Latest news with #WilliamBlake
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Butt-naked Milton and a spot of fellatio: why William Blake became a queer icon
William Blake may be known for seeing angels up in trees, for writing the alternative national anthem Jerusalem, and for his emblematic poem The Tyger. But his story is far more subversive and far queerer than cosy fables allow. It's why Oscar Wilde hung a Blake nude on his college room wall. It's why Blake became a lyric in a Pet Shop Boys song. And it's why David Hockney is showing a Blake-inspired painting at his current exhibition in Paris. When I lived in the East End of London, I'd walk over Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields every day. It felt sort of disrespectful. Perhaps that's why he has haunted me ever since. Years later, while trying to write a book about another artist, I got ill and very low. Suddenly, echoing one of his own visions, Blake came to me and said: 'Well, how about it?' I felt I had to make amends for treading on his dreams. I've met many artists – Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Derek Jarman – but it is Blake whose hand I would love to have held and whose magical spirit I summon up in my new book. He even gave me my title: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A friend has since pointed out that the title sounds suspiciously like a 1970s album by a certain starman from Mars). I was writing about a man who had died a long time ago, yet who still seems alive and among us. Born in 1757, dying in 1827, Blake had perfect timing: not to be confined by Victorian mores, but to live in a looser, revolutionary age. He only ever sold 61 copies of his revolutionary 'illuminated books' – which, for the first time, placed images and words together. Each would be worth £1m now. Blake might have died in poverty and obscurity, but that is exactly where his potential resides – as an unexploded but benevolent device. His posthumous influence lives on in flash-lit scenes – as if his afterlife were a movie being screened in front of us. Cut to the 1820s and Blake's young fans, called the Ancients, are led by Samuel Palmer, who bends to kiss the doorbell of their master's lodgings as he passes by. They enact their Blakean cult in the Kentish countryside, swimming naked in a river and growing their hair long. Jump forward to Manhattan in 1967 and Blake's new disciples, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, are reading his poetry to each other every night in their poverty. They're obsessed. Mapplethorpe gets a job in an antiquarian bookstore and when a copy of Blake's revolutionary America: A Prophecy comes in, he tears a page out and stuffs it down his trousers. Then, freaking out that he might be discovered, he goes to the toilet, rips it up and flushes it away. That evening, he confesses his sin to Smith, who celebrates his act, seeing it as a fabulous infection of the sewers of New York with their hero's subversion. Five years later, on the rocky coast of Dorset, Derek Jarman, deeply under Blake's influence, recreates a Blakean scene for his first narrative Super 8 film. In flickering, saturated 70s colour, Andrew Logan poses as a sea god in the deconstructed dress he'd worn for his first Alternative Miss World that year. A half-naked young sailor floats in a rock pool. A young woman, wearing only a fishing net, plays the siren who lured him to his doom. That night, the crew meet Iris Murdoch in a nearby country house. She takes them up a hill to dance around a megalith in the moonlight. Murdoch cites Blake in a half a dozen of her queer-friendly novels, and discusses him with her lover, the gay liberation hero Brigid Brophy. Flashback to Paris, 1958: Allen Ginsberg, citing Blake in his outrageously queer poem Howl, emulates his hero by reciting it in the nude outside Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop on the Left Bank. He's accompanied by a besuited William S Burroughs, whose cut-up writing technique is heavily influenced by Blake's proto-surrealist texts. In 1975, in the New Mexico desert, David Bowie will play a queer alien, singing and speaking Blake's words, in the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Like Shakespeare's Prospero or Doctor Who, Blake has the power to appear anywhere, any time, rewriting his own fate through his art. That's why one of Oscar Wilde's young lovers, W Graham Robertson, was so inspired by Blake's sensuality that he became his greatest champion, using a multimillion-pound fortune to buy up every work by Blake he could. Presenting them to the Tate 40 years later, Robertson saves Blake for the nation. Yet Blake remains a secret, hiding in plain sight. In Milton, his astoundingly beautiful and prophetic book of 1804, he creates two images of male fellatio and a butt-naked Milton. They wouldn't look out of place in a Mapplethorpe photograph. One reason Blake published his own work was to escape the censoring eye of the printer. It is this same transgression that powers James Joyce in 1920s Paris, as he deploys Blake's queerness like a grenade in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's Leopold Bloom changes sex in a lucid dream sequence, while British grenadiers drop their trousers to bugger each other as an emblem of the anti-imperialism Joyce and Blake shared. In 1970s London, in their house that is as old as Blake, the artists Gilbert & George claim him as their saint. Like them, Blake would today be seen as one artist in two people. Misogynistic history has written his wife Catherine out of the story – but she shared his visions, printing and colouring them in. Then they'd spend the afternoon sitting naked in their backyard. 'Come on in,' they'd tell visitors. 'It's only Adam and Eve, you know.' Their neighbour is the Chevalier D'Eon, a former army officer who now performs fencing demonstrations in a black silk dress. D'Eon duly appears as Mr Femality in a witty salon skit written by Blake that today reads like a Joe Orton farce. Blake declared gender a mere earthly construction and agreed with Milton: 'Spirits when they please / Can either Sex assume or both.' Faced with this fantastical cast, I can only wonder at Blake's alchemical effect. His large colour prints – such as a nude Isaac Newton with Michelangelo thighs sitting at the bottom of the sea – have a 3D texture that still defies explanation. He was trying to make reproducible paintings. Like Andy Warhol and Albrecht Dürer, Blake trained as commercial artist. He believed in the egalitarian power of art. He even proposed a 100ft tall image of a naked 'Nelson Guiding Leviathan' to be set over the road to London like a Regency Angel of the North. Shockingly modern, Blake burned with a fire that can't be put out. His new Jerusalem was an achievable utopia, if only we shook off our 'mind-forg'd manacles' – our prejudices about gender, sex, race and class. His art still inspires us as he shoots his arrows of desire from his bow of burning gold, standing there naked, bursting out of a rainbow. Blake's new world is the one we long for, where we will all be gloriously free to love whoever and however we like. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is published by 4th Estate
Hindustan Times
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Beauty lies in beholder's soul
'To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower', are lines from the English poet and painter, William Blake, that have aged well. To embark on a variation on Blake's theme, it could be said that one, who can find 'beauty in a sweet, little lizzie', is possessed of a blessed soul. Principal of the SBK Government PG College, Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, and professor of Zoology, Shyam Sunder Meena, lives at the rolling edge of the Thar desert. Meena's boundless empathy for the forgotten, and often despised as 'ugly, poisonous, dangerous' creatures, is stirring. His sensitivity mists the eye because he can literally feel a lizzie's sigh. His camera rolls are dominated not by tigers, leopards and King cobras but the hoi polloi of the natural world. The venerable professor expends much of his time observing and wondering about geckos (lizards) clinging to the walls of his home or those modest shadows slinking about in the crevices of Thar rocks. Meena's eye beholds an extraordinary aesthetic to the scale patterns of a house lizard, just as a noble lady may revel in the art and intricacy of Kashmiri embroidery. Meena has documented gecko species of the Thar displaying vivid colour changes and behavioural adaptations as temperatures vary from 55°C to near-freezing. Meena's father dwells in an Alwar village and shares none of his son's empathy. In his nineties, the father clings onto the unscientific beliefs of the anciens rooted in hereditary hearsay. 'My father believes that a monitor lizard (Goh) is so venomous that if a human is bitten, the victim will perish at once and will not have time to even take a sip of water. I asked if he had come across any such victim of a Goh in his long life but he was unable to recall a single case. Fact is, no lizard species of India is venomous. They are misunderstood creatures. Truth is, lizards play an important, unsung role in insect / pest control and are thus an inalienable part of the Thar's complex food web,' Meena told this writer. A spectacle from the Sukhna Reactions to an unforeseen appearance of a spectacled cobra have evolved over the years with growing awareness of its behaviour and availability of quick-reaction rescue personnel. It is, fortunately, no longer a case of bludgeoning the cobra with a handy brick or stick. On Wednesday at 6.30 am, Dr Rajiv Narwal, who holds charge of the Sub-divisional Civil Hospital, Kalka, was on his morning walk at Sukhna Lake. A keen wildlife photographer, Narwal enhances the joys of dawn with clicks of creatures and flowers. That day, he came across an unusual spectacle near the grand Peepul tree opposite the regulator-end gates. 'The striking snake known for its distinctive hood markings and venomous propensity drew onlookers, who took photos and videos. The sighting caused a stir with people maintaining a safe distance while capturing the rare moment. A police team that patrols on electric vehicles was informed and people sought the speedy requisition of the Chandigarh wildlife department rescue team. In the meanwhile, I fetched a long stick not to harm the cobra but to relocate the serpent so that no one suffers an accidental bite. The cobra eventually slithered into a hole leaving the spectators in awe of the encounter,' Narwal told this writer. Delving on what the cobra must have gone through besieged by a crowd of well-intentioned people, Narwal assessed the serpent's predicament thus: 'The cobra's reaction is driven by instinct rather than complex thought. Cobras are solitary, defensive creatures and tend to avoid conflict. Encirclement by humans would have triggered a stress response. The cobra raised its hood as a classic threat display to appear larger than life and intimidate the crowd. This is an automatic response to feeling cornered or threatened by the people taking photos and videos. The snake was likely 'thinking' (in a primal sense) about finding an escape route, scanning for a gap in the crowd or eyeing cover near the Peepul to slink away and hide.' vjswild2@
The Hindu
02-05-2025
- Health
- The Hindu
The future in your palm - a non-contact wearable that studies skin flux to estimate health
William Blake could have scarcely estimated just the expanse that a palm full can contain, when he said 'hold infinity in the palm of your hand', but science today can give him a fair estimate. Smaller and smaller wearable devices, with the surface area the extent of a mere watch dial, have come to play, measuring all kinds of health parameters on the go – heart rate, blood oxygen, even continuous blood glucose levels. Here's yet another wearable, but one with a difference. Researchers have zeroed in on a wearable that can study the streams of molecular substances that pass through the skin, as a measure of studying the health status of individuals. What is different is that this wearable is 'non contact' relying on an enclosed chamber immediately adjacent to the skin's surface to do its job. A collaboration of American and South Korean experts from the domains of materials sciences, dermatology, engineering, bio-medics and chemistry worked to produce a small device, just about the size of a smartphone face, that has demonstrated unique capabilities to measure the flux of water vapour, volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide at various locations on the body, to examine not just skin health but general health too. The particular use has been to study wound healing properties in diabetes and has the additional advantage of non contact operation, therefore potential damage to fragile tissues can be avoided. Catch it early, cost-effectively John A. Rogers who is the Lewis Simpson and Kimberly Querry Professor of Material Sciences and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Neurological Surgery at the Northwestern University, U.S. and is steering the research says his team has been working on wearable technologies for about two decades now. 'With the COVID pandemic, there began a heightened awareness of the value of technologies that could continuously monitor health status; catch very early signs of disease or infection or health complications, in remote and, cost-effective ways. We have introduced a number of skin interface devices for measuring vital signs like electrocardiograms, blood oxygenation, body temperature.' The wearable in question however is unique, he explains. 'It is unique in the sense that the sensors don't contact the skin. They're actually separated from the skin, and instead of directly measuring underlying physiological processes- cardiac cycles, lung function, for example, we're measuring, properties of the skin itself and measuring species that emerge from the body through the skin to the surrounding environment. And likewise, we are also measuring chemical species that can move from the environment into the body through the skin.' He adds this is something that people haven't looked at before, and experiments have proved that there's a lot of interesting information that emerges, related to wound healing but also basic health. The authors write up the results in a recent paper published in Nature journal. This technology can provide unique insights for clinical decision-makers managing conditions such as dermatological diseases and dermal wounds, but who are also interested in understanding the underlying pathophysiologies better. It can also monitor hazardous chemicals that enter the human body via the skin, making it a viable option to monitor the health of persons working in hazardous industries and zones. How the skin works He continues to explain: The skin is a layered substance with a pretty good impermeable water barrier on the very surface - called the stratum corneum. Underneath that is the epidermis and then the dermis. Those tissues are fairly permeable to water. But the stratum corneum is a very thin layer of dead cells, and serves as a barrier. If that barrier did not exist, you'd have tons of water evaporating and water loss just coming out through all surfaces of the body. So, it performs a very critical function as a water barrier. If that's compromised in any way, then, you can be at risk for dehydration and, degradation in the properties of the healthy living part of the skin, the epidermis and, and the dermis. Therefore, measuring water permeation through the skin can tell you a lot about the barrier function of the skin, and various skin disorders can reduce the barrier functions, Prof Rogers explains. 'You can monitor that. Transcutaneous CO₂ for example, coming right through the surface of the skin is important, and physicians already know how to interpret that.' He adds that their assumption is that the device, with its capacity to read and measure the environmental species that enters the body through the skin will likely yield additional insights that physicians are not aware of yet. What the device does The device itself, he describes, is like a small pocket, with wireless electronics that can transmit data to your phone. It also has a chamber that forms a microclimate when the device is sealed against the surface of the skin. Suspended within that chamber is a suite of sensors, very small semiconductor devices that can measure water, CO₂, and various volatile organic compounds. On the back, there is a valve that can be opened and closed through a wireless trigger. When the valve is closed and the device is on the surface of the skin, the sensors measure a gradual increase in the concentration of water vapor and CO₂. When the valve is open to the surrounding environment, the heightened concentrations of those species can dissipate because now those species can just diffuse out to the surrounding environment. We make measurements with the valve closed, then open, and so on. The rate at which those concentrations increase determines the flux.' These low-cost devices can just be adhered to the surface of the skin, and measure these properties continuously, without a physician having to be at call. The device can be mounted anywhere on body and track outward flux and also inward flux at the same time. An additional vital sign Prof. Rogers says there has already been some interest in the device from the perfumery industry. And while it has not yet been studied in an environment where the patient has suffered burns, he added that it would be an exciting pathway to launch on. Once adequate data emerges from the device over a period of time, measurements off the skin might turn out to be an additional vital sign that doctors rely on to estimate the health of their patients, in addition to the conventional vital signs.
Al-Ahram Weekly
19-04-2025
- General
- Al-Ahram Weekly
William Morris and Islamic art - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly
Whatever the variety of their other opinions, visitors to England in the 19th century were united in at least one thing. The country's urban environment was hideously ugly and any care for or pleasure in buildings and living spaces seemed to have been sacrificed to the needs of burgeoning industrialism. The early 19th-century English poet William Blake was not the only commentator to speak of the country's 'dark satanic mills' – in this case the textile factories that drove the first phases of the Industrial Revolution. Friedrich Engels, moving to Manchester from his native Germany in the 1840s, wrote on the 'Condition of the Working Class in England' for German readers horrified at the social costs of early industrialism. However, from the mid-century onwards, efforts were made at least to soften its edges, one of the best-known being associated with the designer William Morris. Like his teacher John Ruskin, one of the 19th-century's greatest art critics, Morris wanted to make Britain better by degrees, starting with improving the design of everyday objects. His ideas, dubbed 'arts and crafts,' soon gave rise to imitators across Europe and among designers wanting to dissolve what they saw as the false distinction between the fine and the useful arts. Art should no longer be only the preserve of the upper classes, they said, but should also be part of the everyday lives of ordinary people and be used to lighten the mood of Europe's cities. Morris's programme for this kind of proselytising design started in the rather unpromising precincts of Britain's mid-19th century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which wanted to model the art of the time on that of the early Italian Renaissance, and the Gothic mediaevalism of Ruskin and others, which eventually gave rise to the Victorian habit of clothing industrial structures in brickwork with mediaeval turrets. However, perhaps because he realised that he was not destined to become a painter or an architect, Morris began to look elsewhere for inspiration, turning his attention towards interior design and exploring influences as varied as northern European Gothic, Italian Renaissance, and even ancient Icelandic in his quest to make more aesthetically satisfying wallpapers, curtains, upholstery fabrics and furniture for otherwards drab Victorian homes. He also became interested in traditional Islamic design and the arabesque and geometrical decoration familiar from Islamic art, with the result that he started to collect Persian carpets, Ottoman ceramics, and Syrian metalware and other objects, using them as inspiration for some of the motifs he wove into his design firm Morris and Company's textiles and wallpapers. But while the interest of many 19th-century European artists and designers in such materials is well-known, as is the 19th-century European boom in orientalist painting that provided imaginative images of Middle Eastern and Arab scenes for European purchasers, for some reason Morris's interest in traditional Islamic art and the use he made of it has only recently become the object of wider attention. This makes a new exhibition at the William Morris Museum in London on precisely this theme all the more rewarding. Held in the Museum's main temporary exhibition spaces and organised by a team of mostly external curators, the exhibition, entitled 'William Morris and Art from the Islamic World,' looks at what is known about Morris's interest in Islamic art and gives some examples of materials produced by Morris and Company in which an Islamic design element may be detected. While the exhibition is unlikely to change people's broader understanding of Morris's design career – many of his textile and wallpaper designs are still in production today – it certainly adds more than just an intriguing footnote to the appreciation of this outstanding 19th-century artist. There is also the question of Morris's well-known political sympathies – he was a revolutionary socialist in the final decades of his life – and while the exhibition does not dwell on this, for many this aspect of Morris is perhaps even more interesting than his design career, with the latter being largely unintelligible without it. Morris and Islam: One thing that Morris was not was an art collector or connoisseur on the standard Victorian model, since his interest was always related to how the arts of the past could contribute to the renovation of the arts and crafts of the present. These were threatened by mass production and the cheapening of design and manufacturing processes as well as the disappearance of traditional skills. Morris wanted to improve standards of design and manufacture and to rebuild craftsmen's skills, and for this reason if for no other he did not take part in the kind of collecting expeditions carried out by some of his peers with a view to building private collections of Islamic or other forms of art. However, while Morris never visited the Middle East or indeed any other part of the world outside Western Europe (except Iceland), he did purchase objects from the region from London dealers when and if they came to hand, usually, in so far as his motives can be reconstructed, because they suggested design motifs or methods of working that he could adapt for use in his own workshops. Unlike Lord (Frederick) Leighton, for example, one of Victorian London's most successful painters who visited Egypt, North Africa, Syria and other places in order to collect items of Islamic art and even had parts of his house done out in Islamic style, Morris does not seem to have engaged in collecting for the sake of collecting but instead to suggest motifs or ways of working lost to 19th-century mass production. His widely documented interest in antique Persian carpets from Southwest Asia, for example, then as now highly collectible, seems to have been motivated by just such an interest. The use of repeating patterns on these, the style called in Europe arabesque, could suggest patterns for Morris's wallpapers and textiles, also confronted with the problem of how to cover extended surfaces with repeating designs without giving rise to monotony and balancing details with overall effect. Writing in the book accompanying the exhibition, art historian Amanda Phillips notes that Morris owned several pieces of decorated Ottoman velvet known as catma that were decorated with repeating vegetal motifs. These pieces, apparently originally used as wall hangings or upholstery fabrics, were thus similar to the more famous Ottoman tiles that featured repeating tulip, pomegranate, and other motifs, and Morris used them as inspiration for his own textile designs. 'Though some of Morris's own designs… use an obvious and emphatic repeat common to Ottoman decorative arts, many more use all-over patterning,' she writes. The 1884 design Granada, used for a silk velvet brocade woven in Morris's south London workshops, uses 'four different large-scale motifs, three renderings of pomegranates and almond-shaped buds, connected by ogives [diagonals] and branches,' which, though often used on traditional Iberian textiles (explaining the name), were also used on Ottoman velvets 'figured with pomegranates, palmettes, ogives, and even crowns.' Another design, Dove and Rose, this time from 1879 and produced in silk and wool, features a repeating motif of a dove and a rose 'placed among foilage arranged in ogives comprising stems and bound with acanthus leaves,' Phillips writes, apparently a reimagining of 14th-century Italian-Iberian designs. However, the dove and the rose motif, or more properly the nightingale and the rose, was also to be found on many Persian objects that Morris would have been familiar with as a result of his research at the South Kensington Museum, now London's Victoria and Albert Museum, notably on carpets and other textiles. A later essay in the catalogue by art curator Moya Carey goes into more detail regarding Morris's debt to carpets from Safavid Iran. From the 1880s onwards, he advised the South Kensington Museum on acquisitions of Persian carpets, the idea being to build a reference collection in London for budding designers, and he himself acquired several magnificent historic carpets, including the 17th-century 'Vase' carpet from Kerman in Iran (so-called because of a vase motif on the central axis) that once hung on the wall in the dining room of his London house. Morris hoped to learn the designs and production methods of these carpets in order to produce new ones woven in England to similar standards, Carey says. While he was never able to reproduce the magnificence of the historic Persian carpets in his London workshops, it being impossible to produce anything as sophisticated at a viable price, the study of the Safavid carpets allowed 'his own design compositions to come more brilliantly alive,' she says. This was the case, for example in the use of 'twisting foliate scrollwork, ogival trellis systems with oversize blossoms, and the animating presence of birds' in designs such as the Bullerswood carpet produced by Morris and Company in 1889. Appropriation: The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is perhaps unusually sensitive to what may distance contemporary visitors from Morris's mental world, even as his designs remain enduringly popular among new generations of purchasers. There is the question of terminology, for example, with 19th-century European collectors tending to run together multiple traditions in their confident talk of 'Islamic art,' by which they meant the arts and crafts of a 'diversity of cultures from the Middle East, Turkey, Central Asia, South and South-East Asia, and Africa from the advent of Islam to the present day,' as exhibition curator Qasira Khan puts it in her catalogue essay. There is also the question of cultural appropriation – in other words, the 'taking or use of the cultural products of 'cultural insiders' by 'cultural outsiders.'' The catalogue contains a sensitive essay by exhibition curator Joanna Bradford exploring this issue and arguing that Morris's use of iconography from other cultures in his work, in this case from the Islamic world, could be seen as problematic today. She gives the example of his use of vegetal patterns in wallpaper designs such as Pimpernel (1876), which reuses the characteristic pattern principles and underlying geometrical grid of Islamic art, or textile designs such as Snakeshead (1876), which 'incorporates small repeating flower motifs characteristic of South Asian block-printed cottons.' However, whatever individual visitors may make of this debate, probably the overall effect of the exhibition is to take them back to Morris's work with renewed appreciation. This is likely to be particularly the case as a result of the detailed investigation of some of Morris's designs undertaken by lead curators Rowan Bain and Qasira Khan, who trace motifs from Morris's 1879 textile design Flower Garden back to items imported from Damascus that he viewed at a London dealer in 1878, notably their use of 'medallions with strap work, birds, and arabesques,' and the dragon and peacock motifs in Morris's furnishing textile Peacock and Dragon (1878), intended for use for heavyweight curtains in London homes, to those on 17th-century Iranian ceramics. Morris's block-printed cottons on themes from the River Thames in southern England, notably Kennet, Evenlode, Wandle, Lea, and Medway, all produced using the then new indigo-discharge process, use motifs suggested by Ottoman ceramics, Bain and Khan say, notably their use of 'stylised lotus blossoms connected by a delicate floral vine' that echo Morris's design in the Medway fabric produced in 1885 of 'a background of white scrolling leaves and tiny flower heads and a forefront of half-open tulips.' Tulip and Lily, an 1875 design for a machine-woven carpet, seems to have been suggested by Ottoman embroidery, and Wild Tulip (1884), a block-printed wallpaper, draws on tulip and flower motifs found on Ottoman ceramics. 'Persian carpets remained the ultimate standard in their category for Morris,' Bain and Khan say, though 'he was never able to achieve the same level of production quality in his own carpet manufacturing' – even in the Peacock and Bird and Holland Park designs he produced as one-off commissions. Overall, Morris's 'originality as a visionary thinker lies in the case he makes for the centrality of art, as well as his striving to return a sense of authenticity and reliability to design and craft that he perceived to have been lost in Britain,' they say. 'For this he looked in many directions for inspiration, creating new designs worked within a European aesthetic framework, springboarding from English creativity and incorporating inspiration from across the Islamic world.' William Morris and Art from the Islamic World, William Morris Gallery, London. * A version of this article appears in print in the 17 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
New funding to 'save' William Blake's cottage
The West Sussex cottage where poet and artist William Blake wrote the words for Jerusalem has secured National Lottery funding. Blake's thatched cottage in Felpham was awarded just under £244,000 to address "urgent structural" concerns in the walls and chimneys and preserve and restore its roof and timbering. The money will also be spent on developing a "long-term, viable plan" for the building, which the Blake Cottage Trust has previously warned was in "real danger of being lost forever". Doug Nicholls, chair of the trust, said the "generous grant" would allow them to undertake essential conservation work and ensure the safety of the historic cottage. Richard Clemmow, a trustee at the trust, said the building was in a "desperate state". He said that last autumn the trust had put up a "tin hat" to protect the roof, which had let in water from rain and storms. Earlier this year, the trust stripped the rotten thatch to prevent the roof from collapsing under its weight. "It feels like a very important moment in our urgent battle to save Blake's Cottage," Mr Clemmow added. Blake and his wife Catherine lived in Felpham between 1800 and 1803. Here he wrote Milton: A Poem that contained in its preface the poem And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time, which was later set to music as the hymn Jerusalem – sometimes sung as an unofficial English national anthem. Mr Nicholls added the trust's vision was to "create a vibrant centre that informs, inspires, and celebrates the extraordinary legacy" of the couple. The Blake Cottage Trust has said it needs to raise £3m in the longer term. Follow BBC Sussex on Facebook, X and Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@ or WhatsApp us on 08081 002250. Biography offers glimpse into William Blake's mind National Lottery
