Latest news with #late-Victorian
Spectator
6 days ago
- Business
- Spectator
V&A's new museum is a defiant stand against the vandals
In last week's Spectator, Richard Morris lamented museum collections languishing in storage, pleading to 'get these works out'. There's an alternative solution: bring the public in. V&A East Storehouse, which opened last weekend, was designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro to do just that. The museum's collections were previously holed up in the creaking, late-Victorian Blythe House. The government decided to sell it in 2015, leading the V&A to find a new home in the Olympics's former Broadcasting Centre in Hackney Wick, a big box since rebadged as Here East, an 'innovation campus'. The Storehouse's entrance indeed blends in with the startups and students sharing the building. With its techy-twee café and plywood-clad reception, it could be yet another co-working space. Yet a glimpse through the glass soon suggests otherwise. After passing through an airlock, I enter a tunnel-like walkway, lined with shelves of objects: a bust of Christ, a carved teak shrine from Ahmedabad, and a chair by Marcel Breuer. In the absence of any curatorial logic, the objects are placed according to their storage requirements, and mounted on to pallets with bespoke fixings that carefully hold the objects in place for shipping. In one way the space is an overdue recognition of the once invisible labour of art handlers. The Storehouse is utilitarian. But its sparing flourishes count, namely by welcoming visitors through the underbelly of the central hall. I emerge in the middle of a climactic triple-height space, encircled by walkways, crowned by a plane of light. Rows of ordinary warehouse shelving extend in all three dimensions, including below, via the glass floor.
NZ Herald
17-05-2025
- NZ Herald
Ruff justice: Revisiting the Dog Tax War in the Hokianga
How the intervention of a great-nephew of Hōne Heke and the advent of the telephone defused the last armed resistance by Māori against the British crown. The Dog Tax War. The very name ensures the events of 1898 in Hokianga can be safely categorised as farce rather than tragedy. However, the story of those events contains elements that could have been taken from today's newspapers, apart from two symbols of late-Victorian modernity: the Maxim gun and the telephone. Fortunately, the
BBC News
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
National Trust's Lanhydrock in Cornwall reopens to the public
A 17th century National Trust house and garden in Cornwall has reopened to the public after it was closed for a year due to a conservation and discolouration was cleaned from the ceiling of Lanhydrock's late-Victorian country house by ceiling has detailed mouldings of artwork, and Nicola Heald, the senior collections and house manager said it had been a "huge project". There are 24 panels with scenes from the Old Testament Book of Genesis, which includes Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark and David and Goliath. Ms Heald said: "I can't wait for visitors to be able to see the completed ceiling in all its glory."The conservation team have done an amazing job, from applying new distemper to repairing unicorn horns, the difference to the ceiling is staggering." Created for Lanhydrock's former owner, John Robartes, between 1620 to 1640, the ceiling is Jacobean plasterwork. John Robartes and the craftsmen took inspiration from manuscripts in his library and from printed research has shown the beasts on the ceiling were copied directly from a book by Edward Topsell, a clergyman who published several books which contained animals.
