City Visions
7.00pm Thursday 27th January 2022
The Salon will be held online via the Zoom platform. Details of how to join will be emailed you before the event.
Admission: Tickets £5.00 in advance only HERE
Join writers TRAVIS ELBOROUGH and TOM BOLTON as they gaze at the capital through its very own eyes - and eyeware.
Join him as he relates the particular part London and its spectacle-makers and opticians, some brilliant others mad, bad and dangerous to know has played in their development. Learn why all spectacles in London were beer goggles until 1629, hear how the London Stone was used to police the sale of glasses and discover how immigrants in Spitalfields and Soho helped shape the optical trade.
When the problems with Londoners' vision are more serious than spectacles can address, the place they head to is Moorfields Eye Hospital, the last remaining of the many (and often odd) medical institutions in what was once a entire district of healthcare institutions around Old Street and City Road. As it prepares to move to a new site, TOM BOLTON reflects on Moorfield's history, its locale of lost hospitals, and London eye medicine in general.
We will learn how the eye has particular sensitivity and significance for Londoners, and how, from treatment at the shrines of saints to alarming early surgery, the city has been at the centre of a long and strange journey towards modern eye healthcare, a journey that includes secret societies, cricketers, fighter pilots, presidents and New Zealand communists...
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TRAVIS ELBOROUGH, described by The Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’, has been a freelance writer, author, broadcaster and cultural commentator for two decades. His books include The Bus We Loved: London's Affair With the Routemaster, Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, (the book that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World), A Walk in the Park, a loving exploration of public parks and green space. Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, was published in 2021. The latest in his collaborations with the cartographer Martin Brown, Atlas of Forgotten Places, also appeared in 2021.
TOM BOLTON is an urban researcher and the author of five books – ‘Camden Town: Dreams of Another London’, ‘Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast’; ‘Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods’ and ‘London’s Lost Rivers: A Walkers Guide Volumes 1 and 2’. He has presented multiple public walks and talks for the Royal Geographical Society Monday Night Lecture, Science Museum Lates, Radio 4, World Service, BBC London and written articles for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Quietus and others
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