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.
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Jack Dykstra
Dr. Sarah Kenny
Joe Saunders
Dr. George Gosling
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?
Dr. Thomas Williams
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 Lawrence
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’.
Modernism in Metro-Land
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”.
Isabella Rosner
Placecloud’s New Subscription Model
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.
The Power of Viewpoints
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.
Placecloud Interview #2: Face Marks
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.
