FORTHCOMING 2012
Banksy: The Bristol Legacy
Edited by Paul Gough
ISBN: 978-1-906593-96-4
160pp
profusely illustrated
softback
PUBLICATION Spring 2012
£14.99: SPECIAL OFFER -
PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NOW AT ONLY £8.50 – POST PAID
In the summer of 2009 Bristol saw a remarkable phenomenon that made international news. An estimated 300,000 people queued for hours, often in pouring rain, for admission to the city’s museum & art gallery. They had been attracted by the media hype surrounding an exhibition ambiguously entitled ‘Banksy vs the Bristol Museum’.
There have been many celebratory books about Banksy, but this is the first non-partisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact. More than a dozen commentators, including art curators, historians, economists, journalists and local government managers, attempt to answer a raft of questions: Is Banksy a subversive influence or merely a bit of fun? Why is Banksy so important to Bristol? Are we dealing with art, ‘street art’ or graffiti? Where does the exhibition leave Bristol as an epicentre of ‘street art’? What was its economic impact?
The book looks at the setting up of the show and questions the need – other than to conform to the required Banksy mystique – for secrecy.
Bristol City Council took an unprecedented risk in allowing the Banksy team a free run of its galleries. The implications of this for future museum practice and for State encouragement of the popular arts are dealt with in detail.
In the wake of the exhibition the council designated a run-down area of the inner city for a ‘street art’ bonanza, inviting artists from around the world. The book attempts to judge the success of that initiative. Finally, a practising lawyer asks whether Banksy’s work can be given ‘listed building’ consent.
Rainer Maria Rilke: The Sonnets to Orpheus
Translated by David Cook
ISBN: 978-1-908326-14-0
£6.50
Publication: 29 February 2012
The Picturesque and the Later Georgian Garden
Michael Symes
ISBN: 978-1-908326-09-6
£18.50 (provisional)
Publication: April 2012
Social History of Bristol City Docks
Steve Poole
ISBN: 978-1-908326-10-2
Publication: September 2012
Historic Gardens of Herefordshire
Tim Mowl and Jane Bradney
ISBN: 978-1-906593-91-9
£19.99
Publication: May 2012
Herefordshire is a secretive border county of Marcher castles, small
manor houses, farms, lush orchards, scattered villages and meandering rivers. It is the epitome of rural England before the onset of industrialisation. Evidence of the designed landscapes of its castles is best preserved in the fifteenth-century walks, moat and park that surround atmospheric fragments of Bronsil Castle at Eastnor. By the seventeenth century a national renaissance in cider production had brought the clergyman turned landscape fancier, John Beale, to Backbury Hill. The view from the top inspired him to look upon Nature as a new model for garden design, a radical idea, ahead of its time.
In the eighteenth century the county rose to the cutting edge of
landscape aesthetics in 1794 when two squires – Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price – published theories of Picturesque taste and initiated a style wars campaign. They undermined Humphry Repton’s typically suburban proposals, forcing him to opt for more open parkland. Herefordshire was too remote for rich Edwardian
industrialists seeking a rural escape, consequently its Arts and Crafts
legacy is small, though there is a deliciously decaying Italian Garden at How Caple Court. Today, the motorway network stops abruptly at Ross-on-Wye, maintaining that sense of isolation. But in the pools and revetments of Lawless Hill overlooking the Wye at Sellack the county has one of the most inspired of modern gardens – a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water and the the Japanese gardens of Kyoto.
The Classical Buildings of Bath
Mike Jenner
ISBN: 978-1-908326-03-4
£19.95 (provisional)
