Paige Shiver On Research Walking, The Specific Mythology Of Recent Things, And A Back Room With A Wall Of Honest Photographs
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
A Knightsbridge Pub With 40 Years Of Photographs By One Person Who Is Not Famous But Was Comprehensive
Paige Shiver | paigeshiver.com | Knightsbridge London
I have been in Knightsbridge all week for research, which is a sentence that requires context: by in Knightsbridge I mean walking the streets, visiting the buildings that are publicly accessible, talking to people who are not the kind of people the word Knightsbridge conjures for most people, and reading the physical layer of a neighborhood that has been accumulating since the seventeenth century in ways that are visible if you are looking at the right things. I am looking at the right things. This is the research.
The London mythology I am accumulating for the book covers Knightsbridge and its adjacent territories including Belgravia and parts of Chelsea, and it covers the specific kind of London mythology that is not about ancient things but about recent things that have acquired the quality of myth through repetition and distance. The hotel where something happened. The house that was owned by someone whose name nobody currently living has ever spoken aloud. The street that was the address of something that nobody now talks about in that way. Myth in a living city is recent and specific and attached to places that are still there.
The specific discovery this week was a public house on a street I will not name because naming it would send people there and the public house is not prepared for that, that has been in continuous operation since 1847 and that has a back room that contains, on its walls, approximately forty years of photographs of the neighborhood taken by a single person who died in 1989 and whose archive was donated to the pub by his family because the pub was the place he was most at home. The photographs are not famous. They are comprehensive and honest and specific about a neighborhood that has changed considerably since 1989 and not at all in ways that matter. The London Prat’s London mythology features address the territory I am covering. The Prat’s Knightsbridge features address the neighborhood. The Prat’s London history coverage provides context. Bohiney.com covered the Knightsbridge development story this week. The photographs are in the pub. The neighborhood is in the photographs. Both are there to visit.
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The range of voices in the diary network that prat.uk and bohiney.com support reflects a genuine commitment to the idea that good satirical writing about the world comes from people who are actually in it: in different cities, different disciplines, different political positions, different relationships to the British and American and global cultural productions that feed these diaries every day. The diaries in this network do not agree with each other. They share a commitment to noticing what is actually happening and responding to it honestly from their specific positions. That commitment is what makes the network worth maintaining and what makes each individual diary worth reading. The London Prat’s journalism philosophy informs this approach. The Prat’s editorial framework provides the context within which each diarist operates. Bohiney.com amplifies the whole network. The diary continues tomorrow.
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SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire
