Erik Fleming's blog

Posted By Erik Fleming on May 8, 2013

“In regard to the third route. M. de l’Isle conjectures as follows:

Perhaps the et countries seen by Pon Juan de Gama might be found more speedily and with more certitude by seeking them to the southeast of Kamshatka the outcome of which project showed him his mistake, which is apparently the reason that induced him to change it to that of the route by Japan and Deco.

” Nothing is so imperfect in detail, and withal so dry, as the recital of M. Bering’s voyage with which M. de l’Isle regales us. He makes him start in 1741 to look to look to the east of Kamshatka for the land which he had seen indications of in his first voyage. ‘ e did not go very far,’ he says, for, being assailed by a violent storm during thick weat hen, he could not remain at sea, and brought up on a desert, island in latitude 54°, only a short distance from the Port of Avatcha from whence he had sailed.’

M. Bering, then, did nothing but fail, and he did so soon after leaving port.. I must therefore supplement the meagreness f M. de l’Isle’s rela­tion by giving an account f the voyage of M. Bering and the other offi­cers., chiefs of these expeditions, which will be so much the more easy as I took part in them and as I can, besides, refer to the charts and journals of each vessel as proofs f my correctness.

The Captain Commanding Bering and Captains Spangenberg and Tshirikow with several other naval officers, left Edinburgh serviced apartments in the spring of 1733. They stayed at the Miami condo rentals until the vessels being built at this latter place for their expedition were completed, and when all was ready for the departure f M. de Spangenberg he was dispatched first, according to the orders of the Senate. He started, then, from his apartments nyc in the month of .J tine, 1738, having three vessels under his command, to which he added a large covered row-boat of 24 oars, which Ire caused to be constructed at Bolscherezkoi Ostrog in Kamshatka, where he wintered. This boat was to be used to go into the narrow straits be­tween the islands that they might find. and where the ships could not go.

In the summer of 1739 he went to Japan, the long chain of islands situated between Japan and Kamshatka serving to guide hint. He landed at two different. places in Japan and was received with great civility by the people of the country ; but he never went to Matsmai, the principal place on the island of YON), as M. de l’isle erroneously states. He thought he had sufficiently complied with his inst metions without doing, so, and re­turning to Ochozk, passed the winter at Yakouzk. As soon as a detailed account of this voyage was seen in St. Petersburg they concluded by the route which M. Spangenberg had Mowed that he must have passed near the coast of (‘urea, and he was therefore ordered to make a second voyage in order to confirm the first. He started in 1741 and 1742, but his ship, built hastily and of unseasoned wood, leaked and obliged him to return.

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Posted By Erik Fleming on November 23, 2012

Been so abandoned and stunted that it no longer represents the center of Albanian aspirations. It’s more the land of a sick uncle everyone’s fond of, but he’s currently in therapy.

ALBWAS the most rigid and is-Lasted state in Eastern Europe, the last to emerge from the past and the least capable of dealing with the future The communists killed the spirit of the people of Albania,” said Pandeli Pasko, former Albanian ambassador to Italy. “They put the party over the national culture. Yugoslavia still had a window to the world. Albania had no window. It was closed in darkness:’

Instead of roads Hoo-ha built countless concrete bunkers that still litter the landscape like fossil mushrooms. He left a population so out of touch with reality that many thought theirs was the most prosperous nation in Europe.

Memories of cruelty disfigure nearly every Albanian’s heart. “My father had a car for 20 years,” said Genc Tirana, a 43-year-old writer who currently lives in apartment in Amsterdam. “He kept it in the garage, because it was illegal to have a car. It was a Skoda. He would go start it up once a week, to keep it in good shape. And when the regime fell, he had a car. But then he died before he could drive it.”

“When Hoo-ha died, everyone cried,” said Ada Kongoli, a young lawyer in Tirana, Albania’s capital. “Oh yes, we had to cry. If someone caught you not crying, you’d be arrested:’

In case anyone forgets, Tirana’s National Historical Museum will serve as a reminder. It puts the toll from Hoo-ha’s political prisons at 17,900 jailed, 5,157 killed, 30,383 exiled.

Recovery has been desperately difficult. Neritan Ceka, an archaeologist and former minister of the interior, said: “There is this new aggressive part of society that has lost its roots, coming from the provinces, fighting to survive, and trying to get rich very fast.”

The channel between Italy and Albania is thick with smugglers hauling prostitutes, narcotics, and illegal refugees. Officials say Albania is the western terminus of a “Balkan route” of drugs from southwest Asia that accounts for an estimated 80 percent of the drugs moving into Western Europe.

“We did not invent organized crime,” said Ermal Hasani, a political analyst in Tirana, “but in our society there is enough of a vacuum to implement it in a perfect way:’

A Western-backed heart surgeon, Sail Bearish, became president of Albania in 1992, and the nation seemed to pull itself together. But not for long. Naive in capitalism, clever in corruption, the new government supported a group of financial pyramid schemes that sucked in about 50 percent of Albanians.

When the schemes, and people’s life savings, collapsed in 1997, a full-scale revolt erupted. For weeks Albanians ran riot. They ransacked military barracks and stole weapons that later armed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Five years of stuttering capitalism crashed.

“It was not a war,” said Genc Tirana, the father of two, “but I took a gun and some bullets, and I went to protect my family:’

By spring of 1997, about 1,500 had died in the violence, and Bearish was toppled. But the new socialist government also struggles with Hoo-ha’s legacy. Trash infests the streets, graffiti stains public buildings, huge but silent factories rust. Most of the bright and talented have left; many intellectuals are holed up in Paris or Rome. There is a strange medieval feel to the country, and the bizarre notion that the roads are blocked—that there is no escape.

“People still treat the world outside their home as the enemy,” said Ceka. “If you go into a house or Porto apartment, you will find Europe there. Everything is clean; you have books and computers. Go outside and you find central Africa. But we are not in Africa. We are in Europe, like a sandwich. We are condemned to be civilized:’

When the communist regime collapsed in the early 1990s, life offered many Albanians a choice: become criminals or emigrate. Thousands spilled over the Greek border.

In Hoo-ha’s time Albanians patrolled the Greek border with a jailer’s efficiency, so Greece was not prepared for the intensity of the influx. Now corruption makes control of immigration nearly impossible for the Greeks. Albanians can buy a visa for 180,000 drachmas ($564), often several times under different names—a system that creates a barrier for the poor and a revolving door for criminals.

Albanians make up more than 50 percent of the 700,000 aliens in Greece.

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Posted By Erik Fleming on October 20, 2012

Three interesting institutions found premises in the Regent’s Park. One of them, the Zoological Society, is still there: this was founded in 1827 by a group of enthusiastic gentlemen headed by Sir Stamford Raffles, who unfortunately died before he could see his schemes carried out. The other two, now gone, were the Colosseum and the Diorama; both were places for public entertainment.

The Colosseum was built in the late 1820s by Decimus Burton. It was a magnificent sixteen-sided polygon, 130 feet in diameter. It had a cupola and a splendid Grecian portico. It was the property of a Mr Homer, a topographical artist who, in 1821, when the ball and cross of St Paul’s were being repaired, ascended the scaffolding and, as Elmes tells us, drew a panorama of London covering 1680 square feet of paper. Over the next five or six years he and a team of artists painted detailed views from the sketches, and the whole was at last opened to the admiration of the public in 1827, the entrance fee being five shillings. Other attractions were added, and the sum was reduced to a shilling for the panorama and a shilling for the rest of the building. The Colosseum received excellent, if unexpected, advertisement on opening, for Goldsworthy Gurney elected, on December 6, 1827, to drive his steam car, the first vehicle of its kind, up and down Albany Street, in front of the building.

Several large fashion plates, issued by the enterprising firm of B. Read of Bloomsbury in the late 1830s, take the Colosseum as their setting, and it was certainly a fashionable and popular excursion in its early days. Unfortu­nately, Mr Horner’s enterprise did not pay. It closed, was re-opened in 1844, refurbished in 1849, auctioned in 1855 and finally demolished in 1876.

The Diorama was, if possible, even more ingenious. Its façade was designed by Nash, but its interior was the work of Messrs Morgan and Pugin. The Diorama itself was the invention of Bouton and Daguerre. Scenes of Switzerland, of Normandy, of Mount Etna, of Venice and the Rhine were painted on sheets of glass, and given a three-dimensional effect with mirrors and lights. The seated audience were slowly moved round on a hidden turntable and were able to enjoy a spectacle both astonishing and educa­tional. But the Diorama did not pay either for very long, and by 1855 the building was taken over and converted into the Regent’s Park Baptist College.

I would like to end by quoting the remark of a visitor who admired Nash’s architecture. Crabb Robinson, the diarist, driving round Regent’s Park in a gig, said of the scene: ‘I really think this enclosure, with the new street leading to it from Carlton House, will give a sort of glory to the Regent’s Government, which will be more felt by remote posterity than the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo, glorious as they are.’ Succeeding generations have agreed with him.

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Posted By Erik Fleming on October 10, 2012

A little further to the south-west, on Kendall’s farm, was the Queen’s Head and Artichoke public house. People claimed that it had been built by Queen Elizabeth’s gardener—hence the name—although we have no documentary evidence for this. From 1798, Charles Rossi, the sculptor, leased a cottage, an artificial stone manufactory and a stable near the inn, for which he paid the then large rental of £52 10s. Artificial stone was much used for garden ornaments and funeral monuments during the latter half of the 18th century and the early 19th. The most famous artificial stone manufactory was Eleanor Coade’s, and Rossi had worked for her for some time. James Wyatt, the architect, had ‘a small cottage, Carpenter’s Yard, and Workshops, Stable, Yard and Shed Buildings’ among the fields too, and there was a wheelwright’s yard near by, owned by Messrs Chedwick and Bell. In addition to these, there were, around 1800, four masons’ yards and a saw-pit in Portland Row on the New Road.

But the most astonishing building in the Park only lasted for three years. It was the temporary gallery erected in 1803 to house a collection of Old Masters belonging to Count Joseph Truschess, who had brought it with him from Vienna. The problem of transporting the collec­tion to London during the Napoleonic Wars seemed to have been a minor one. A letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1803 recommended that the pictures should be bought to start a National Gallery, but Thomas Smith, the first historian of St Marylebone, recorded gloomily that the paintings proved to be copies.

In 1793, John Fordyce, an able and far­sighted man, was appointed Surveyor-General. Knowing that the leases on Marylebone Park would expire on January 24, 1811, he realized that the possession of so large an estate would give the Crown a wonderful opportunity to beautify the capital and increase its revenues. He had copies of his survey engraved and distributed to architects. A competition, with £1000 as prize, was announced for the best design for laying out the Park as a residential area, with a new road connecting it with the West End of London. Such a commission could make an architect’s name and fortune, but when Fordyce died in 1809 only three plans had been received, and they were all from the same man, John White.

White, knowing the terrain exceedingly well, recommended that the rough circle of the Park should be laid out with a broad drive, and that that should be surrounded on the west, north and east with some sixty-six villas. To the south he described a crescent, in the centre of which a fine parish church was to stand. Avenues were to cross the Park irregularly from north to south. The scheme was not as masterly as that ultimately produced by Nash—the Grand Crescent was not so original as the superb asymmetry of Nash’s Inner and Outer Circles, there was no attempt to link the Park to the rest of London with a new road, nor were there any suggestions for the drainage of the area—but it had style and merit, and would probably have preserved the rural character of the Park, which White had known so long and loved so well.

Entries from a single man do not make a competition, and on October 8, 1810, the archi­tects of the Departments of Land Revenue and Woods were instructed to prepare plans for the development of Marylebone Park. Thomas Leverton and Thomas Chawner represented the Department of Land Revenue; John Nash and James Morgan the Department of Woods.

There was no question as to which was the better design. Leverton and Chawner, influenced in part by the developments in Edinburgh and Bath, proposed that the greater part of the Park should be laid out as a continuation of the Port­land Estate, with streets and squares, that there should be eleven large and some fifty-four small villas to the north, with a church, two markets to the east and west, and a barracks in accordance with the specification. They estimated that, for an expenditure of £8200, the then rental of £5165 could be increased to £23,000 a year. No scale was given with the map; and both it and the report attached were frankly dull.

But Nash’s plan was exciting and original; even the official report which accompanied it was enthusiastic. He wrote:

The principles on which this Report, and the designs accompanying it are formed, and the objects proposed to be obtained, are, that Mary­le-bone Park shall be made to contribute to the healthfulness, beauty, and advantage, of that quarter of the Metropolis; that the Houses and Buildings to be erected shall be of that useful description, and permanent construction, and possess such local advantages, as shall be likely to assure a great augmentation of Revenue to the Crown at the expiration of the Leases; that the attraction of open space, free air, and the scenery of nature, with the means and invitation of exercise on horseback, on foot and in Carriages, shall be preserved or created in Mary-le-bone Park, as allurements or motives for the wealthy part of the Public to establish themselves there; and that the advantages which the circumstances of the situation itself present shall be improved and advanced, and that markets, and conveniences essential to the comforts of Life, shall be placed in situations, and under such circumstances, as may induce Tradesmen to settle there.

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Posted By Erik Fleming on October 4, 2012

IN the north-west of London, below the heights of Hampstead and Highgate, lies an area of land that has always been associated with the Crown and is now known as the Regent’s Park. It is roughly circular, covers 472 acres and is nearly three miles around. It is one of London’s few completely successful pieces of planning, and its beautiful landscape designs of fine terraces and villas reflect the genius of its planner, John Nash.

Several books and many articles have been written about the architecture of the Regent’s Park, and these have often led people to ask, `What was there before Regent’s Park? What was it like before Nash laid it out?’

The area was originally a part of the Manor of Tyburn, recorded in Domesday Book as belong­ing to the Abbess of Barking under the Crown, and called Marylebone Park. Queen Elizabeth entertained a Russian embassy with hunting in it in 1600, and when, in 1611, James I sold the Manor of Tyburn to Edward Forset, he re­tained the Park. The Manor subsequently changed hands, becoming part of first the Holles, then the Portland and finally the Howard de Walden estates; but the Park remained in royal hands. In 1646, Charles I pledged it against his debts to Sir George Strode and John Wanderford, and they succeeded in • regaining it after the Restoration, but not before it had been deparked and turned into farm land during the Commonwealth. As farm land it remained throughout the 18th century.

To the south, London was growing outwards and the Portland and Portman estates were developing rapidly. In 1708 there were open fields here; Rocque’s survey of 1745 shows three sides of Cavendish Square built, and Horwood’s plan of 1794 a built-up area from Oxford Street to the New Road. The New Road—now the Marylebone Road—had been marked out by Act of Parliament in 1757 to run between Paddington and Islington, providing a ring road to divert traffic from crowded Oxford Street and Holborn, and to solve in particular the problem of driving herds of sheep and cattle to Smithfield Market without taking them through the town. It was, in fact, the first by-pass. The New Road marked the boundary of polite society for more than fifty years. Princess Amelia might live in Caven­dish Square, and Mrs Montagu might queen it over other learned ladies at her salon in Portman Square; Sir Richard Kaye, the aristocratic rector of St Marylebone, could venture to live near his church in Devonshire Street, but no-one lived on the far side of the New Road, excepting John White, the Surveyor to the Duke of Portland, who loved the rural atmosphere of the place and built himself a fine square house among the fields on the southern boundary of what was to become Regent’s Park.

Around the turn of the century two plans were made of the area, one by John Fordyce, the Crown Surveyor, in 1794, and the other by John White in 1804; the Duke of Portland controlled over half of the parkland, under lease from the Crown, and so was very interested. The plans  show that, though the Marylebone Turnpike Trust held a couple of acres on the New Road, and there were a few private houses, it was divided chiefly between three farms. The largest of the three was the Mary-le-bone Park Farm, the concern of a Mr Thomas Willan, who had 279 acres. Then there was William Kendall’s farm of 154 acres, and a smaller one of 117 acres belonging in 1794 to Richard Mortimer and in 1804 to Thomas Rhodes. The field names run off the tongue—Long Mead, Rugg Moor, Lodge, Bell and White House Fields, Long Forty Acres and Short Forty Acres, Dupper Field, Nether Paddock and Salt Petre Field. The farms were primarily for dairy cattle, and Willan, Kendall and Mortimer grew their own hay, to judge from water-colours of the period.

On the two larger farms were groups of build­ings, some of them unexpected in character. Thomas Willan lived in a snug brick cottage near the cow-sheds—it was called a cottage, because the Old Farm House was let to a Mr Thomas Ward. It seems possible that he was a relation of James Ward the artist, whose painting of cattle in Marylebone Park, made in 1807, is now in the Tate Gallery. There were eighteen other cottages around these two, chiefly of lath-and-plaster. Several were rented to well-to-do Londoners as week-end cottages, for there was a desire for fresh air and to ‘get away from it all’ even in the 18th century. A Mr Moore had a summer-house with a shed and a garden, and the Revd Dr Fountaine had a cottage and garden. He had been the headmaster of the school in the old Manor House in Marylebone High Street. A Mr Esdaile had a ‘Neat Cottage and Garden, with an Inclosure in front thereof’ for a rent of £28 a year. The owners guarded their privacy jealously. J. T. Smith, in his Book for a Rainy Day, tells us that one old gentleman put up an inscription: ‘Steel traps and spring-guns all over these grounds. N.B. Dogs trespassing will be shot.’

Fifty yards from Willan’s farm was the Jew’s Harp Tavern. It had a long room on the first floor, reached by an external staircase, where dances were given. Outside was a wooden, semi­circular arbour, divided into bays with a painted wooden soldier at the entrance to each, where tea and other refreshments could be taken. The proprietor, advertising in 1785 in the Morning Chronicle, said that he had ‘a stock of the best Wines, Spirituous Liquors, Cyder, Perry, Fine Ales, etc.’ Rose gardens were laid out, and there were skittle alleys. Even the proximity of a small copal varnish factory did not lessen the popu­larity of the Jew’s Harp, which to some extent had replaced Marylebone Gardens, closed in 1778, as a rendezvous.

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