.

The web platform will go fully live at 5:00pm on Friday 10 February. From next week, the web platform will be developed and maintained on a weekly basis on behalf of the Brighton Society at no charge.

‘Elephant Bones’ in Wish Park

A new artistic creation ‘Elephant Bones’, designed to represent an elephant’s rib cage, is now providing seating and shelter for visitors to the Wish Park playground. The design also incorporates short poems about elephants written by local children, which have been burned into the cladding.

According to a local legend, an elephant, part of a travelling circus, sadly died whilst performing in the park and was laid to rest in the grounds.

Park users and members of the local community, including the Friends of Wish Park, were involved in planning and designing the eye catching structure, taking part in workshops run by Richard Wolfströme from Threshold (part of the Love Architecture Festival.)

Designed by Brighton company Chalk Architecture with structural engineering by QED Structures, also based in the city. It was built by R J Dance & A Roberston, local contractors.

The construction includes ‘ribs’  made of ‘glulam’ (glued and laminated) wood a strong, light, durable material, used to build bridges, church domes, and other buildings. The cladding on the back and the bench are partly made from recycled pier decking, and the whole structure is wheelchair and pushchair accessible.

The project has been funded through ‘Section 106’ contributions from the development of the Nuffield Hospital in New Church Road.

Festival programme covers

The subject of the first post in Brighton Bits, in February 2009, was the rather gloomy appearance of the programme cover. Perhaps, as the Guest Director that year was the distinguished sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor, CBE RA, something enigmatic was only to be expected. In any event his other contributions that year were highly intriguing and made a significant contribution to the Festival's prestige.











This year the Guest Director is Laurie Anderson, an experimental performance artist, composer, musician and film director, so presumably she had no hand in this year's austere cover, apart from providing the photo.

Underwhelming rather than eye-catching, perhaps the design has been dictated by the cost of colour printing.

Apparently 1988 was a rather more 'festive', maybe less cash strapped, year:

Harold Turner in Hove

Harold George Turner, 1885 - 1961, started his career in the Brighton Borough Engineer's office in the 1900s. During WW1 he entered the family firm of Box & Turner and in 1920 set up his own architectural practice in Haywards Heath.

By the 1930's his style had crystallised into Sussex farmhouse vernacular, with references to the Arts & Craft showing in windows, chimneys and detailing and in the high quality of the interior fixtures and fittings. 

Such was the popularity of Turner's style that his houses are to be seen all over Haywards Heath and in the wider mid Sussex area including Eastbourne. They are always identifiable by the curly gutter brackets that were his signature.

In Brighton & Hove many of his houses can be seen in the Barrowfield estate in the Tongdean CA, a selection of which are shown below.

It is difficult to know how much of the original interiors have survived. Perhaps one day a proud owner will include their property on the Heritage Open Days programme? 

Tales of the City

The film, Tales of the City, was produced by young people from East Brighton in response to the Brighton Photo Biennial 2012 theme Agents of Change: Photography and the Politics of Space.

Weekly workshops, facilitated by artist Evan Wilkinson, ran throughout July and August 2012 encouraging participants to explore the politics of their space using animation and digital storytelling.

The young people involved in the Tales of the City project went on to facilitate a series of workshops held in libraries throughout October 2012 allowing children and families to explore animation and create their own digital stories.
http://www.citylibraries.info
http://www.bpb.org.uk/2012/
Brighton Photo Biennial is produced and curated by Photoworks.

Persephone Books

In their latest biannual newsletter Persephone Books have chosen to illuminate their pages with two images drawn from Brighton & Hove's art collection. On the cover is the locally well-known "Alice in Wonderland", c.1879, by George Leslie Dunlop, and depicting his daughter Alice. GLD was part of the St. John's Wood (London) clique of painters who favoured light-hearted, domestic genre paintings. He became an RA in 1876. The popularity of GLD's work has survived to this day, his "Daughters of Eve" fetching £170,000 in 2000.

On the inside pages is "The Coat of Many Colours" c.1926, by local artist Louis Ginnett. Louis was a member of the famous circus family, he attended Brighton, Hove & Sussex Grammar School, became a teacher at Brighton College of Art and in 1913 was commissioned to produce an extraordinary series of murals for the Grammar School hall. These he worked on, on and off, until their completion in 1939, and they are still to be seen to this day.

School Hall, BHASVIC

Persephone Books, of Lambs Conduit Street, London, prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. With their distinctive plain grey jackets and cream 'labels' for the title wording, all their books look the same from the outside. Inside, each is different, with the endpapers chosen especially to match the date and mood of the book.

The Regency Society new website

The Regency Society, the city's oldest conservation society now has a new website. In an effort, no doubt, to appear modern the elegant traditional-style font of the banner heading has been supplanted by sans-serif and the ammonite capital motif has been abandoned. The old website suffered from a cramped, over-busy look; the new lacks visual impact, the word that jumps to mind is 'pallid'. It does, however appear to be more logically laid-out, easier to navigate and the pages quicker to load.

City Council's new website

Brighton & Hove City Council now has a colourful, bright new website. Early days, but it seems a lot slicker and snappier than the old one.

Congratulations to the Brighton Society website

It was announced at the Civic Voice AGM in Peterborough yesterday that the Brighton Society website has come out top of the Civic Voice nominated websites.

More details to follow.

Brighton Society website

The excellent Brighton Society website has been nominated in the competition for the Civic Voice Awards for the best "Civic Society Website".  Click here to view the shortlist of competing websites and vote for your favourite.

The New Encyclopaedia of Brighton

First Impressions
The new version is a pleasure to pick up and handle. The cover appears to be more durable and the paper is smooth making it easy to leaf through; the print is sharp and clear, arranged in two columns, and attractively interspersed with motifs and illustrations. I particularly liked the old street maps reproduced on the inside of the front and back covers

Detailed variations between the two versions will only become clear with extended use but here are a few of the points that have already come to light:-

• There are many more articles (394) in the new version compared with the original (216). 
• Whereas the original version was mainly topographical in layout, the new version seems to have abandoned this approach and contains many more articles on  people, events and social phenomena.
• Some of material imported from Timothy Carder's work has been heavily abridged.
• The new version contains no list of figures and no separate Index to People.
• The articles are now indexed conventionally by page numbers rather than serial  numbers and consequently are easier to find.
• The new version appears not to have been indexed in the same depth as the original. Whereas the original General Index (excluding people) had about 3000 entries with much cross-referencing, the new version has only about 1000 entries which includes people. The extent to which this matters, bearing in mind the greater number of articles, will perhaps depend on the kind of use to which one wants to put the Encyclopaedia.

I will certainly be using them in parallel for the forseeable future.

REGENCY Magazine

Of the many free magazines & news sheets available within the City, "REGENCY", published monthly, really stands out. It is one of those magazines that it is better to read in the hand than on the internet. It is 'glossy' and looks good, is attractively illustrated and laid out, and invariably includes one or more topical issues in some depth together with interesting articles from local contributors. Regular features include: What's on; Local News, and Letters to the Editor. It is edited by Tony Davenport.

Although free, REGENCY is careful to keep the space devoted to advertising below the critical level at which one automatically blanks them out. On this account alone, if I were a local advertiser, I would be keen to get my business or product included.

If I were not one of the 12,000 residents on the regular circulation list I would be hastening to find out where I could regularly pick one up.

The Black Horse, Church Street . . . .

 . . . is now called "112 Church Street".

Call me a traditionalist, but I prefer "The Black Horse", as a name, so much more romantic; and I prefer the black paint and the solid-looking gold lettering.

I wonder if the changes made any difference to the takings?

Anish Kapoor

A view of Mr Kapoor's installation at the old fruit and veg. market in Circus street. (The colour of the child's anorak is purely accidental). The work is called "the Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc"  and is made up of 5 items covering almost the entire market floor which seem to vaguely mark out a woman's body. Two enormous tortured cylinders lie behind the camera. The two red heaps in the distance are presumably the spoil from the central excavation which although looking spherical in this shot is actually an extremely elongated ellipse. 

It is very impressive from scale alone and well worth a visit. I have heard from two separate sources that young children are particularly fascinated by it.

The Festival Programme cover which I criticised in an earlier post now begins to make more sense. Anish Kapoor is the Guest Artistic Director for the Festival with several of his works on display throughout the City. It was obviously deemed appropriate  to have his work featured on the programme cover.

On the other hand one wonders if one of the primary functions of the programme has been overlooked. Surely it should be bold, eye-catching and attractive. Brighton is full of talented Graphic Designers. How about a competition next year?