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Prospect Street (Gloucester, Mass)
In 1934 Edward Hopper created his oil painting ‘Sun on Prospect Street’. Its subject is an ordinary street in an ordinary American seaside town. The geometric image showing a row of houses and three...
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St Patrick’s Street (Cork)
God created the Dutch out of mud and clay. The Netherlands, as that cheerful Cromwell admirer Andrew Marvell wrote in his 1653 poem on ‘The Character of Holland’, is composed of ‘indigested vomit from...
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Avenue & Rue Frochot (Paris)
Near Place Pigalle is a leafy cul-de-sac, closed by a wrought iron secured gate, which is called Avenue Frochot. Developed in the 1830s, the avenue has an enticing artistic history. Alexandre Dumas...
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Rua das Flores (Lisbon)
The Rua das Flores is a narrow steep street in the old town of Lisbon. Two monuments stand close together at the southern end of the Bairro Alto, the statue of Luis de Camões, the celebrated poet,...
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The Shambles (York)
We tend to associate the charm of cities with the architectural splendour of cathedrals, palaces, museums, monuments, or bridges. Few of us would mention the beauty of an abattoir. We pay attention to...
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Via Appia (Rome)
Terror as subject-matter is common in both art and literature and has a long history. Art tells its own story of horrors. Francisco Goya and Giovanni Battista Piranesi were the outstanding printmakers...
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Preview
A preview of our forthcoming book that will grow this summer to 500+ pages and then will be published in print. The price will be 60 euros but suscribers will pay 40 (avoiding the cost of the...
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Broad Quay (Bristol)
The architectural splendour of cities such as Liverpool in Britain or Middelburg in the Netherlands bears witness to the financial rewards of the slave trade, the largest forced migration in global...
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Campo Vaccino (Rome)
The Forum Romanum, at the heart of Ancient Rome, was in the seventeenth century populated by cows, goats and cattle traders – hence the name Campo Vaccino, the ‘field of cows’. In his 1636 ‘Vue du...
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Piazza del Campo (Siena) Or rather: not the Piazza del Campo …
The characteristic mode of portraying the city in early European painting was as a cluster of towers hidden behind an enclosing barrier, and seen in the background of a scene to which it not...
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Thames Street (London)
Thames Street is a narrow river-side street in Vintry which, during the reign of Henry VIII, contained the grand residences of many courtiers and merchants. Wool exporter and Lord Mayor of London John...
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Censorship in the Dutch Golden Age – 1
Introduction Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) lived in Rotterdam, where he published his rightly famous Dictionaire in 1697. The importance of this book for the dissemination of the ideas of Descartes and...
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The Invention of the Printing Press
There is a national myth in the Netherlands that was taught in school well into the sixties of the 20th century: a man who lived in Haarlem, Laurens Jansz Coster, was walking his small children in the...
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Catherine Wheel Alley (London)
Medieval urban life held many hazards. There was no common law of the land. Regulations were set by the lord of the manor or by the mayor and his council in towns and cities. The streets of London...
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2013 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 33,000...
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censorship and religion
Gutenberg brought freedom and suppression. He liberated the word, but from the sixteenth century onwards most secular and religious authorities in Europe tried to regulate and control it. Printers...
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Riva degli Schiavoni (Venice)
Cities prosper and cities decline. Sometimes they rise, at other times they sink. Prior to Napoleon’s invasion in 1797, Venice had long established an economically minded Republican government that...
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The Censor at Work
Johan van Oldenbarneveldt – the powerful Secretary of the States who lost his head in 1618, accused of treason by prince Maurice of Orange. His dead ended the first great struggle between the princes...
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Corpses and Copyrights
For considerable time almost every London church had its own cemetery. Before 1800 there were more than two hundred such graveyards in the capital. St George’s at Hanover Square, Mayfair, was built...
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Paternoster Row (London)
Over time great cities remain largely the same and are always changing. Streetscapes are continually remodelled. In architecture everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. Every new generation is...
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