"Not all those who wander are lost..."

- JRR Tolkien

A wonderful sentiment and image to encounter as one wanders the Tube and streets of London.

'Not all those who wander are lost'

Writing Britain at the British Library

 

Palast der Republik (Berlin) - Revisited

'… it seemed incomprehensible to him that this building could have succumbed to the destruction so completely in such a short space of time, that it could stand here in the middle of a growing, constantly evolving city and at the same time continue to disintegrate from the inside out, and he thought about the many memories of this place, its stories, which, given it had no memory of its own, were being consumed together with its interior without ever having been heard or recorded.'

Extract - Fridolin Schley, ‘The Heart of the Republic’, published in Helen Constantine (eds.) and Lyn Marven (trans.), Berlin Tales (Oxford, 2009).

Meades on Pevsner

No reading required (no. 1)

'Jonathan Meades: Worcestershire' from Travels with Pevsner (1998)

More here...

St Winifred's Church - Manaton, Devon (8 July 2011)

On the hill slope higher up is the village. Here are thatched walls too and cob cottages with rounded corners and bulging hearths and hollyhocks and fuchsias in the garden. Out of the sycamores near the hill top peep the tall pinnacles of a thin church tower. Inside the church, low 15th-century arcades of clustered columns support a barrel-shaped wooden roof whose timbers are carved. And right across the east end, for we do not expect to see a chancel arch in Devon, will be a wooden screen with carved base and painted Saints on its panels, and through the wooden tracery above the panels we can see the altar.

Devon - Introduction from John Betjeman (ed.), Collins Guide to English Parish Churches (London, 1958), p. 136.

And Northlew Church is full of that carved woodwork that is characteristic of that age of faith in Devon when farms prospered and wool sold well and men gave their best - because everyone believed that Christ was God - to the grandest building in the parish: the church...

John Betjeman, 'In the West Country with John Betjeman' from Wales and the West (ITV, shown 17 September 1962)

Palast der Republik (Berlin) - Under demolition (July, 2007)

The Palast der Republik (1973-76) was the seat of the East German Parliament until 1990. In 2003, thirteen years after reunification, the German Parliament voted to demolish the building.


Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels. At the most we gaze in wonder, a kind of wonder which itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. A. Bell (London, 2001; Paperback, 2002), pp. 23-24.


Brokedown Palast (Ole Tangen Jr.) - Berlin Erases its Communist Past. This is the story of the Palast der Republik in Berlin.