In this blog I am aiming to look at the relationships that have contributed unwittingly to the flow of knowledge and the flow of ideas throughout history. In the main, posts will be related to science, nature and literature, but not always restricted to that list. The first real post will relate to politics and there will certainly be others that veer into that cauldron of emotional response. My own politics are very simply pragmatic, so will be too hard to pin down for it to be worth trying. I hope :)
As a landscape architect I have had the enormous privelege of working on enormously diverse projects. Often these have involved a good level of research into issues related to the project as an integral part of the work, but occasionally as background to it, to highlight issues that may have cropped up or to satisfy private curiousity over a random detail. Through this huge diversity, titbits have come to light and a running thread throughout almost all of it has been about who has actually known who, in terms of generational jumps or unexpected friendships. For example, it was a bit of a surprise to hear Laurens van der Post, travel writer of extraordinary compass, described as a member of the Bloomsbury Group on a radio program. Just as an aside! Indeed, it turns out that he was a regular visitor of their myriad parties and walks when he was a young man.
In the early 1990s this interest was developed further during work on the A3 at Hindhead. As part of the study into some perplexingly horrible road alignments it was important to establish the cultural associations in Hindhead itself and in the surrounding villages. Since this work, a fascinating book has been published locally called The Hilltop Writers by WR Trotter, but in those days it was local libraries, museums and diaries that provided the source material. It is a very rich seam. I will do a 'thing' on it in more detail later, but the presence of Lord Tennyson in Haslemere, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw at Hindhead, Helen and George Allingham at Witley and Flora Thompson in the post office in Grayshott all within a 20 year period, walking almost every day to call on their friends and acquaintances across the heath on each side was an extraordinary collection of talented and creative people.
Thankfully some of the more disturbing ideas never came to anything and Hindhead has now been bypassed through a tunnel, saving a cultural, historic and scenic landscape from utter destruction. It is going to be interesting to see how the heath develops on the previous line of the A3...
Ideas rarely start from a static beginning. As members of the public in receipt of these ideas it can often appear to be so, but for almost all of the great discoveries it is useful to contemplate Newton's view of the matter:
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.
Isaac Newton
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