Tag: Swansea Museum
Swansea’s golden age of innovation
After five years of labour our baby was born last week. It weighed in at a whopping 1.88 kilograms and almost 600 pages. Its many parents are rightly proud of it. You’ll have guessed by now that it’s a big book. Entitled Swansea’s Royal Institution and Wales’s first museum, it will stand for many years […]
Return the Red Lady
Languish is the right word. In a corner of a remote museum there languish some ancient human bones. They were discovered by William Buckland in 1823 in Paviland, or Goat’s Hole, one of the many caves that punctuate the limestone cliffs on the south coast of Gower. The bones belonged to the person who became […]
Ruin’d universes: the paintings of George Little
Long before all-year sea bathing became de rigueur with the middle classes of Mumbles, if you were up early enough, on any day of the week and at any time of the year, you’d be able to spot two figures in the waves on Caswell Bay. One of them was George Little. Born in 1927 […]
The destruction of culture: a plea to Swansea Council
What makes a city a city? I mean, in the sense of a particular, distinctive city. Its people, certainly, its geography, landscape and architecture, also its economy and politics. But what really sets a city apart from its neighbours is its culture – that network of traditions, customs, institutions and habits, most of them with […]