Since the first time they caught a ride on a Spanish ship from Peru, potatoes have taken the world on a wild journey. Feared as the “work of the devil”, hailed as the answer to starvation and cooked into a thousand different recipes, today our planet consumes one trillion- a trillion! – every single year. In this video we trace the potato back to the very beginning and follow its incredible path from Incan sacrifices to Mr. Potato Head and everything in between.
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How Whalley Range changed the course of history
In the mid-1830s, Samuel Brooks did something remarkable: he left Mosley Street. It was a place he had lived for many years, nestled in Manchester’s urban core just four blocks from the newly-built Royal Exchange. Among his neighbours were the city’s great and good, merchants and bankers described by one author as “some of the most opulent characters [in] the United Kingdom”. This was simply how cities worked: the elite in the centre, the poor on the outskirts. That is, until 1834, when Brooks broke ranks.
It was many years ago, while researching a book on the future of housing, that I had my second encounter with the little-known banker-cum-visionary of suburbia Samuel Brooks. My research had led me to a book first published in 1987 by the American academic Robert Fishman. It was called Bourgeois Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Most of it was about the US, but his story starts in the UK, first in London where merchants first set up weekend retreats in Clapham. But it was the third chapter where Brooks made his entrance, and where my interest was piqued. Fishman was making the case that the world’s first proper suburb was Whalley Range in Manchester.
He told a story that I already knew a bit about. Back in the 1980s, I had been a planning officer for Whalley Range and my team had started to worry because developers were coming in with proposals to demolish the Victorian villas in the area so that they could build apartments. We decided to designate it as a conservation area so that nothing could be knocked down without our permission.
A conservation area is partly based on the architectural quality of an area but it also depends on history. Which is to say: if we wanted to save the villas from the bulldozers we’d need to argue for the area’s historic importance. So, I was sent off to the local history section of Central Library to see if I could find anything interesting. I spent an afternoon going through the card index tracking down articles. The story I uncovered — about a merchant and banker called Samual Brooks who finally decided that he could no longer stand to live in the city centre and instead built his suburb — felt like it belonged to me, as things do when you discover them from the original sources. But years later, here was the same story in Robert Fishman’s book, and his claim was that Whalley Range wasn’t just Manchester’s first suburb, it was effectively a world first! […]
Samuel Brooks. Photo: Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery.
Continue readi8ng: The secret history of the world’s first suburb
Kate Bryan explores the surprising influences on Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “artistic genius”? Maybe a creative icon? Or a unique talent?
But every artist creates their works in a time and a place, inspired by the world around them. And sometimes these sources of inspiration are properly surprising and help us think of their works in new ways.
In this programme, Kate Bryan takes one artistic work which has reached iconic status and finds out about the unexpected influencers who might have led to the work’s creation. The work she’s picked is Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. Painted in 1893 when Munch was a young man, the painting has become an icon, there’s even an emoji. But can we see the artwork in a new light by learning about the influencers who might have inspired Munch to paint it?
Joining Kate in the studio is Professor Dorothy Price from the Courtauld Institute of Art – together they meet influencers from Parisian painters to Peruvian mummies, from German philosophers to cloud formations! At the end of the programme, they must choose the influencer they found the most persuasive or who helped them see The Scream in a totally new light.
With contributions from Christopher Heaney, Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University; Sue Prideaux, author of Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream; the atmospheric physicist Dr Fred Prata and the environmental historian and writer Dr Richard Hamblyn.
Presenter: Kate Bryan
Producer: Camellia Sinclair for BBC Audio in Bristol
21 Feb 2012
The very first footage taken of the new font in Salisbury Cathedral, that was consecrated on 28th September 2008.
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