Fear and loathing in Peckham
Jane Sandeman | 28 February 2007 The UNICEF reports that the United Kingdom has the poorest teenagers in the world, indicating that with the so-called epidemic of teen- age gun crime, British teenagers must be the devils incarnate. It’s surprising that the Home Office isn’t rounding up everyone between the ages of 13 and 19 and throwing away the key. However if you look more closely at the UNICEF report, by its own admission, it is...
Something Stinks
Austin Williams | 28 February 2007 I’ve just finished reading Steven Johnson’s “The Ghost Map” about London’s 19th C cholera epidemics. Until Dr John Snow located the source of the problem in the water supply, everyone believed that the killer disease has something to do with the all-pervasive stench of the city; the ‘miasma’ permeating the over-crowded slums of the city. Using painstaking empirical data backed up by meticulous...
Care Matters: Green Paper
Future Cities Project | 28 November 2006 Future Cities Project respond to ‘Care Matters: Transforming the Lives of Children and Young People in Care’, a Green paper from the Department for Education. While the Government expresses confidence that the proposals set out in this Green Paper will deliver a step change in the outcomes of children in care, for all the grandiose rhetoric the proposals are in fact rather modest....
Does Every Child really Matter?
Dave Clements | 30 October 2006 At his trial, Manning said that Kouao [his partner, the girl’s great aunt] would strike Victoria on a daily basis with a shoe, a coat hanger and a wooden cooking spoon and would strike her on her toes with a hammer. Victoria’s blood was found on Manning’s football boots. Manning admitted that at times he would hit Victoria with a bicycle chain. Chillingly, he said, ‘You could beat her and she wouldn’t...
Tackling Overcrowding in England: A Discussion Paper
Dave Clements | 14 September 2006 Future Cities Project respond to ‘Tackling Overcrowding in England’, a consultation paper by the Department for Communities and Local Government, September 2006. ‘Increasing housing supply and reducing overcrowding will be priorities for this Government.’ The remit of this consultation paper ostensibly concerned with ‘tackling overcrowding’ is so curtailed by the unspoken premise of...
Arts in Society
‘Arts in Society’ edited by Paul Barker; Five Leaves, 2006. 196pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 18 August 2006 There’s a certain self-assured confidence about this series of essays that first appeared in the social sciences magazine New Society between 1964 and 1976. Barker, who was the editor of New Society from 1968 until 1986, has dipped into a rich archive and rescued some of that magazines finest writing, most...
‘Waist Down’ travelling exhibition
‘Waist Down–Miuccia Prada: Art and Creativity’ Exhibition at Prada Los Angeles: July 27 – August 27, 2006 Reviewed by Elisabetta Gasparoni-Abraham | 20 August 2006 One of my favourite places in Los Angeles is the Prada Epicenter – Prada’s retail ‘experience’ on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills which opened in 2004 and is the third of its kind in the world. On my last visit, “Waist Down” was its latest marvel – a touring...
Camouflage
Camouflage by Neil Leach; MIT Press, 2006. 289pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 1 July 2006 After the Alan Sokal affair, cultural studies writers have been nervous of transgressing the boundaries between pretentious quackery and insightfulness. Reviewers too, tread cautiously for fear of humiliation. This is a pity, because such intellectual caution tends to obscure the rare occasions when a cultural studies’ book hits the nail on the...
New York’s Beaux-Arts masterpiece
Elisabetta Gasparoni | 12 June 2006 The New York Public Library – majestic columns and arches, grand marble staircases, high, elaborately decorated ceilings – stands magnificent and inviting at the intersection of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Begun in 1899 and completed in 1911 it is a continuing monument to knowledge and research. The Beaux-Arts style employed by architects John Merven Carrere and Thomas Hastings...
Gardens of Canal Houses
‘Behind the Facades: Gardens of Canal Houses’ by Renate Dorrestein, Koen Kleijn and Harold Strak D’Arts/Architectura & Natura; 2005. 226pp Reviewed by Austin Williams | 9 March 2006 This book comprises a long essay on the history of gardens in Amsterdam and photographs of those individual gardens over the seasons. Excellent and revealing though most of the images are, it is the historic overview that makes this book....
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