Beheaded at the Tower of London in 1541, Margaret Pole is one of the most famous martyrs in English History. During her lifetime, she was one of the richest magnates in England and had several properties befitting her wealth and status. This viewpoint discusses her Thames-side residence, the Erber, which stood on Dowgate Street.
Alice’s viewpoints explore the oppressive forces that shaped sexuality, while centring experiences of joy, playfulness, and queerness. Expect break-up ballads, wandering genitals, public sex, and some very strange euphemisms.
Her project about foraging and rights to land was selected for the main exhibition at Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2019 and her writing on subjects around space and social justice has appeared in Open City blog, Eyesore Magazine and BUM Editions Journal.
On 5 August 1872, Christopher Rafferty shot two Chicago police officers in Mrs O’Brien’s Bar. All involved in the crime were of Irish birth or descent. Rafferty had 3 trials – being found guilty of murder each time – and he had become a celebrity of sorts by the time he was executed in 1874.
The beach huts at Ventnor are cut down bathing machines, operated by the Blake family which first providing changing accommodation for visitors in 1857.
This is one of the most important sites for Shiʿi Muslims in Kabul, said to mark the spot where the Prophet’s cloak spent a night while being taken south to Kandahar.
Heaven is a landmark of gay life in London for many reasons, but this viewpoint introduces listeners to the ACT UP tour which singer Jimmy Somerville undertook in the early 1990s…
In the room, visitors can see some of the original graffiti art left by the squatters which includes anti-fascist, anti-Thatcher and feminist political slogans.
Here are some instructions on using Audacity. If you’re using a laptop + mic for your recording, and want a bit more control, this might be for you: Firstly, include 30 or so seconds of the recording when you aren’t talking so that you can use that to filter background noise. All of the following
Airport Viewpoints are a series of short experimental artworks, which present an exploration of airport space and experience. The viewpoints, in the form of sound and image, are an assemblage of my own observations as I navigate around multiple airport spatial zones via Google Street View.
This viewpoint – an epic two-parter on the Barbican Redevelopment Scheme – tells the story of the making of the modern office building and how plastic laminates revolutionised the design and construction of the building type. In particular, how curtain-walling systems enabled the open-plan offices of today.
The Upper Cut Club in Forest Gate embodied the cockney spirit in its 1960s heyday. Owned by a local prize-fighter, the club drew high profile celebrities and underworld figures. The club’s brief run introduced African American acts including Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Nina Simone to East London youth. It is believed that Hendrix wrote the iconic ‘Purple Haze’ backstage.
Funeral spectators were expected to be mournful and well behaved – Jenkin Evans had other ideas however. Evans took a trophy pendant from a funeral outside Westminster Abbey…
The block where founding father of grime DJ Slimzee was surveilled by the police while setting up pirate station Rinse FM, and then arrested, and given a historic ASBO preventing him entering a building with more than 4 storeys
This viewpoint considers the role of the Freemasons’ Tavern, Great Queen Street (now the Connaught Rooms) in the so-called ‘birth’ of association football. It was the venue for the first meeting of the Football Association on 26 October 1863.
Before The National Gallery, a gigantic Georgian stable complex stood here, tending to the needs of over 200 royal horses and housing dozens of workers. The King’s mews was at the heart of one of the biggest urban horse populations in the world and an equestrian craze that gripped an entire nation.
Aphrodisiacal chocolate houses that gave way to exclusive clubs. Taverns with blood-soaked tales. Bland buildings belying strange societies and many other hidden histories. London overflowing with flavour and entangled with the world.
Live music has been played at this location since 1942, and as the 100 Club since 1964. This viewpoint jumps into one of the venue’s most iconic periods and explores its association with punk music and fashion in the 1970s.
Originally one of the main Roman roads of Londinium this main city street was inhabited during the medieval period by many immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy. In time it hosted many early coffee houses, the Post Office and eventually became famous as a centre for banking.
George’s viewpoints will offer glimpses into the history of charity and community over the past few hundred years. They’ll include the story of Thomas Guy, who used his enormous wealth to found a new hospital just south of the Thames in the 1720s. Guy’s Hospital is a leading medical institution and still an impressive site today, so why was his statue hidden from sight in 2020?
Thomas is a historian of the early Middle Ages and a former curator at the British Museum’s Department of Coins and Medals. He worked as project curator for the major international exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend (British Museum 2014) and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. His books Viking Britain (2017) and Viking London (2019) are published by William Collins.
Anna’s viewpoints will be exploring the literal and metaphorical blooming of flower culture in nineteenth-century London, from the rise of the cut-flower trade in Covent Garden and the flower girls of Piccadilly Circus, to the working-class flower shows of Bloomsbury and Peckham. Flowers were abundant in late-Victorian London, one commentator remarking in 1881 that it had become ‘a city of summer flowers, a floral London, where the beauties of the garden are transplanted to balcony, window sill, and even to house top’.
Joshua is a writer, photographer and tour guide, focusing on the Art Deco and Modernist architecture of London’s suburbs. Since 2011 he has run the Modernism in Metro-Land website and has just published “A Guide to Modernism in Metro-Land”, the pocket guide to the suburbs’ hidden architecture. He is also contributor to “100 20th-Century Gardens and Landscapes”, and “The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs”.
We’re delighted to welcome Isabella Rosner to Placecloud as a new expert. In June 2021 she’ll be publishing a series of viewpoints on places, mainly in Hackney, associated with the Quakers.
We’re very excited to be launching a new subscription model in June 2021. We’ve signed up 50 wonderful academics, published authors and independent researchers, with more signing up every week. They’ll start by publishing around 450 viewpoints in London in June, amounting to 50+ hours of highest quality research.
Stories, memories, etc. are extremely potent. By placing them in the physical world, that potency is unleashed. When a listener experiences a place through a viewpoint, the place becomes emotionally charged for that person. Not just for the duration of the viewpoint, but forever. Whether it’s a building, a bridge or a tree, the effect is the same: having listened to a viewpoint, the object awakens – permanently – onto the listener’s ’emotional landscape’, to coin a phrase.
We talk about Mike Leigh’s ‘wild’ film Naked, set in a real-but-not-real ’90s London, and how it documents that the city is always both eternal and ever-changing. Finally, Tom tantalises us with hints at his next projects: a voyage around UK’s nuclear power stations, and a new book about the ‘plague walks’ he made during lockdown in 2020.
We’re delighted to offer Heritage Alliance members 50% off our Placecloud commission on street view tours ticket sales until the end of 2021, for those who sign up by midnight on Christmas Eve 2020. This is our way of offering support to the heritage sector after a torrid year.
George and Rafaela range across self-assembling cathedrals, egoic skyscrapers, the pickling of a serial-killer’s head, professional wailing women, and more. We hear about Rafaela’s education in criminology and forensic medicine, and her turn from science to the world of history and culture.
Surround yourself with pillows, rugs, sofas, etc. If you can, make the recording under a duvet! Seriously, it works!
