At different times of the day, or in different seasons, the light falling in the Abbey will light up something that you have walked past a million times and never seen before.
Designed by. Developed by. Toggle navigation. Sir John Betjeman by Howard Coster. Sir John Betjeman memorial. Related commemorations See all commemorations. Dame Peggy Ashcroft Wystan Hugh Auden Laurence Olivier Howard and Enid Nixon Edward Carpenter Can an appreciation of the social history preserved in the environment re-connect us to the places we inhabit? Betjeman focused on Swindon on several occasions, and the town was the subject of his poetry, a television film, and a history published by Swindon Borough Council.
In , Betjeman declared he had come to love Swindon because of its people, but he was extremely dubious about the new housing estates. He wrote: "there aren't enough playing fields yet, it seems, for the children. Everything looks impersonal, though it's well meant.
Is this Swindon? Betjeman loved the bits of the town that were not the result of post-war planning. These were the parts of Swindon that offered a living environment where the borough's past could be appreciated, notably Christ Church in Swindon Old Town and the houses built by the Great Western Railway.
Apart from Marlborough, the importance of Wiltshire to John Betjeman's work is not well known, but it deserves to be. In his films and poetry, Betjeman draws attention to the small details of the places we walk through every day, details like railings, porches, and windows. In his film on Devizes, Betjeman tells us to "always look down alleys if you want to find the real history of a town.
He is constantly looking down alleys, as well as down lanes and passageways and gardens, hunting out the stories from the past that are embedded in buildings and landscapes. Through his eyes, unnoticed aspects of the Wiltshire environment reveal the histories of the people who shared these places hundreds of years before.
Williams would welcome anyone who has memories of John Betjeman's visits to Wiltshire to share them with him directly at p. BBC Local. He left Oxford in without a degree.
Betjeman taught briefly at Heddon Court School, Hertfordshire, and then worked for a while as an insurance broker before becoming, in , an assistant editor of the Architectural Review.
That same year he published his first book of verse, Mount Zion. Although somewhat mannered and certainly minor, the collection was distinguished by at least one poem, "The Varsity Students' Rag," which quietly but effectively satirizes the mindless, boys-will-be-boys destructiveness of his former fellow Oxfordians.
In Betjeman became editor of the Shell series of topographical guides to Britain and married Penelope Chetwode, a writer by whom he had a son and a daughter, but who pursued her own writing career abroad for most of their married life. In he became film critic for the Evening Standard but was fired less than a year later for his overly enthusiastic reviews.
Betjeman's second volume of verse, Continental Dew: A Little Book of Bourgeois Verse , is undistinguished but for its foreshadowing of an attitude that was to fully surface in subsequent books: a deep-dyed distrust of "modernity" in all of its guises—its indifference to tradition, its runaway materialism, and its savaging of the landscape.
Betjeman's book titles and sub-titles are frequently thematic, as in his first book on architecture, Ghastly Good Taste: a depressing story of the rise and fall of English architecture ; it was followed by University Chest and then Antiquarian Prejudice , which defines architecture for Betjeman as not mere building styles but as the total physical environment in which life is lived.
His topographical writings, which celebrate actual places he loved and excoriate places he loathed, include Vintage London , English Cities and Small Towns , and First and Last Loves In this period he issued two volumes of verse that revealed him to be a serious poet and not a mere "versifier": Old Lights for New Chancels and New Bats in Old Belfries Although they share with most modern poetry a profound pessimism about life, these works established Betjeman as a distinctive voice and somewhat of an anomaly: in an age dominated by lyric-contemplative verse, Betjeman relied strongly on narrative, or at least anecdotal, elements; in an age of free verse, he wrote in tight metrical and stanzaic forms; in an age of poetic obfuscation, Betjeman, though not without his ambiguities, was accessible; in an age of tight Classical control of emotion, he was wistfully playful and even sentimental.
In short, Betjeman was a throwback to the best-loved poets of English verse tradition—to Tennyson, Hardy, and Kipling. In both volumes Betjeman made humanly evocative use of place many of his poem titles are place names , reflecting the importance of topography in his work and projecting his thesis that as the landscape grows uglier the possibility of human happiness recedes.
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