I was keen to get to see David to get a good gander at one of his latest aviation related works: ‘Circus’ – having only had a glimpse of it until now. So here it is with its artist.
But what and who I particularly want to talk about in this post is Tim Carroll, some of his work, and his book ‘100 Views of Swindon’.
Tim’s work came onto horizon some time ago now – well before I knew him – when I bought a small piece of his from Artsite and the Post Modern. I hung my nose over it for long enough and hemmed and hawed so in the end I bought it – despite being skint. I love it. I’m can’t explain why – I just do. And – as I’ve explained in this post – that’s enough! As far as I’m concerned anyway. Here it is:
Tim uses this motif a lot – sometimes in ceramic form. Others in painted form. Sometime they are more rounded – but I like the angular nature of this one. I like to think of then as synchronized swimmers.
100 views of Swindon
The other thing I wanted to talk about on here is Tim’s 100 views of Swindon. Doing a Ronseal this is exactly what it says it is: a collection of paintings that comprises 100 personal and intimate views of Swindon. #obvs
I love these paintings. I love the style and I love the colours. And yes, I love them because they’re of Swindon. I also love because they don’t focus on the iconic and what one might consider to be the picturesque but rather prosaic, everyday Swindon scenes. The ones that we see all the time but yet rarely notice.
And now Tim’s collected them all together in to a lovely little book.
As it says in the book’s foreward: ‘… Tim’s 100 Views of Swindon wholeheartedly embraces the town from his own perspective; at street level, peering round a corner or over a rooftop. He brings urban scenes to life by accepting the awkward angles from which you might approach them, including what might be considered obstructions to the view such as street signs and parked cars.’
It’s a super collection of work. When I was deciding which to buy I had a terrible time selecting one. And there had to be a choice as I simply don’t have the wall space. In the end I plumped for one that featured the David Murray John tower because I love that building. So I’ve contented myself with that one and a few others in postcard form – notably The Blondinis. This post shows Tim, a few years back now, doing some restoration work on this gorgeous and exuberant piece of public art.
I also bought one of the tented market to give to my friend Ash Mistry, owner of Eggelicious. Here it is in situ on the Eggelicious stand in the tented market:
Print by Tim Carroll – one of his 100 views of Swindon
NB: Eggelicious are now in the new food court, The Crossing in the Brunel Centre. And E2 on Wood Street.
Of course, what we have here is bit of artistic foreshadowing what with the tented market now earmarked for demolition. So not only is 100 views a super affordable (£10) coffee table book that’s a perfect gift for any Swindonian it’s also a unique record of a town that was three years in the making!
The gorgeous book is available from the central library on Regent Circus or from Linda Kasmaty. If you’re a Twitter user look for @kasmaty
Swindon City of Sanctuary hosts Regional Meeting – a year on from launch
Just a year since the launch of Swindon City of Sanctuary, we are delighted to host a regional meeting for the National Charity, bringing together people who have formed their own cities/towns/villages of Sanctuary from all over the South West, Wales and even Ireland!
It’s promising to be an exciting and inspiring day, taking place at Los Gatos in Old Town, where lunch will be served to all in attendance. Food is being cooked by Los Gatos and presented by some of the refugees who’ve donated recipes for our very popular Pop-Up Restaurants and for “Sanctuary Tapas”, an initiative created by Los Gatos as part of their pledge to support Swindon City of Sanctuary in making Swindon a Welcoming, Supportive and inclusive place to live.
With a welcome from Swindon City of Sanctuary’s Chair, Shareen Campbell and Development Worker, Nicola Wood, there will be talks from the national charity’s Chief Officer, Sian Summer-Rees, as well as from delegates from Wales who are working on a “Wales, Nation of Sanctuary” project. Delegates from across the region will share ideas and successes from their areas. “The idea is we’ll all go away motivated and full of new ways we can make our cities more welcoming,” said Forward Maisokwadzo, organiser of the meeting.
It’s been a busy year for all involved with Swindon City of Sanctuary. We were very grateful to receive funding from the late Lord Joel Joffe, through his Charitable Trust. Since then, we have successfully piloted a hosting scheme called ‘Room for All’ in which Swindon residents with a spare room sign up to become hosts on a short-term basis, for refugees who might otherwise become homeless after receiving their right to remain in the UK. This gives them a vital safe place to be, whilst awaiting important documents to enable them to work and find alternative accommodation.
In June, Swindon City of Sanctuary took a lead in organising Swindon’s biggest Refugee Week to date, with the support of local businesses and charities such as The Harbour Project,Voluntary Action Swindon & Swindon Viewpoint amongst many others. Events took place throughout the week, including a community cinema, art exhibitions, live music and a Global Tea Party . It was a huge success.
We have also started a weekly Thursday evening event in partnership with the stylish Darkroom Espresso Café and The Harbour Project. It’s a relaxed get together over coffee, board games and live music and everyone is welcome (that means you!)
Development Worker, Nicola Wood, said:
“We are thoroughly excited to be hosting this year’s regional meeting for City of Sanctuary. It’s a wonderful way for us to celebrate how much we have achieved in the last year. It’s fantastic to be part of a growing movement to make the UK and Ireland a safe, welcoming place for all who live here, especially for those who have had to flee from war and persecution. We are sure to come away on Thursday inspired and motivated to continue our work.”
Chair, Shareen Campbell added, “We live in a global community and it’s so important to show compassion, to have empathy and offer friendship to all our neighbours in need, no matter who they are, or what their background may be. For me this epitomises what the City of Sanctuary movement is about, creating a welcoming, inclusive place for all who live in our cities, towns or villages and this is at the heart of all we do”.
NOTES
This is a closed meeting but please feel free to contact the below people for further information:
CONTACTS
• For information/detail about the event or to attend to take pictures please contact:
Forward Maisokwadzo – 07982136368 / Forward@cityofsanctuary.org
• For information about the lunch, sanctuary tapas/pop up restaurant please contact Shareen Campbell – 07716087361
• For further information about Swindon, City of Sanctuary and its future plans, Nicola Wood, Development Worker on nicola@swindon.cityofsanctuary.org
• For information about how to pledge support, or how you can help, contact info@swindon.cityofsanctuary.org or see https://swindon.cityofsanctuary.org
Information about the national charity, City of Sanctuary:
City of Sanctuary is a movement to build a culture of hospitality for people seeking sanctuary in the UK. Our goal is to create a network of towns and cities throughout the country which are proud to be places of safety for people seeking sanctuary and helping them integrate into their local communities.
The City of Sanctuary movement began in October 2005 in Sheffield. Since then, we have supported the development of over 90 City of Sanctuary initiatives in towns and cities across UK and Ireland. We believe the ‘sanctuary message’ of welcome and inclusion is needed in all spheres of society and as such we are committed to helping schools, universities, health and maternity services, theatres and arts centres, churches and other faith centres, sports, communities, businesses and homes become ‘places of sanctuary’. A key element of these ‘streams of sanctuary’ relationships is awareness raising, telling the true stories of refugees to those who never hear them.
Restoring the Blondinis First things first listeners: how ON EARTH did it get to be September already?! Now …
In the early days of this blog – in the summer of 2013 even – I wrote a post about the sculpture of the Great Blondinis. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about here’s the post in question: https://swindonian.me/2013/06/24/the-great-blondinis-sculpture/
1. Thamesdown Borough Council, with financial assistance from Sun Alliance insurance group, Southern Arts, British Alcan and Metalfast Ltd, commissioned the work.
2. The commission came just before the Swindon rail works closed. It was made in association with British Rail craftsmen.
3. Jon Clinch sculpted it from foundry cast aluminium alloy (LM6).
What that doesn’t say is that this sculpture is the absolute last thing made in the once great GWR works. That singular fact surely affords this sculpture a special significance? Though derided by many I love and still miss its joyful, cheery presence in the town centre.
Tim Carroll restores the Blondinis
I chanced upon some photos on Facebook of Swindon-based artist Tim Carroll restoring the sculpture when it got moved from its original home in Wharf Green to its current location in a play park in Gorse Hill. This was some time ago I should add.
This wonderful, exuberant sculpture used to have a prominent position in Wharf Green. Now they’re in a play park in Gorse Hill. I do feel that’s a huge shame. I’d love to see them somewhere prominent once more.
Here they are duly titivated and in situ in Gorse Hill.
Find Tim Carrol’s impressive CV here: http://www.timcarroll.yolasite.com/contact-us.php Tim often uses Swindon and the area as subject matter. I’m particularly fond of his 100 views of Swindon. Would that I had the wall space and the cash! I’m delighted though to own a print of one of his views of the David Murray John Tower and some postcards of some others.
I guess, given the restoration work Tim did on the sculpture, it’s no surprise that he included it in his 100 views of Swindon. Here it is – it’s rather lovely:
Tim Carroll Blondinis 100 views Swindon – the Great Blondinis
Pew here for a hand-turned pen with a Christ Church connection
Swindon pen-maker Simon Webb, has a reputation for fashioning exquisite hand-made pens from wood connected to aspects of Swindon’s history. This time it’s pens from Christ Church Pews.
The latest piece of piece of wood to enter his workshop is a section of an oak pew from Swindon’s Christ Church. Commented Simon, ‘when I heard that, as part of a renewal project, the church planned to dispose of some pews I thought at once how fabulous it would be to give part of a pew another life as a pen.’
What lies beneath
‘Underneath the dark exterior the wood is a lovely pale brown colour with a gorgeous grain structure’ said Simon. Adding that he’s already been contacted by coupleswho were married at Christ Churchand want to own a piece of it in pen form.
Christ Church have commented on Facebook: ‘We are delighted such beautiful pens are being made from the wood of one of Christ Church’s pews.’
There are three styles of pen to choose from, all made to exacting standards. The range includes a gunmetal and platinum ballpoint, a standard-sized fountain or rollerball and a large desk pen. The fountain pens come in a presentation box, complete with leather carrying case and ink cartridges. Non-pen users can enjoy a piece of Ecumenical history too because Simon is also making cufflinks from the oak.
Prices for the pens range from £60 to £160 for the large desk pen. The cufflinks are £30 a set.
Other than at September’s autumn fayre you can buy a pen, from Christ Church wood or otherwise, directly from Simon.
For every Christ Church pen sold, Simon will make a donation to Christ Church.
Simon’s first foray into re-writing Swindon history came with pens made from the beloved, storm-felled, 300-year-old walnut tree in Lydiard Park.
Then came the STEAM museum pens, turned from a piece of Jarrah – a foundation timber in the GWR Works. For literature and nature lovers Simon has made pens from the famous mulberry tree in the garden at the Richard Jefferies’ Museum at Coate.
High-Tech lines standing proud on Swindon’s skyline
Back in 1950, in his ‘Studies of Swindon’, John Betjeman wrote, apropos of architecture in Swindon, that there was ‘very little architecture in Swindon and a great deal of building’. He then went on to say that ‘Swindon, instead of being a West Country town, looked on its outskirts at any rate, like any industrial town anywhere.’
Implicit in Betjeman’s observation is, I think, the suggestion that Swindon, by sheer dint of its position rubbing shoulders with Bristol and Bath and Cheltenham, should be architecturally similar. But why should it and why would it?
Different Births
Those three places grew out of very different circumstances to Swindon. The point that Betjeman appears to miss is that Swindon – well the ‘New Swindon’ at any rate – is an industrial town. It was the great GWR industry that brought it into being and it’s its industry that has breathed life into its lungs ever since. So why would it have sweeping Georgian crescents or Regency arcades? Why do we expect it to?
Betjeman made that observation two decades or more before Swindon gained the modern buildings that qualify, in my entirely non-expert opinion, as ‘architecture’. If nothing else their designers are people I’ve heard of: Sir Norman Foster and Sir Hugh Casson – responsible for the Spectrum Building (still known to many as the Renault Building despite Renault being long gone from it) and the Wyvern Theatre respectively.
Betjeman was a lover of, and passionate advocate for, Victorian architecture. And thank goodness for that. Otherwise the nation and the world would have lost the glory that is St. Pancras station in London.
We also have him to thank for the continued existence of our Railway Village. As this 2017 article from The Swindon Advertiser points out: ‘… by the 1960s there were plans to raze the area. And it was only saved following a campaign by famous poet and architecture buff, Sir John Betjemen.
Yet it’s a moot point whether he would’ve approved of the Wyvern Theatre, the Link Centre and Foster’s Spectrum building. Tension structures such as those were of their time. Nevertheless, and love them or loathe them, all of them are architecturally interesting. But perhaps none more so than my particular favourite: the David Murray John Tower.
It’s an exuberant exclamation mark of a building that proudly proclaims itself across the Swindon skyline. At 83 metres high, the DMJ (along with Old Swindon’s Christ church) is the master of all it surveys.
The building struck me when I first moved to Swindon and I love it to this day.
Knowing even less at that time about architecture than I do now (and that’s not to say a great deal) it seemed to me to have something of a futuristic feel to it – though I couldn’t pin it to anything more specific than that. It’s only now, having researched the building a little, I understand what my subconscious was relating to.
Douglas Stephen
The architect responsible for the DMJ tower was Douglas Stephen. Sadly, Stephen is now dead, though his name lives on in the Douglas Stephen Partnership.
If your response to that nugget of information is ‘Douglas who?’ you’d be in good company.
Back in 2004, Jonathan Meades (essayist, broadcaster and respected architecture authority) published an article on Building.co.uk entitled: ‘Five great architects … you’ve never heard of’ in which he writes about a number of architects, Douglas Stephen included, on why they’re so good – and also so neglected.
On the subject of Stephen, Meades has this to say:
‘Yet there was something about the details … The Mount was the first of Douglas Stephen’s buildings I saw. It was completed in 1965, and was entirely out of step with its time: it was at odds with both the fey Festival style and with the sculptural brutalism that was the conventional reaction to the Festival style (and which Stephen had essayed). But Stephen belonged to no school. That, I suspect, is why he is overlooked. The Mount retains its extraordinary freshness. So does his David Murray John Tower in Swindon, that town’s most (only?) striking building, a mini-skyscraper that has affinities to a design of Frank Hampson’s for Dan Dare, Pilot Of The Future.’
I think now that it was the Dan Dare influence that was ringing a very quiet bell in my brain when first my eyes alighted upon the DMJ tower.
The David Murray John Tower is on that list. He wrote of it: ‘Designed by Douglas Stephen and built in the Seventies, this tower is a sleek, slick return to the smooth white grace of Twenties and Thirties Modernism. It’s a mixed-use building, incorporating social housing, offices and retail, which is rare in Britain. Stephen was a communist and believed in architecture as a power for social good.’
The DMJ keeps company on Mr Meade’s list with: Marseille Cathedral, the Walhalla Temple in Bavaria, Cothay Manor in Somerset and Edinburgh’s Stewart’s Melville College.
As to whether Stephen’s building achieved that lofty aim I’m not sure. Its intended mixed-use was innovative in its day. But it’s arguable that it turned not to be so workable.
So, with no knowledge of what it’s like to live and work in that building I base my affection for it on its aesthetics and what is so clearly stood for: the future.
It was the intention of the building’s futuristic look to reflect the forward-looking aspirations of the town at the time.
With its curved corners, the design of the building is sleek and sophisticated. It’s clad in stainless steel – an expensive material even then. It makes historical references with its nods to Art Deco and Modernism. Everything about the building makes a statement – it screams at you to look it. Indeed, you can’t avoid looking at it – it’s visible for miles. At night when lights are on inside it, it’s like a land-locked lighthouse.
Compare and contrast
Think now to the Whalebridge car park at Kimmerfields in the town centre. Every time I look at that building I think of a stockade, a fort, in a western film. It’s all pointy edges and sharp protruding angles. Even the steel decorative panels inserted into the walls remind me of barbed wire.
side panels in Whalebridge car park – photo by Swindon Driver
This is a structure that’s doing the opposite to the DMJ. Where the former stands proud and tall and proclaims itself, the latter is a building on the defensive. Arguably much like society at the time of writing (2017): austerity, Brexit and more. Pathetic fallacy in architecture.
Kimmerfields car park – photo by Daniel Webb
A Wonder of Swindon
Mr Meades isn’t the only one to find favour with the David Murray John Tower. When talking about this building I ought to mention that the author Jasper FForde, famously invented ‘The Seven Wonders of Swindon.’ And taking the top spot on his list is the ‘Tower of Brunel’:
“Give me a tower to touch the sky!” With those words, city elder Mr David Murray John proposed the building of a skyscraper to give Swindon the skyline it had lacked since the destruction of the Cathedral of St Zvlkx almost five centuries before.’
Given that Fforde’s Seven Wonders of Swindon are set in a futuristic/alternative/parallel universe it’s not hard to think that he knew/recognised what niggled at me: the futuristic look of the thing.
Now. Okay. So the real ‘Tower of Brunel’ doesn’t quite reach the vertigo-inducing heights of Mr Fforde’s invention but a skyline it does give. And yes, there’s an argument that the architect’s intentions didn’t quite come to fruition.
But I still feel that there’s much around this edifice we should laud and applaud. There’s Murray John’s energetic exhortation for a tower to touch the sky. There’s the shining optimism it was built to represent and Ffordes T-I-C yet affectionate tribute.
Then there’s the singular fact that Jonathan Meades, a respected authority on architecture, placed the DMJ on his personal list of five extraordinary buildings. In the world. Keeping company with Marseille Cathedral, the Walhalla Temple in Bavaria, Cothay Manor in Somerset and Edinburgh’s Stewart’s Melville College,
