Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 219

The Weird Behaviour Of Book Lovers

Intestinal Parasites Volume Two –British Boundary Lines; 1066-1700 –A Guide To The Cumberland Pencil Museum –Greek Rural Postmen And Their Cancellation Numbers –The Pictorial Dictionary Of Barbed Wire These are some of the volumes to be found in Arthur Bryant’s library; I mention a few titles in every book, and most of them are based […]

Severing The Links With London’s Past

London grows, and in doing so it sheds the past. The fabric of much that made the city special to Londoners is unravelling. Here’s another small example. The city’s drag & cabaret pubs can trace their origins back to the old music halls. They hide in plain sight in high streets around the city – […]

The Mother Of All Stage Mothers

In 1957 a woman wrote a memoir biting the hand that fed her. She was Rose Louise Hovick, born in Seattle, and her thrice-married mother Rose changed Louise and her sister June’s birth certificates to avoid child labour laws before dragging them off around the country with an army of virtually kidnapped children to […]

The Theme Tune To ‘Bryant & May: The Series’

No, there’s not a series yet – although the option has been picked up by a TV production company – but in the meantime a very nice chap called Des Burkinshaw has written the theme tune for a Bryant & May TV series. I was just in the middle of writing a piece about theme […]

A Puzzle From Bryant & May

Sometimes I hide things in books (I don’t mean as my mother did, once using a haddock bone as a bookmark). I do this largely for my own amusement (it turns out), and in ‘The Burning Man’ I did something I’ve never done before – I added an homage. I thought it was pretty obvious, […]

The London Engine

I don’t sleep late in London – I’m rarely still in bed after 5:30am, but sometimes I seem to hear it starting up like a distant car engine. King’s Cross is surprisingly quiet. In the summer all you really hear first thing in the morning is the sound of the river birds below. But then […]

Making Money From The Arts

In today’s Guardian Suzanne Moore points out that the role of an arts college has been quietly changing behind our backs. 80 students have been occupying Central Saint Martin’s, which is planning to ditch 580 foundation course places. These are the one-year courses which are all that now remain of the free art school […]

When Big Architects Get Big Ideas

I’ve always disliked Richard Rogers (not the composer, the architect). Although I know the purpose is for their interiors to be sightline-free, I still think Paris’s garish Pompidou Centre is an eyesore, and I hate London’s gasworks-like Lloyds building. Both have exteriors that look like Ferraris made for the Middle Eastern market have been carelessly […]

Spent: Viv Nicholson Passes Into Mythology

The people who make it into modern mythology aren’t always heroines or heroes; particular;y here in the UK we often remember them because they tried and failed. One thinks of our love of explorers like Scott of the Antarctic or Earnest Shackleton and the Endurance, or even Eddie the Eagle, the hopeless Olympic skier. Add […]

White Snow, Black Comedy

What is it that makes snow-set films so appealing? The whited-out spaces that give images a purity of design? The emptiness that conjures the spirit of old westerns? The cinematography that puts figures in vast landscapes? ‘Prize Idiot’ probably wasn’t the best title for a movie, so this new Scandi-noir starring Stellan Skarsgard has been […]