Limehouse Detour April 18 2010

Motivations:

Some of the reasons we paint, print, sculpt, make exhibitions/ installations in, around & photograph:

the created environment, communities, cities, villages and their components include:

Proust experienced something like dying on seeing Vermeer’s ‘View of Delft.’ He also wrote of “measuring with the eye the place we occupy in space.’

Barthes’ photograph of his mother tells him he will die ‘Every photograph is this catastrophe’

‘The photograph justifies the desire even if it does not satisfy it”

Nabokov noted how our unsophisticated cameras ‘record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world’

Walter Benjamin bemoaned how the most perfect reproduction lacks presence in time and space and the unique existence where it happens to be.

Robert Smithson: defined the zero panorama that seems to contain ruins in reverse; they do not fall into ruin, but rather rise into ruin before being built.

Jeremiah Sheehan, US Architect and UK architectural historian & designer [the V&A Pugin exhibition] was taught by his father, who had little feeling for architecture, to search St. Louis for ‘ghosts’ those fittings, fragments, ruins even paint that all reveal earlier presence.

Brian Daubney & Jenny Dawes 2010

The Crossing Lines Detour: Sunday 18th. April: 10.30 pm: Limehouse DLR Station

Everyone does as they wish:  support if wanted or if lost:  Brian’s mobile is 078 1144 7752

The Stroll, [about 90 minute or more]  From the Station round the Basin

Basin: Coal, Steel, Ice Wood Food Chemical Imports for London/  England

Limehouse Cut built to speed gunpowder and corn to London

St Anne’s Church 1 of 5 Hawksmoor Churches celebrating Marlborough’s Wars

Regents Canal London’s 1^st ring road, path to 2,500 miles of canal industrial revolution

Stephenson’s Viaduct and worlds 1^st electronically controlled cable railway

Accumulator Tower 1860 London’s 1^st hydraulic power station

Narrow Street The Grapes, Dickens, Attlee, Barnado, Morris, Nicholas II, Pepys etc.

Ropemakers Fields over Limehouse Link Tunnel, Dunbar Wharf, Chinese links, Whistler, Turner

All on top of Limehouse Link: The world’s most expensive road under the basin

Detours: [ up to 2hours or more ]

South: Dunbar – Canary Wharf – Isle of Dogs – Manchester Rd – Gt Eastern – Mudchute Farm, Greenwich Foot Tunnel DLR north or south

East: Dunbar -Canary Wharf – Docklands Mus. Warehouses Poplar – Trinity Wharf -  Excel – Barrier Park – City Airport {DLR

North East: thro Ropemakers Fields to St Annes – Limehouse Cut –to Bow Locks- Three Mills 1776 House Mill /Stratford Olympic site

North: Regents Canal – Ragged School Museum – Mile End Park -Bridge/ – Queen Mary Uni – Portuguese Cemetery[behind Law] – canal to Victoria/Regents Park

North West: Branch Road by station – Commercial Road to Yorkshire Rd – L. Salmon Lane, Ropeworks- Three Colt St – tiny church yard- St Dunstans – Stepney Green – London Hospital  Whitechapel- Gallery [tube]. 

West: Limehouse station straight on – cement Works – tunnels -River Highway or Cable Street  – Free Trade Wharf- Shadwell Park & Basin Wapping Project -    Canal St Katharines- The Tower  {DLR or Tube]

Given that we are likely to be dispersing along different routes, a final meeting may not be possible for everyone

But from 2.15 onwards  some of us will be at the Wapping Project by Shadwell Basin

Opposite the Prospect of Whitby, it is a former power station, eatery,  gallery.

All the best,   Brian  <daubneydawes@btinternet.com>

Google map: Limehouse East London

British Waterways Limehouse has all the stock shots and maps to the Olympics

Limehouse is part of Tower Hamlets and the detour pack included some details on the Borough from the 2008 GLA Social Trends Survey:

The 2001 Census population for Tower Hamlets (TH) was 196,106.

TH population grew by 17.9% between 1991-2001 and a further 7.07% 2001-2007.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) mid-2007 population estimate was 215, 300

GLA estimates that by 2016, population will be nearly 300,000

Tower Hamlets has the largest percentage of 20-34 year olds in the country.

57% are 15-44 year olds compared with 41.5% for the country as a whole.

9% of the population are over 65 compared to 16% across the UK.

Over 50% of the population is non-White British of whom 33% are Bangladeshi..

Residents’ average incomes are within both the top and bottom 12.5% in the country.

St. Katherine & Shadwell Trust

This from Jenny Dawes & Brian Daubney …

Jenny Dawes has been Director of St Katharine & Shadwell Trust – The Community Foundation for the City and East End of London, since 1990. Brian Daubney, writer and historian, has worked as a volunteer with the Trust throughout that period 

Background

In 1990, a new East End community foundation was launched with an exhibition of photographs of Wapping, Shadwell and Limehouse – the areas in which it was to work.

Today, the Trust makes grants across the East End and City of London – a kaleidoscopic area rich in history and visual imagery – and still resorts to visual images to convey the complexity of the area it serves.

We propose to look at the communities that make up this area, using a framework that can support and encompass a variety of approaches, collaborative and individual.

Rationale

When John Levett introduced ‘London Villages?’ as the theme for this LIP/CUCR collaboration, it resonated with a perennial problem:

How do we convey the complexity of the area in which we work and explain what we do and why we do it? 

Describing the city in a lecture for London Weekend Television, Peter Ackroyd used the comparison of volcanic and sedimentary layers on layers that sometimes assume underlying repeated profiles even over centuries of change.

Proposal

1 Built environment

Past:

Working out from the fixed points of the City and Tower of London to:

• identify historic villages across the four boroughs of the City of London, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham, using old maps

• ascertain where there are still physical traces of the villages or other evidence of their history

Present:

• trace where village centres have migrated from their original location

• look at the built environment to determine where new village-type centres and communities have been created

The Area

Four boroughs: City of London, Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets

The area is home to almost 700,000 people speaking more than 70 languages. Their numbers swelled every day by hundreds of thousands of people passing through the area, commuters and tourists arriving by road, rail, river and air:

123m passengers through Liverpool Street each year, (London’s 3rd largest station)

3m passengers through City Airport each year

more than 2m visitors arrive annually to see St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London etc

The area is dissected and bound by major roads and the industrial flow of the Thames. Traditionally a home for commerce and industry it contains both an historic royal palace and some of the most densely occupied estates in the country, major business centres and the moribund wastelands of the London Docks and Lower Lea Valley.  Three of the four boroughs are ‘Olympic Boroughs’. The main site for the 2012 games is under construction in Newham.

National indices of deprivation (1 = worst level of deprivation, 352 = least deprived)

 Hackney 1 (Easington = 2)

Newham 3 (Liverpool = 4)

Tower Hamlets 5 (Islington = 6)

City 275 (Isles of Scilly = 352)