Architectural Urban Myths

I've just posted an example on my other blog of something that people like to tell each other even though it can't be true.

The demeanour when passing on one of these curious adult fairy tales, following a rhetorical enquiry regarding your awareness of the 'fact' in question, is usually that of condescension mixed with surprise at your ignorance.

If you refuse to play along by feigning surprise at your own lack of a sense of intellectual engagement with your environment, followed by rueful recognition of the strange circumstance you've failed to register and appreciation for its illumination, and can be bothered to point out why it can't be true, the demeanour quickly changes to truculence and disappointment at your lack of appreciation for their generosity, almost as if you've spurned membership of a club that they're proud to be part of.

The examples I'm going to give here are "buildings they built back to front", both major civic structures whose architectural significance is on a national if not global scale.

The first is St George's Hall, Liverpool, and the story goes something like this:

"Oh yeah, St George's Hall - you know they built it back to front? Yeah, and when the architect found out, he committed suicide."

I've been listening to that one since I was a child, and it's sometimes followed up with one about the lions in front having no teeth - apparently they were copied from the ones on Trafalgar Square, and by the time someone noticed there were no teeth, it was too late.*

The St George's Plateau set is completed by poking ridicule at the sculptor of the statue on top of the column to the north east of St George's Hall, sometimes described as being of Nelson, sometimes, correctly, as Wellington, for depicting his subject wearing a Roman toga with jackboots and a sword.

St George's Hall is a pared-down neoclassical building on a superhuman scale which presages the style favoured for public buildings in the 1930s in Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, the USA, and most notoriously, Nazi Germany. One of the many crimes of the Nazi regime, albeit on a minor scale by comparison, is the damning of this ultimate development of classicism by association with rally grounds and militarism.

It was designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes in 1842, who did in fact die before it was completed in 1854, but from exhaustion, not suicide.

Aside from the idiocy of suggesting that Victorian surveyors couldn't use a compass, or Victorian builders follow a plan, and that the architect wouldn't visit the site before the walls were raised, there's nothing in the building's aspect or design that suggests it's the wrong way round. 

Here's an aerial view ©webbaviation

On the left is Lime Street, Liverpool's main thoroughfare, and St George's main entrance here faces Lime St Station, Liverpool's main railway station.

On the right is an ornamental garden with no vehicular access.

And the lions do have teeth, and they couldn't have been copied from Landseer's at Trafalgar Square because those were designed in 1866, eleven years after Cockerell designed the lions for St George's Plateau.

As you can see here, Wellington isn't wearing a toga either, although perhaps the cape might be mistaken for a toga from the back - but the statue is at the NE side of St George's plateau, with its front facing the city centre.

The other building I've heard people say was built the wrong way round is in Glasgow. 

It's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, built for the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1901.

Here's the front, on Argyle St, one of Glasgow's main thoroughfares, with a large porticoed entrance:

and here's the back, overlooking the River Kelvin, with no entrance:

For it to be the wrong way round, Glasgow would have to have been still living in the canal age in 1901.

 PS - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkdale_Palace_Hotel for perhaps the most celebrated example of this architectonic histeron-proteron delusion.

* An urban myth about Reading's Maidan Lion statue and its sculptor combines elements of the St George's Hall and associated lion statues myths: "It was rumoured that Blackall Simonds killed himself as the lion’s pose was not accurate. This is not true! He studied the movement of lions at London Zoo and it shows the moment when a lion is moving at speed. Experts from London Zoo have even confirmed that the pose is accurate."

Aged Comic Cast in Role of Rainforest Fauna Fancier

What did Bruce Forsyth say about the saucer-eyed arboreal primate?






"Nice tarsier, tarsier nice."

                                                                                

                                                

Now see here

You might be interested to see what I have to say about the execution in Arizona that took two hours: https://overyourdeadbody.blogspot.co.uk (scroll down to 24th July).

The Burning of The Midnight Lamp

Further to my earlier post, here's something else that they always get wrong on TV shows and films set in times or places without electric light. 

Paraffin lamps with glass chimneys (or kero-seen lamps in America) or hurricane lanterns (hurricane lamps, ditto) in such productions invariably have the glass coated with a thick layer of soot, so that only a dim glimmer of light penetrates. The wick is usually turned up too far as well, so that what light there is flickers crazily.

Paraffin or oil lamps with chimneys need to have the wick trimmed so it burns evenly when it's lit, and when the chimney is lowered into place, the wick must be turned down immediately, before it covers the glass with soot, because the increased draught produced by the chimney causes the flame to burn higher, producing more smoke.

Incidentally, the crops of rape which blanket the countryside, burning the retina with its violent yellow blossom and assaulting the nose with its glutinous aroma, nowadays in pursuit of EU subsidies for the benefit of the processed food and biofuel industries, and looking so alien and out of place in the landscape, were, surprisingly, previously a feature of the Victorian countryside. 

Before the oil and petrochemical industries existed, fuel for lamps was extracted from rape seed, known as colza oil (from the Dutch/German for 'cabbage seed', rape being a member of the brassica or cabbage family), and whale blubber, known as train oil (from the Dutch/German for 'tear', from the way blubber 'weeps' oil when heated).

The Locomotion, but not by Little Eva

As I mentioned in http://robocono.blogspot.no/2014/07/confusing-fashion-tip-in-popular.html, while at a wedding recently I noticed a generational difference in the way people dance. Under the age of, say, 40, they all jig up and down on the spot and wave their arms in the air in time to the music. All of them, in exactly the same way. 

Of course different generations have their own styles of dancing, and between the 1950s (in the UK, with jiving, in the US a bit earlier, with the Lindy Hop) and some 15 years ago, different youth groups had their own styles - punks pogoed, skinheads did the moon stomp, bikers headbanged,  and so on. 

But generally speaking, since the passing from fashion of moving around clasped in each others arms and following the steps of the waltz, or the military two step ("Oh what a pity the pubs in the city all close at half past ten" / "Oh what a pity she'd only one titty to feed the baby from") or whatever the music dictated, individual dancers moved individually, perhaps echoing their partner in doing The Twist, or The Hitchhiker or whatever, but not in any case repeating the same movements all night.

I've noticed another generational difference in movement, this time on the street, and I've watched it appear and grow in popularity over the past five years or so.

In walking, the natural way to move your arms is to swing them backwards and forwards, in turn, at the side of your body, in line with the direction of travel. This action is seen at its most exaggerated in soldiers marching, when the arms are raised level with the shoulders.

Some years ago, I started to notice young women in their twenties swinging their arms from side to side across the front of their body when walking. Then I noticed slightly older women doing it, and then I noticed young men doing it.

I've tried doing it myself to see if there's anything in it, and it feels not just counterintuitive and odd, but actually contrived and awkward - it breaks the rhythm of your pace, and you have to swing your upper body from side to side to accommodate it.

I'm not saying everyone under the age of forty walks like this, but it's definitely getting more popular.

Where does it come from? Who started it, and why?


Old, left, New, right

Contrived Opening for Anaphoric Humorous effect

Speaking of titles, which sounds laboured, but I was, here, in May; I reckon I can help 20th Century Fox out if they ever decide to make another Die Hard sequel. 

They had Die Hard, Die Hard II,  Die Hard  with a Vengeance, and then I felt they lost their way a little. "Live Free or Die Hard" and "A Good Day to Die Hard" don't quite have the same ring. 

How about Die Hard with a Fucking Vengeance and Die Hard with a Fucking Vengeance You Bastard?

 Bloke in a vest © Reg Smythe

Confusing Fashion Tip in Popular Musical Hit

I went to a wedding recently, and due to the age of the happy couple and the bulk of the celebrants, I was exposed to music that would make me whizz the tuning dial past the station as fast as I could if I came across it on the radio.

I felt sorry for the mob on the dance floor - every tune sounded the same, and they all danced to every tune in exactly the same way, jigging up and down with their arms in the air, waving them in time to the music. And they weren't even on ecstasy.

The music consisted of maddeningly catchy melodic hooks and choruses repeated without variation above a heavy baseline, with bursts of electronically enhanced yodelling and melisma. (Apparently, the first pop record to feature melisma was "To Sir With Love" by Lulu, 1967, although Stevie Wonder and Whitney Houston must surely have more to answer for in this respect, via a shared background in the conventions of US gospel singing.)

One tune that was repeated a few times, presumably by request, was "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" by Beyoncé Knowles. I remember this from when it came out, and was reminded of the mental response the chorus elicited when I first heard it. 

It goes: "If you like it then you should have put a ring on it". 

Number one, if the lyrics are directed at single "ladies", as the title suggests, and "putting a ring on it" refers to removing men from the market for sexual liasons by marrying them (or getting engaged?), it's surely not the men's third finger the women like.

Plus, it's necessary to interpret "it" as being used here to either = unattached men in general, or as an insulting, non-gendered substitute for "him". 

2, if you don't know the title, the other lyrics are difficult to make out, and you might assume it referred to unattached women.

Either way, the logical interpretation is that the theme of this song is a recommendation of genital piercing. 

Period Piece About Old Hooker Having the Painters In

Jewel-like Extravagance on a Minuscule Scale

Insects and arthropods inhabiting forest floor detritus, all less than 2.5mm in length (illustration from child's encyclopedia of science).