Crossrail Don’t Just Dig Tunnels
This report on the BBC, gives the latest progress on the archaeology program, that runs alongside Crossrail. Similar reports have also turned up all over the world including this one from India. So perhaps Crossrail is showing the world how to dig in more ways than one!
You have to congratulate Crossrail on their attitude to the past, which seems to be much better than other projects.
I suppose you could also be cynical, and say that they see the public relations as beneficial to getting the project done on time, as it minimises objections.
But who cares, if the project comes in on or under budget? Everybody!
It Was A Good Day Out!
In my view, Liverpool is always one of the best days out in the UK. It is an easy train journey from London. I went First Class, but a ticket in Standard costs fifty one pounds with Virgin Trains, if you book a few days before.
The three exhibitions; St. George’s Hall, Tom Murphy and the Chagall cost me four pounds for entry in total (I’m a Member at the Tate in London) and my only other expenses were lunch at Carluccio’s and a sandwich and a drink for the journey home in Marks and Spencer.
The walking was easy, as it’s gently downhill from the station and St. George’s Hall to the Pier Head, the Ferries and the museums there.
Even walking back up isn’t a steep climb, but it is totally pedestrianised and if you know Liverpool like I do, you can even cross into the station by a subway and an escalator. Or should I say, you normally can, but at present the underground part of Lime Street station is being refurbished. This refurbishment will also mean you can get the train back to the main station using James Street station at the Pier Head.
If you want to visit the cathedrals and the University, there is a bus at the Pier Head, which takes you right up the hill. So it’s then an easy walk downhill back to the station.
If ever a city, was laid out for visitors, it is Liverpool. It’s also difficult to get lost as generally from most of the city centre, you can see the cathedrals and/or the Liver Building.
There are lots of finger posts, but a few maps and better information on the buses would be a great help for visitors.
Chagall At The Tate Liverpool
I’d gone to the Tate Liverpool to see the Chagall exhibition.
Chagall At The Tate Liverpool
I found it very enlightening and it showed me how little I know about art and especially artists like Marc Chagall. But don’t take my word for it, that it is good, read this report from the Telegraph. It starts like this.
Forty years ago, Marc Chagall was one of the uncontested masters of modern art. Living out his old age on the Cote d’Azur, immersed in his magic-realist memories of the old Russian-Jewish world, Chagall seemed fully the equal – well, almost the equal – of his sometime Riviera neighbours Picasso and Matisse.
Since then his critical stock has inexorably declined. He’s come to be seen as a whimsical fellow-traveller of Modernism who produced an overabundance of self-consciously poetic and rather sugary images. His trademark flying postmen, mooning lovers and bearded violinists have come to seem questionable in their sincerity, never mind their artistic quality.
This exhibition, the largest Chagall show in Britain for 15 years, gives us the chance to look again at this long derided figure and decide whether he should be reinstated as a major 20th- century figure or left quietly in his corner.
I think that it is definitely a must-see exhibition and unless you saw it in Zurich earlier, you’ll have to travel to Liverpool. Someone said to me, that they’ll catch the exhibition when it comes to London. It won’t and it’ll probably be many years before an exhibition of this scope is mounted again.
So go and decide, where you think Chagall should be placed in the history of art. i liked the exhibition a lot, and his work to me, is almost a progression of the various styles of art through the twentieth century. Just like any great artist, Chagall seemed to be a complex person, who the more you look at his work, the more you see in it.
The Anonymous Widower 