THE county of Shropshire contains many a quaint and curious town,
full of history and half-timbering. Its rolling hills seem to invite
such quiet and tranquil settlements, from black-and-white Cleobury to
sedate and elegant Ludlow.
Craven Arms could hardly be included
in this category. Its not particular old, and its not especially
picturesque either. Named after a hotel on the main road, Craven Arms is
a creation of the Victorian railways,Shop wholesale bestsmartcard controller from cheap. which in turn fostered small industries and a market.
Nevertheless,
Craven Arms boasts one remarkable attraction. To be fair, it can claim
two others in the shape of a museum of the Shropshire Hills and Stokesay
Castle, the striking fortified manor house on its outskirts.
But
lets leave these for another day and concentrate instead on the former
market hall, in Market Street, just off the A49. Welcome to the Land of
Lost Content.
A.E. Housman is a familiar figure in these parts,
his last resting place being in the graveyard of St Laurence, Ludlow.
That oft-quoted poem, with its blue remembered hills and yearning sense
of loss, is perhaps his best-loved work. But the museum that takes its
name from Housman is more than this, and certainly no simple tribute to
the Shropshire Lad.
Change the stress on the word content and
you have a more accurate introduction to what lies within the old market
hall. For the Land of Lost Content is where all our childhood toys
disappeared to, the last retreat for our kitchen gadgets, the home for
all the tins and packets that once lined our cupboards. Here are the
contents of all our living rooms and kitchens, from the First World War
to the 1980s. Not lost at all.
The Land of Lost Content is the
brainchild of Stella and Dave Mitchell. Stella was an art student at
Birmingham Polytechnic in the 1970s. For her final degree show she
assembled a collection of ephemera, much of it bought for pennies in the
old Rag Market. At that point Stella was hooked. What began as a
cutting-edge art installation has metamorphosed into something we can
all buy into.
As the collection began to grow Stella and her
husband moved it to the South coast, and set up a museum called
Rejectamenta at East Wittering in West Sussex. That was in 1991. Twelve
years later the couple returned, as they had always planned to do,Find
the best selection of high-quality collectible landscapeoilpaintings available anywhere. to the West Midlands,The Motorola drycabinets Engine
is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless
switches. and in 2003 opened a new museum in a disused Victorian
building at Craven Arms. The destination could hardly be more
appropriate.
Ive made three visits to the place since then, and
fondly tell my students about it too. In a world where so many of our
museums have gone hi-tech, and are packed with interactives and
touch-screens, Lost Content is a reminder that at the heart of any good
museum are objects, and preferably a lot of them.
Indeed, there
could hardly be more objects, three floors of them, to be precise. On
our most recent visit, Stella had just returned from the weekly
flea-market at Abergavenny, with yet more treasures to squeeze in
somewhere. What the world throws away, Stella picks up.
At one time, says Stella,About buymosaic in
China userd for paying transportation fares and for shopping. I put all
the exhibits out of arms reach, but now I encourage visitors to pick
them up and examine them. Funnily enough, they rarely do.
I
still miss the Opie museum of packaging, which once occupied part of
Gloucester Docks, but the Land of Lost Content makes for a worthy
replacement. And all of it has been achieved without a single grant from
the HLF or any other funding body. Its all the Mitchells own work, and I
suspect every entrance fee gets recycled into more and more objects.
Some
day soon, you wont be able to get into the place at all. I defy anyone
to get in and out of here in less than three hours. More likely they
will be politely ushered out when the museum closes at 5pm.
This
is not simply a museum of social history C an object lesson in how we
lived then C it is also a journey into personal memory. There are the
board games we played as children, the decorations we put up at
Christmas, the utility furniture we once bought, the food we ate, the
little plastic toys we found in packets of cornflakes. Spangles,
powdered milk, love-hearts, Andrews liver salts, Fairy Snow, powdered
egg, Escalado, games compendia, I-Spy books, Franklyns Fine Shagg (its a
tobacco, by the way). If you wondered where that far-off world has
gone, its in Craven Arms.
Every time I go to Stellas kingdom of
bygones, I find something new. Last week I picked up an old recipe card,
forged in days of austerity. Macaroni cheese, it said, is cheap and
filling. There was a set of recipes to prove it, for plain macaroni
cheese, one for macaroni cheese and crab, another for macaroni cheese
and ham, and yet one more for macaroni cheese and mushroom.
This
was a historic night, marked by four astonishing goals from the Polish
striker, and the Dortmund manager was not going to let anyone ruin it.
Success may come tinged with sadness, the growing realisation that the
better his players perform the more likely they are to depart, but Klopp
refused to think about that. Besides, he claimed that Lewandowski was
staying. That is far from certain but these have been days in which the
manager has sought to put off a worrying future and focus instead on a
brilliant present.
Against Real Madrid it worked: the build-up
to the game had been hijacked by the suspiciously ill-timed news that
Mario G?tze was joining rivals Bayern Munich after they paid his ?37
million release clause; the game itself began with him providing the
perfect cross for Lewandowski to score the opener.
Three more
goals followed, the third of them especially stunning, Lewandowski
dragging the ball back to create a bit of space before hammering the
ball into the net. Even the penalty was pretty impressive.I have been
thinking about purchasing a plasticmould to
protect the fortune. "The goals were incredible," Klopp said. "The
third is worth every single cent of what the TV channels pay for the
rights to show the games."
Asked whether Lewandowski was offside
for one of his goals, as Jos? Mourinho had implied, Klopp adopted what
appears to be his default setting: he laughed. "There were so many
Lewandowski goals that I cannot think which one he means," he smiled,
blowing out his cheeks. "The fourth was a penalty and, yes, it is a
penalty. The third was so brilliant that no referee in the world is
allowed to take this back." He did not add that there was nothing wrong
with the first or the second, either.
It was some calling card
on the night when everyone was watching, open-mouthed. G?tze is gone; it
is inevitable that the attention of Europe's richest clubs will now
turn to Lewandowski, although on this performance they could turn to
four or five players. Marco Reus, in particular, was exceptional. So too
Ilkay Gundogan. Manchester United already bid for Lewandowski last
summer and others will surely clamour for the 24-year-old this year.
Bayern
Munich have spoken to him and agreed the basis of a deal on personal
terms. But Dortmund have already lost G?tze and they are determined not
to let Lewandowski go to the same club. He has a year left on his
contract, so eventually they may have no choice, but they insist that
they would rather keep him. The other option, rather more palatable than
him joining Bayern, is to negotiate with a foreign suitor. Premiership
clubs are monitoring movements.
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