Tag Archives: London

Spring 2018 Issue XI: Every Picture Tells a Story

My Walk Home

February 13, 2018 hjthompson

The route home was a highlight of my summer job. I love the noise of cities, but Central London during rush hour is a specific kind of organized chaos that I miss while at Smith. I was working for the British government, and was a stone’s throw away from the heart of Westminster. At 5:30 pm I would pass the Abbey, where there was always a constant queue outside, rain or shine. I would turn left and head towards Westminster, a scattering of familiar landmarks in the background. Taking this route every day, I would look up as I walked towards the train station, craning my neck and weaving through the crowd, before descending onto the platform.

The day this photo was taken, I had a slightly different routine. The persistent summer rain was heavier than usual. Huddled under my umbrella, I wasn’t able to look skywards at my normal view. I stood by the side of the road, waiting for the traffic light to change, when a sticker in my line vision caught my eye. London is covered with weird and wonderful stickers—some political, some not—especially in such close proximity to Parliament. This one stood out more than the others; its colors and its positioning were relevant to the divisive turn British politics had taken.

The one-year anniversary of the Brexit vote occurred around this time. The growing uncertainty over the reality of leaving the European Union had resulted in camps of ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ becoming more vocal and more divided. People were frustrated with the slow pace of negotiations, with the constant barrage of press coverage, and with the politicians still talking in hypotheticals. When we embarked, no one knew what the Brexit process would look like, and one year later, we’d still had no clarification. My job for the Department for Work and Pensions was impacted by this political gridlock—although pension policies and social benefit systems are not the first things that come to mind when thinking about Brexit, I was quickly learning that leaving the EU would affect every aspect of society.

A year later, and the referendum was still splitting opinion; still generating anger; still providing a platform for not-so-fringe extremist groups. I keep myself updated with UK news when I’m at Smith, and I take an interest in following Brexit developments, yet the omnipresent cloud hanging over London upon my return from the U.S. that summer was an adjustment that I hadn’t expected. Placed at eye-level, this sticker offered a pithy retort to the divisive rhetoric to which I wish I hadn’t grown accustomed, and it made me smile. So, I took a picture, the traffic light changed, and I carried on with my journey home.

Helena ’18 is an international student from West London, UK. A Government major and History minor, she studied abroad during her Junior year in Geneva, and she hopes to continue to live and work abroad after Smith.

Fall 2015 Issue V: Tastes

Hops and Heart: A Love Letter to England’s Drink of Choice

November 9, 2015 emooney

Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t like beer. You won’t find opinions on microbrews, top notes, or the proper way to pour yourself a glass here. No, not even six months at Queen Mary University of London, where I spent the spring of 2015, could turn me into an ale-appreciator. So it may seem a bit strange that I am, self-professedly, writing a love letter of sorts to the barley-brewed beverage, but over my time in the United Kingdom I came to value beer for far more than its taste.

The pub, short for public house, is undoubtedly an English institution, and has been since Britain was Roman. In small English towns, a pub is often a community focal point, serving not only as a place to purchase food and refreshments but also as a kind of meetinghouse. Here, a pub might be referred to simply as your “local” – your local pub. The terminology has carried over to the big city, where “local” denotes your favorite pub, the one you frequent most often. In either case, from the country village to the metropolis, the local is the place to be.

MOONEY.Beer.IMG_8628 — A “Guinness and Black,” a pint of Guinness mixed with blackcurrant syrup. Yes, that is my hand.

I mention pubs because they are, of course, the absolute best place for patrons to buy and consume beer. And consume it they do – my local while at Queen Mary, a JD Wetherspoon franchise called The Half Moon, or, often, just “Spoons” – stocks nearly 50 varieties on any given day [1]. The English relationship to beer in the public house is an interesting one, and very different from American drinking culture: across the pond, it is completely normal to stop by and have a pint (or a few) after class or during lunch, whereas stateside, regularly drinking at two in the afternoon might be cause for a bit of alarm.

But the regularity with which beer is consumed in England lends it a special function not found elsewhere: it is an entirely social drink, and a unifying one at that. The English, as a whole, take real pride in their beer, in how it’s brewed and aged, how it’s bottled and served, how it looks and even how it feels [2]. Its continuous presence in the daily lives of Britons – at meals, at parties, in the garden, anywhere – gives your average pint a strangely comforting quality. There’s a familiarity to the ritual of pouring a pint, especially from the tap; a familiarity to the aroma and the way the foamy bubbles settle. Pouring or buying a pint for someone is an act of love – it’s a shared history, an acknowledgement of kinship, and a mutual point of pleasure. Even better if you do it in your local pub, because sharing a local means sharing a bond: you are family there.

While I never learned to love lager, an anguishing fact for most of my British companions, I certainly learned to love what it stands for. And if half a year of bonding over beer happens to leave a better taste in my mouth than the drink itself, well – that’s alright with me.

[1] If you are interested in English pub culture, I highly recommend a sojourn into the world of Wetherspoons – with nearly 1000 distinct locations across the UK and Ireland, the idiosyncrasies of a Wetherspoons pub are fascinating.

[2] Investigate the English tradition of Real Ale if you’re curious!

Emma Mooney is an Art History major and Landscape Studies minor in her final year at Smith College. She enjoys writing and editing, graphic and interior design, and dissecting the inner workings of the pop culture world. After she graduates from Smith in May 2016, she tentatively hopes to begin a career in publishing.

Spring 2015 Issue III: Up Close / From Afar

Traveling without a Map

February 9, 2015 Emily Casey

What can I find without a map? This was the question I was forced to ask myself this fall when I arrived in London to conduct research for my dissertation in art history and realized I had forgotten to pack a map.

The great irony is that one of the focuses of my research while in London was eighteenth century maps of the British empire. I spent days at the Greenwich Maritime Museum and the British Museum, as well as collections and archives outside London, poring over maps picturing the Atlantic world—a ring of geographic sites ranging from England to the West coast of Africa, the Caribbean, and the colonies of North America surrounding the vast expanse of the ocean. This research brought me up close to the textures and images of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. With my iPad I shot detailed pictures of engraved lines, navigational marks, swirling scripts, and decorative cartouches. Some maps were hand-colored in delicate washes of green and red and blue. Others bore scribbled notes by printmakers in brown gall ink prompting their engravers to make changes.

As an art historian, the question I want to ask of these objects is not how they got people places, but how they helped people in local settings imagine the wider world of which they were a part. In my dissertation I explore how British and American peoples of the eighteenth century imagined and represented the ocean between them in art, literature, and material culture. In the period I study, navigation at sea was an uncertain and often dangerous business. Scientists and geographers were still struggling to figure out how to reliably calculate longitude on a ship. Maps were often outdated or inaccurate. The explorer James Cook complained that he and his crew could “hardly tell when we are possessed of a good sea chart until we our selves have proved it.” In other words, seafarers often didn’t know where exactly they were going, or where they even were until they were there.

The sense of being at sea that I found in the archive reflected how I felt about the state of my own research. As a graduate student, I had reached the edge of the map guiding me through completing coursework, passing my exams, and achieving doctoral candidacy. Now, at the beginning stages of my dissertation, I was a bit like a sailor uncertain of my direction, struggling to navigate with a compass and the sky.

Leaving the museum or library after hours of straining my eyes over yesterday’s maps, I found myself on the busy streets of the city, this time literally without a map of my own. While my maplessness began as an accident of ill-preparedness, it soon became a purposeful means of discovering my place in the city.
Mapless, I looked up, not down. With my feet leading, I was able to focus on what was around me. Without a map, I tramped along the banks of the Thames, encountering the sixteenth-century London of Shakespeare’s Globe and Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind. Without a map, I stumbled over the cobblestones of Spitalfields, finding the eighteenth-century homes and workshops of Hugoenot silk weavers. Without a map, I puffed to the top of the Naval Observatory, stood on the Prime Meridian, and gasped at the bright green parakeets that filled the air.

At least once on every walk I would capture an image with my iPhone. Like the little boats and recordings of a ship’s trajectory that showed up on the old maps I was studying, this gesture marked my place in space and time. Looking back through all the pictures I took while in London now, I see where I was, and where I was going. Traveling without a map helped me approach my research with greater curiosity and creativity. The visual record of my wanderings in the city and the archive is a sort of map that reminds me where I have been, even as I continue to chart my course toward new waters.

Emily Casey is a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Delaware. In her research she seeks to bring global perspectives to the art, history, and material culture of the Americas. While a Smith student, Emily worked at the Smith College Museum of Art and studied abroad in Paris.

Fall 2014 Issue II: Adapting

A Scientific Theory of Adapting

November 12, 2014 Krithika Venkataraman

Prologue: propose your theory

I begin at carbon.

Time goes by and I wonder what parts of me are like the rings of a tree that I can come back to count.

I begin at the earth’s orbit.

Time goes by and I cannot decide if I would rather dance through the monsoon, watch marigolds bloom, or pounce on a pile of sugar maple leaves.

I begin at evolution.

Time goes by and I wonder what I have inherited to escape extinction and what will become of me next.

Memoir: perform your experiments

In India, community is a way of life. Tradition dictates co-existence in large “joint families,” and this is where I began. Until the age of six, I did not leave this world.

At the age of six, my family moved to Belgium, where I spent the next eight years at a British school. Here, I escaped bullies by playing with bugs instead and fended off the freezing weather with the excitement of first snowfalls. I learnt to hike the Black Forest Mountains and orienteer in the woods surrounding a former Belgian palace. Most importantly, it was in Belgium that I found the taste buds in me dedicated to odorous cheese.

XIV

At the age of fourteen, moving back to India did not feel like moving back home. Joint families were being dismissed as impractical and careers swallowed us. While we still fussed fondly over each other in the family, we now often had to let Skype be our proxy. I found new comforts in watching monsoon showers and learnt to keep windows closed, lest a monkey should stroll in and help itself to the bananas I’d saved for myself.

XVIII

At the age of eighteen, I took off once again, but this time alone, to the United States for four years of college. In this journey, first year’s excitement countered second year’s homesickness, while third year’s adventurous spirit clashed with fourth year’s unyielding demands to deliver a relentless work ethic. I learnt over potlucks and poetry readings that my new sisters would be from every continent and I wouldn’t try to hide the tears when alumnae came back with touching stories of how their best friends decades on were the Smithies they grew up with.

XXI

At the age of twenty-one, I returned to Europe for a semester in London. This city grew to be the melting pot that merged my childhood and adolescent homes, churning out a savoury mélange. While I let myself revel here in the British slang I had grown up with, I puzzled over how unbelievably at home I felt in this city I had never before lived in. Yet, I yearned for the sisterhood I had at Smith and the sense of community I had with my family in India.

Epilogue: analyze your results

What changes during each move is not the skeleton from which I am composed, the species to which I belong, or the axis on which my world rotates. Instead, what living abroad – although I could not tell you where abroad is anymore – has taught me is to embrace. Travel has the transformative power to breed new tongues, new friendships, and new outlooks. But travel also turns the lights on stark truths and uncomfortable realizations. Chapter XVIII was my greatest challenge despite it being lived in my first home. What stood in the way of my re-assimilation was an unfair expectation that time and evolution had paused in the eight years that I had lived away. However, during my recent return to Europe, to my second home, what played in my favor was a faith in the place to offer me what it had, rather than demand of it what I thought it ought to have. And it was thus that we lived in a state of symbiosis.

If there’s one thing I carry with me, it’s the habit to never say goodbye when I leave each new place I’ve imbibed. There is only ever “I will leave and be back,”for in Tamil, my mother tongue, that is what we say when parting. We will not leave people or places behind, but rather take them along and revisit them when we are miles away and desperately in need of a slice of home.

Krithika Venkataraman considers herself a modern nomad, pausing to think each time when asked where home is. Home, for her, spans three continents and her assimilation and re-assimilation across these has been purely organic, much like the molecules she studies as a student of biochemistry and neuroscience. As a citizen of the 21st century, she is witnessing a beautiful move towards a global culture, and it is to this culture that she belongs.