I was in Newcastle today for the AGM of the Mercia Cinema Society. Here are a few quick snaps.
December 13, 2008
November 23, 2008
Archive awareness month
I went to Leeds Grand Theatre twice yesterday. Early afternoon, I visited to see an interesting exhibition celebrating 130 years of the Theatre It had been organised in collaboration with the West Yorkshire Archive Service.
17th – 22nd November – The Grand Theatre and Opera House Leeds Exhibition
Grand Theatre and Opera House, Leeds
Open 10am to 4pm and an hour before performances
The Grand Theatre will be hosting an exhibition featuring the collections of WYAS. This exhibition will be interactive and feature oral history recordings, costumes, plans and documents amongst the vast array on display.
(Unfortunately, the advance publicity in the Theatre Brochure didn’t mention the hour before performances bit, otherwise I could have saved myself one of the two trips!)
On approaching the Grand Theatre, I was delighted to see all of the scaffolding gone and the exterior pretty much complete. The exhibit was in the Grand Hall, a large lofty rectangular space above the foyer of which the five arched windows admit light to it.
Inside, I was first struck as to how much the room had been transformed. I knew it was going to become the lobby area for the newly reconstructed Assembly Room with a bar built under the balcony staircase but I wasn’t expecting black mahogany lined with mirrors and satin pink bands on near white wallpaper above, nor the two enormous crystal chandeliers. The light fittings may well be original to the room but it was very much Indian restaurant before, red flock wallpaper, red velvet drapes, red patterned carpet. Now, it is stunningly light and bright, a surprising contrast to the tiled & marbled sombre stairwells that lead to it.
The exibition itself wasn’t overly extensive and I was a little disappointed on my first quick walk round. On reading the display panels, however, I became much more engrossed. Here was the original Director’s register from the 1860s before the building was even built. An inventory of all the building assets showed arcane records such as four wire gas globe guards in a room under the stage and there were photos of the Queen gracing the Royal Box. (I was much more interested in the Front of House stage lighting enclosure above which appeared to contain Strand Pageants or possibly Furse Frencas). If you donned a pair of white gloves, it was possible to examine a selection of very old programmes as well as the archives of the Leeds Amateur Operatic Society. There were also photos and plans, including the proposals from the 60s to demolish the place and replace it with a huge mixed development (which fortunately never happened!)
An unexpected historical object was the 1980s lighting desk, a Strand Gemini (I noticed it had a White Light asset tag on it, perhaps it was on loan). It was powered up but the monitor was off and as there weren’t any lights connected to it I resisted the temptation to do a few cross-fades.
On my way back out again, I wandered to the old Assembly Room/Plaza Cinema entrance. The new area was modern and stark but some tiling from the original staircase had been preserved. I suspect this might become the new Stage Door entrance as this is now underneath the stage end of the Assembly Room, the interior having been reversed.
One very welcome improvement is the removal of the Carbuncle from the roofline. Contrast this view with my exterior photo from January last year!
We returned that evening to see LAOS’ production of Oliver! It was really good and there was little to fault. I felt they overlit some scenes and used way too much smoke, but that is just my opinion, being a bit of a Prince of Darkness when it comes to atmospheric stage lighting.
LAOS join MOAS on our must see list, we are looking forward to The Producers in May.
(Update- it is the Grand hall, not the Royal hall, text corrected. In fact, it is called the Emerald Grand Hall, presumably a sponsor as the main house is called the Yorkshire Bank Auditorium).
November 18, 2008
Seven hours in Belgium
Well, the Sky Broadband stopped working late on Friday night and it didn’t start again until the early hours of this morning, so it is a good job I went away for the weekend!
We spent seven hours in Bruges (or Brugge, as they call it) on Sunday, travelling overnight there and back on P&O North Sea Ferries. The weather disappointed a little as it drizzled some of the day, but the city did not. In that time, we visited the Belfry, the chocolate museum, the lamp museum, the Brugs Bier Festival and took a walk round the shopping areas, getting some Belgian chocolate to take back.
I looked for one photo to sum up the day and I chose this one- a pop up tableau chocolate box.
November 13, 2008
The consequences are sticky…
It seems that there is a critical shortage of sperm donors in Britain. Well, there is a surprise. Why could that be? Perhaps it was the removal of anonymity, or the Child Support Agency, or the rule caps.
(Stories like this don’t help…)
Well, let me tell you another unintended consequence of righteous rule making.
12,000 lives turned upside down through Government Agency incompetence
25% of the adult population to go through these checks, & more intrusive ones
The Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) has been created to help prevent unsuitable people from working with children and vulnerable adults.
We will do this by working in partnership with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), which will gather relevant information on every person who wants to work or volunteer with vulnerable people.
Good old Samizdata put it succincty
And people wonder why there is sometimes a shortage of volunteers for things like youth clubs and the like. The destruction of civil society, of the bonds of trust that are vital to such an organic, grass-roots cluster of non-state institutions, is remorseless and deliberate. This government, in its totalitarian way - I use that word quite deliberately - wants to make all human interactions subject to its tests. The consequences for the long term health of civil society, and of the ability of people to grow up normally, are ignored.
Well, I’ve had enough. I’ve had three CRB checks for volunteering with children but there won’t be a fourth. The school where I used to be a parent governor was happy with list 99 checks in my time but now want an enhanced disclosure. If I’d still been there I would have resigned on principle as it is entirely disproportionate to the risk and the system is seriously flawed anyway (as well as being yet another way of raising money, just ask Thunderdragon).
So, I’m quietly going to drop out of the reading scheme when it is up for CRB renewal. The community radio will also get forced down the registration route and the decision is to either only accept adults or to struggle to find people willing to go through the grief. It won’t be my decision though.
Do tou know a third unintended consequence? Fine buildings not currently in use are being demolished because it isn’t viable to let them stand empty now that the business rate relief has been abolished. Perhaps that is why the Morley Pavilion is back on the market. Yours for £2k a week or so (plus £400 rates) if you don’t have a Million or two to spare to just buy it.
(You can’t knock it down I’m afraid, it is in a conservation area).
October 7, 2008
The crazy world of Arthur Brown
Last Thursday morning, I noticed a huge plume of smoke to the west of Bradford as I drove into work. As I drove through the city centre, the air was a hazy yellow tinge and there was an acrid odour.
As I rounded the corner on the road leading to our office, I was relieved to see that our headquarters building looked intact. Looking out of our office windows though, the devastation was apparent. Where once stood a proud if somewhat jaded mill building, there was now a silhouette of walls with bits missing and stubbled tops, like an ancient cathedral ruin in the mist. The site was surrounded by fire tenders with their telescopic ladders hosing water, a real ten pumper. There were no longer flames visible, but the wreckage was belching toxic fumes into the sky.
The story can be found here and here.
This building was, surprisingly enough, still a working woollen mill. Bradford made its fortune on wool, but now one more of the remaining traders has bitten the dust.
The Police are treating the fire as suspicious: it was possibly started by a burnt out stolen car. The business was a going concern and the owners had rebutted offers from developers to sell their site in what is otherwise a declining area but ripe for demolition and redevelopment. Having a fire like this is convenient fore somebody. Quack quack?
During the day of the fire, we would occasionally peep out of the window, to see what was going on. By hometime, the smoke had abated somewhat but there were still tenders pumping into the wreckage.
On Friday, the demolition Contractors arrived to make the site safe, pushing down the remains with big articulated arms, but still the site smouldered and two hoses remained.
Today, the site is just a large pile of rubble with the recoverable metalwork being seperated off for scrap. As you can imagine, a Victorian Mill has a lot of cast iron columns and girders to recycle but they will probably have to be smelted first.
Reading about this after the event, the Fire Brigade said that it burnt so ferociously because there were 3,000 bales of wool stored in the factory and the flooring was heavily impregnated with Lanolin, otherwise known as wool wax or wool grease. Whilst both wool and lanolin are considered fire resistant in normal use, in an inferno they will burn ferociously.
Reading this, I recall my early days at GEC Coventry where we were based at an old pre-war factory in Spon Street. This was the 2nd biggest fire risk in the City Centre as it had been the original Rudge Whitworth motorbike Factory and all of the floors were impregnated with engine oil. It then became the biggest fire risk after the previous number one risk burnt down!
It was a rather ugly factory, being constructed of early concrete columns and brick cladding/Rittal industrial windows with what could best be described as a large shed on the roof of the main six story block (the Canteen). However, it was listed as being of special architectural interest because of its post-iron column design. It survived the blitz (despite all around being bombed) but eventually succombed to the developer’s wrecking ball when the site became a large retail development and Coventry skydome arena.
Coventry had some very strict byelaws about inflammable materials within the city centre core, presumably based on the carpet bombings of the fateful night in 1941 when much of the City Centre was destroyed. I can remember needing some meths for a Mamod steam engine once and was bemused to find that boots only sold it in metal containers, not the normal glass ones. (I was even more surprised that if you wanted it in Norway, you had to go to the State off-license to buy it, “Rødspirit”). I once went and stood on the highest point I could access in the City Centre and tried to imagine what it could have been like during the blitz. Despite how many war films or shocking photos you have seen, the reality cannot really sink in. I did the same in Bradford last week, seeking a high viewpoint and wondering how one solitary fire could bring the tinge of destruction to such a large area. Every fire tender in the area was in attendance and they were calling in other fire response teams from elsewhere in west Yorkshire. How would the emergency response teams cope in a major calamity if there had been ten fires, or a hundred? The answer is of course that they couldn’t.
Let us hope that they never have to.
