John Levett tastes tastes, names names. Old varieties like Ribston Pippin recall when the city and the country were more clearly connected. They lead forward, too, in the movement to save England’s allotments. Some years ago BBC Radio 5 ran a Doris Day in celebration of Dorises everywhere. They even managed to get a phone […]
Talking back to the past, John Levett owns up to an inner Constance Spry. Let’s continue, John, whenever, however. For what’s gone before, all thanks. Essay and photos by John Levett There was a long-serving picture editor at Time-Life whose name I can’t recall. He wrote well and remembered every picture he came across. One […]
From the Edwardian garden, down a slippery slope to many purposes. Or was it up? In her chapter on “The Arts and Crafts Garden” in her [still] wonderful book The English Garden in the 20th Century, Jane Brown refers, in turn, to Gertrude Jekyll’s Gardens for Small Country Houses. I had a copy of it […]
The old trees of Cambridge and Oxford are riddled with association. How do you elude history and fall into the nature of nature? Essay and photos by John Levett I spent my career in primary education. I don’t miss what it became. I left teaching in 2003 and haven’t set foot into a school since. […]
John Levett tracks the “inherent restlessness” of plants, people, structures, de-structures—and memory—along the Thames’ tributaries. Back in the ‘80s Paul Burwell [RIP], Anne Bean and Richard Wilson formed the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, described once as “a multi-media urban-junk-and-pyrotechnics percussion trio” and famously performing ‘Concrete Barges’ at Rainham Marshes on the Thames Estuary and coming close […]
John Levett, venturing after poet Philip Larkin, recreates his own past —true to the present. Essay and photos by John Levett About a week ago I delivered a presentation entitled ‘Refractory memory.’ Some of the definitions of ‘refractory’ include obstinate, stubborn, mulish, pigheaded, obdurate, headstrong, self-willed, wayward, wilful, perverse, contrary, recalcitrant, obstreperous, disobedient, difficult. For […]
Did you miss the Festival of Britain? Likely so. And though post-war styles are in revival, its spirit of communitarian hope is harder to come by. One of the most memorable events in my life was the 1951 Festival of Britain—memorable because I never went to it. I was six years old at the time […]
Not far from Legoland, a memorial to progressive engagement at Runnymeade, the riverside of liberty. In 1956 the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, introduced Premium Bonds, a variety of the savings scheme beloved of governments of the time—savings being seen as ‘a good thing,’ very worthy, a benefit to the nation and, given […]
For all you photographers, travelers and misc. flaneurs: How to kick the windmill habit, one click at a time. There is a group of which I am a member which concerns itself with urban spaces, their communities, cultural change within them and documentation of their present and their evolution. We come together each month, share […]
Gardening for glory—or at least for memory and experimentation’s sake. John Levett reviews the stand-up efforts of early summer around his neighborhood in Cambridge, England. Always for me and always with a capital letter Summer begins on June 1st and ends on August 31st irrespective of movements of planets, moons and poets. The plants in […]