HOBBLING WITH OBELISKS

 As I’ve said before, I accept that not everybody is as moved by and as interested in obelisks as I am.  But once you start looking for them they pop up all over the place – you’ll be walking along and boom – there it is, often in the least likely place.  

 

Let’s say, for example, one afternoon you’re ambling in Mistley in Essex, just up the road from where I live, and you see a garden containing a tall, green topiary obelisk, well you’re going to be impressed by that: but wait. 

Then you walk a little further up the street and you see that behind the live, growing obelisk there’s a wooden garden obelisk, as they’re called.  These aren’t really obelisks in any real sense – they're not made from one piece and they lack the all-important pyramidion –  but they’re still a good thing.

 

And then say, one night having been to a lecture by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan on the lost gardens of London, and you’re walking along the Albert Embankment between Lambeth and Vauxhall, and you see this thing tucked away behind a hoarding.  I took a picture, not sure what I was taking a photograph of.  A spot of Photoshopping helped a little, but only a little.

Some online research reveals that it’s standing tight beside the headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation: 

and further messing about with Google streetview indicates it’s actually in a car park.  

More than that I don’t know, but I’m inclined to think it must be some kind of ventilation duct, most likely for the Tube, like this one in honour of George Dance the Younger, who laid out the Finsbury Estate in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Frankly it seems to me that if you’re going to have a ventilation duct for a subterranean railway, then why wouldn’t you have it in the shape of an obelisk? 

And then, and I don’t want you to think my life is glamorous or colourful or anything, but last week I was given a personal tour of the Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House (currently under refurbishment).  My guide was Edwin Heathcote, who writes about architecture and design in the Financial Times, and is also ‘The Keeper of Meaning’ at the house – a job title that’s hard to improve on. (I get to call him Eddie).

 

And as we walked through the postmodern and indeed cosmic wonders of the house, there were obelisks galore, small ones, decorative objects, many of which if I understood Mr. Heathcote correctly, were bought by Jencks on souvenir stalls around the pyramids in Cairo. 

 

There was also this marvelous and unusual tableau, someone working at a computer while bracketed by obelisks.  I may have to find a way of doing that myself.

OBELISK FINDER GENERAL

I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason.  I believe that most things happen for no reason whatsoever. And I don’t believe that life brings you what you need.  And yet and yet ...  

I currently find myself billeted (for reasons that make more sense some days than others) in Manningtree in Essex. That’s where Matthew Hopkins, aka the ‘Witchfinder General,’ did some of his best work.  Funny thing about witch hunts – they always find lots of witches.  He did look at least somewhat like Vincent Price who played him in the movie.

 Quite independently, and before I moved here, I had developed an interest in obelisks.  Now I discover this area is strangely well-supplied with obelisks.

If you start somewhat to the east of Manningtree you’ll find the Mistley Towers, op cit, quite the folly landmark, but rather more intriguingly from my point of view it’s also the site of the obelisk commemorating Jean Death, a hard name to live with.  

In fact there’s a bakery in Manningtree called the De’aths Bakery, so presumably there’s some connection, and something for me to investigate.

If you go into Manningtree from Mistley and walk up the hill to the Trinity Free Church, you’ll find a churchyard which looks rather older than the church, and in there you’ll find a couple more obelisks, small, discreet, unspectacular and all the more appealing for that.

And then last weekend, I walked to Cattawade, part of which I’d often seen from the train heading up into Suffolk, and I’d spotted some fine industrial ruins; ICI, Ilford films, Xylonite, as I now know.  Part of the area was once known as Highams Park. Some say that Margaret Thatcher worked for Xylonite at this location, but others say she worked up in Lawton – more research needed there too.

Most of the Cattawade site has been demolished or left to collapse, which was why I was there, but (need I say) I discovered an obelisk.

In fact it's a war memorial that used to be in the grounds of the now absent ICI compound.

At one time it had obviously had commemorative metal plaques attached to it, but they’ve been removed for safe keeping, and so the stone has become a canvas for some profoundly unambitious taggers. Couldn’t any self-respecting street artist do wonders with an obelisk? This one’s in Lincoln County Oklahoma (pic by MJ Alexander, I believe).

THE OBELISK AND I (ANOTHER IN THE SERIES)

Again I’ve been walking with, or at least past or close to or in the vicinity of, obelisks.  I’m tempted say ‘it’s what I do’ and recently it kind of is, but it’s a new interest, not quite an obsession yet, and I don’t altogether know why.  I just like ‘em is all.

Last week, walking with top photographer Jason Oddy, we went to look at Edwin Lutyens’ Royal Naval DivisionWar Memorial on Horse Guards Parade (that’s it below).  It was designed immediately after the First World War in which the Royal Naval Division took terrible losses at Gallipoli.

 

For a monument it’s rather well-travelled.  It was first placed in Horse Guards Parade in 1925, ten years after Gallipoli, but it was moved during the Second World War, for safety.  After that it went to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, and only returned to Horse Guards Parade in 2003.  

 

It’s tucked away at the side of the parade ground, and nobody was paying it any attention.  It was evidently once a fountain, but it was bone dry on the day we looked at it.

Jason and I were heading for Waterloo so inevitably we walked past Cleopatra’s Needle, which people seem to think is a great place to hang out and pose, though it doesn’t look very comfortable, especially if you sit on the sphinx. 

And then a couple of days back I went to Spitalfields to have another look (I mean, I’d seen it before in passing) at the obelisk in the wall of the garden adjacent to Hawksmoor’s Christ Church. Built into it is a drinking fountain, supplied by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association in 1860, but again it was dry.

If you walk into the garden you’ll see another obelisk stashed away in a corner, disappearing behind greenery. This one is a memorial to the Nash family from the early 19^thcentury.

The website for British listed buildings describes it as ‘Portland stone with statuary marble inscription panels. Square obelisk surmounted by a flaming gadrooned urn.’ I had never encountered the word gadrooned before. I have obviously led a sheltered life.

The garden is a place you can walk and sit and admire the obelisks (although I didn’t see anybody else doing that) and nobody will bother you.  I sat there for a while and noticed what I took to be a family group sitting nearby. I didn’t see marriage or birth certificates but it looked like mum, dad and teenage son.  They were drinking beer, and although I wasn’t watching very closely, I did notice that after a while the dad lit his crack pipe.  Ah, families.

What I have learned subsequently is that Nicolas Hawksmoor designed Britain’s first large obelisk (80 feet tall) erected in the market place in Ripon in 1702, and much messed about with since. I feel the need for a field trip coming on.

 

 

THE OBELISK WALK - DEUX

Look, obviously I don’t expect everybody to share all my obsessions, but since I got “hooked on obelisks” (title for a book?) I see them everywhere.  Why only this morning this image of an obelisk by Athanasius Kircher popped up unbidden, and inscrutably, on my Facebook feed:

A little research reveals that it’s from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, and it’s demonstrating the principle of the camera obscura, the devil being associated with shadows (I think).

Then I found this image by Edward Gorey (he was quite a man for an obelisk) – and as I’ve said before, everything’s better with skulls, even obelisks.

There are also two lines by Gorey in a poem titled "The Chinese Obelisks" that run as follows:

          A was an Author who went for a walk
         B was a Bore who engaged him in talk.

And then last night I was walking past Amoeba Music, a shop that’s been in business in LA about as long as I have, with the consequence that the mural on the side that runs down Ivar Avenue, is looking a little faded these days.  

But then – holy smokes – I see that in the two bottom corners there are fantastical beasts and obelisks!  Coincidence?  Synchronicity?  The universe sending me a message? You decide.

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

I’ve been walking, and thinking about obelisks. If you walk a couple of miles, all of them up hill, from where I am now in East Hollywood, you’ll come to the Griffith Park Observatory, and outside it you’ll find this:

It’s sometimes known as the Griffith Observatory Obelisk, sometimes as the Astronomers' Monument, designed by Archibald Garner, completed in 1934 even before the opening of the observatory, about 40 feet tall, with figures of Hipparchus, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Herschel at the base. (I admit that I’d never heard of Hipparchus.)

Those statues and the armillary sphere on top give it a rather more complex design than I think an obelisk should have, though I’m not knocking it.  But if you head down the road to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery you’ll find (what seem to me at a least) purer examples of the breed, such as this one marking the grave of Griffith J, Griffith, the very man that Griffith Park is named after.

Further south still, on the University of Southern California campus, you’ll find a line of comparatively short obelisks, each about nine feet tall, which mark the involvement of students and faculty in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

So clearly Los Angeles has its shared of obelisks even if it’s not exactly famous for them. London on the other hand, has loads, as I found out recently. 

The "biggie" of course is Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment (above), a genuine Egyptian obelisk, and that’s a whole obsession in itself, especially how they got it to England: in an iron tube that was 90 feet long – the obelisk itself being about 70 – and they built an ocean-going vessel around it so it could towed all the way from Egypt.  Complications, some of them lethal, ensued.  

I didn’t know any of this story until very recently, and asking around my acquaintances, many of whom like to think they’re pretty knowledgeable, none of them did either.

Once you start keeping your eyes open for obelisks, London seems to be full of them, and again some look more perfect examples than others.  I saw obelisks in Chelsea:

West Hampstead:

Saville Row:

In an antique shop in Mayfair

In Bunhill Fields, an obelisk monument to Daniel Defoe, but Iain Sinclair has claimed Bunhill Fields so fervently I dare hardly set foot there.

And outside of London too, such as this rather wonderful one in Mistley, in Essex. Those are the Mistley Towers behind it, and there’s an inscription on the obelisk commemorating a local woman named Jane Death.  I kid you not.

I also realized that I’d photographed obelisks in the past, while out walking, without really thinking about it much.  This one in Bristol:

There is also this especially fine obelisk on a crazy golf course in Great Yarmouth.

And I know that years ago I was in Washington DC and definitely saw the Washington Monument.  This is the tallest obelisk in the world, 555 feet high, completed in 1844 – there is much discussion about whether or not slave labor was used.  In any case, I only saw it from a distance, and I was young and unimpressionable back then.  There is also an argument that it isn’t a true obelisk, which should be made from one piece of stone – impossible given the size, and also given that there is currently an elevator inside.

And if you’re a conspiracy theorist you’ll be thrilled to see this:

And finally (at least for now, I mean this obsession is only just starting, I haven’t even started on Athanasius Kircher) there is this by the great illustrator Tom Gauld.

It’s a myriorama “inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, and I’m actually not sure If that walking figure is Sterne or Tristan Shandy, but that’s very definitely an obelisk.  Now, there is no mention of an obelisk in Tristram Shandythough there’s plenty of walking, nor is there an obelisk mentioned in A Sentimental Journey,so this may be an indication of Mr. Gould’s own obelisk obsession.  

         I have, however found a reference to an obelisk in Sterne’s writing.  It appears in Sermon XVIII titled “The Levite and his Concubine” and runs as follows:

“Certainly there is a difference between Bitterness and Saltness, that is, between the malignity and the festivity of wit, the one is a mere quickness of apprehension, void of humanity, and is a talent of the devil; the other comes  from the Father of spirits, so pure and abstracted from persons, that willingly it hurts no man : or if it touches upon an indecorum, 'tis with that dexterity of true genius, which  enables him rather to give a new colour to the absurdity, and   let it pass. He may smile at the shape of the obelisk raised to another's fame, but the malignant wit will level it at once with the ground, and build his own upon the ruins of it.”

         Wit, obelisks, ruins – my kind of sermon.