Moving Patterns

The show at the Royal Geographical Soety in London is over. It’s time to reflect on the experience. What has emerged?

While working on the project I tried to keep three questions in mind. I’d amassed a magpie hoard of photos from my Indian journey in 2008 and my visits to my research sites (Green Street, Newham, and the South Asian Collection and archive at the V&A in 2008 and 2009). First, what kind of material had I gathered? – what did it utter?

What it seemed to yield was most obviously, its colour; then its plenitude and variety. The images were each vivid in themselves. Seen together, they seethed with narratives of place. From spending time with such a mass of images, came a realisation of the mobility of the ornament and how much it contributes to our sense of place. So the transient, shifting, cosmopolitan nature of Green Street became ever more apparent. People and their cultures migrate and traditions of ornament travel endlessly with them. On Green Street, a wide variety of ornament unselfconsciously coexists. And this made me think about what is implied in the word ‘cosmopolitan’: what makes a city truly cosmopolitan is not just its variety of ethnicities but its giving space to multiple ways of seeing.

So,what kind of experience did I want viewers of the ‘Moving Patterns’ exhibition to receive? On the answer to this question depended another: what structures might I use to allow the material to speak? In the end I made an installation which would offer opportunities to look and to receive in different ways; there were items which surrounded the viewer, items to look at or to look into.

The part of the installation which evoked the world of contemporary production and consumption (rafts of pallets bearing the fragile containers of consumption, ornamented carrier bags), was to lead the viewer to a ‘mini museum’, a display itself concerning museum display, seeking to make visible the always - present connections between commerce and the activity of collecting. But above all, the exhibition had to enact the ‘cosmopolitan’, and this meant that the work of the contributing artists was key. There had to be a space for different approaches, for various ways of seeing. I wanted the presence of different artists to decentre all the work, including my own. The carrier bags in these images are by artists Samar Abbas, Nilesh Mistry, Sumi Perera and Helen Scalway.

Although my final image is one which I drew myself, it seeks to evoke a sense of a decentred, shifting space with no one centre, but with many.

More images from the ‘Moving Patterns’ exhibition will be uploaded to the ‘Fashioning Diaspora Space’ site on the V&A’s website later this year. Thank you for following this blog, and my special thanks to all those readers who have contributed some fascinating comments.

At one end of the Pavilion exhibition space of the Royal Geographical Society, I created a mini-museum based on experiences of looking into the South Asian Textile Collection at the V&A: a small display which explored the activities of collection and display in the colonial nineteenth century. As an installation it faced the pallets and carrier bags (see the May post for images) which I had used to evoke the contemporary passage of goods across the continents from South Asia to British retail outlets. In this ‘facing’, I wanted to suggest that the colonial past and post-colonial present hold each other in inescapable relationship and to make visible the centuries-old entanglements of British and South Asian cultures of ornament.

Mini-museum made for the exhibition ‘Moving Patterns’, at the Royal Geographical Society, May 2009.

This is a crest I created for a show in London’s Royal Geographical Society. The helmet is derived from the V&A’s royal crest and the flowers are from embroideries on display in the museum’s Nehru Gallery. The museum has always been an open and sharing institution but it is interesting that the helmet, on a royal crest from another era, suggests the opposite: power sustained by a heavy defendedness, limiting vision. The back of the crest includes a photo of a memorial in a church in Mumbai, to a British soldier who died in India in the 1840s, with samples of South Asian textiles reproduced from the textile archive at the V&A.

The Victorians collected plants, butterflies, and ornament - for example, see Owen Jones’s iconic collection, The Grammar of Ornament. The work here, based on a nineteenth century botanical illustration of an Indian waterlily or ‘lotus’, combined with a South Asian textile in the archive at the V&A, was created to suggest the links between these different kinds of collection.

But the links can become unruly; ornament, like plant life, has an independence which refuses to be pinned down in a box

In these images, the butterflies have been pinned down in a new habitat: they appear against the spinning machinery of a nineteenth century textile mill. In the nineteenth century, as sometimes now, collecting and possessing on a vast scale was often connected with a quest for knowledge leading to power and wealth, and the possession of knowledge went with wealth-creation. These images place a butterfly collection, based on South Asian textiles, in a new habitat: among the spinning machines in a nineteenth century Lancashire cotton mill, a place where fortunes might be lost but also made.

Prince Albert was a driving force behind the creation of the South Kensington Museum, today known as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Royal crests are to be found both inside and outside the museum building. But the wealth of Britain in the nineteenth century was hugely enhanced by its colonies. The royal crest, the might it conveys, was backed by the treasures of the colonies, including the textile treasures of India. The thought inspired me to create an artists book. In this image, heraldic British lion cut-outs derived from decorative floor tiles inside the V&A Museum, frame samples from the V&A’s South Asian textile collection.

Here are some more images from the book, entitled ‘Some of Albert’s beasts

This image, a 3-d collage in an ‘archive box’, came about as a result of thinking about the ‘knowledge’ which a museum may contain and foster, and the ‘understanding’ sought by an artist. It gives a glimpse into my studio during an earlier residency to explore this project at Wimbledon College of Art. The studio photo is framed by the great ceramic staircase at the V&A. In my mind as I made this piece was the question: How do the understandings generated in the artists studio, relate to the knowledges generated by the museum, and vice versa? And how does their origin within institutions affect the form they take?

The image of my studio appears in an earlier blogpost. The many photos on the walls were taken in India, in Green Street, E7, where there are many South Asian textile shops, and in the South Asian textile collection at the V&A.

Below are some more such 3-d ‘dioramas’, all scenes from the museum and its South Asian textiles, playing on such nineteenth century modes of display and entertainment as dioramas and paper theatres (eg ‘Pollock’ theatres).

An ‘archive box’ in which a photo of the patterning created by the highly rational, functional drawers in the textile store at the V&A is reframed by a sample of their contents, in this case a nineteenth century Indian beetlewing garment border embroidered on net, whose pattern speaks of a quite different notion of what ‘function’ in a garment might entail.

This ‘archive box’ fails to contain its 3-d collage. A photo of the nineteenth century ceramic staircase at the V&A is interlaced with an embroidered flower photographed in the museum’s Nehru Gallery of South Asian design, combining in an interplay of different kinds of power and energy.

The question here is what frames what? An ‘archive box’ in which a photo of the National Art Library at the V&A, (which might be seen as ‘framing’ knowledge), is itself framed and animated by the energy of a giant flower from a textile in its South Asian Collection, which bursts the box.

The exhibition was open in May 2009 and is now closed. In my next post, which will be my last on this project, I will be reflecting on the whole experience. Eventually many images from the exhibition will appear on the V&A’s online site for the ‘Fashioning Diaspora Space’ project.

The themes of this exhibition concern the mobility of ornament between Britain and South Asia in both colonial and post colonial times in Britain. To convey some of this, the exhibition exploits ideas of framing. Frames isolate the thing framed, and speak of its status. Even buildings can act as ‘frames’ for the work or people or things within. In an earlier post I discussed this in relation to the Royal Geographical Society and its ‘framed’ location near the Albert Hall, Albert Memorial, the great museums - Prince Albert’s knowledge-base.

This exhibition sets out to question, through the use of collage and juxtaposition, the effect of such authoritative framing. Houses, shops and museums might conventionally be considered to be structures which ‘frame’ their contents - but they would not exist without their contents, which surge through them, a moving, vital, escaping flow. Perhaps it is in the nature of frames to be contested. In this example from the ‘Moving Patterns’ exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society, a traditional nineteenth century British house acts as a frame for the lives of its twenty-first century inhabitants of South Asian origin; but a small row of photographs of such houses are in turn framed in medallion shapes derived from an Asian rug: making this work, I realised that where one locates any frame depends on one’s point of view. The pillars in RGS Pavilion, on which the images are fixed, offer yet another layer of framing, as does the greenery of Exhibition Road, SW7, beyond, to the RGS itself.

The exhibition also places unlike things in close proximity. For example, there are groups of carrier bags (used in the show because they are so suggestive of shops, purchases, consumption), placed on the wooden pallets which speak of the transportation of goods across the world. The bags, decorated by very different artists, do not form a homogeneous group; but in their very contrasts they do speak to each other. During the course of the show, the pallets on which they stand have come to seem to me to be like rafts on which very different kinds of things co-exist, not melding with each other but not denying each other either: rather, quietly sharing the space. (The bags on this pallet are by Sumi Perera, Samar Abbas and Helen Scalway).

At the far end of the gallery at the Royal Geographical Society, the installation changes to suggest a miniature museum; but more of that in my next post. The work below was contributed by guest artists Anjana Patel, Nilesh Mistry, Samar Abbas, Sumi Perera, Nagat El-Mahi, Jagmohan Bangani and Punam Sharma. Anjana Patel exploited multiple layers of cutting to create a bag on the theme of the veiled bride, the veiled space.

Anjana Patel 2009, Bridal carrier bag: front, back, and interior detail:

Nilesh Mistry worked on the theme ‘India Loves Gold’.
Nilesh 2008: Golden Trainer’ bag, front and back, and ‘Mobile Tartan’ bag:

Sumi Perera used laser cutting techniques for her bags . The cut-out pieces form a suggestion of continents as themselves light and mobile. Sumi Perera, 2009, ‘Journeys’ carrier bag, ‘Continent Confetti’ and Luggage labels:

Samar Abbas is a product designer who presented his edgy work in the form of canvas printed bags. Samar Abbas, 2008, Designs for carrier bags. ‘Circling Coppers’:

The remaining images come from artists who submitted works on paper to the exhibition. Here are some of Nagat El-Mahi’s designs for a Sudanese sari, a ‘toab’. Nagat has moved in the last few years to London from Sudan and her work incorporates suggestions of the wavy lines of the Swiss Re ‘Gherkin’ in London, the cobra, and dome-forms which are common to both church and mosque architecture; the colouring is traditional to the Sudanese toab. These designs were originally produced for ‘The British Sari Story’ run by the arts consultancy, Bridging Arts www.bridging-arts.com but are included here as being of great interest in this context also.

Nagat El-Mahi, 2007, ‘Designs for a British Sari’ Another artist, Punam Sharma, contributed works evoking the elusiveness of her memories of home when she was far away in the UK, using thin layers of paper pulp - interesting in the light of India’s long paper recycling tradition: Punam Sharma, 2008, ‘Memories’

Jagmohan Bangani saiys that his work was inspired by his memories of his distant village and that he has chanted the mantras which were an every day part of his village life on to his canvas ‘with the help of my brushes and my colours’. Jagmohan Bangani, 2008 ‘Memories’:

Moving Patterns is my drawing installation, at the Royal Geographical Society showing from May 7th-May 21st . It bears witness to the way in which pattern and ornament are laden with meaning and memory in both colonial and post-colonial times and is part of the Fashioning Diaspora Space project with the Victoria & Albert Museum, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

With a focus on ornament, I explore the processes of material cultural exchange between Britain and South Asia in a visual re-imagining of the relations between place, identity and national cultures, featuring guest artists Nilesh Mistry, Samar Abbas, Sumi Perera, Anjana Patel, Nagat El-Mahi, Jagmohan Bangani and Punam Sharma.

My work is primarily concerned with research into the visual representation of the experience of the contemporary cosmopolitan city. I focus is on urban pattern and ornament which codes places and things, fills them with meaning, suffuses them with memory, and badges identities.

Between Britain and South Asia in particular, textile patterns have shuttled back and forth; this exhibition explores this entanglement of cultures and the way it is shaping our urban environment. The installation seeks to enact the re-framings and recontextualisations of identities in the cosmopolitan city, in evoking such sites as the street, the shop, the museum, and the way mobile, mutable pattern flows between them in a process of endless becoming, like cities themselves.

I was looking for communicable structures through which to convey the shifting plenitude of the material and decided to explore the notions of ‘shop’ and ‘museum’, echoing my research sites, the contemporary textile shops in Green Street, Newham, and the South Asian textile collection at the V&A. This chart was made as a result of my many visits to South Asian textile shops and conversations with proprietors, employees and customers. It’s an attempt to reveal more about the dynamics of the South Asian shop: not just the business dynamics but the imaginative (social, psychological) ones as well.

It contrasts with another chart’, this time a take on the South Asian textile archive at the V&A. So many items in the collection, so many labels, places, times, purchases… the V&A, I decided, is metaphorically speaking, the National Storage Cupboard of Design and like all the best cupboards (such as C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe which magically leads into Narnia), it has no end; once inside you are in a network of connections which lead everywhere. This is what this crammed, untidy drawing tries to explore.

In an earlier post I mentioned the way the museum acts as a huge frame for its contents, directing our looking in certain ways. The great building itself speaks of its origin at the height of the British Empire, ornamented as it is with various heraldic beasts such as lions and unicorns. I looked at these outside the building and then found more examples inside on some tile work. By placing various fabric samples from the South Asian textile collection within frames derived from these heraldic beasts, I hoped to disturb the animals somewhat, to make a way of seeing anew these familiar hierarchical creatures. This phase of work turned into another small collection entitled ‘Some of Albert’s Beasts.’

A famous archive of pattern is the ‘Grammar of Ornament’ by the nineteenth century architectural historian Owen Jones, who had a great deal to do with the ‘Indian’ collections in the then South Kensington Museum. The ‘Grammar’ is a wonderful collection but it is noticeable that the pattern samples are given in isolation from their original contexts so as to create a certain sense of order. I wanted to question this apparently static order and to this end have shredded some of the pages in my copy (only colour photocopies, actually - I can’t be destroying books) in order to return Jones’s careful, tight arrangements to a state in which the possibility of any number of other orderings might become visible.

The time for the exhibition, for displaying the visual outcomes of this project, is rapidly drawing closer. It opens at the Royal Geographical Society on May 7th and before it does I hope to show on this site, some further ideas on collecting and the ‘framing’ of collections.

I was back in Wimbledon College of Art, in The Drawing Centre Project Space, for a second phase of the residency. The residency was immensely helpful, for it kept posing the question: what are the key aspects of my experiences in this project?

I kept returning to the jostle of different worlds in close proximity in the city, the mutual encounter of different ways of seeing the world: the sheer quantity and uncontrollability of stuff, of goods, amongst which places and distances fold and tangle. Slowly I realised that this was my response: the point for me would lie in some expression of this jostling, these encounters, the quantity, fluidity, uncontrollability of the connections.

But where to start? Was it to be with the museum or the shopping street? Both were riveting to me but, ever an enticed shop-window gazer, I decided to start with the street.

By now I’d paced Green Street and its surrounding roads many times. Streets, houses, shops: textiles, the factories and workshops where they had been made, carrier bags,– it seems like a vast mosaic, and one in constant motion, shifting with seasons, people, the flow of traffic, goods, will and desire: a gigantic collage which my feet ached with walking.

And collage is what I turned to at this stage: the cut and paste technique in which different images from different sources are placed together in juxtaposition. At this stage I needed a method which itself would express the meaning of the work which I hoped to make: an evocation, however slight, of this city of different worlds touching.

                  

It was all experiment at this stage, trying one thing against another until the elements seemed to resonate with and against each other. All the images in this post are photos of my sketchy try-outs which is why they seem unfinished - because they are. The trial-and-error method seemed to chime with the try-it-and-see of drawing practice: make a mark – does it work? Put this with that – what happens?

In Green Street like any other shopping street in the UK, the shops’ clients carry their purchases away in carrier bags. Somehow these carrier bags stuck in my mind. They were so many and so ephemeral, carrying the things which people had fancied and bought, away from the shops and along the pavements into the houses around the shopping street.

So I started taking carrier bags apart and re-making them, tentatively; then more came, and finally a mock-up of great big one. This was made of the drafting film used by architects. I used it to project images on to and they became ghostly against the semi-translucent surface.

           

 The pavements stayed with me as well; the streets where very different ways of life intersect.  I began to think about pavements and Asian rugs,  pavements-as-carpets. By framing views from the street - a nineteenth century house, a stucco ornament, the local football club - in a surround derived from an Asian carpet, and then repeating the process, a pavement seemed to appear; a kelim runner, composed of complex footprints, both carpet and path, mysteriously connecting the ornament in the post-colonial shops and streets to that in the other site for this project, the South Asian Textile Collection at the V&A.

In my next post I hope to write about the final phase of this residency, when I began to focus more on this imperial collection of visual treasure and the ways in which the Museum ‘frames’ it.

My residency in the Wimbledon College of Art Drawing Centre Project Space unfolded in three separate phases. In the intervening months between the first and second phases, I’d gone to India for a month and come back; revisited Green Street and the South Asian Textiles display at the V&A several more times; reflected and tried to order and then re-order the photographic material.

At every point what confounded me was the way that different worlds and different ways of seeing the world seemed to jostle: before the second part of the residency started, I had time to reflect on the way ornament and pattern seem to reveal the underlying world-pictures of their makers. This is what I’d like to write about in this post.

There was a spew of pattern, some far, far too inexpensive for the work it represented and some precious beyond any price. In the shops as in the museum’s South Asian archive, this ornament and pattern came from both Hindu and Islamic sources; the street and the museum also proffered a wealth of English sources, both from colonial and post-colonial times, in the form of Victorian Gothic Revival imagery jumbled up with the ‘international modern’. But such genealogies, although interesting, were not my main focus.

In these weeks between the first and second phase of the Wimbledon residency, I made various drawings; the one here was an earlier attempt to draw an Islamic geometric pattern using geometric principles. Trying (unsuccessfully, I think) to do this left me amazed at the skill of Islamic draughtspeople.

(This laborious attempt, I must painfully confess, took me some time.)

But what I learned from it was that if it were repeated, it would behave in a certain way. Islamic geometric pattern often lets the eye travel across the field it occupies and then, because the repetition can go on forever, wander out into a suggestion of infinity. Geometric pattern originates in the same ancient interest in mathematics that made Eastern astronomy pre-eminent, and it alludes to a divine perfection in the world’s design, the endless possibilities in geometry for crystalline, kaleidoscopic patterning.

On a Hindu stupa (a temple-like reliquary) in southern India the exponential explosion of gods, humans and creatures all from one tiny invisible point also suggests the world’s space conceived as inherently generative, endlessly fertile, maternal. I tried to develop a drawing expressing this, starting with a tiny  ground plan of a Hindu stupa which I found in Adam Hardy’s book, ‘Form, Transformation and Meaning in Indian Temple Architecture: Space and Time in Representation and Design’, (1998, in Paradigms of Indian Architecture, Collected Papers on South Asia no.13, ed. G.H.R. Tillotson, Centre of South Asian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, (London:Curzon Press) 107-134).

This small image I found intriguing; I appropriated it and then worked on it to make it hugely proliferate. Here are two versions.

     

 

In their very different ways the ornament associated with religious cultures implies a world where the notion of infinity is, at least in some contexts, still connected to that of timelessness. The pencil drawing above left, done rather delicately on tracing paper, is so different from an image which I had made a few years before, evoking a nineteenth century textile mill.  This was  compiled simply by putting together repeatedly another appropriated image, this time a single drawing, a steel engraving by a 19th century Manchester engineer showing, very functionally, the parts of a textile mill machine for maintenance purposes.

 

The repeated image seems to me to be full of noise and clacking machine time. But in every case the appropriation of a single tiny image, followed by making it insistently repeat itself, seems to reveal more clearly something of the different world-view each embodies.

I’d taken so many photos. Now I had boxes of them, pictures taken in and around Green Street, E.13, images of the shops and houses; and many also from the South Asian Textile Collection at the V&A, photos of the textile storage and display, and of the museum building itself.

What to do with all this material, this evidence of the churn of the city? In my research plan I’d indicated that I would ‘analyse’ the images – but the truth is, they formed a tumbling, out-of-control hoard. There were images of the grey and brick houses and shop fronts, the streets around Upton Park, the tube station for Green Street; the surging colour behind the plate glass of the shops, the myriad details of the textiles within. Then there was the functional, colourless, locked metal storage unit in the Textile Archive of the South Asian Collection in the V&A, which opened to reveal a profusion of fragile, glowing treasures inside.

A mass of fine connections joined these apparently disparate worlds; so fine, so tangled, I felt perplexed. But then something happened. I had the good fortune to be granted a residency within the The Centre for Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, to which I owe so many thanks. Wimbledon College of Art is part of University of the Arts London.

The residency was to be divided over two (later extended to three) periods, a total of six weeks in all. I would be able to engage with my many images within the critical but supportive atmosphere of the Centre for Drawing. The allocated project space at the Centre is a long, white, rather narrow room. It became a ‘think tank’ and the first thing I did was to cover the facing creamy walls with swarms of photos, the ‘street’ ones on one side, the ‘museum’ ones on the other.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this ‘display’ was that the photos were constantly near being uncontrollable; at the most literal level they fell down off their blu-tack all the time, but then they asked to be put up differently, they wanted to re-arrange themselves, they hustled themselves about. Massed, the crowds of photos had all the too-muchness and instability of the great city. Still, divided in space and time, the ‘street’ and ‘the museum’ were nonetheless in dialogue, the glowing blocks and trails of colour on each side of the room resonating against each other; dissimilar, but in a conversation spanning centuries.

I started very simply by putting up all the images taken in each shop, together; then thought – why? There were so many possible ways of arranging, of categorising: this itself spoke of the complexity of encountering, and of moving between, the various worlds the images came from.

My second site for this practice-based research is the South Asian Collection at the V&A, particularly the textiles collection. Buildings tell their own stories just as textiles do and the V&A and its South Asian textiles are no exception, being vivid, poignant utterances of a huge, complex and often bitter history - the history of Britain’s imperial past in India. How does the museum present or ‘frame’ its collection? Frames instruct us, or try to, as to how to perceive the thing which is framed. The shop windows in Green Street are also contemporary ‘frames’.

But where do you start? The V&A building is itself a huge frame for the treasures within. We could say also that the area of London in which it stands also ‘frames’ the museum itself. Just up Exhibition Road is the Albert Memorial, built to commemorate the Prince Consort, with ‘Asia’ in one corner portrayed like this.

The main entrance to the museum, cathedral-like, gives us Albert again.

Or we pass through other doors marked with the signs of royalty. Knowledge and power go together … yet that is too simple. Inside the theme continues, in these wall tiles, for example.

When we come to the Nehru gallery of ‘Indian’ art, we are met by a plan of its lay-out. The plan is interesting, in the form of a niche in a mosque, and also reminiscent of a page from Owen Jones’s great work, The Grammar of Ornament. Everything is everything clear, separated.

When we arrive in the gallery there it all is, in spot lit cases, as museum displays often are, theatrical.

How far it seems from bustling Green Street (where the shop displays stage their own intense theatrics, however) or from the often harsh sites of South Asian textile production. The ‘knowledge’ which the museum provides, often information in the form of dates, places, categories of craft, seems highly controlled. Yet it leads straight back and out to those other heaving places, those other uncontrollable, entangled histories. There are many more items in the collection than can be displayed. The way they are stored has its own fascination. Here are some images from behind the scenes.

These drawers, cupboards and safe-like rolling units speak of the patient work of classifying, labelling, the need to be able to retrieve items, care in preservation. The labels on the items, often themselves old and fragile, also seem eloquent of another time.

It’s in this work of identification, preservation, dissemination, that one sees the passion and love on the part of successive generations of museum officers for the objects in the museum’s care. This makes visiting this place, with its imperial past, a very complex experience. Once again I found myself pondering how to respond as an artist to what feels like a mighty, too-great weight in this site of collection and learning. How can any artist frame a response to this complexity, this weight? I felt it could only be through the forming of visual remarks which were very light and yet also evocative – but what a challenge. In my next post I hope to share some of the struggles to rise to this challenge.

Since the beginning of last year I’ve been walking frequently along Green Street in East London and around the streets which form its hinterland, looking at the shop displays and also at the houses in the surrounding area, the blocks of flats, the vehicles and street furniture. (The other place I go to a lot is the South Asian Collection at the V&A, but that’s for a later post).

Various populations originating from South Asia (often Gujerat via East Africa) have settled in this area of London bringing their food, music, films and clothing traditions with them. Last week I was in Green Street and the shops were crowded, noisy, bustling. There were groups of young women looking for new outfits, part of the run-up to the many local weddings: whole families were out looking for new outfits for the festival of Eid: friends were shopping together to match this or that item of clothing for a family gathering or social engagement. The cash tills were ringing. The many carrier bags of purchases were being borne out of the shop, an occasional corner of peacock blue, burning fuschia pink or deep turquoise silk peeping out. Of course the textiles speak of different origins and are aimed at different clienteles: they contain all kinds of nuances.

(With grateful thanks to ‘Bindia’ of Green Street, Newham, E.13, where these photos were taken, for their generous help).

What happens to all these purchases? I keep imagining gloriously coloured silken paths blazing along the grey London streets to different nearby destinations. It may be that some jewelled colours in their carrier bags go into blocks of flats built in the nineteen seventies or eighties.

Or it may be into one of the thousands of houses in the acres of local back streets built between 1885 (according to the builders’ plaques on the walls) and the nineteen twenties.

But these modest houses, mainly built in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the height of the British Empire, also tell of a way of life, now vanished. Their doorways and windows are ornamented with mass-produced swags of leaves and flowers. Sometimes a moulding of a medieval king’s head will appear, sometimes a cherub. This ‘Victorian Gothic’ is a product of the nineteenth century British fantasy of a lost ‘middle ages’. These streets were mass-built for an already industrialised, city dwelling people, for people caught up in the turmoil of their own time (steam power, mass production, railways, the electric telegraph), a turmoil which was carrying them - who knew where?

In their house building they seem to be looking backwards to a figment of a rural , monarchical ‘England’, a somehow stabilising notion, reassuring in an un-reassuring world.

To walk here is to discover a rich set of legacies in ornament: uttering all sorts of narratives, endlessly fascinating. These legacies can be seen in any of Britain’s cosmopolitan cities.

Below are some images of the Green Street houses and details of their ornament as they appear today.