Posts Tagged ‘England’
NOTES: Travel Guide Books
I am developing an obsession with guidebooks. I’m particularly fond of the little fold out maps. They contain opinions and advice on the nature of place and encounters with place.
The idea of sites for painting becoming sights for people to come and look at through the circulation and distribution of images is interesting. A site is somewhere artists come to paint, the site becomes a scene, tourists come to see the site of the scene, the scene becomes a picture postcard, more tourists come to see the sights/sites. This is something pointed out by Lubbren, that the art colony is a precursor to the holiday resort, where artists make a place known for its particular beauty, then the images of that place become known, which attracts people to visit. In turn also, the presence of the artists mean the development of facilities to meet their needs, which are developed further to accommodate the needs of tourists.
Denys Val Baker suggests this too in his book about the St. Ives artist community:
Thus that one scene, perhaps one moment, of local life, might be translated into a series of other moments, many of which would later be sent out into the world, to be hung in galleries, reproduced in books, and so on. And because of seeing those results, all kinds of people might be tempted to visit the place that inspired them.
Denys Val Baker, Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea 1959 p.22
So, back to the guidebooks. The images of Cornwall and St. Ives produced by artists which in turn attract other visitors are interesting, but a textual version of these images come in the form of the guidebook. The earliest one that I have stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop in London is Black’s Guide to Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Published in 1877, its tenth edition, it pre-dates the first ideas of art colony in the county. The theory that it is indeed the artists which establish place as tourist site/sight, endowing a place beauty, making it attractive/attraction, is perhaps best illustrated by the short piece on St. Ives from Black’s:
The position of St. Ives, [...] is one of picturesque and uncommon beauty,; and it is to be regretted that the favourable impression which at first the tourist necessarily forms should be dissipated on his entrance into the town by its accumulation of nastiness. The streets are narrow and crooked; the shops mean and squalid; and everywhere pervades a fishy smell, “most tolerable, and not to be endured”.
Black’s Guide to Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, 1877
As David Tovey points out in his survey of early guides in St Ives Art Pre-1890: The Dawn of the Colony, visitor accounts refer to St. Ives as being disorderly and putrid-smelling, and some even recommend avoiding the town completely. 1877 is the year that the branch line is completed, during a decade which sees the beginning of a decline in the fishing and mining industries.
BOOK: Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea, Denys Val Baker, 1959
p. 9
Why do artists come to Cornwall?
It is a mixture of material and mystical, facts and fantasies, all equally important. The climate, the brilliant light, the almost Mediterranean blue of the sea, the fascinating formations of rocks and cliffs, hills and valleys, sand and pebble shores – these are some of the more obvious attractions. So, too, is the comparitive freedom and easiness of life in a small but cosmopolitan town such as St. Ives, as compared to most of the provincial towns and industrial areas; the congenial atmosphere of working and living among large groups of fellow artists; the facilities of numerous art galleries and show-rooms, several art societies, clubs and other meeting places; and last but by no means least, a sympathetic local population and press, conditioned by several decades of growing-up alongside the art colony, so that what might seem an oddity if dumped in some other part of Britain has come to be taken for granted in Cornwall.
p. 10
The bones of this land are not speechless
And first you should learn their language
This is a hideous and wicked country,
Sloping to hateful sunsets at the end of time,
Hollow with mine shafts, naked with granite, fanatic
With sorrow. Abortions of the past
Hop through these bogs; black-faced, the villagers
Remember burnings by the hewn stones.
Heath-Stubbs makes Zennor sound like the vision of the countryside/Cornwall portrayed in Straw Dogs or An American Werewolf in London. It’s a strange, alien and terrifying place. Part of England, but not of it. It’s a truly hellish vision.
Val Baker goes on to recount Walter de la Mare‘s reaction to his first visit to Corwall, who wrote that he didn’t feel safe until he’d crossed the River Tamar and was safely back in Devonshire. He also mentions that Aleister Crowley was rumoured to visit West Penwith regularly to conduct black masses.
It’s not really surprising that the freedom felt by artists engendered by landscape also attracted those in search of other kinds of freedoms. The ancient wildness of Cornwall’s landscape , along with its Iron Age dwelling places and standing stones has the suggestion of the pre-Christian, and perhaps could be described as godless.
It is then that the drowned sailors of the past can be heard hailing their names above the moaning of the waters. It is then that the sense of the primordial, the strange and the savage, the unknown, the very long ago, fills the dusk with something that is akin to dread. It is then that the place becomes haunted; a giant heaves grey limbs from his granite bed; a witch sits in that stone chair on a cliff…
p. 11
Past and present, moments and centuries, all are entangled and interwoven in Cornwall. Eternity is contained in a hundred years. And this is not only reflected in the landscape but in the people.
The past of their lives has lost neither face nor voice behind the shroud, nor are the passions of the flesh, not is the animate soul, wanting to it. Other races forfeit infancy, forfeit youth and manhood, with their progression to the wisdom age may bestow. These have each stage always alive, quick at a word, a scent, a sound, to conjure up scenes in spirit and in flame.
George Meredith
The Cornish people themselves are like their land, an old and knowing race, withdrawn to strangers, living as much in the past as the present; without, as has been said, much creative inspiration, yet with a quick response to all things of that nature.
reaction to a sensitized soil
The thing about the Cornish is that they are not nice: exciting and attractive, but not nice. They have colour enough to turn the spectacles of most onlookers pink but it is not fast to light. The impulsiveness that goes as far as magnanimity does not sustain generosity; the devotion, loyal to fanaticism, has no fidelity; the forthcomingness keeps much more back than reticence – like an iceberg, two-thirds under the water, if there were not anything less like an iceberg than any Celt… Where does it go, then, all the colour? The warm tones of manner, the light and shade of speech? the colour goes into the personality. Almost one might say it is enough for the Cornish to be Cornish; btu not quite for they have a full measure of Celtic discontent. The energy that makes for colourfulness goes into the business of living – always a hard one in Cornwall – the fervour into congregational worship, into a personal relationship with omnipotence, not into embellishing its dwelling-place; the enterprise into seeking fortunes afield.
R. Glyn Grylls Cornish Review
A somewhat dark and damning description of the Cornish, really, although R. Glyn Grylls is herself Cornish, that I dare say would be unpublishable now. At least you’d hope so. But that idea of both the landscape and the people, its/their fundamental alienness, persists in popular culture as the aforementioned films demonstrate just one example. The English middle-classes love to holiday in cottages across the county, but will still make jokes about its ‘primitive’ nature unthinkingly.
p. 12
The open coliseum of each little cove of sand or rock may be the theatre for any natural, supernatural or unnatural event. The unending presence of the sea breathing ceaselessly over the shoulder of each hill, the the rock charged with a thousand sunsets or carved by a hundred years of rain, the little trees loaded with berries growing away from the prevailing wind, offering crimson to green, the mind’s incessant vertigo at the cliff edge, and the slow constructional flight of the seagull – these things in some way act as the charming of magicians and open up the deeper rooms of experience in man, making him aware of his being part of the natural universe, at the head of a great unseen procession of gods, and devils, spectres and dragons; of being a channel for unknown and undefined forces; of facing the mystery of life, awakening powers of perception which search beyond the frontiers of normal events.
p. 19
There is a good reason, of course, for the fascination which the streets and buildings of St. Ives have for artist. It is simply a lack of change.
p. 22
Atmosphere! Yes, that its the important ingredient of St. Ives as an art colony: an atmosphere that gives as well as takes, to and from the artists. Did St. Ives have atmosphere before the artists came and settled? Of course. But is that atmosphere stronger because of their presence? Again, of course. We are on subtle ground here, but then the atmosphere of an art colony is a subtle thing. [...] Thus that one scene, perhaps one moment, of local life, might be translated into a series of other moments, many of which would later be sent out into the world, to be hung in galleries, reproduced in books, and so on. And because of seeing those results, all kinds of people might be tempted to visit the place that inspired them. And once they had seen St. Ives at first hand – the cobbled streets, the fairy-like harbour, the Mediterranean-blue sea, the artists at work before their easels, pictures hanging everywhere, studios tucked away down almost every little by-way – what would be the general reaction? Wonderment, delight, fascination, ‘there’s nowhere else like it in Britain’. How many thousands of people are there who come back to St. Ives year after year for this very reason; how many indeed, as I know myself, who have come for a visit and stayed a lifetime?
Finally then, how are we to define what it is that draws them? The place? The paintings? The fishermen? The artists? Or perhaps everything curiously mixed up?
It is on these lines, I fancy, that St. Ives has become what it is today. It remains, underneath, what it has always been, a Cornish fishing port; but it has had imposed on it the everyday life of an artists community – an imposition at first resented and resisted, but later accepted and even assimilated so that today ‘them artists’, as the fishermen used to refer to them, with a wealth of disparagement, are as familiar to the locals as the postman, the butcher and the baker. If you stop and consider those last words, perhaps you may experience their full impact.
BOOK: Designing the Seaside, Gray 2006
p. 7
Western seaside resorts are multilayered places, redolent with meaning for the present and memory of the past.
Seaside architecture, combined with a multiplicity of images related to the seaside, define its meaning and consumption.
p. 36
Discussion of arguments surrounding the perception and consumption of nature. Can nature be consumed? If not, how is it used, experienced, represented, perceived?
The visual sense was increasingly hegemonic in the sensing of the natural world, and nature, including the sea, was transformed in to an overridingly visual spectacle. In turn , the fundamental process of tourist consumption became capturing the gaze, each one of which could ‘literally take a split second’. Everything else in the tourist experience and tourist services was relegated as subsidiary.
p. 53
Once the middle and working classes were able to holiday by the sea, one persistent conflict revolved around whether resorts were select and respectable or popular and open to all comers. … A higher social tone could be attempted, for example, by resisting the the freeing of restrictions on bathing, entertainment and transport that might lure working class visitors and opposing the development of facilities, including piers in the second half of the nineteenth century and holiday camps in the interwar period of the next century, thought to endanger a resort‘s reputation by making it more popular.
p. 65
Buying a room in a hotel, a ticket for a seaside attraction or simply sunbathing on a beach [also] involves buying into a more general idea of the seaside or a particular resort. We consume a reality and an image, and the two may not match.
