Lakeland and its Poets. Visiting Lodore Falls and the town of Keswick

10.01.202210.01.2022 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

‘How does the water
Come down at Lodore?’
My little boy asked me
Thus, once on a time;
And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.

Robert Southey, The Cataract of Lodore, 1820

Having a genuine interest in English Romantic poetry, one December weekend, I decided to go to the town of Keswick (pronounced as [‘kesik] or [‘kezik]) located in the Lake District, Cumbria. My choice of destination was motivated by the fact that the poets Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey lived there at the beginning of the 19^th century and where their friend William Wordsworth, a famous poet, visited them.

Below, I will reflect on the visual landscape of the area and nature as a public good. Finally, I will consider critically the issue of taste as defined by the Lake Poets[1]. Altogether, this reflection should explain the social, cultural and economic divisions that I found in Keswick and its surroundings.

The visual landscape of Lakeland

The Lake District, also known as the Lakes and Lakeland, is a national park of North West England. I had a chance to see its northern part with the town of Keswick situated along the northeast shore of Derwentwater lake and surrounded by picturesque hills and mountains, scary caves and magnificent waterfalls.

Alfred Wainwright, a British cartographer and illustrator, dedicated 13 years of his life to exploring the landscape of the area and created seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells published between 1955 and 1966. Through fine detailing, Wainwright’s illustrations and maps depict not only the fells and paths of Lakeland but also the enigma of nature and its magnetism.

The cover of Volume One of Lakeland Mountain Drawings by Alfred Wainwright

My perception of Lakeland was conditioned by the fact that it was my first visit to that area. I was impressed by the beauty of unusual colours of nature which I have not seen anywhere in the UK. The mountains of orange, green and brown with white snowcaps; the azure sky with lenticular clouds of white and grey shades reflecting in the surface of Derwentwater; black-and-white sheep feeding in the green meadows; trees and shrubs of marsh, sand and black; and pearl-white waterfalls altogether made up the palette of Lakeland in winter.

Continue reading “Lakeland and its Poets. Visiting Lodore Falls and the town of Keswick” →

Stick out your tongue at your mother tongue. Or how I visited Shakespeare’s town Stratford-upon-Avon

14.12.202114.12.2021 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

One December weekend before Christmas, I decided to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, the hometown of English poet and writer William Shakespeare. I went there with the Manchester International Society organising cultural events and bus trips across the UK for students and members of the university community.

Whilst the bus was carrying us from Northern England to Midlands, I had a very nice chat with a female master student from China who came to Manchester to study intercultural communication. We shared a common interest in Lake poetry and experienced similar problems of using English English, as far as we were native speakers of Russian and Chinese languages.

For the first time, I leant that British English should be called English English from my main supervisor who explained to me how to use it in my thesis properly. Not ‘practice’ but ‘practise’, not ‘garbage’ but ‘rubbish’, not ‘while’ but ‘whilst’, etc.

My acquaintance, a master student, told me that there was a hierarchy of English languages. For example, British English and American English take higher positions within the hierarchy of languages compared to Australian and Canadian variants, whilst Asian and Chinese English-es take the lowest positions because of the sounds and pronunciations that are typical for those groups of languages.

Meanwhile, our bus reached the green fields of Warwickshire and I saw a couple of road signs reading ‘Shakespeare’s town’ and ‘London’. Once the bus dropped us off in Stratford-upon-Avon, we noticed that the car parking was very busy. Crowds of people, including us, were going towards the Victorian Christmas Fayre taking place in the town centre.

The Fayre stalls located along the main streets near the river Avon were full of Christmas gifts, decorations, hand-crafted goods, candles and illuminations. The smell of fried potatoes, mulled wine and other tasty food mixed with the Christmas spirit was in the air. People were waiting in queues to grab something to eat or drink.

And Shakespeare as a linguistic sign looked at the crowded street from different corners and through the windows of pubs, shops and half-timbered houses. One could see his images on hotel signs, hoodies, mugs, copybooks and souvenirs. We followed Henley Street and came across William Shakespeare’s statue that was surrounded by people visiting the Christmas Fayre.

Continue reading “Stick out your tongue at your mother tongue. Or how I visited Shakespeare’s town Stratford-upon-Avon” →

Welsh sketches. From Aberystwyth with love

26.11.202130.11.2021 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

Aberystwyth is a coastal university town in Ceredigion county of West Wales. If you decide to go there, please do not forget to bring a bit of cultural curiosity and a sense of humour with you. Be ready to meet nice locals there: witches, ghosts, deities, fiends, druids and courageous detectives investigating mysterious crimes. Louie Knight is one of them. He is the best private detective in the town and the main character of the Aberystwyth noir novels by British writer Malcolm Pryce.

In the fifth book of the series, Louie deals with the long-time disappearance of Ninochka, a daughter of Uncle Vanya, a Soviet museum worker from Ukrainian Hughesovka where Ninochka was possessed by the spirit of a dead Welsh girl named Gethsemane Walters. Uncle Vanya, or the man who introduced himself in that way, came to Aberystwyth to ask Louis and his business partner Calamity for help in search of Ninochka. As a fee, uncle Vanya suggested a very valuable sock worn by Yuri Gagarin during his first flight into space.

‘What a story!’ you may say. And you will be right. The Aberystwyth noir novels nicely convey the atmosphere of the town. They can be a good start for learning about its weather, places and legends.

Once you are in the town, go to the Pier from where a beautiful view of the promenade and the Constitution Hill is revealed. The sounds of the blowing wind and crashing waves may combine with the songs of starlings and cries of seagulls there. In evenings, if the weather is clear, wonderful sunsets can be seen from the seafront.

In late November, when I happened to be in Aberystwyth, the weather was mild and changeable. Sometimes it was sunny, sometimes rainy, sometimes cloudy, sometimes windy, but always welcoming.

Rain or shine, people walk along the Prom edged by colourful buildings of the student dorms, hotels, pubs, cafés and small workshops. Once you get to the northern end of the Prom, kick the bar. ‘Kick the Bar’ is a local ritual of kicking the railings performed by students to attract love. However, nowadays not only students but also town dwellers of different ages kick the bar as tradition says.

From the northern end of the Prom, you can easily get to the top of the Constitution Hill either by following a winding path surrounded by small shrubs or by using the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway. Students enjoy going up Consti, as they call the Hill lovingly, and observing picturesque sunsets in evenings and looking at stars shining at nights from the top. One sunny morning after the rain, I was enjoying coffee with the fresh air and the gorgeous view of the bay in the Consti café on the top of the hill. Time stopped and it was nice just to live the moment.

Continue reading “Welsh sketches. From Aberystwyth with love” →

An imaginative journey in the pandemic world

25.11.202125.11.2021 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

I wrote this poem during the third lockdown in the UK. It reflects my experience of staying in one place and not crossing borders between countries for more than a year. The poem has no rhymes but who cares about rhymes nowadays. 
 
An imaginative journey in the pandemic world

I am on my way to St. Michael’s Mount
The train is moving from the North to the South of England
I see green fields and fast-flowing hill streams
But then I cross the English Channel 
(or la Manche as they call it in France)
And I am thinking about people who cross it 
Day by day risking their lives
And where am I going?
To St. Michael’s Mount 
(or le Mont-Saint-Michel as they call it in France)
That welcomes pilgrims with the rise and fall of tides.

Alexandrina Vanke
18th March 2021

Todmorden. A town with a scary name and social hierarchy

11.07.201912.06.2020 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ 3 Comments

Every year after passing our annual reviews, my University friends and I go on a trip to a town with a scary name of Todmorden. Todmorden is located in Northern England on the boundary between Yorkshire and Lancashire. If you split this name into two words, you will get ‘tod’ evoking associations with a German word ‘Tod’ meaning ‘death’ and ‘mor’ resembling a French word ‘mort’, which also means ‘death’. In other words, or playing with words you may easily get something like ‘deadly death’ or ‘death-death-something’. These associations make an aura of the place:D

Todmorden is full of legends about the origin of its name. One of the stories goes back to the 15^th century and tells of the Wars of the Roses. Without going into detail, I just say that bloody conflicts occurred between two rival groups of the English elite belonging to the dynasty of Plantagenet, the branch of Lancaster, having a red rose as its symbol, and the branch of York with a symbol of a white rose.

The Monument of the Roses, June 2018 © Photo by A. Vanke

Centuries passed, and today local cricket clubs use red and white roses as their emblems rivaling on the cricket pitch only. Now only the monument under the railway arc resembles the Wars of the Roses. However, there are no inscriptions on stone. It is quite hard to understand, whether stone roses refer to the past wars or the present sports competitions. I am guessing to both of them;)

The town and surroundings of Todmorden are also noteworthy by its industrial past and its farming present. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, this area was considered to be working-class because its residents mainly were employed in heavy industry and cotton mills located in the same place. However, after the 1970s most of the industry was dismissed that changed the local economy and life of the working-class community.

Now Todmorden is gentrified and has a mixed social composition. People belonging to different social classes live there. What is remarkable that this social hierarchy is visible in the landscape of the town and its surroundings. With friends, we enjoy walking in the countryside and hiking in the hills around Todmorden. Whenever we go up to the hills, I have a feeling that we move from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy. If you have not stopped reading yet, I invite you to climb the hills together and see what can be found on the way.

At the bottom

In the valley, one can see a six-storey building of the Robinwood mill. This cotton mill was constructed at the beginning of the 19^th century. Its owners also built around some housing blocks for workers and more beautiful villas for managers. The mill building looks brutal and stable. It was made of stone bricks and reconstructed several times. The front of the building has some traces of a fire. Locals say that somebody set fire to the mill to make money, and now some parts of the building are for sale.

The Robinwood mill, July 2019 © Photo by A. Vanke

And what’s about housing? In the valley, one can find old well-built houses where mainly pensioners live and some social housing blocks for workers. Houses for pensioners (some of them belong to a local working-class community) are of low height with solid walls of stone brick, nice chimneys, double-glazed windows, through which one can see pot plants and house cats. There are small gardens with rosebushes in front of these houses. Sometimes the residents hang laundry outside.

Housing in the valley, June 2018 © Photo by A. Vanke

Relatively ‘new’ social housing resembles by its architecture typical council estates in England. It is two-storey housing blocks with flat and gable roofs, simple facades, and windows of different sizes. If you have a look at a window, you may see lace curtains and fresh flowers in vintage vases. Some residents put English cross flags on their windows with expressing their national identity and white-and-blue flags, which meaning I could hardly ever get. Life of people living in the valley seems to be hard.

Social housing at the bottom of the hill, July 2019 © Photo by A. Vanke

In the middle

Having looked around in the valley, we are going up to the hill. Several routes are leading to the top. Every time we explore a new route that allows us to know the local area better. The middle of the hill has picturesque views of the town with the cotton mill and small houses scattered in the valley. There are more trees and shadows here. At some point, you may realize that you are in the middle of nowhere. But soon you understand that the local middle class occupies this place on the hill.

Houses in the middle of the hill, July 2019 © Photo by A. Vanke

This awareness comes, when you see another type of housing and small shiny cars of bright colours, red, yellow, white driving up and down the hill. I would say that houses in the middle are more diverse in design and style, but all of them have something in common. For example, middle-class houses are normally bigger than those we saw at the bottom. They may have more spacious yards and nicer gardens. If you come across local farms you will see that farmers usually have a piece of land near their houses.

This land needs to be cultivated by tractors. And we met one friendly tractor driver cultivating lands of different farmers. According to locals, the life of farmers is far from easy today. They produce meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and other foodstuffs, and sell them in the town market. While we were wandering around the farms, we met nice animals:) smiling horses, sleepy cows, lazy sheep, curious ostriches, beautiful deer, cute ponies, and funny buffalos. From the middle of the hill, life seems to be pastoral but still hardworking.

On the top

We keep on moving to the top. And what we find there? From the top of the hill, you will see picturesque panoramic views of the countryside with its beautiful fields, farms, other hills, and windmills. If you look more carefully you can notice villas hidden in the foliage of old trees. The villas are often surrounded by fences and sometimes by the barbed wire. Yes, exactly like this *Х*Х*Х* That’s why it is quite problematic to understand what is happening there because villas are hidden from the public eye in contrast to the houses in the middle and at the bottom of the hill. However, you will feel the atmosphere at the top of the local social hierarchy.

Villas on the top looks spacious and beautiful. Some of them resemble small castles surrounded by the piece of land which is not cultivated but used for the golf course or gardens. Some villas’ owners have greenhouses in their territories and decorate their yards with elegance and style. While we were going down, in one villa, I noticed a straw hat accurately laying on the garden armchair. In another one, a bonsai garden with accurately cut evergreens drew my attention. The people from the top of the hill drive Range Rover cars and keep dogs barking at passers-by.

I was thinking that life on the top might be aisé. However, barking dogs, fences and barbed wires were telling us that life was not easy there too.

Going down to earth

Our way back was much easier than to the top. When you are coming back you can see all types of houses in the distance. At that moment you may realize that social hierarchy exists and it is visible in the landscape. We were going down, down and down to earth, and finished our trip in the Golden Lion pub, a very popular local spot.

Тампере. Уютный город с индустриальной культурой

05.12.201605.12.2016 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

В первые дни декабря мне довелось побывать в уютном финском городе – бывшем промышленном центре Финляндии, известном сегодня как центр новых технологий, образования и науки. В Тампере я приехала на несколько дней для того, чтобы принять участие в семинаре “Маскулинности на границах”, который предполагал дискуссию по вопросам мужественности между финскими и российскими исследователями, художниками и активистами. Наш междисциплинарный семинар проходил в двух местах, в Музее индустриальной культуры Верстас и Музее Ленина, что повлияло на мое восприятие города.

Многослойный контекст пребывания в Тампере заставил задуматься о том, что может превратить промышленный город в удобное место для жизни и отдыха.

Картонажная фабрика Тако. Фото Александрины Ваньке

Первое, что поражает, когда добираешься пешком за десять минут от вокзала до центра, – это то, что самая современная гостиница Sokos, в фойе которой постоянно толпятся туристы, расположена вблизи фабрики по производству картона. Из большого окна номера открывается вид на чудесный пруд и заводскую трубу, выпускающую клубы дыма. Здесь же около гостиницы находятся магазины, ночные клубы, бары, кафе и ресторанчики с вкусной едой и недорогими (по европейским меркам) ценами. С ними соседствуют бывшие фабричные здания, помещения которых сейчас заняты парикмахерскими, офисами и художественными мастерскими. Но это далеко не все! В этом же пространстве вы найдете пристань с красивыми маленькими яхтами, палубы которых присыпаны белым снежком.

Вид на реку Таммеркоски. Фото Александрины Ваньке

Обилие такого количества разнородных объектов инфраструктуры в одном месте удивительным образом создает в Тампере комфортную городскую среду, что приводит в восторг туристов.

Стоит пройти немного наверх от пристани и пространство поменяет свою конфигурацию. По мере удаления от центра улицы расширяются и образуют прямые линии, а в жилых кварталах дома новой постройки перемежаются со зданиями бывших ткацких фабрик, построенных в XIX веке из красного кирпича. В последних сегодня размещаются салоны красоты и студии дизайна. И если оказаться на одной из таких линий, например, на улице Papinkatu, то в одном ее конце можно увидеть церковь, а в другом – парк и бухту. Удивительно, как отдыхают глаза, когда смотришь на водную гладь и тонкие льдинки. И в этом почти безлюдном месте может произойти нечто неожиданное. Например, можно встретить красивого финского зайца, который любезно согласится попозировать на камеру.

Финский заяц на фоне бывшей ткацкой фабрики. Фото Александрины Ваньке

Южный парк и бухта Вииниканлахти. Фото Александрины Ваньке

Сбалансированная экосистема и здоровая природная среда, по отношению к которой местные жители проявляют заботу, добавляет гармонии спокойному ритму жизни Тампере.

Вместе с тем, живая интеллектуальная среда с прогрессивными идеями в области социальных наук оставляет ощущение открытости и создает свободное пространство для кросс-культурных обменов и множественных интерпретаций. Невероятная атмосфера Тампере, задаваемая структурой урбанистического пространства, помогла, на мой взгляд, и участникам семинара “Маскулинности на границах” найти точки соприкосновения и осознать важность трансграничного диалога. Ведь осмысляя другого по ту сторону границы, мы лучше узнаем себя.