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Continuing collaboration for industrial design team, Katie and Trevis of Inch and Mile. Stay tuned for their latest creations....
inchandmile.com
This Zinnia is growing in the raised garden bed, and although the number of Zinnias growing this year is less than previous years, they continue to offer some color in the back yard as well as some photo ops.
Having missed it a few weeks back, when it was taken out of service at Guildford, I thought I'd blown my chance for a last shot of Stagecoach Hants & Surrey 33020 (T593 CGT).
I believe it's usually to be found out of the way, on Haslemere town service 59.
It showed its face on the 72 yesterday though, and today, I was very surprised to see it out Hampshire way on Farnborough - Camberley route 2.
It looked most out of place in Farnborough for some reason!
The Hants CC bus cuts from 4th January 2015 will see the Saturday evening service on route 2 withdrawn. There was only an evening service on one day of the week, as the funding for the evening services on Mondays to Fridays was withdrawn in the last round of HCC bus cuts.
HCC have also axed the funding for the hourly Sunday service, so Stagecoach are taking it on commercially (but only every two hours) from January.
Kingsmead, Farnborough, Hampshire.
Hotel Viru was built in 1972. Architects: H. Sepmann, M. Port, V. Tamm, V. Asi, L. Raudesepp. Engineer U. Pall.
Metro Plaza building was designed by renowned KOKO architects Raivo Kotov and Kaur Stöör. Its ground floors are based on centuries-old walls. Built on the order of Tallinn merchant and industrialist Ch.Rottermann during the period 1848-1850, the department store and residential building played a major role in the formation of Tallinn’s 0-point. The historic building, initially filled with shops and an apartment, has been used by educational institutions throughout most of its history. Around 1871, the building was sold to the City of Tallinn and converted into a school, a year later the Aleksander Nevski Poeglaste Gümnaasium opened its doors here. The Upper Secondary School for Boys continued to operate until 1917. During the period of Estonian independence, the building was home to Tallinn’s First Upper Secondary School for Girls, after World War II it was home to Tallinn Special Industrial School No. 49, and later the Tallinn Pedagogical College. With the construction of Metro Plaza, the building regained its original function in the form of retail spaces.
The continuing heat wave in the United States in July 2011 has broken temperature records in many locations, killed dozens and seen nearly half of all Americans under heat advisories at its peak. Four movies, created with data from NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft for the period from July 16-24, show the movement of a dome of heat across the eastern two-thirds of the country. They highlight two familiar temperatures: surface air temperature and surface skin temperature, during both daytime and nighttime conditions.
Surface air temperature is something we experience whenever we go outside. High surface air temperature makes even shady places feel hot. Surface skin temperature is what we feel when we touch the ground. During daytime, the surface skin temperature is generally much warmer than surface air temperature because dark surfaces are so effective at absorbing sunlight. The surface air and skin temperatures are related by something invisible but actually quite familiar: infrared -- or heat -- radiation. Our skin is very sensitive to infrared radiation, making a sun-heated wall feel warm even from a few feet away after sunset. Air absorbs very little sunlight, but easily absorbs infrared radiation emitted by the warm surface. It's the sun-warmed surface -- not sunlight -- that heats the air during daytime.
The four movies illustrate the extraordinarily high temperatures in the US heat wave. Both types of temperature, for daytime and nighttime, are shown as a difference (anomaly) from the average over the previous eight years of AIRS data. Over the Northeast and northern Midwest, temperatures are 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. During normal weather there, daytime surface air temperatures are around 85 degrees Fahrenheit, while nights cool to around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures 20 degrees above average show daytime highs over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime lows in the mid-80s. These high temperatures, along with high humidity (also observed by AIRS but not shown here), make the central and eastern US one of the hottest regions on the planet in late July 2011.
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About AIRS
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, AIRS, in conjunction with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit, AMSU, sense emitted infrared and microwave radiation from the Earth to provide a three-dimensional look at Earth's weather and climate. Working in tandem, the two instruments make simultaneous observations all the way down to the Earth's surface, even in the presence of heavy clouds. With more than 2,000 channels sensing different regions of the atmosphere, the system creates a global, 3-dimensional map of atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud amounts and heights, greenhouse gas concentrations, and many other atmospheric phenomena. The AIRS and AMSU fly onboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft and are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, under contract to NASA. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Credit
NASA/JPL AIRS Project
Download the image
Various sizes of the image are available, and there are two ways to download:
1) Right-click on the image. Click on a size next to "View all sizes".
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Resources
Atmospheric Infrared Sounder web site ›
How to get the AIRS data
If Tesco can continue to supply new cases of Matchbox in a timely fashion, continue to keep stores regularly restocked and at the price they are putting them out at now then they have definitely got a success on their hands. Its still a huge shame they appear to have the sole exclusive rights to sell Matchbox here in the UK like ASDA used to do, I want to see them distributed everywhere but I guess we should be thankful Matchbox has returned to this country full stop!
Since Tesco began selling Matchbox again back in August unfortunately due to timing it has missed the last two cases of 2019 and jumped straight to 2020, the first country on this planet to receive them amazingly! Its a very very good assortment with a mixture of brand new castings and recolours of some very old favourites such as this 1957 Ford Thunderbird. In comes chrome and a velvety metallic crimson paint job and voila, one of its finest editions in a good many years. Mint and boxed.
5428 ‘Eric Treacy’ can be seen stripped down inside Grosmont shed with 80136 and 2253 on steam test outside the shed at Grosmont
Continuing my obsession with clock I finally got around to creating my own classic Grandfather clock. It ticks and chimes in all the right way and even the moon phase indicator works! :)
This is about 2/3 of what I have left to grade and it's going on week #3. I think, for my own sanity, I have to buckle down and just kick ass and finish grading these God forsaken essays! I need my life and my head back!
Continuing the fungi images taken in a friends garden a feew days back. Very small and delicaye they are about 18mm in diameter.
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Continued from last photo:
FINISHED: Recycled Cereal Box cardboard Boot Spats. Inspired by traditional Native American footwear.
Ok, on to accessory 2.
See next photos....
Gangasagar Mela 2017
The river Ganga (Ganges) which originates in the Gangotri glacier in the snow clad high Himalayas, descends down the mountains, reaches the plains, flows through ancient pilgrimage sites, and drains into the Bay of Bengal. A dip in the ocean, where the Ganga meets the sea is considered to be of great religious significance particularly on the Makara Sankranti day (January 14/15), when the sun makes a transition to Capricorn from Sagittarius. Almost a million of Hindu devotees from all over India gather at Gangasagar for a holy dip and perform rituals and prayer (puja) with a belief that it will cleanse and purify their souls.
Ganga Sagar - pain, bliss and sanctification
The Ganga Sagar Mela continues to throb with life, with the energy of millions of pilgrims. The pilgrimage may be extremely tough, but the pilgrims know that the visit will purify their souls. The visit fulfils their lifelong desire and often one can see tears of joy rolling down their cheeks. That is the magic of religion!
Images of Bengal, India
Happy Birthday Deona Marie.
Writing in chalk on Lake Street on what would have been Deona Marie's birthday. Marie was killed on June 13th while protesting the June 3rd law enforcement shooting death of Winston Smith. She was killed by Nicholas Kraus who drove his vehicle into a car being used as a barricade for those protesting.
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This image is part of a continuing series following the unrest and events in Minneapolis following the May 25th, 2020 murder of George Floyd.
copyright stuff continue
This time the examiner.com stole my pageant photo and cropped it. how come people they did not ask and try to steal the photos? it is sharing but it is not free to use it. :(
that is their URL
www.examiner.com/holidays-in-san-francisco/the-2010-miss-...
Continuing with the theme of flowers for some still life art shots. This one was illuminated by north light from a large window to the right of the lilly. The color background is a yellow foam board with post production vignetting. A white reflector is close to the left to bounce back light into the shadows. Played with several compositions before settling on this one. Tried additional backgrounds too, including a tan one and a black one, but this is our favorite.
for Mohd Shahid Ali .. a cab driver who hails from Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh and has been plying taxi 5 years now ...
Whenever i have bought a new lens ... First thing i hav done is to take a portrait shot of a cab driver ... When i bought 50mm and a fish eye i did the same nd now whn i bought tilt shift lens i shot Shahid .... Wanted this to feature in the 365 but for some reason it remained unprocessed
..recently added a black scratchplace, and repositioned the middle pickup (Tex-Mex Strat) closer to the neck.
Somewhere, Nyc.
1908 Kodak VP Autographic, digitized
Continuing a set-sequence shot with this camera.
The Palace of Versailles is a former royal residence commissioned by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about 19 kilometers (12 mi) west of Paris, France.
The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed, under the direction of the French Ministry of Culture, by the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles. About 15,000,000 people visit the palace, park, or gardens of Versailles every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.
Louis XIII built a simple hunting lodge on the site of the Palace of Versailles in 1623. With his death came Louis XIV who expanded the château into the beginnings of a palace that went through several changes and phases from 1661 to 1715. It was a favorite residence for both kings, and in 1682, Louis XIV moved the seat of his court and government to Versailles, making the palace the de facto capital of France. This state of affairs was continued by Kings Louis XV and Louis XVI, who primarily made interior alterations to the palace, but in 1789 the royal family and capital of France returned to Paris. For the rest of the French Revolution, the Palace of Versailles was largely abandoned and emptied of its contents, and the population of the surrounding city plummeted.
Napoleon, following his coronation as Emperor, used Versailles as a summer residence from 1810 to 1814, but did not restore it. Following the Bourbon Restoration, when the king was returned to the throne, he resided in Paris and it was not until the 1830s that meaningful repairs were made to the palace. A museum of French history was installed within it, replacing the apartments of the southern wing.
The palace and park were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1979 for its importance as the center of power, art, and science in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. The French Ministry of Culture has placed the palace, its gardens, and some of its subsidiary structures on its list of culturally significant monuments.
History
Main article: History of the Palace of Versailles
An engraving of Louis XIII's château as it appeared in 1652
Versailles around 1652, engraving by Jacques Gomboust [fr]
In 1623, Louis XIII, King of France, built a hunting lodge on a hill in a favorite hunting ground, 19 kilometers (12 mi) west of Paris and 16 kilometers (10 mi) from his primary residence, the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye The site, near a village named Versailles, was a wooded wetland that Louis XIII's court scorned as being generally unworthy of a king; one of his courtiers, François de Bassompierre, wrote that the lodge "would not inspire vanity in even the simplest gentleman". From 1631 to 1634, architect Philibert Le Roy replaced the lodge with a château for Louis XIII, who forbade his queen, Anne of Austria, from staying there overnight, even when an outbreak of smallpox at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1641 forced Louis XIII to relocate to Versailles with his three-year-old heir, the future Louis XIV.
When Louis XIII died in 1643, Anne became Louis XIV's regent, and Louis XIII's château was abandoned for the next decade. She moved the court back to Paris, where Anne and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, continued Louis XIII's unpopular monetary practices. This led to the Fronde, a series of revolts against royal authority from 1648 to 1653 that masked a struggle between Mazarin and the princes of the blood, Louis XIV's extended family, for influence over him. In the aftermath of the Fronde, Louis XIV became determined to rule alone. Following Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV reformed his government to exclude his mother and the princes of the blood, moved the court back to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and ordered the expansion of his father's château at Versailles into a palace.
Louis XIV had hunted at Versailles in the 1650s, but did not take any special interest in Versailles until 1661. On 17 August 1661, Louis XIV was a guest at a sumptuous festival hosted by Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, at his palatial residence, the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte. Louis XIV was impressed by the château and its gardens, which were the work of Louis Le Vau, the court architect since 1654, André Le Nôtre, the royal gardener since 1657, and Charles Le Brun, a painter in royal service since 1647. Vaux-le-Vicomte's scale and opulence inspired Louis XIV's aesthetic sense, but also led him to imprison Fouquet that September, as he had also built an island fortress and a private army. Louis XIV was also inspired by Vaux-le-Vicomte, and he recruited its authors for his own projects. Louis XIV replaced Fouquet with Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a protégé of Mazarin and enemy of Fouquet, and charged him with managing the corps of artisans in royal employment. Colbert acted as the intermediary between them and Louis XIV, who personally directed and inspected the planning and construction of Versailles.
Construction
Work at Versailles was at first concentrated on gardens, and through the 1660s, Le Vau only added two detached service wings and a forecourt to the château. But in 1668–69, as a response to the growth of the gardens, and victory over Spain in the War of Devolution, Louis XIV decided to turn Versailles into a full-scale royal residence. He vacillated between replacing or incorporating his father's château, but settled on the latter by the end of the decade, and from 1668 to 1671, Louis XIII's château was encased on three sides in a feature dubbed the enveloppe. This gave the château a new, Italianate façade overlooking the gardens, but preserved the courtyard façade, resulting in a mix of styles and materials that dismayed Louis XIV and that Colbert described as a "patchwork". Attempts to homogenize the two façades failed, and in 1670 Le Vau died, leaving the post of First Architect to the King vacant for the next seven years.
Le Vau was succeeded at Versailles by his assistant, architect François d'Orbay. Work at the palace during the 1670s focused on its interiors, as the palace was then nearing completion, though d'Orbay expanded Le Vau's service wings and connected them to the château, and built a pair of pavilions for government employees in the forecourt. In 1670, d'Orbay was tasked by Louis XIV with designing a city, also called Versailles, to house and service Louis XIV's growing government and court. The granting of land to courtiers for the construction of townhouses that resembled the palace began in 1671. The next year, the Franco-Dutch War began and funding for Versailles was cut until 1674, when Louis XIV had work begun on the Ambassadors' Staircase , a grand staircase for the reception of guests, and demolished the last of the village of Versailles.
Following the end of the Franco-Dutch War with French victory in 1678, Louis XIV appointed as First Architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, an experienced architect in Louis XIV's confidence, who would benefit from a restored budget and large workforce of former soldiers. Mansart began his tenure with the addition from 1678 to 1681 of the Hall of Mirrors, a renovation of the courtyard façade of Louis XIII's château, and the expansion of d'Orbay's pavilions to create the Ministers' Wings in 1678–79. Adjacent to the palace, Mansart built a pair of stables called the Grande and Petite Écuries from 1679 to 1682 and the Grand Commun, which housed the palace's servants and general kitchens, from 1682 to 1684. Mansart also added two entirely new wings in Le Vau's Italianate style to house the court, first at the south end of the palace from 1679 to 1681 and then at its north end from 1685 to 1689.
War and the resulting diminished funding slowed construction at Versailles for the rest of the 17th century. The Nine Years' War, which began in 1688, stopped work altogether until 1698. Three years later, however, the even more expensive War of the Spanish Succession began and, combined with poor harvests in 1693–94 and 1709–10, plunged France into crisis. Louis XIV thus slashed funding and canceled some of the work Mansart had planned in the 1680s, such as the remodeling of the courtyard façade in the Italianate style. Louis XIV and Mansart focused on a permanent palace chapel, the construction of which lasted from 1699 to 1710.
Louis XIV's successors, Louis XV and Louis XVI, largely left Versailles as they inherited it and focused on the palace's interiors. Louis XV's modifications began in the 1730s, with the completion of the Salon d'Hercule, a ballroom in the north wing, and the expansion of the king's private apartment, which required the demolition of the Ambassadors' Staircase In 1748, Louis XV began construction of a palace theater, the Royal Opera of Versailles at the northernmost end of the palace, but completion was delayed until 1770; construction was interrupted in the 1740s by the War of the Austrian Succession and then again in 1756 with the start of the Seven Years' War. These wars emptied the royal treasury and thereafter construction was mostly funded by Madame du Barry, Louis XV's favorite mistress. In 1771, Louis XV had the northern Ministers' Wing rebuilt in Neoclassical style by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, his court architect, as it was in the process of falling down. That work was also stopped by financial constraints, and it remained incomplete when Louis XV died in 1774. In 1784, Louis XVI briefly moved the royal family to the Château de Saint-Cloud ahead of more renovations to the Palace of Versailles, but construction could not begin because of financial difficulty and political crisis. In 1789, the French Revolution swept the royal family and government out of Versailles forever.
Role in politics and culture
The Palace of Versailles was key to Louis XIV's politics, as an expression and concentration of French art and culture, and for the centralization of royal power. Louis XIV first used Versailles to promote himself with a series of nighttime festivals in its gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674, the events of which were disseminated throughout Europe by print and engravings. As early as 1669, but especially from 1678, Louis XIV sought to make Versailles his seat of government, and he expanded the palace so as to fit the court within it. The moving of the court to Versailles did not come until 1682, however, and not officially, as opinion on Versailles was mixed among the nobility of France.
By 1687, however, it was evident to all that Versailles was the de facto capital of France, and Louis XIV succeeded in attracting the nobility to Versailles to pursue prestige and royal patronage within a strict court etiquette, thus eroding their traditional provincial power bases. It was at the Palace of Versailles that Louis XIV received the Doge of Genoa, Francesco Maria Imperiale Lercari in 1685, an embassy from the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1686, and an embassy from Safavid Iran in 1715.[
Louis XIV died at Versailles on 1 September 1715 and was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV, then the duke of Anjou, who was moved to Vincennes and then to Paris by Louis XV's regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans. Versailles was neglected until 1722, when Philippe II removed the court to Versailles to escape the unpopularity of his regency, and when Louis XV began his majority. The 1722 move, however, broke the cultural power of Versailles, and during the reign of Louis XVI, courtiers spent their leisure in Paris, not Versailles.
During Christmas 1763, Mozart and his family visited Versailles and dined with the kings. The 7-year-old Mozart played several works during his stay and later dedicated his first two harpsichord sonatas, published in 1764 in Paris, to Madame Victoria, daughter of Louis XV.
In 1783, the palace was the site of the signing of the last two of the three treaties of the Peace of Paris (1783), which ended the American Revolutionary War. On September 3, British and American delegates, led by Benjamin Franklin, signed the Treaty of Paris at the Hôtel d'York (now 56 Rue Jacob) in Paris, granting the United States independence. On September 4, Spain and France signed separate treaties with England at the Palace of Versailles, formally ending the war.
The King and Queen learned of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789, while they were at the palace, and remained isolated there as the Revolution in Paris spread. The growing anger in Paris led to the Women's March on Versailles on 5 October 1789. A crowd of several thousand men and women, protesting the high price and scarcity of bread, marched from the markets of Paris to Versailles. They took weapons from the city armory, besieged the palace, and compelled the King and royal family and the members of the National Assembly to return with them to Paris the following day.
As soon as the royal family departed, the palace was closed. In 1792, the National Convention, the new revolutionary government, ordered the transfer of all the paintings and sculptures from the palace to the Louvre. In 1793, the Convention declared the abolition of the monarchy and ordered all of the royal property in the palace to be sold at auction. The auction took place between 25 August 1793 and 11 August 1794. The furnishings and art of the palace, including the furniture, mirrors, baths, and kitchen equipment, were sold in seventeen thousand lots. All fleurs-de-lys and royal emblems on the buildings were chambered or chiseled off. The empty buildings were turned into a storehouse for furnishings, art and libraries confiscated from the nobility. The empty grand apartments were opened for tours beginning in 1793, and a small museum of French paintings and art school was opened in some of the empty rooms.
By virtue of an order issued by the Versailles district directorate in August 1794, the Royal Gate was destroyed, the Cour Royale was cleared and the Cour de Marbre lost its precious floor.
19th century – history museum and government venue
When Napoleon became Emperor of the French in 1804, he considered making Versailles his residence but abandoned the idea because of the cost of the renovation. Prior to his marriage with Marie-Louise in 1810, he had the Grand Trianon restored and refurnished as a springtime residence for himself and his family, in the style of furnishing that it is seen today.
In 1815, with the final downfall of Napoleon, Louis XVIII, the younger brother of Louis XVI, became King, and considered returning the royal residence to Versailles, where he had been born. He ordered the restoration of the royal apartments, but the task and cost was too great. Louis XVIII had the far end of the south wing of the Cour Royale demolished and rebuilt (1814–1824) to match the Gabriel wing of 1780 opposite, which gave greater uniformity of appearance to the front entrance. Neither he nor his successor Charles X lived at Versailles.
The French Revolution of 1830 brought a new monarch, Louis-Philippe to power, and a new ambition for Versailles. He did not reside at Versailles but began the creation of the Museum of the History of France, dedicated to "all the glories of France", which had been used to house some members of the royal family. The museum was begun in 1833 and inaugurated on 30 June 1837. Its most famous room is the Galerie des Batailles (Hall of Battles), which lies on most of the length of the second floor of the south wing. The museum project largely came to a halt when Louis Philippe was overthrown in 1848, though the paintings of French heroes and great battles still remain in the south wing.
Emperor Napoleon III used the palace on occasion as a stage for grand ceremonies. One of the most lavish was the banquet that he hosted for Queen Victoria in the Royal Opera of Versailles on 25 August 1855.
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the palace was occupied by the general staff of the victorious German Army. Parts of the château, including the Gallery of Mirrors, were turned into a military hospital. The creation of the German Empire, combining Prussia and the surrounding German states under William I, was formally proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors on 18 January 1871. The Germans remained in the palace until the signing of the armistice in March 1871. In that month, the government of the new Third French Republic, which had departed Paris during the War for Tours and then Bordeaux, moved into the palace. The National Assembly held its meetings in the Opera House.
The uprising of the Paris Commune in March 1871, prevented the French government, under Adolphe Thiers, from returning immediately to Paris. The military operation which suppressed the Commune at the end of May was directed from Versailles, and the prisoners of the Commune were marched there and put on trial in military courts. In 1875 a second parliamentary body, the French Senate, was created and held its meetings for the election of a President of the Republic in a new hall created in 1876 in the south wing of the palace. The French Senate continues to meet in the palace on special occasions, such as the amendment of the French Constitution.
20th century
The end of the 19th and the early 20th century saw the beginning of restoration efforts at the palace, first led by Pierre de Nolhac, poet and scholar and the first conservator, who began his work in 1892. The conservation and restoration were interrupted by two world wars but have continued until the present day.
The palace returned to the world stage in June 1919, when, after six months of negotiations, the Treaty of Versailles, formally ending the First World War, was signed in the Hall of Mirrors. Between 1925 and 1928, the American philanthropist and multi-millionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr. gave $2,166,000, the equivalent of about thirty million dollars today, to restore and refurbish the palace.
More work took place after World War II, with the restoration of the Royal Opera of Versailles. The theater was reopened in 1957, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
In 1978, parts of the palace were heavily damaged in a bombing committed by Breton terrorists.
Starting in the 1950s, when the museum of Versailles was under the directorship of Gérald van der Kemp, the objective was to restore the palace to its state – or as close to it as possible – in 1789 when the royal family left the palace. Among the early projects was the repair of the roof over the Hall of Mirrors; the publicity campaign brought international attention to the plight of post-war Versailles and garnered much foreign money including a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
One of the more costly endeavors for the museum and France's Fifth Republic has been to repurchase as much of the original furnishings as possible. Consequently, because furniture with a royal provenance – and especially furniture that was made for Versailles – is a highly sought-after commodity on the international market, the museum has spent considerable funds on retrieving much of the palace's original furnishings.
21st century
In 2003, a new restoration initiative – the "Grand Versailles" project – was started, which began with the replanting of the gardens, which had lost over 10,000 trees during Cyclone Lothar on 26 December 1999. One part of the initiative, the restoration of the Hall of Mirrors, was completed in 2006. Another major project was the further restoration of the backstage areas of the Royal Opera of Versailles in 2007 to 2009.
The Palace of Versailles is currently owned by the French state. Its formal title is the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles. Since 1995, it has been run as a Public Establishment, with an independent administration and management supervised by the French Ministry of Culture.
The grounds of the palace will host the equestrian competition during the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Architecture and plan
The Palace of Versailles is a visual history of French architecture from the 1630s to the 1780s. Its earliest portion, the corps de logis, was built for Louis XIII in the style of his reign with brick, marble, and slate, which Le Vau surrounded in the 1660s with Enveloppe, an edifice that was inspired by Renaissance-era Italian villas. When Mansart made further expansions to the palace in the 1680s, he used the Enveloppe as the model for his work. Neoclassical additions were made to the palace with the remodeling of the Ministers' Wings in the 1770s, by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, and after the Bourbon Restoration.
The palace was largely completed by the death of Louis XIV in 1715. The eastern facing palace has a U-shaped layout, with the corps de logis and symmetrical advancing secondary wings terminating with the Dufour Pavilion on the south and the Gabriel Pavilion to the north, creating an expansive cour d'honneur known as the Royal Court (Cour Royale). Flanking the Royal Court are two enormous asymmetrical wings that result in a façade of 402 metres (1,319 ft) in length. Covered by around a million square feet (10 hectares) of roof, the palace has 2,143 windows, 1,252 chimneys, and 67 staircases.[
The palace and its grounds have had a great influence on architecture and horticulture from the mid-17th century to the end of the 18th century. Examples of works influenced by Versailles include Christopher Wren's work at Hampton Court Palace, Berlin Palace, the Palace of La Granja, Stockholm Palace, Ludwigsburg Palace, Karlsruhe Palace, Rastatt Palace, Nymphenburg Palace, Schleissheim Palace, and Esterházy Palace.
Royal Apartments
The construction in 1668–1671 of Le Vau's enveloppe around the outside of Louis XIII's red brick and white stone château added state apartments for the king and the queen. The addition was known at the time as the château neuf (new château). The grands appartements (Grand Apartments, also referred to as the State Apartments[141][142]) include the grand appartement du roi and the grand appartement de la reine. They occupied the main or principal floor of the château neuf, with three rooms in each apartment facing the garden to the west and four facing the garden parterres to the north and south, respectively. The private apartments of the king (the appartement du roi and the petit appartement du roi) and those of the queen (the petit appartement de la reine) remained in the château vieux (old château). Le Vau's design for the state apartments closely followed Italian models of the day, including the placement of the apartments on the main floor (the piano nobile, the next floor up from the ground level), a convention the architect borrowed from Italian palace design.
The king's State Apartment consisted of an enfilade of seven rooms, each dedicated to one of the known planets and their associated titular Roman deity. The queen's apartment formed a parallel enfilade with that of the grand appartement du roi. After the addition of the Hall of Mirrors (1678–1684) the king's apartment was reduced to five rooms (until the reign of Louis XV, when two more rooms were added) and the queen's to four.
The queen's apartments served as the residence of three queens of France – Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche, wife of Louis XIV, Marie Leczinska, wife of Louis XV, and Marie-Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI. Additionally, Louis XIV's granddaughter-in-law, Princess Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, duchesse de Bourgogne, wife of the Petit Dauphin, occupied these rooms from 1697 (the year of her marriage) to her death in 1712.
Ambassador's Staircase
The Ambassadors' Staircase (Escalier des Ambassadeurs) was an imperial staircase built from 1674 to 1680 by d'Orbay. Until Louis XV had it demolished in 1752 to create a courtyard for his private apartments, the staircase was the primary entrance into the Palace of Versailles and the royal apartments especially. It was entered from the courtyard via a vestibule that, cramped and dark, contrasted greatly with the tall, open space of the staircase – famously lit naturally with a skylight – so as to overawe visitors.
The staircase and walls of the room that contained it were clad in polychrome marble and gilded bronze, with decor in the Ionic order. Le Brun and painted the walls and ceiling of the room according to a festive theme to celebrate Louis XIV's victory in the Franco-Dutch War. On the wall immediately above the staircase were trompe-l'œil paintings of people from the Four Parts of the World looking into the staircase over a balustrade, a motif repeated on the ceiling fresco. There they were joined by allegorical figures for the twelve months of the year and various Classical Greek figures such as the Muses. A marble bust of Louis XIV, sculpted by Jean Warin in 1665–66, was placed in a niche above the first landing of the staircase.
The State Apartments of the King
The construction of the Hall of Mirrors between 1678 and 1686 coincided with a major alteration to the State Apartments. They were originally intended as his residence, but the King transformed them into galleries for his finest paintings, and venues for his many receptions for courtiers. During the season from All-Saints Day in November until Easter, these were usually held three times a week, from six to ten in the evening, with various entertainments.
The Salon of Hercules
This was originally a chapel. It was rebuilt beginning in 1712 under the supervision of the First Architect of the King, Robert de Cotte, to showcase two paintings by Paolo Veronese, Eleazar and Rebecca and Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee, which was a gift to Louis XIV from the Republic of Venice in 1664. The painting on the ceiling, The Apotheosis of Hercules, by François Lemoyne, was completed in 1736, and gave the room its name.
The Salon of Abundance
The Salon of Abundance was the antechamber to the Cabinet of Curios (now the Games Room), which displayed Louis XIV's collection of precious jewels and rare objects. Some of the objects in the collection are depicted in René-Antoine Houasse's painting Abundance and Liberality (1683), located on the ceiling over the door opposite the windows.
The Salon of Venus
This salon was used for serving light meals during evening receptions. The principal feature in this room is Jean Warin's life-size statue of Louis XIV in the costume of a Roman emperor. On the ceiling in a gilded oval frame is another painting by Houasse, Venus subjugating the Gods and Powers (1672–1681). Trompe-l'œil paintings and sculpture around the ceiling illustrate mythological themes.
The Salon of Mercury
The Salon of Mercury was the original State Bedchamber when Louis XIV officially moved the court and government to the palace in 1682. The bed is a replica of the original commissioned by King Louis-Philippe in the 19th century when he turned the palace into a museum. The ceiling paintings by the Flemish artist Jean Baptiste de Champaigne depict the god Mercury in his chariot, drawn by a rooster, and Alexander the Great and Ptolemy surrounded by scholars and philosophers. The Automaton Clock was made for the King by the royal clockmaker Antoine Morand in 1706. When it chimes the hour, figures of Louis XIV and Fame descend from a cloud.
The Salon of Mars
The Salon of Mars was used by the royal guards until 1782, and was decorated on a military theme with helmets and trophies. It was turned into a concert room between 1684 and 1750, with galleries for musicians on either side. Portraits of Louis XV and his Queen, Marie Leszczinska, by the Flemish artist Carle Van Loo decorate the room today.
The Salon of Apollo
The Salon of Apollo was the royal throne room under Louis XIV, and was the setting for formal audiences. The eight-foot-high silver throne was melted down in 1689 to help pay the costs of an expensive war, and was replaced by a more modest throne of gilded wood. The central painting on the ceiling, by Charles de la Fosse, depicts the Sun Chariot of Apollo, the King's favorite emblem, pulled by four horses and surrounded by the four seasons.
The Salon of Diana
The Salon of Diana was used by Louis XIV as a billiards room, and had galleries from which courtiers could watch him play. The decoration of the walls and ceiling depicts scenes from the life of the goddess Diana. The celebrated bust of Louis XIV by Bernini made during the famous sculptor's visit to France in 1665 is on display here.
Private apartments of the King and Queen
The apartments of the King were the heart of the château; they were in the same location as the rooms of Louis XIII, the creator of the château, on the first floor (second floor US style). They were set aside for the personal use of Louis XIV in 1683. He and his successors Louis XV and Louis XVI used these rooms for official functions, such as the ceremonial lever ("waking up") and the coucher ("going to bed") of the monarch, which was attended by a crowd of courtiers.
The King's apartment was accessed from the Hall of Mirrors from the Oeil de Boeuf antechamber or from the Guardroom and the Grand Couvert, the ceremonial room where Louis XIV often took his evening meals, seated alone at a table in front of the fireplace. His spoon, fork, and knife were brought to him in a golden box. The courtiers could watch as he dined.
The King's bedchamber had originally been a Drawing Room before Louis XIV transformed it into his own bedroom in 1701. He died there on 1 September 1715. Both Louis XV and Louis XVI continued to use the bedroom for their official awakening and going to bed. On 6 October 1789, from the balcony of this room Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, joined by the Marquis de Lafayette, looked down on the hostile crowd in the courtyard, shortly before the King was forced to return to Paris.
The bed of the King is placed beneath a carved relief by Nicolas Coustou entitled France watching over the sleeping King. The decoration includes several paintings set into the paneling, including a self-portrait of Antony van Dyck.
Private apartments of The Queen
The petit appartement de la reine is a suite of rooms that were reserved for the personal use of the queen. Originally arranged for the use of the Marie-Thérèse, consort of Louis XIV, the rooms were later modified for use by Marie Leszczyńska and finally for Marie-Antoinette. The Queen's apartments and the King's Apartments were laid out on the same design, each suite having seven rooms. Both suites had ceilings painted with scenes from mythology; the King's ceilings featured male figures, the Queen's featured females.
Hall of Mirrors
The Hall of Mirrors is a long gallery at the westernmost part of the palace that looks out onto the gardens. The hall was built from 1678 to 1681 on the site of a terrace Le Vau built between the king and queen's suites. The hall is clad in marble and decorated in a modified version of the Corinthian order, with 578 mirrors facing 17 windows and reflecting the light provided by them. The ceiling fresco, painted by Le Brun over the next four years, embellishes the first 18 years of Louis XIV's reign in 30 scenes, 17 of which are military victories over the Dutch. The fresco depicts Louis XIV himself alongside Classical figures in the scenes celebrating moments in his reign such as the beginning of personal rule in 1661, breaking from earlier frescoes at Versailles that used allegories derived from Classical and mythological scenes.
The Salon of War and the Salon of Peace bookend the Hall of Mirrors on its northern and southern ends respectively. The Salon of War, constructed and decorated from 1678 to 1686, celebrates French victories in the Franco-Dutch War with marble panels, gilded bronze trophies of arms, and a stucco bas-relief of Louis XIV on horsebask riding over his enemies. The Salon of Peace is decorated in the same fashion but according to its eponymous theme.
Royal Chapel
The Royal Chapel of Versailles is located at the southern end of the north wing. The building stands 40-meter (130 ft) high, and measures 42 meters (138 ft) long and 24 meters (79 ft) wide. The chapel is rectangular with a semicircular apse, combining traditional, Gothic royal French church architecture with the French Baroque style of Versailles. The ceiling of the chapel is constituted by an unbroken vault, divided into three frescos by Antoine Coypel, Charles de La Fosse, and Jean Jouvenet. The palette of motifs beneath the frescoes glorify the deeds of Louis IX, and include images of David, Constantine, Charlemagne, and Louis IX, fleur de lis, and Louis XIV's monogram. The organ of the chapel was built by Robert Clicquot and Julien Tribuot in 1709–1710.
Louis XIV commissioned the chapel, its sixth, from Mansart and Le Brun in 1683–84. It was the last building constructed at Versailles during Louis XIV's reign. Construction was delayed until 1699, however, and it was not completed until 1710. The only major modification to the chapel since its completion was the removal of a lantern from its roof in 1765. A full restoration of the chapel began in late 2017 and lasted into early 2021.
Royal Opera
The Royal Opera of Versailles was originally commissioned by Louis XIV in 1682 and was to be built at the end of the North Wing with a design by Mansart and Vigarani. However, due to the expense of the King's continental wars, the project was put aside. The idea was revived by Louis XV with a new design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel in 1748, but this was also temporarily put aside. The project was revived and rushed ahead for the planned celebration of the marriage of the Dauphin, the future Louis XVI, and Marie-Antoinette. For economy and speed, the new opera was built almost entirely of wood, which also gave it very high quality acoustics. The wood was painted to resemble marble, and the ceiling was decorated with a painting of the Apollo, the god of the arts, preparing crowns for illustrious artists, by Louis Jean-Jacques Durameau. The sculptor Augustin Pajou added statuary and reliefs to complete the decoration. The new Opera was inaugurated on 16 May 1770, as part of the celebration of the royal wedding.
In October 1789, early in the French Revolution, the last banquet for the royal guardsmen was hosted by the King in the opera, before he departed for Paris. Following the Franco-German War in 1871 and then the Paris Commune until 1875, the French National Assembly met in the opera, until the proclamation of the Third French Republic and the return of the government to Paris.
Museum of the History of France
Shortly after becoming King in 1830, Louis Philippe I decided to transform the palace into a museum devoted to "All the Glories of France," with paintings and sculpture depicting famous French victories and heroes. Most of the apartments of the palace were entirely demolished (in the main building, practically all of the apartments were annihilated, with only the apartments of the king and queen remaining almost intact), and turned into a series of several large rooms and galleries: the Coronation Room (whose original volume was left untouched by Louis-Philippe), which displays the celebrated painting of the coronation of Napoleon I by Jacques-Louis David; the Hall of Battles; commemorating French victories with large-scale paintings; and the 1830 room, which celebrated Louis-Philippe's own coming to power in the French Revolution of 1830. Some paintings were brought from the Louvre, including works depicting events in French history by Philippe de Champaigne, Pierre Mignard, Laurent de La Hyre, Charles Le Brun, Adam Frans van der Meulen, Nicolas de Largillière, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Marc Nattier, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Hubert Robert, Thomas Lawrence, Jacques-Louis David, and Antoine-Jean Gros. Others were commissioned especially for the museum by prominent artists of the early 19th century, including Eugène Delacroix, who painted Saint Louis at the French victory over the British in the Battle of Taillebourg in 1242. Other painters featured include Horace Vernet and François Gérard. A monumental painting by Vernet features Louis Philippe himself, with his sons, posing in front of the gates of the palace.
The overthrow of Louis Philippe in 1848 put an end to his grand plans for the museum, but the Gallery of Battles is still as it was, and is passed through by many visitors to the royal apartments and grand salons. Another set of rooms on the first floor has been made into galleries on Louis XIV and his court, displaying furniture, paintings, and sculptures. In recent years, eleven rooms on the ground floor between the Chapel and the Opera have been turned into a history of the palace, with audiovisual displays and models.
Estate of Versailles
The estate of Versailles consists of the palace, the subsidiary buildings around it, and its park and gardens. As of June 2021, the estate altogether covers an area of 800 hectares (8.0 km2; 2,000 acres), with the park and gardens laid out to the south, west, and north of the palace. The palace is approached from the east by the Avenue de Paris, measuring 17 miles (27 km) from Paris to a gate between the Grande and Petite Écuries. Beyond these stables is the Place d'Armes, where the Avenue de Paris meets the Avenue de Sceaux and Avenue de Saint-Cloud (see map), the three roads that formed the main arteries of the city of Versailles. Exactly where the three roads meet is a gate leading into the cour d'honneur. hemmed in by the Ministers' Wings. Beyond is the Royal Gate and the main palace, which wraps around the Royal and finally Marble Courts
The estate was established by Louis XIII as a hunting retreat, with a park just to the west of his château. From 1661, Louis XIV expanded the estate until, at its greatest extent, the estate was made up by the Grand Parc , a hunting ground of 15,000 hectares (150 km2; 37,000 acres), and the gardens, called the Petit Parc, which covered 1,700 hectares (17 km2; 4,200 acres). A 25-mile (40 km) long, 10-foot (3.0 m) high wall with 24 gateways enclosed the estate.
The landscape of the estate had to be created from the bog that surrounded Louis XIII's château using landscape architecture usually employed in fortress building. The approach to the palace and the gardens were carefully laid out via the moving of earth and construction of terraces. The water from the marsh was marshalled into a series of lakes and ponds around Versailles, but these reservoirs were not sufficient for the palace, city, or gardens. Great lengths were taken to supply Versailles with water, such as the damming of the river Bièvre to create an inflow in the 1660s, the construction of an enormous pumping station at the river Seine near Marly-le-Roi in 1681, and an attempt to divert water from the river Eure with a canal in the later 1680s.
Gardens
The gardens of Versailles, as they have existed since the reign of Louis XIV, are the work of André Le Nôtre. Le Nôtre's gardens were preceded by a simple garden laid out in the 1630s by landscape architects Jacques Boyceau and Jacques de Nemours, which he rearranged along an east–west axis that, because of Louis XIV's land purchases and the clearing of woodland, were expanded literally as far as could be seen. The resulting gardens were a collaboration between Le Nôtre, Le Brun, Colbert, and Louis XIV, marked by rigid order, discipline, and open space, with axial paths, flowerbeds, hedges, and ponds and lakes as motifs. They became the epitome of the French formal garden style, and have been very influential and widely imitated or reproduced.
Subsidiary structures
The first of the subsidiary structures of the Palace of Versailles was the Versailles Menagerie [fr],[199][200] built by Le Vau between the years 1662 and 1664, at the southern end of the Grand Canal. The apartments, overlooking the pens, were renovated by Mansart from 1698 to 1700, but the Menagerie fell into disuse in 1712. After a long period of decay, it was demolished in 1801. The Versailles Orangery, just to the south of the palace, was first built by Le Vau in 1663, originally as part of the general moving of earth to create the Estate.[191] It was also modified by Mansart, who, from 1681 to 1685, totally rebuilt it and doubled its size.
In late 1679, Louis XIV commissioned Mansart to build the Château de Marly, a retreat at the edge of Versailles's estate, about 5 miles (8.0 km) from the palace. The château consisted of a primary residential building and twelve pavilions, in Palladian style placed in two rows on either side of the main building. Construction was completed in 1686, when Louis XIV spent his first night there. The château was nationalized and sold in 1799, and subsequently demolished and replaced with industrial buildings. These were themselves demolished in 1805, and then in 1811 the estate was purchased by Napoleon. On 1 June 2009, the grounds of the Château de Marly were ceded to the Public Establishment of the Palace, Museum and National Estate of Versailles.
La Lanterne, is a hunting lodge named after the lantern that topped the nearby Menagerie that was built in 1787 by Philippe Louis de Noailles, then the palace governor. It has since 1960 been a state residence.
Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon, whose construction from 1762 to 1768 led to the advent of the names "Grand" and "Petit Trianon", was constructed for Louis XV and the Madame du Barry in the Neoclassical style by Gabriel. The building has a piano nobile, basement, and attic, with five windows on each floor. On becoming king, Louis XVI gave the Petit Trianon to Marie Antoinette, who remodeled it, relaid its gardens in the then-current English and Oriental styles, and formed her own court there.
In 1668, Louis XIV purchased and demolished the hamlet of Trianon, near the northern tip of the Grand Canal, and in its place, he commissioned Le Vau to construct a retreat from court, remembered as the Porcelain Trianon. Designed and built by Le Vau in 1670, it was the first example of Chinoiserie (faux Chinese) architecture in Europe, though it was largely designed in French style. The roof was clad not with porcelain but with delftware, and was thus prone to leaks, so in 1687 Louis XIV ordered it demolished. Nevertheless, the Porcelain Trianon was itself influential and copycats were built across Europe.
The Grand Trianon
The Grand Trianon with courtyard and gardens. The wing at left is a residence of the President of France.
The Grand Trianon with courtyard and gardens. The wing at left is a residence of the President of France.
To replace the Porcelain Trianon, Louis XIV tasked Mansart with the construction in 1687 of the Grand Trianon, built from marble in three months. The Grand Trianon has a single story, except for its attached service wing, which was modified by Mansart in 1705–06. The east façade has a courtyard while the west faces the gardens of the Grand Trianon, and between them a peristyle. The interiors are mostly original,[214] and housed Louis XIV, the Madame de Maintenon, Marie Leszczynska, and Napoleon, who ordered restorations to the building. Under de Gaulle, the north wing of the Grand Trianon became a residence of the President of France.
The Queen's hamlet and Theater
Near the Trianons are the French pavilion, built by Gabriel in 1750 between the two residences, and the Queen's Theater and Queen's Hamlet, built by architect Richard Mique in 1780 and from 1783 to 1785 respectively. These were both built at the behest of Marie Antoinette; the theater, hidden in the gardens, indulged her appreciation of opera and is absolutely original, and the hamlet to extend her gardens with rustic amenities. The building scheme of the Queen's Hamlet includes a farmhouse (the farm was to produce milk and eggs for the queen), a dairy, a dovecote, a boudoir, a barn that burned down during the French Revolution, a mill and a tower in the form of a lighthouse.
Modern political and ceremonial functions
The palace still serves political functions. Heads of state are regaled in the Hall of Mirrors; the bicameral French Parliament—consisting of the Senate (Sénat) and the National Assembly (Assemblée nationale)—meet in joint session (a congress of the French Parliament) in Versailles to revise or otherwise amend the French Constitution, a tradition that came into effect with the promulgation of the 1875 Constitution. For example, the Parliament met in joint session at Versailles to pass constitutional amendments in June 1999 (for domestic applicability of International Criminal Court decisions and for gender equality in candidate lists), in January 2000 (ratifying the Treaty of Amsterdam), and in March 2003 (specifying the "decentralized organization" of the French Republic).
In 2009, President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the global financial crisis before a congress in Versailles, the first time that this had been done since 1848, when Charles-Louis Napoleon Bonaparte gave an address before the French Second Republic. Following the November 2015 Paris attacks, President François Hollande gave a speech before a rare joint session of parliament at the Palace of Versailles. This was the third time since 1848 that a French president addressed a joint session of the French Parliament at Versailles. The president of the National Assembly has an official apartment at the Palace of Versailles. In 2023 a state visit by Charles III to France included a state banquet at the Palace.
Aladdin is laid face down on a counter to continue the deboxing process. The only thing left to do is the remove the wire from around his waist. His shirt is opened in the back to make removing the wire easier. I discover that his belt is a separate piece, fastened in the back with Velcro, and the cape is removable on his left shoulder, but it is sewn to the right shoulder of his shirt. There are manufacturer's markings on his lower back, including his edition number and size (#899 of 6000), which matches his Certificate of Authenticity. After the wire is removed, his shirt and belt are closed up again, but his cape is kept over his head. His cape is then place down, over his back. I remove the plastic tabs fastening his hat to his head, then replace the hat on his head. The hat goes on his head rather loosely, so it is prone to falling off if he isn't in the upright position. He is now fully deboxed.
The plastic spacer is then removed from the backs of the two dolls. The next step is to
free the dolls from the built in doll stands. Aladdin is the first to be removed. There are wires around his legs, securing him to the doll stand and a small spacer. His hands are freed from Jasmines by cutting some rubber bands. I accidentally snipped the tip of one of Jasmine's fingers off. Oops!
The cardboard backing has been cut open to reveal the ends of the various fasteners used to secure the dolls and plastic spacers to the backing. Then the large spacer is freed from the backing, and the backing is laid down flat, revealing the backs of the dolls, who are still attached to the spacer, the doll stands, and the bottom of the backing. Next the backing is cut off from the base of the display stand. The bottom of the backing is still stuck to the base with double stick tape. The backing, with the Certificate of Authenticity attached, is put away inside of the acrylic top of the case, which is then placed in the original shipping carton.
The slipcover has been taken off, to reveal the dolls inside the display case. The dolls can be seen from three sides and the top of the clear acrylic case. The base of the case is gold filigree pattern over black, with a golden nameplate in front. The cardboard backing secures the dolls in their factory poses, and contains the Certificate of Authenticity. Then the acrylic cover is taken off, so the dolls are now in clear view.
Deboxing my Limited Edition Jasmine and Aladdin Doll Set, #899 of 6000, from the Disney Fairytale Designer Collection. Flash is used in most of these photos, as the the sunlight had faded.
Disney Fairytale Designer Collection
US Disney Store
Released In Store 2013-09-17
Released and Purchased Online 2013-09-18
Sold Out Online 2013-09-20
Received 2013-09-26
#899 of 6000
Product Information:
Jasmine and Aladdin Doll Set
$129.95
Item No. 6070040900892P
Eastern promise
Fans of Disney's romantic eastern adventure couldn't wish for anything more magical than this pair of Jasmine and Aladdin dolls. Part of the limited edition Disney Fairytale Designer Collection, they feature elegantly detailed costumes.
Magic in the details...
Please Note: Each Guest will be limited to ordering a maximum of one of this item per order.
As part of the Disney Fairytale Designer Collection this pair of Jasmine and Aladdin dolls were carefully crafted by artists inspired by Disney's beloved 1992 movie. The Sultan's daughter and street urchin have been reimagined in exquisite detail with these limited edition dolls. Brought to life with careful attention, they uniquely capture the essence of the fairytale couple, creating a one of a kind set that will be a treasured keepsake of collectors, Disney fans, and every princess at heart!
• Global Limited Editon of 6000
• Includes Certificate of Authenticity
• Jasmine features beaded headdress with matching earrings, and necklace
• Lustrous black hair and rooted eyelashes
• Richly embroidered top with rhinestone accents and beaded chain detailing at shoulders
• Satin skirt with embroidered peacock feathers, scalloped hem, and rhinestone accents
• Flowy chiffon underskirt
• Flower accessory
• Aladdin features satin turban with feather and jeweled accent
• Chest panel with ornate embroidery and matching cummerbund
• Satin cape with embroidered trim and contrast purple satin lining
• Satin pants and shirt with gold braid detailing at cuffs
• Dolls sold in a special keepsake display case with intricate details on the base, including a golden plate with the name of Jasmine and Aladdin
• Includes special Disney Fairytale Designer Collection Gift Bag
• Part of the Disney Fairytale Designer Collection
* Intended for adult collectors -- Not a child's toy.
The bare necessities
• Plastic / polyester
• Jasmine: 11 1/2'' H
• Aladdin: 12'' H
• Imported
Graffiti (plural; singular graffiti or graffito, the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from simple written words to elaborate wall paintings, and has existed since ancient times, with examples dating back to ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire (see also mural).
Graffiti is a controversial subject. In most countries, marking or painting property without permission is considered by property owners and civic authorities as defacement and vandalism, which is a punishable crime, citing the use of graffiti by street gangs to mark territory or to serve as an indicator of gang-related activities. Graffiti has become visualized as a growing urban "problem" for many cities in industrialized nations, spreading from the New York City subway system and Philadelphia in the early 1970s to the rest of the United States and Europe and other world regions
"Graffiti" (usually both singular and plural) and the rare singular form "graffito" are from the Italian word graffiato ("scratched"). The term "graffiti" is used in art history for works of art produced by scratching a design into a surface. A related term is "sgraffito", which involves scratching through one layer of pigment to reveal another beneath it. This technique was primarily used by potters who would glaze their wares and then scratch a design into them. In ancient times graffiti were carved on walls with a sharp object, although sometimes chalk or coal were used. The word originates from Greek γράφειν—graphein—meaning "to write".
The term graffiti originally referred to the inscriptions, figure drawings, and such, found on the walls of ancient sepulchres or ruins, as in the Catacombs of Rome or at Pompeii. Historically, these writings were not considered vanadlism, which today is considered part of the definition of graffiti.
The only known source of the Safaitic language, an ancient form of Arabic, is from graffiti: inscriptions scratched on to the surface of rocks and boulders in the predominantly basalt desert of southern Syria, eastern Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia. Safaitic dates from the first century BC to the fourth century AD.
Some of the oldest cave paintings in the world are 40,000 year old ones found in Australia. The oldest written graffiti was found in ancient Rome around 2500 years ago. Most graffiti from the time was boasts about sexual experiences Graffiti in Ancient Rome was a form of communication, and was not considered vandalism.
Ancient tourists visiting the 5th-century citadel at Sigiriya in Sri Lanka write their names and commentary over the "mirror wall", adding up to over 1800 individual graffiti produced there between the 6th and 18th centuries. Most of the graffiti refer to the frescoes of semi-nude females found there. One reads:
Wet with cool dew drops
fragrant with perfume from the flowers
came the gentle breeze
jasmine and water lily
dance in the spring sunshine
side-long glances
of the golden-hued ladies
stab into my thoughts
heaven itself cannot take my mind
as it has been captivated by one lass
among the five hundred I have seen here.
Among the ancient political graffiti examples were Arab satirist poems. Yazid al-Himyari, an Umayyad Arab and Persian poet, was most known for writing his political poetry on the walls between Sajistan and Basra, manifesting a strong hatred towards the Umayyad regime and its walis, and people used to read and circulate them very widely.
Graffiti, known as Tacherons, were frequently scratched on Romanesque Scandinavian church walls. When Renaissance artists such as Pinturicchio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or Filippino Lippi descended into the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, they carved or painted their names and returned to initiate the grottesche style of decoration.
There are also examples of graffiti occurring in American history, such as Independence Rock, a national landmark along the Oregon Trail.
Later, French soldiers carved their names on monuments during the Napoleonic campaign of Egypt in the 1790s. Lord Byron's survives on one of the columns of the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion in Attica, Greece.
The oldest known example of graffiti "monikers" found on traincars created by hobos and railworkers since the late 1800s. The Bozo Texino monikers were documented by filmmaker Bill Daniel in his 2005 film, Who is Bozo Texino?.
In World War II, an inscription on a wall at the fortress of Verdun was seen as an illustration of the US response twice in a generation to the wrongs of the Old World:
During World War II and for decades after, the phrase "Kilroy was here" with an accompanying illustration was widespread throughout the world, due to its use by American troops and ultimately filtering into American popular culture. Shortly after the death of Charlie Parker (nicknamed "Yardbird" or "Bird"), graffiti began appearing around New York with the words "Bird Lives".
Modern graffiti art has its origins with young people in 1960s and 70s in New York City and Philadelphia. Tags were the first form of stylised contemporary graffiti. Eventually, throw-ups and pieces evolved with the desire to create larger art. Writers used spray paint and other kind of materials to leave tags or to create images on the sides subway trains. and eventually moved into the city after the NYC metro began to buy new trains and paint over graffiti.
While the art had many advocates and appreciators—including the cultural critic Norman Mailer—others, including New York City mayor Ed Koch, considered it to be defacement of public property, and saw it as a form of public blight. The ‘taggers’ called what they did ‘writing’—though an important 1974 essay by Mailer referred to it using the term ‘graffiti.’
Contemporary graffiti style has been heavily influenced by hip hop culture and the myriad international styles derived from Philadelphia and New York City Subway graffiti; however, there are many other traditions of notable graffiti in the twentieth century. Graffiti have long appeared on building walls, in latrines, railroad boxcars, subways, and bridges.
An early graffito outside of New York or Philadelphia was the inscription in London reading "Clapton is God" in reference to the guitarist Eric Clapton. Creating the cult of the guitar hero, the phrase was spray-painted by an admirer on a wall in an Islington, north London in the autumn of 1967. The graffito was captured in a photograph, in which a dog is urinating on the wall.
Films like Style Wars in the 80s depicting famous writers such as Skeme, Dondi, MinOne, and ZEPHYR reinforced graffiti's role within New York's emerging hip-hop culture. Although many officers of the New York City Police Department found this film to be controversial, Style Wars is still recognized as the most prolific film representation of what was going on within the young hip hop culture of the early 1980s. Fab 5 Freddy and Futura 2000 took hip hop graffiti to Paris and London as part of the New York City Rap Tour in 1983
Commercialization and entrance into mainstream pop culture
Main article: Commercial graffiti
With the popularity and legitimization of graffiti has come a level of commercialization. In 2001, computer giant IBM launched an advertising campaign in Chicago and San Francisco which involved people spray painting on sidewalks a peace symbol, a heart, and a penguin (Linux mascot), to represent "Peace, Love, and Linux." IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco collectively US$120,000 for punitive damages and clean-up costs.
In 2005, a similar ad campaign was launched by Sony and executed by its advertising agency in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami, to market its handheld PSP gaming system. In this campaign, taking notice of the legal problems of the IBM campaign, Sony paid building owners for the rights to paint on their buildings "a collection of dizzy-eyed urban kids playing with the PSP as if it were a skateboard, a paddle, or a rocking horse".
Tristan Manco wrote that Brazil "boasts a unique and particularly rich, graffiti scene ... [earning] it an international reputation as the place to go for artistic inspiration". Graffiti "flourishes in every conceivable space in Brazil's cities". Artistic parallels "are often drawn between the energy of São Paulo today and 1970s New York". The "sprawling metropolis", of São Paulo has "become the new shrine to graffiti"; Manco alludes to "poverty and unemployment ... [and] the epic struggles and conditions of the country's marginalised peoples", and to "Brazil's chronic poverty", as the main engines that "have fuelled a vibrant graffiti culture". In world terms, Brazil has "one of the most uneven distributions of income. Laws and taxes change frequently". Such factors, Manco argues, contribute to a very fluid society, riven with those economic divisions and social tensions that underpin and feed the "folkloric vandalism and an urban sport for the disenfranchised", that is South American graffiti art.
Prominent Brazilian writers include Os Gêmeos, Boleta, Nunca, Nina, Speto, Tikka, and T.Freak. Their artistic success and involvement in commercial design ventures has highlighted divisions within the Brazilian graffiti community between adherents of the cruder transgressive form of pichação and the more conventionally artistic values of the practitioners of grafite.
Graffiti in the Middle East has emerged slowly, with taggers operating in Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf countries like Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and in Iran. The major Iranian newspaper Hamshahri has published two articles on illegal writers in the city with photographic coverage of Iranian artist A1one's works on Tehran walls. Tokyo-based design magazine, PingMag, has interviewed A1one and featured photographs of his work. The Israeli West Bank barrier has become a site for graffiti, reminiscent in this sense of the Berlin Wall. Many writers in Israel come from other places around the globe, such as JUIF from Los Angeles and DEVIONE from London. The religious reference "נ נח נחמ נחמן מאומן" ("Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman") is commonly seen in graffiti around Israel.
Graffiti has played an important role within the street art scene in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially following the events of the Arab Spring of 2011 or the Sudanese Revolution of 2018/19. Graffiti is a tool of expression in the context of conflict in the region, allowing people to raise their voices politically and socially. Famous street artist Banksy has had an important effect in the street art scene in the MENA area, especially in Palestine where some of his works are located in the West Bank barrier and Bethlehem.
There are also a large number of graffiti influences in Southeast Asian countries that mostly come from modern Western culture, such as Malaysia, where graffiti have long been a common sight in Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Since 2010, the country has begun hosting a street festival to encourage all generations and people from all walks of life to enjoy and encourage Malaysian street culture.
The modern-day graffitists can be found with an arsenal of various materials that allow for a successful production of a piece. This includes such techniques as scribing. However, spray paint in aerosol cans is the number one medium for graffiti. From this commodity comes different styles, technique, and abilities to form master works of graffiti. Spray paint can be found at hardware and art stores and comes in virtually every color.
Stencil graffiti is created by cutting out shapes and designs in a stiff material (such as cardboard or subject folders) to form an overall design or image. The stencil is then placed on the "canvas" gently and with quick, easy strokes of the aerosol can, the image begins to appear on the intended surface.
Some of the first examples were created in 1981 by artists Blek le Rat in Paris, in 1982 by Jef Aerosol in Tours (France); by 1985 stencils had appeared in other cities including New York City, Sydney, and Melbourne, where they were documented by American photographer Charles Gatewood and Australian photographer Rennie Ellis
Tagging is the practice of someone spray-painting "their name, initial or logo onto a public surface" in a handstyle unique to the writer. Tags were the first form of modern graffiti.
Modern graffiti art often incorporates additional arts and technologies. For example, Graffiti Research Lab has encouraged the use of projected images and magnetic light-emitting diodes (throwies) as new media for graffitists. yarnbombing is another recent form of graffiti. Yarnbombers occasionally target previous graffiti for modification, which had been avoided among the majority of graffitists.
Theories on the use of graffiti by avant-garde artists have a history dating back at least to the Asger Jorn, who in 1962 painting declared in a graffiti-like gesture "the avant-garde won't give up"
Many contemporary analysts and even art critics have begun to see artistic value in some graffiti and to recognize it as a form of public art. According to many art researchers, particularly in the Netherlands and in Los Angeles, that type of public art is, in fact an effective tool of social emancipation or, in the achievement of a political goal
In times of conflict, such murals have offered a means of communication and self-expression for members of these socially, ethnically, or racially divided communities, and have proven themselves as effective tools in establishing dialog and thus, of addressing cleavages in the long run. The Berlin Wall was also extensively covered by graffiti reflecting social pressures relating to the oppressive Soviet rule over the GDR.
Many artists involved with graffiti are also concerned with the similar activity of stenciling. Essentially, this entails stenciling a print of one or more colors using spray-paint. Recognized while exhibiting and publishing several of her coloured stencils and paintings portraying the Sri Lankan Civil War and urban Britain in the early 2000s, graffitists Mathangi Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., has also become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos for singles "Galang" and "Bucky Done Gun", and her cover art. Stickers of her artwork also often appear around places such as London in Brick Lane, stuck to lamp posts and street signs, she having become a muse for other graffitists and painters worldwide in cities including Seville.
Graffitist believes that art should be on display for everyone in the public eye or in plain sight, not hidden away in a museum or a gallery. Art should color the streets, not the inside of some building. Graffiti is a form of art that cannot be owned or bought. It does not last forever, it is temporary, yet one of a kind. It is a form of self promotion for the artist that can be displayed anywhere form sidewalks, roofs, subways, building wall, etc. Art to them is for everyone and should be showed to everyone for free.
Graffiti is a way of communicating and a way of expressing what one feels in the moment. It is both art and a functional thing that can warn people of something or inform people of something. However, graffiti is to some people a form of art, but to some a form of vandalism. And many graffitists choose to protect their identities and remain anonymous or to hinder prosecution.
With the commercialization of graffiti (and hip hop in general), in most cases, even with legally painted "graffiti" art, graffitists tend to choose anonymity. This may be attributed to various reasons or a combination of reasons. Graffiti still remains the one of four hip hop elements that is not considered "performance art" despite the image of the "singing and dancing star" that sells hip hop culture to the mainstream. Being a graphic form of art, it might also be said that many graffitists still fall in the category of the introverted archetypal artist.
Banksy is one of the world's most notorious and popular street artists who continues to remain faceless in today's society. He is known for his political, anti-war stencil art mainly in Bristol, England, but his work may be seen anywhere from Los Angeles to Palestine. In the UK, Banksy is the most recognizable icon for this cultural artistic movement and keeps his identity a secret to avoid arrest. Much of Banksy's artwork may be seen around the streets of London and surrounding suburbs, although he has painted pictures throughout the world, including the Middle East, where he has painted on Israel's controversial West Bank barrier with satirical images of life on the other side. One depicted a hole in the wall with an idyllic beach, while another shows a mountain landscape on the other side. A number of exhibitions also have taken place since 2000, and recent works of art have fetched vast sums of money. Banksy's art is a prime example of the classic controversy: vandalism vs. art. Art supporters endorse his work distributed in urban areas as pieces of art and some councils, such as Bristol and Islington, have officially protected them, while officials of other areas have deemed his work to be vandalism and have removed it.
Pixnit is another artist who chooses to keep her identity from the general public. Her work focuses on beauty and design aspects of graffiti as opposed to Banksy's anti-government shock value. Her paintings are often of flower designs above shops and stores in her local urban area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some store owners endorse her work and encourage others to do similar work as well. "One of the pieces was left up above Steve's Kitchen, because it looks pretty awesome"- Erin Scott, the manager of New England Comics in Allston, Massachusetts.
Graffiti artists may become offended if photographs of their art are published in a commercial context without their permission. In March 2020, the Finnish graffiti artist Psyke expressed his displeasure at the newspaper Ilta-Sanomat publishing a photograph of a Peugeot 208 in an article about new cars, with his graffiti prominently shown on the background. The artist claims he does not want his art being used in commercial context, not even if he were to receive compensation.
Territorial graffiti marks urban neighborhoods with tags and logos to differentiate certain groups from others. These images are meant to show outsiders a stern look at whose turf is whose. The subject matter of gang-related graffiti consists of cryptic symbols and initials strictly fashioned with unique calligraphies. Gang members use graffiti to designate membership throughout the gang, to differentiate rivals and associates and, most commonly, to mark borders which are both territorial and ideological.
Graffiti has been used as a means of advertising both legally and illegally. Bronx-based TATS CRU has made a name for themselves doing legal advertising campaigns for companies such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Toyota, and MTV. In the UK, Covent Garden's Boxfresh used stencil images of a Zapatista revolutionary in the hopes that cross referencing would promote their store.
Smirnoff hired artists to use reverse graffiti (the use of high pressure hoses to clean dirty surfaces to leave a clean image in the surrounding dirt) to increase awareness of their product.
Graffiti often has a reputation as part of a subculture that rebels against authority, although the considerations of the practitioners often diverge and can relate to a wide range of attitudes. It can express a political practice and can form just one tool in an array of resistance techniques. One early example includes the anarcho-punk band Crass, who conducted a campaign of stenciling anti-war, anarchist, feminist, and anti-consumerist messages throughout the London Underground system during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Amsterdam graffiti was a major part of the punk scene. The city was covered with names such as "De Zoot", "Vendex", and "Dr Rat". To document the graffiti a punk magazine was started that was called Gallery Anus. So when hip hop came to Europe in the early 1980s there was already a vibrant graffiti culture.
The student protests and general strike of May 1968 saw Paris bedecked in revolutionary, anarchistic, and situationist slogans such as L'ennui est contre-révolutionnaire ("Boredom is counterrevolutionary") and Lisez moins, vivez plus ("Read less, live more"). While not exhaustive, the graffiti gave a sense of the 'millenarian' and rebellious spirit, tempered with a good deal of verbal wit, of the strikers.
I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like. Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of p---- artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.
The developments of graffiti art which took place in art galleries and colleges as well as "on the street" or "underground", contributed to the resurfacing in the 1990s of a far more overtly politicized art form in the subvertising, culture jamming, or tactical media movements. These movements or styles tend to classify the artists by their relationship to their social and economic contexts, since, in most countries, graffiti art remains illegal in many forms except when using non-permanent paint. Since the 1990s with the rise of Street Art, a growing number of artists are switching to non-permanent paints and non-traditional forms of painting.
Contemporary practitioners, accordingly, have varied and often conflicting practices. Some individuals, such as Alexander Brener, have used the medium to politicize other art forms, and have used the prison sentences enforced on them as a means of further protest. The practices of anonymous groups and individuals also vary widely, and practitioners by no means always agree with each other's practices. For example, the anti-capitalist art group the Space Hijackers did a piece in 2004 about the contradiction between the capitalistic elements of Banksy and his use of political imagery.
Berlin human rights activist Irmela Mensah-Schramm has received global media attention and numerous awards for her 35-year campaign of effacing neo-Nazi and other right-wing extremist graffiti throughout Germany, often by altering hate speech in humorous ways.
In Serbian capital, Belgrade, the graffiti depicting a uniformed former general of Serb army and war criminal, convicted at ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnian War, Ratko Mladić, appeared in a military salute alongside the words "General, thank to your mother". Aleks Eror, Berlin-based journalist, explains how "veneration of historical and wartime figures" through street art is not a new phenomenon in the region of former Yugoslavia, and that "in most cases is firmly focused on the future, rather than retelling the past". Eror is not only analyst pointing to danger of such an expressions for the region's future. In a long expose on the subject of Bosnian genocide denial, at Balkan Diskurs magazine and multimedia platform website, Kristina Gadže and Taylor Whitsell referred to these experiences as a young generations' "cultural heritage", in which young are being exposed to celebration and affirmation of war-criminals as part of their "formal education" and "inheritance".
There are numerous examples of genocide denial through celebration and affirmation of war criminals throughout the region of Western Balkans inhabited by Serbs using this form of artistic expression. Several more of these graffiti are found in Serbian capital, and many more across Serbia and Bosnian and Herzegovinian administrative entity, Republika Srpska, which is the ethnic Serbian majority enclave. Critics point that Serbia as a state, is willing to defend the mural of convicted war criminal, and have no intention to react on cases of genocide denial, noting that Interior Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin decision to ban any gathering with an intent to remove the mural, with the deployment of riot police, sends the message of "tacit endorsement". Consequently, on 9 November 2021, Serbian heavy police in riot gear, with graffiti creators and their supporters, blocked the access to the mural to prevent human rights groups and other activists to paint over it and mark the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism in that way, and even arrested two civic activist for throwing eggs at the graffiti.
Graffiti may also be used as an offensive expression. This form of graffiti may be difficult to identify, as it is mostly removed by the local authority (as councils which have adopted strategies of criminalization also strive to remove graffiti quickly). Therefore, existing racist graffiti is mostly more subtle and at first sight, not easily recognized as "racist". It can then be understood only if one knows the relevant "local code" (social, historical, political, temporal, and spatial), which is seen as heteroglot and thus a 'unique set of conditions' in a cultural context.
A spatial code for example, could be that there is a certain youth group in an area that is engaging heavily in racist activities. So, for residents (knowing the local code), a graffiti containing only the name or abbreviation of this gang already is a racist expression, reminding the offended people of their gang activities. Also a graffiti is in most cases, the herald of more serious criminal activity to come. A person who does not know these gang activities would not be able to recognize the meaning of this graffiti. Also if a tag of this youth group or gang is placed on a building occupied by asylum seekers, for example, its racist character is even stronger.
By making the graffiti less explicit (as adapted to social and legal constraints), these drawings are less likely to be removed, but do not lose their threatening and offensive character.
Elsewhere, activists in Russia have used painted caricatures of local officials with their mouths as potholes, to show their anger about the poor state of the roads. In Manchester, England, a graffitists painted obscene images around potholes, which often resulted in them being repaired within 48 hours.
In the early 1980s, the first art galleries to show graffitists to the public were Fashion Moda in the Bronx, Now Gallery and Fun Gallery, both in the East Village, Manhattan.
A 2006 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum displayed graffiti as an art form that began in New York's outer boroughs and reached great heights in the early 1980s with the work of Crash, Lee, Daze, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. It displayed 22 works by New York graffitists, including Crash, Daze, and Lady Pink. In an article about the exhibition in the magazine Time Out, curator Charlotta Kotik said that she hoped the exhibition would cause viewers to rethink their assumptions about graffiti.
From the 1970s onwards, Burhan Doğançay photographed urban walls all over the world; these he then archived for use as sources of inspiration for his painterly works. The project today known as "Walls of the World" grew beyond even his own expectations and comprises about 30,000 individual images. It spans a period of 40 years across five continents and 114 countries. In 1982, photographs from this project comprised a one-man exhibition titled "Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent ..." (The walls whisper, shout and sing ...) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
In Australia, art historians have judged some local graffiti of sufficient creative merit to rank them firmly within the arts. Oxford University Press's art history text Australian Painting 1788–2000 concludes with a long discussion of graffiti's key place within contemporary visual culture, including the work of several Australian practitioners.
Between March and April 2009, 150 artists exhibited 300 pieces of graffiti at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Spray paint has many negative environmental effects. The paint contains toxic chemicals, and the can uses volatile hydrocarbon gases to spray the paint onto a surface.
Volatile organic compound (VOC) leads to ground level ozone formation and most of graffiti related emissions are VOCs. A 2010 paper estimates 4,862 tons of VOCs were released in the United States in activities related to graffiti.
In China, Mao Zedong in the 1920s used revolutionary slogans and paintings in public places to galvanize the country's communist movement.
Based on different national conditions, many people believe that China's attitude towards Graffiti is fierce, but in fact, according to Lance Crayon in his film Spray Paint Beijing: Graffiti in the Capital of China, Graffiti is generally accepted in Beijing, with artists not seeing much police interference. Political and religiously sensitive graffiti, however, is not allowed.
In Hong Kong, Tsang Tsou Choi was known as the King of Kowloon for his calligraphy graffiti over many years, in which he claimed ownership of the area. Now some of his work is preserved officially.
In Taiwan, the government has made some concessions to graffitists. Since 2005 they have been allowed to freely display their work along some sections of riverside retaining walls in designated "Graffiti Zones". From 2007, Taipei's department of cultural affairs also began permitting graffiti on fences around major public construction sites. Department head Yong-ping Lee (李永萍) stated, "We will promote graffiti starting with the public sector, and then later in the private sector too. It's our goal to beautify the city with graffiti". The government later helped organize a graffiti contest in Ximending, a popular shopping district. graffitists caught working outside of these designated areas still face fines up to NT$6,000 under a department of environmental protection regulation. However, Taiwanese authorities can be relatively lenient, one veteran police officer stating anonymously, "Unless someone complains about vandalism, we won't get involved. We don't go after it proactively."
In 1993, after several expensive cars in Singapore were spray-painted, the police arrested a student from the Singapore American School, Michael P. Fay, questioned him, and subsequently charged him with vandalism. Fay pleaded guilty to vandalizing a car in addition to stealing road signs. Under the 1966 Vandalism Act of Singapore, originally passed to curb the spread of communist graffiti in Singapore, the court sentenced him to four months in jail, a fine of S$3,500 (US$2,233), and a caning. The New York Times ran several editorials and op-eds that condemned the punishment and called on the American public to flood the Singaporean embassy with protests. Although the Singapore government received many calls for clemency, Fay's caning took place in Singapore on 5 May 1994. Fay had originally received a sentence of six strokes of the cane, but the presiding president of Singapore, Ong Teng Cheong, agreed to reduce his caning sentence to four lashes.
In South Korea, Park Jung-soo was fined two million South Korean won by the Seoul Central District Court for spray-painting a rat on posters of the G-20 Summit a few days before the event in November 2011. Park alleged that the initial in "G-20" sounds like the Korean word for "rat", but Korean government prosecutors alleged that Park was making a derogatory statement about the president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, the host of the summit. This case led to public outcry and debate on the lack of government tolerance and in support of freedom of expression. The court ruled that the painting, "an ominous creature like a rat" amounts to "an organized criminal activity" and upheld the fine while denying the prosecution's request for imprisonment for Park.
In Europe, community cleaning squads have responded to graffiti, in some cases with reckless abandon, as when in 1992 in France a local Scout group, attempting to remove modern graffiti, damaged two prehistoric paintings of bison in the Cave of Mayrière supérieure near the French village of Bruniquel in Tarn-et-Garonne, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in archeology.
In September 2006, the European Parliament directed the European Commission to create urban environment policies to prevent and eliminate dirt, litter, graffiti, animal excrement, and excessive noise from domestic and vehicular music systems in European cities, along with other concerns over urban life.
In Budapest, Hungary, both a city-backed movement called I Love Budapest and a special police division tackle the problem, including the provision of approved areas.
The Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 became Britain's latest anti-graffiti legislation. In August 2004, the Keep Britain Tidy campaign issued a press release calling for zero tolerance of graffiti and supporting proposals such as issuing "on the spot" fines to graffiti offenders and banning the sale of aerosol paint to anyone under the age of 16. The press release also condemned the use of graffiti images in advertising and in music videos, arguing that real-world experience of graffiti stood far removed from its often-portrayed "cool" or "edgy'" image.
To back the campaign, 123 Members of Parliament (MPs) (including then Prime Minister Tony Blair), signed a charter which stated: "Graffiti is not art, it's crime. On behalf of my constituents, I will do all I can to rid our community of this problem."
In the UK, city councils have the power to take action against the owner of any property that has been defaced under the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 (as amended by the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005) or, in certain cases, the Highways Act. This is often used against owners of property that are complacent in allowing protective boards to be defaced so long as the property is not damaged.
In July 2008, a conspiracy charge was used to convict graffitists for the first time. After a three-month police surveillance operation, nine members of the DPM crew were convicted of conspiracy to commit criminal damage costing at least £1 million. Five of them received prison sentences, ranging from eighteen months to two years. The unprecedented scale of the investigation and the severity of the sentences rekindled public debate over whether graffiti should be considered art or crime.
Some councils, like those of Stroud and Loerrach, provide approved areas in the town where graffitists can showcase their talents, including underpasses, car parks, and walls that might otherwise prove a target for the "spray and run".
Graffiti Tunnel, University of Sydney at Camperdown (2009)
In an effort to reduce vandalism, many cities in Australia have designated walls or areas exclusively for use by graffitists. One early example is the "Graffiti Tunnel" located at the Camperdown Campus of the University of Sydney, which is available for use by any student at the university to tag, advertise, poster, and paint. Advocates of this idea suggest that this discourages petty vandalism yet encourages artists to take their time and produce great art, without worry of being caught or arrested for vandalism or trespassing.[108][109] Others disagree with this approach, arguing that the presence of legal graffiti walls does not demonstrably reduce illegal graffiti elsewhere. Some local government areas throughout Australia have introduced "anti-graffiti squads", who clean graffiti in the area, and such crews as BCW (Buffers Can't Win) have taken steps to keep one step ahead of local graffiti cleaners.
Many state governments have banned the sale or possession of spray paint to those under the age of 18 (age of majority). However, a number of local governments in Victoria have taken steps to recognize the cultural heritage value of some examples of graffiti, such as prominent political graffiti. Tough new graffiti laws have been introduced in Australia with fines of up to A$26,000 and two years in prison.
Melbourne is a prominent graffiti city of Australia with many of its lanes being tourist attractions, such as Hosier Lane in particular, a popular destination for photographers, wedding photography, and backdrops for corporate print advertising. The Lonely Planet travel guide cites Melbourne's street as a major attraction. All forms of graffiti, including sticker art, poster, stencil art, and wheatpasting, can be found in many places throughout the city. Prominent street art precincts include; Fitzroy, Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and the CBD, where stencil and sticker art is prominent. As one moves farther away from the city, mostly along suburban train lines, graffiti tags become more prominent. Many international artists such as Banksy have left their work in Melbourne and in early 2008 a perspex screen was installed to prevent a Banksy stencil art piece from being destroyed, it has survived since 2003 through the respect of local street artists avoiding posting over it, although it has recently had paint tipped over it.
In February 2008 Helen Clark, the New Zealand prime minister at that time, announced a government crackdown on tagging and other forms of graffiti vandalism, describing it as a destructive crime representing an invasion of public and private property. New legislation subsequently adopted included a ban on the sale of paint spray cans to persons under 18 and increases in maximum fines for the offence from NZ$200 to NZ$2,000 or extended community service. The issue of tagging become a widely debated one following an incident in Auckland during January 2008 in which a middle-aged property owner stabbed one of two teenage taggers to death and was subsequently convicted of manslaughter.
Graffiti databases have increased in the past decade because they allow vandalism incidents to be fully documented against an offender and help the police and prosecution charge and prosecute offenders for multiple counts of vandalism. They also provide law enforcement the ability to rapidly search for an offender's moniker or tag in a simple, effective, and comprehensive way. These systems can also help track costs of damage to a city to help allocate an anti-graffiti budget. The theory is that when an offender is caught putting up graffiti, they are not just charged with one count of vandalism; they can be held accountable for all the other damage for which they are responsible. This has two main benefits for law enforcement. One, it sends a signal to the offenders that their vandalism is being tracked. Two, a city can seek restitution from offenders for all the damage that they have committed, not merely a single incident. These systems give law enforcement personnel real-time, street-level intelligence that allows them not only to focus on the worst graffiti offenders and their damage, but also to monitor potential gang violence that is associated with the graffiti.
Many restrictions of civil gang injunctions are designed to help address and protect the physical environment and limit graffiti. Provisions of gang injunctions include things such as restricting the possession of marker pens, spray paint cans, or other sharp objects capable of defacing private or public property; spray painting, or marking with marker pens, scratching, applying stickers, or otherwise applying graffiti on any public or private property, including, but not limited to the street, alley, residences, block walls, and fences, vehicles or any other real or personal property. Some injunctions contain wording that restricts damaging or vandalizing both public and private property, including but not limited to any vehicle, light fixture, door, fence, wall, gate, window, building, street sign, utility box, telephone box, tree, or power pole.
To help address many of these issues, many local jurisdictions have set up graffiti abatement hotlines, where citizens can call in and report vandalism and have it removed. San Diego's hotline receives more than 5,000 calls per year, in addition to reporting the graffiti, callers can learn more about prevention. One of the complaints about these hotlines is the response time; there is often a lag time between a property owner calling about the graffiti and its removal. The length of delay should be a consideration for any jurisdiction planning on operating a hotline. Local jurisdictions must convince the callers that their complaint of vandalism will be a priority and cleaned off right away. If the jurisdiction does not have the resources to respond to complaints in a timely manner, the value of the hotline diminishes. Crews must be able to respond to individual service calls made to the graffiti hotline as well as focus on cleanup near schools, parks, and major intersections and transit routes to have the biggest impact. Some cities offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of suspects for tagging or graffiti related vandalism. The amount of the reward is based on the information provided, and the action taken.
When police obtain search warrants in connection with a vandalism investigation, they are often seeking judicial approval to look for items such as cans of spray paint and nozzles from other kinds of aerosol sprays; etching tools, or other sharp or pointed objects, which could be used to etch or scratch glass and other hard surfaces; permanent marking pens, markers, or paint sticks; evidence of membership or affiliation with any gang or tagging crew; paraphernalia including any reference to "(tagger's name)"; any drawings, writing, objects, or graffiti depicting taggers' names, initials, logos, monikers, slogans, or any mention of tagging crew membership; and any newspaper clippings relating to graffiti crime.
Continuing the sporting theme, we were recently commissioned to shoot a bank of imagery to be used for Greens Health & Fitness for their up coming ad campaigns.
Shot on the new Hasselblad H4D50.
This picture is attributed to a dear friend of mine, a friend that further ignited the spark of traveling dwelling inside of me.
Thank you for an amazing trip :) — with Dragana Todić.
Continuing back through past shoots again with the stunning Alicia. This time (our 4th shoot together) we went downtown St. John's and walked around finding different nooks and locations to shoot in. Alicia looks amazing as always and I think we got a nice variety of poses and backdrops that I tend to miss when shooting in the studio with a simple blank wall (and sometimes the wind really adds some dynamics to the hair!). More to come!
Continuing into 2024 with a mix of new Dorset photos and ones from last autumn's Texas trip.
This was an essential absolute u-turn on the empty highway for this completely unexpected find in the middle of nowheresville, Texas. There is something about it that is so 'wrong' that it ends up being so 'right'.
Working the 2D40 from Stourbridge Junction to Stratford-upon-Avon is London Midland Class 172, 172335.
The Turbostar units have become one of the most vital parts of the post-privatisation scene on the UK network, operating on a majority of the country's higher capacity routes.
The roots of the Class essentially go back to the Networkers of the early 1990's. Ordered by Network SouthEast, these units, which comprised of the diesel Class 165 and 166, were constructed to kill off the ancient railcars and units of the 1950's. With a promising order on the go, this was brought to an abrupt halt by privatisation, whereupon Network SouthEast was killed off and replaced by a selection of franchises based in the London area. Whilst routes these units were proposed to be introduced on were subsequently scrapped, the new operators of the Chiltern Mainline, Chiltern Railways, maintained their order, and took on what was known as the Class 168 'Clubman' units, which began operation from 1998 in a style similar to that of the previous Class 165's.
However, Adtranz intended to improve the breed with a new and more futuristic style. In conjunction with the Class 357 'Electrostar' equivalent, a prototype trailer car rebuilt from a 4-CIG unit was unveiled in 1997 to highlight their new look. This was followed in 1998 by the arrival of the Class 170, originally ordered by Midland Mainline to work semi-fast operations out of London St Pancras to Leicester, Derby and Nottingham. Later operators of the Class 170 were Central Trains in 1999, who operated them across the Midlands and on longer distance trains into Wales and to Yorkshire, Anglia Railways, working on the Great Eastern around Ipswich, Norwich and Cambridge, Southwest Trains, which used their small fleet on trains from London Waterloo to Salisbury and Yeovil Junction, and Scotrail, working the premier commuter service between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as other longer distance trains. This coincided with a second batch of Class 168's built in the same style that were introduced between 2000 and 2004.
In total, 122 Class 170's were built between 1998 and 2005, together with 19 Class 168's, 13 in the original style, and 6 in the new. Together these units dominated many of the longer distance semi-fast and express trains on the UK mainline network, but their success was far from over.
In 2003, to replace the ageing 'Hastings' Units on the Marshlink and Uckfield Lines, 16 Class 171's were released in 2003 to improve the reliability of this often forgotten route. Working between Brighton and Ashford, these trains have revolutionized operations on the line, and continue to maintain a high standard of work even today.
But again this wasn't the end, as in 2010 yet another member of the Turbostar family was introduced in the form of the Class 172. Class 172's were built to work between three operators, London Midland, Chiltern Railways and London Overground. Chiltern and Overground Class 172's were constructed to similar principles as the earlier batches, working out of London Marylebone on the Chiltern Mainline, and on the Gospel Oak to Barking route for the newly formed London Overground, replacing the previous Class 150's.
However, London Midland ones were built to a different standard, instead incorporating an intermediate gangway allowing for through access during rush-hour to increase internal capacity. Operating around Birmingham, these different 172's garnered immediate acclaim for their vastly improved interiors, kicking out many of the dusty Class 150's that dated back to the 1980's.
Today the Class 170's have been kicked up and down the length and breadth of the network with the changing tides of franchises. Whilst Chiltern's Class 168's have remained on their original route, Class 170's have been redistributed heavily. Midland Mainline replaced their 170's in 2006 with Class 222's, transferring them to Central Trains. Southwest Trains saw off their small fleet of 170's in 2006, selling them to First Trans-Pennine Express to operate routes between Manchester, Leeds, York and Hull. These have since been transferred south to Chiltern to strengthen their fleet in 2015. In 2003, several Anglia Class 170's were leased to form the fleet of Hull Trains, which worked a high speed service between London King's Cross and Hull, but were replaced by Class 222's in 2005, these being transferred to Scotrail. Franchise reorganization in the Midlands saw Central Trains split into numerous franchises, with the Class 170's being taken under the wing of London Midland, working trains in and around the West Midlands, and Cross Country, working long-distance trains between Cardiff and Nottingham, as well as Birmingham and Stansted Airport. Scotrail units have remained largely the same, whilst the Class 171's and 172's continue to ply their trade on their original operations.
Continuing with the "Things that children play with" set. This is an experiment and a social comment, what comment I don't know yet. Any thoughts and ideas most welcome.
Got inundated by new translations today that is why I am somewhat absent, please forgive me.
I visited Glasgow this weekend 30th September 2018 , taking in a Kylie Minogue concert at the SSE Hydro on the Sunday evening and spending many hours walking through the city.
Walking the streets down at the Trongate on Tuesday the 2nd I I passed a sign stating "Police Museum" , I had never seen it before though probably because I am always looking up at the architecture on the fine buildings surrounding the area .
I decided to visit, wow, I loved it, staffed by two ex police officers, now volunteers, very knowledgeable on all the items archived and on display.
I highly recommend a visit if you are in Glasgow , I enjoyed my hour or so that I visited , posting some of the photos I captured during my time there , it really was an excellent unplanned hour that educated me and gave an insight into a Glasgow from times gone by .
THE GLASGOW POLICE MUSEUM IS SITUATED ON THE FIRST FLOOR
AT 30 BELL SREET, MERCHANT CITY, GLASGOW G1 1LG
Glasgow Police Museum
Police museum eddie-and-alistair
Hiding in plain sight in Merchant City, tucked away on the first floor of a building above a fancy restaurant, the Glasgow Police Museum is a veritable treasure trove of historic artifacts from the UK's oldest police force. In this feature, we take a tour of this cave of policing wonders under the knowledgeable care of curators Alastair and Eddie, and see what changes the years have brought in the tools of the trade used by Scotland's finest.
"It's been sixteen years since we opened," Eddie says. "We do a couple of days a week. We’re volunteers, and the museum's set up by the Glasgow Heritage Society, which was started in 1999. In 2002, we opened the museum, and we get between nine and ten thousand visitors a year, so that’s about 160 thousand people since the time we opened. The staff are all volunteers, all retired officers apart from a few exceptions, and it’s very successful."
"The police went from using a top hat to the helmet, to different styles of helmets," Alastair tells me as we go into the museum's gallery and are greeted with an array of glass cases. “In 1912, there were these helmets with the shiny metal badge, but the officers didn’t like them, because at night it reflected the light, so what they did was give them a black badge and black buttons on their greatcoats so they wouldn’t be so visible to suspects. Now today, stealth isn't so much of a priority, and they have the bright yellow high vis jackets."
"Getting restraints on a suspect back in the day was a two man job," I'm told as we stop to admire a selection of what look like manacles. “The handcuffs here are designed like a tourniquet and called Snitchers; you put it round the wrists, the cop on the other side did the same, and you walked the suspect into the office. The metal one there is an early version of the one we use today."
In the next case are an assortment of elegantly painted Billy clubs. "These were the early batons," Alastair explains. "We have a George the 4th model, used from 1820 to 1830, William the 4th from 1830 to 1837, and an early Victorian one 1837."
“In the Second World War, obviously there were bombings in Glasgow and Clydebank," Alastair continues, indicating what looks like an early biohazard getup, “so policemen had to carry a helmet and gas mask. The lamps they carried had a screen on the front to stop it shining upwards and being visible to German planes. Although I’ve always wondered why they bothered, as there’s a big shiny river running through the middle of the city."
The next point of interest is a display cabinet with a selection of communication gear. "Communication went from the wooden clappers, to the whistle, to the police box," Alastair informs me, "even though we all had whistles right up to the 1970s, probably longer. Even as an inspector in 1989, I still had a whistle. This radio here is dated to 1936. It’s a receive only set, the idea being you receive the call, and once you’re finished dealing with it, you went to the police box and phoned in the result. It wasn’t until after the start of the Second World War that the RAF perfected the two way radio, and then police managed to get them during the war. Up until the 1950s, if you joined the traffic department you had to learn the Morse code, which was still in use at that time."
Now we come to the guns. "The Martini International .22 Rifle here was carried on duty by Superintendent Alistair Petrie in Holyrood Crescent on 15 July 1969," Alastair explains. "An armed man, James Griffiths, was firing from the attic flat at 14 Holyrood Crescent, Glasgow. As there were no rifle marksmen in Glasgow Police at that time, the Glasgow Police Rifle Club members, with small calibre rifles, were called out to try to contain Griffiths in the flat at Holyrood Crescent, but he escaped over the rooftops. Griffiths was eventually cornered at 26 Kay Street, where Ch. Supt. Calum Finlayson shot him dead. The Enfield Pattern percussion pistol," he continues, indicating an antique sidearm of the sort Captain Jack Sparrow might be seen sporting, "was used by Glasgow Police in the 1850-60 period. The pistols were kept at the police office and issued only as required when police officers and detectives expected that the criminals they were going to arrest were armed. The pistol is marked ‘Glasgow Police’ and has an inventory number on the trigger-guard."
"We had Britain’s first police dogs too in Glasgow," Alastair says with no little amount of pride. "They were Airedales with Collie and Retrievers bred into them. Collies for the brains, Retriever for the sense of smell, and the Airedale was a big strong terrier dog that was easily bored, always liked to be active. That was why Major Richardson, an army dog breeder, selected that breed for the police. Glasgow bought four of them, two for Maryhill and two for the Queens Park area."
Before the days of modern police badges, Alastair explains, "A detective’s tip staff was his identity which he carried in his pocket. The policemen at the time carried their baton with the handle in the middle, they walked down the street and people could see they were policemen, because in that time the uniform was quite civilian in appearance. Obviously detectives couldn’t do that as they’d give the game away, so they carried a miniature in their pocket which they could show if asked to identify themselves."
"The Glasgow Police Museum is based on the city of Glasgow Police, which was Britain’s first police force," Alastair tells me. "We’re all told at school that Robert Peel created the police in 1829 in London, but Glasgow had a police force fifty years before in 1779, and it was formalised by the Glasgow Police Act which was signed by King George III in 1800, when Robert Peel was a twelve year old school boy. There were actually eighteen police forces in the UK before Peele’s police, so where they got the idea his was first I’ve no idea."
The Glasgow Police Museum illustrates the history of the Glasgow Police 1779 - 1975, through artifacts, stories and images. Its International Room has uniforms and insignia from EVERY country in the World.
The brilliant 'Sillitoe Tartan' black and white dicing on the staircase leads you up and into this museum HQ.
Uniformed police from Glasgow's past stand proudly on patrol . Then photos, medals and documents tell stories of individual bravery and even sacrifice ensuring these officers remain eternally 'on the beat' in their home city.
Notorious criminals they brought to justice are not forgotten.You can even view the fingerprint sheet of an infamous Scottish mass murderer. Who indeed ? Just find the evidence.
The International Exhibition shows 'world policing' at its best . The French and Italian uniforms are so stylish of course. There's even a badge from the famous Cairo Antiquities Police Department ..
No Bells or Whistles here. None Needed. Just superb staff who being ex 'force' are really on the case. Kids will love this. Adults equally so.
I was in here for ages. Must have been reading too many Inspector Rebus books .
Anyway, the facts you are given here are so much more exciting than fiction.
Open everyday. Free entrance but a small donation is suggested to fund upkeep.
The Glasgow Police Historical Exhibition contains artefacts and text boards which provide a historical insight into the people, events and other factors which contributed to the founding, development
and progress of Britain's first Police force, the
City of Glasgow Police from 1779-1975.
The International Police Exhibition in the museum
illustrates the spread of policing throughout the World. Over 2000 items of insignia, headgear and uniforms from every country in the World are on display.
Entry to the museum is FREE and if you enjoyed your visit and wish to make a donation towards the upkeep of the museum, this would be appreciated.
The Glasgow Police Museum is the museum of Britain’s first police force, from 1800 to 1975.
The exhibits in the Glasgow Police Historical Exhibition provide a historical insight into the people, events and other factors which contributed to the founding, development and progress of Britain's first Police force, the City of Glasgow Police from 1779 - 1975.
The International Police Exhibition in the museum illustrates the spread of policing throughout the world. More than 2,000 items of insignia, headgear and uniforms from all corners of the globe are on display.
Continuing from my previous shot...More incredible shot from the top of St Pauls and now looking North...The centrepiece is Christ Church Greyfriars another Christopher Wren beauty and it was severely damaged during the Blitz in 1940....The steeple still standing after the wartime damage, was disassembled in 1960 and put back together using modern construction methods. The surviving east wall was demolished in 1962 seen in the top photo.....The Tower is now used as a private residence.....The former HQ for the Post Office stands behind it was completed in 1911, it closed in 1996 and is now the Merrill Lynch HQ.....The roof of Smithfield market can also be seen in both photos..........
Here, hundreds of researchers, businesses and progressive home- owners will be living and working side-by-side, along with great food, drink and entertainment venues. A collection of stunning public spaces for everyone, of all ages, to use.
Everyone here is united by one purpose: to help families, communities and cities around the world to live healthier, longer, smarter and easier lives. In short, to live better. In the process, our businesses will continue to grow, employ more local people and help ensure Newcastle excels.
Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick university and a member of the Russell Group, an association of research-intensive UK universities.
The university finds its roots in the School of Medicine and Surgery (later the College of Medicine), established in 1834, and the College of Physical Science (later renamed Armstrong College), founded in 1871. These two colleges came to form the larger division of the federal University of Durham, with the Durham Colleges forming the other. The Newcastle colleges merged to form King's College in 1937. In 1963, following an Act of Parliament, King's College became the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
The university subdivides into three faculties: the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; the Faculty of Medical Sciences; and the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering. The university offers around 175 full-time undergraduate degree programmes in a wide range of subject areas spanning arts, sciences, engineering and medicine, together with approximately 340 postgraduate taught and research programmes across a range of disciplines.[6] The annual income of the institution for 2022–23 was £592.4 million of which £119.3 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £558 million.
History
Durham University § Colleges in Newcastle
The establishment of a university in Newcastle upon Tyne was first proposed in 1831 by Thomas Greenhow in a lecture to the Literary and Philosophical Society. In 1832 a group of local medics – physicians George Fife (teaching materia medica and therapeutics) and Samuel Knott (teaching theory and practice of medicine), and surgeons John Fife (teaching surgery), Alexander Fraser (teaching anatomy and physiology) and Henry Glassford Potter (teaching chemistry) – started offering medical lectures in Bell's Court to supplement the apprenticeship system (a fourth surgeon, Duncan McAllum, is mentioned by some sources among the founders, but was not included in the prospectus). The first session started on 1 October 1832 with eight or nine students, including John Snow, then apprenticed to a local surgeon-apothecary, the opening lecture being delivered by John Fife. In 1834 the lectures and practical demonstrations moved to the Hall of the Company of Barber Surgeons to accommodate the growing number of students, and the School of Medicine and Surgery was formally established on 1 October 1834.
On 25 June 1851, following a dispute among the teaching staff, the school was formally dissolved and the lecturers split into two rival institutions. The majority formed the Newcastle College of Medicine, and the others established themselves as the Newcastle upon Tyne College of Medicine and Practical Science with competing lecture courses. In July 1851 the majority college was recognised by the Society of Apothecaries and in October by the Royal College of Surgeons of England and in January 1852 was approved by the University of London to submit its students for London medical degree examinations. Later in 1852, the majority college was formally linked to the University of Durham, becoming the "Newcastle-upon-Tyne College of Medicine in connection with the University of Durham". The college awarded its first 'Licence in Medicine' (LicMed) under the auspices of the University of Durham in 1856, with external examiners from Oxford and London, becoming the first medical examining body on the United Kingdom to institute practical examinations alongside written and viva voce examinations. The two colleges amalgamated in 1857, with the first session of the unified college opening on 3 October that year. In 1861 the degree of Master of Surgery was introduced, allowing for the double qualification of Licence of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, along with the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Doctor of Medicine, both of which required residence in Durham. In 1870 the college was brought into closer connection with the university, becoming the "Durham University College of Medicine" with the Reader in Medicine becoming the Professor of Medicine, the college gaining a representative on the university's senate, and residence at the college henceforth counting as residence in the university towards degrees in medicine and surgery, removing the need for students to spend a period of residence in Durham before they could receive the higher degrees.
Attempts to realise a place for the teaching of sciences in the city were finally met with the foundation of the College of Physical Science in 1871. The college offered instruction in mathematics, physics, chemistry and geology to meet the growing needs of the mining industry, becoming the "Durham College of Physical Science" in 1883 and then renamed after William George Armstrong as Armstrong College in 1904. Both of these institutions were part of the University of Durham, which became a federal university under the Durham University Act 1908 with two divisions in Durham and Newcastle. By 1908, the Newcastle division was teaching a full range of subjects in the Faculties of Medicine, Arts, and Science, which also included agriculture and engineering.
Throughout the early 20th century, the medical and science colleges outpaced the growth of their Durham counterparts. Following tensions between the two Newcastle colleges in the early 1930s, a Royal Commission in 1934 recommended the merger of the two colleges to form "King's College, Durham"; that was effected by the Durham University Act 1937. Further growth of both division of the federal university led to tensions within the structure and a feeling that it was too large to manage as a single body. On 1 August 1963 the Universities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne Act 1963 separated the two thus creating the "University of Newcastle upon Tyne". As the successor of King's College, Durham, the university at its founding in 1963, adopted the coat of arms originally granted to the Council of King's College in 1937.
Above the portico of the Students' Union building are bas-relief carvings of the arms and mottoes of the University of Durham, Armstrong College and Durham University College of Medicine, the predecessor parts of Newcastle University. While a Latin motto, mens agitat molem (mind moves matter) appears in the Students' Union building, the university itself does not have an official motto.
Campus and location
The university occupies a campus site close to Haymarket in central Newcastle upon Tyne. It is located to the northwest of the city centre between the open spaces of Leazes Park and the Town Moor; the university medical school and Royal Victoria Infirmary are adjacent to the west.
The Armstrong building is the oldest building on the campus and is the site of the original Armstrong College. The building was constructed in three stages; the north east wing was completed first at a cost of £18,000 and opened by Princess Louise on 5 November 1888. The south-east wing, which includes the Jubilee Tower, and south-west wings were opened in 1894. The Jubilee Tower was built with surplus funds raised from an Exhibition to mark Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887. The north-west front, forming the main entrance, was completed in 1906 and features two stone figures to represent science and the arts. Much of the later construction work was financed by Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, the metallurgist and former Lord Mayor of Newcastle, after whom the main tower is named. In 1906 it was opened by King Edward VII.
The building contains the King's Hall, which serves as the university's chief hall for ceremonial purposes where Congregation ceremonies are held. It can contain 500 seats. King Edward VII gave permission to call the Great Hall, King's Hall. During the First World War, the building was requisitioned by the War Office to create the first Northern General Hospital, a facility for the Royal Army Medical Corps to treat military casualties. Graduation photographs are often taken in the University Quadrangle, next to the Armstrong building. In 1949 the Quadrangle was turned into a formal garden in memory of members of Newcastle University who gave their lives in the two World Wars. In 2017, a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. was erected in the inner courtyard of the Armstrong Building, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his honorary degree from the university.
The Bruce Building is a former brewery, constructed between 1896 and 1900 on the site of the Hotspur Hotel, and designed by the architect Joseph Oswald as the new premises of Newcastle Breweries Limited. The university occupied the building from the 1950s, but, having been empty for some time, the building was refurbished in 2016 to become residential and office space.
The Devonshire Building, opened in 2004, incorporates in an energy efficient design. It uses photovoltaic cells to help to power motorised shades that control the temperature of the building and geothermal heating coils. Its architects won awards in the Hadrian awards and the RICS Building of the Year Award 2004. The university won a Green Gown award for its construction.
Plans for additions and improvements to the campus were made public in March 2008 and completed in 2010 at a cost of £200 million. They included a redevelopment of the south-east (Haymarket) façade with a five-storey King's Gate administration building as well as new student accommodation. Two additional buildings for the school of medicine were also built. September 2012 saw the completion of the new buildings and facilities for INTO Newcastle University on the university campus. The main building provides 18 new teaching rooms, a Learning Resource Centre, a lecture theatre, science lab, administrative and academic offices and restaurant.
The Philip Robinson Library is the main university library and is named after a bookseller in the city and benefactor to the library. The Walton Library specialises in services for the Faculty of Medical Sciences in the Medical School. It is named after Lord Walton of Detchant, former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Professor of Neurology. The library has a relationship with the Northern region of the NHS allowing their staff to use the library for research and study. The Law Library specialises in resources relating to law, and the Marjorie Robinson Library Rooms offers additional study spaces and computers. Together, these house over one million books and 500,000 electronic resources. Some schools within the university, such as the School of Modern Languages, also have their own smaller libraries with smaller highly specialised collections.
In addition to the city centre campus there are buildings such as the Dove Marine Laboratory located on Cullercoats Bay, and Cockle Park Farm in Northumberland.
International
In September 2008, the university's first overseas branch was opened in Singapore, a Marine International campus called, NUMI Singapore. This later expanded beyond marine subjects and became Newcastle University Singapore, largely through becoming an Overseas University Partner of Singapore Institute of Technology.
In 2011, the university's Medical School opened an international branch campus in Iskandar Puteri, Johor, Malaysia, namely Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia.
Student accommodation
Newcastle University has many catered and non-catered halls of residence available to first-year students, located around the city of Newcastle. Popular Newcastle areas for private student houses and flats off campus include Jesmond, Heaton, Sandyford, Shieldfield, South Shields and Spital Tongues.
Henderson Hall was used as a hall of residence until a fire destroyed it in 2023.
St Mary's College in Fenham, one of the halls of residence, was formerly St Mary's College of Education, a teacher training college.
Organisation and governance
The current Chancellor is the British poet and artist Imtiaz Dharker. She assumed the position of Chancellor on 1 January 2020. The vice-chancellor is Chris Day, a hepatologist and former pro-vice-chancellor of the Faculty of Medical Sciences.
The university has an enrolment of some 16,000 undergraduate and 5,600 postgraduate students. Teaching and research are delivered in 19 academic schools, 13 research institutes and 38 research centres, spread across three Faculties: the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; the Faculty of Medical Sciences; and the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering. The university offers around 175 full-time undergraduate degree programmes in a wide range of subject areas spanning arts, sciences, engineering and medicine, together with approximately 340 postgraduate taught and research programmes across a range of disciplines.
It holds a series of public lectures called 'Insights' each year in the Curtis Auditorium in the Herschel Building. Many of the university's partnerships with companies, like Red Hat, are housed in the Herschel Annex.
Chancellors and vice-chancellors
For heads of the predecessor colleges, see Colleges of Durham University § Colleges in Newcastle.
Chancellors
Hugh Percy, 10th Duke of Northumberland (1963–1988)
Matthew White Ridley, 4th Viscount Ridley (1988–1999)
Chris Patten (1999–2009)
Liam Donaldson (2009–2019)
Imtiaz Dharker (2020–)
Vice-chancellors
Charles Bosanquet (1963–1968)
Henry Miller (1968–1976)
Ewan Stafford Page (1976–1978, acting)
Laurence Martin (1978–1990)
Duncan Murchison (1991, acting)
James Wright (1992–2000)
Christopher Edwards (2001–2007)
Chris Brink (2007–2016)
Chris Day (2017–present)
Civic responsibility
The university Quadrangle
The university describes itself as a civic university, with a role to play in society by bringing its research to bear on issues faced by communities (local, national or international).
In 2012, the university opened the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal to address issues of social and economic change, representing the research-led academic schools across the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences[45] and the Business School.
Mark Shucksmith was Director of the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal (NISR) at Newcastle University, where he is also Professor of Planning.
In 2006, the university was granted fair trade status and from January 2007 it became a smoke-free campus.
The university has also been actively involved with several of the region's museums for many years. The Great North Museum: Hancock originally opened in 1884 and is often a venue for the university's events programme.
Faculties and schools
Teaching schools within the university are based within three faculties. Each faculty is led by a Provost/Pro-vice-chancellor and a team of Deans with specific responsibilities.
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
School of Arts and Cultures
Newcastle University Business School
Combined Honours Centre
School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Newcastle Law School
School of Modern Languages
Faculty of Medical Sciences
School of Biomedical Sciences
School of Dental Sciences
School of Medical Education
School of Pharmacy
School of Psychology
Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology (CBCB)
Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering
School of Computing
School of Engineering
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics
School of Natural and Environmental Sciences
Business School
Newcastle University Business School
As early as the 1900/1 academic year, there was teaching in economics (political economy, as it was then known) at Newcastle, making Economics the oldest department in the School. The Economics Department is currently headed by the Sir David Dale Chair. Among the eminent economists having served in the Department (both as holders of the Sir David Dale Chair) are Harry Mainwaring Hallsworth and Stanley Dennison.
Newcastle University Business School is a triple accredited business school, with accreditation by the three major accreditation bodies: AACSB, AMBA and EQUIS.
In 2002, Newcastle University Business School established the Business Accounting and Finance or 'Flying Start' degree in association with the ICAEW and PricewaterhouseCoopers. The course offers an accelerated route towards the ACA Chartered Accountancy qualification and is the Business School's Flagship programme.
In 2011 the business school opened their new building built on the former Scottish and Newcastle brewery site next to St James' Park. This building was officially opened on 19 March 2012 by Lord Burns.
The business school operated a central London campus from 2014 to 2021, in partnership with INTO University Partnerships until 2020.
Medical School
The BMC Medicine journal reported in 2008 that medical graduates from Oxford, Cambridge and Newcastle performed better in postgraduate tests than any other medical school in the UK.
In 2008 the Medical School announced that they were expanding their campus to Malaysia.
The Royal Victoria Infirmary has always had close links with the Faculty of Medical Sciences as a major teaching hospital.
School of Modern Languages
The School of Modern Languages consists of five sections: East Asian (which includes Japanese and Chinese); French; German; Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies; and Translating & Interpreting Studies. Six languages are taught from beginner's level to full degree level ‒ Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese ‒ and beginner's courses in Catalan, Dutch, Italian and Quechua are also available. Beyond the learning of the languages themselves, Newcastle also places a great deal of emphasis on study and experience of the cultures of the countries where the languages taught are spoken. The School of Modern Languages hosts North East England's only branches of two internationally important institutes: the Camões Institute, a language institute for Portuguese, and the Confucius Institute, a language and cultural institute for Chinese.
The teaching of modern foreign languages at Newcastle predates the creation of Newcastle University itself, as in 1911 Armstrong College in Newcastle installed Albert George Latham, its first professor of modern languages.
The School of Modern Languages at Newcastle is the lead institution in the North East Routes into Languages Consortium and, together with the Durham University, Northumbria University, the University of Sunderland, the Teesside University and a network of schools, undertakes work activities of discovery of languages for the 9 to 13 years pupils. This implies having festivals, Q&A sessions, language tasters, or quizzes organised, as well as a web learning work aiming at constructing a web portal to link language learners across the region.
Newcastle Law School
Newcastle Law School is the longest established law school in the north-east of England when law was taught at the university's predecessor college before it became independent from Durham University. It has a number of recognised international and national experts in a variety of areas of legal scholarship ranging from Common and Chancery law, to International and European law, as well as contextual, socio-legal and theoretical legal studies.
The Law School occupies four specially adapted late-Victorian town houses. The Staff Offices, the Alumni Lecture Theatre and seminar rooms as well as the Law Library are all located within the School buildings.
School of Computing
The School of Computing was ranked in the Times Higher Education world Top 100. Research areas include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and ubiquitous computing, secure and resilient systems, synthetic biology, scalable computing (high performance systems, data science, machine learning and data visualization), and advanced modelling. The school led the formation of the National Innovation Centre for Data. Innovative teaching in the School was recognised in 2017 with the award of a National Teaching Fellowship.
Cavitation tunnel
Newcastle University has the second largest cavitation tunnel in the UK. Founded in 1950, and based in the Marine Science and Technology Department, the Emerson Cavitation Tunnel is used as a test basin for propellers, water turbines, underwater coatings and interaction of propellers with ice. The Emerson Cavitation Tunnel was recently relocated to a new facility in Blyth.
Museums and galleries
The university is associated with a number of the region's museums and galleries, including the Great North Museum project, which is primarily based at the world-renowned Hancock Museum. The Great North Museum: Hancock also contains the collections from two of the university's former museums, the Shefton Museum and the Museum of Antiquities, both now closed. The university's Hatton Gallery is also a part of the Great North Museum project, and remains within the Fine Art Building.
Academic profile
Reputation and rankings
Rankings
National rankings
Complete (2024)30
Guardian (2024)67
Times / Sunday Times (2024)37
Global rankings
ARWU (2023)201–300
QS (2024)110
THE (2024)168=
Newcastle University's national league table performance over the past ten years
The university is a member of the Russell Group of the UK's research-intensive universities. It is ranked in the top 200 of most world rankings, and in the top 40 of most UK rankings. As of 2023, it is ranked 110th globally by QS, 292nd by Leiden, 139th by Times Higher Education and 201st–300th by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Nationally, it is ranked joint 33rd by the Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide, 30th by the Complete University Guide[68] and joint 63rd by the Guardian.
Admissions
UCAS Admission Statistics 20222021202020192018
Application 33,73532,40034,55031,96533,785
Accepte 6,7556,2556,5806,4456,465
Applications/Accepted Ratio 5.05.25.35.05.2
Offer Rate (%78.178.080.279.280.0)
Average Entry Tariff—151148144152
Main scheme applications, International and UK
UK domiciled applicants
HESA Student Body Composition
In terms of average UCAS points of entrants, Newcastle ranked joint 19th in Britain in 2014. In 2015, the university gave offers of admission to 92.1% of its applicants, the highest amongst the Russell Group.
25.1% of Newcastle's undergraduates are privately educated, the thirteenth highest proportion amongst mainstream British universities. In the 2016–17 academic year, the university had a domicile breakdown of 74:5:21 of UK:EU:non-EU students respectively with a female to male ratio of 51:49.
Research
Newcastle is a member of the Russell Group of 24 research-intensive universities. In the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), which assesses the quality of research in UK higher education institutions, Newcastle is ranked joint 33rd by GPA (along with the University of Strathclyde and the University of Sussex) and 15th for research power (the grade point average score of a university, multiplied by the full-time equivalent number of researchers submitted).
Student life
Newcastle University Students' Union (NUSU), known as the Union Society until a 2012 rebranding, includes student-run sports clubs and societies.
The Union building was built in 1924 following a generous gift from an anonymous donor, who is now believed to have been Sir Cecil Cochrane, a major benefactor to the university.[87] It is built in the neo-Jacobean style and was designed by the local architect Robert Burns Dick. It was opened on 22 October 1925 by the Rt. Hon. Lord Eustace Percy, who later served as Rector of King's College from 1937 to 1952. It is a Grade II listed building. In 2010 the university donated £8 million towards a redevelopment project for the Union Building.
The Students' Union is run by seven paid sabbatical officers, including a Welfare and Equality Officer, and ten part-time unpaid officer positions. The former leader of the Liberal Democrats Tim Farron was President of NUSU in 1991–1992. The Students' Union also employs around 300 people in ancillary roles including bar staff and entertainment organisers.
The Courier is a weekly student newspaper. Established in 1948, the current weekly readership is around 12,000, most of whom are students at the university. The Courier has won The Guardian's Student Publication of the Year award twice in a row, in 2012 and 2013. It is published every Monday during term time.
Newcastle Student Radio is a student radio station based in the university. It produces shows on music, news, talk and sport and aims to cater for a wide range of musical tastes.
NUTV, known as TCTV from 2010 to 2017, is student television channel, first established in 2007. It produces live and on-demand content with coverage of events, as well as student-made programmes and shows.
Student exchange
Newcastle University has signed over 100 agreements with foreign universities allowing for student exchange to take place reciprocally.
Sport
Newcastle is one of the leading universities for sport in the UK and is consistently ranked within the top 12 out of 152 higher education institutions in the British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) rankings. More than 50 student-led sports clubs are supported through a team of professional staff and a network of indoor and outdoor sports facilities based over four sites. The university have a strong rugby history and were the winners of the Northumberland Senior Cup in 1965.
The university enjoys a friendly sporting rivalry with local universities. The Stan Calvert Cup was held between 1994 and 2018 by major sports teams from Newcastle and Northumbria University. The Boat Race of the North has also taken place between the rowing clubs of Newcastle and Durham University.
As of 2023, Newcastle University F.C. compete in men's senior football in the Northern League Division Two.
The university's Cochrane Park sports facility was a training venue for the teams playing football games at St James' Park for the 2012 London Olympics.
A
Ali Mohamed Shein, 7th President of Zanzibar
Richard Adams - fairtrade businessman
Kate Adie - journalist
Yasmin Ahmad - Malaysian film director, writer and scriptwriter
Prince Adewale Aladesanmi - Nigerian prince and businessman
Jane Alexander - Bishop
Theodosios Alexander (BSc Marine Engineering 1981) - Dean, Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology of Saint Louis University
William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong - industrialist; in 1871 founded College of Physical Science, an early part of the University
Roy Ascott - new media artist
Dennis Assanis - President, University of Delaware
Neil Astley - publisher, editor and writer
Rodney Atkinson - eurosceptic conservative academic
Rowan Atkinson - comedian and actor
Kane Avellano - Guinness World Record for youngest person to circumnavigate the world by motorcycle (solo and unsupported) at the age of 23 in 2017
B
Bruce Babbitt - U.S. politician; 16th Governor of Arizona (1978–1987); 47th United States Secretary of the Interior (1993–2001); Democrat
James Baddiley - biochemist, based at Newcastle University 1954–1983; the Baddiley-Clark building is named in part after him
Tunde Baiyewu - member of the Lighthouse Family
John C. A. Barrett - clergyman
G. W. S. Barrow - historian
Neil Bartlett - chemist, creation of the first noble gas compounds (BSc and PhD at King's College, University of Durham, later Newcastle University)
Sue Beardsmore - television presenter
Alan Beith - politician
Jean Benedetti - biographer, translator, director and dramatist
Phil Bennion - politician
Catherine Bertola - contemporary painter
Simon Best - Captain of the Ulster Rugby team; Prop for the Ireland Team
Andy Bird - CEO of Disney International
Rory Jonathan Courtenay Boyle, Viscount Dungarvan - heir apparent to the earldom of Cork
David Bradley - science writer
Mike Brearley - professional cricketer, formerly a lecturer in philosophy at the university (1968–1971)
Constance Briscoe - one of the first black women to sit as a judge in the UK; author of the best-selling autobiography Ugly; found guilty in May 2014 on three charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice; jailed for 16 months
Steve Brooks - entomologist; attained BSc in Zoology and MSc in Public Health Engineering from Newcastle University in 1976 and 1977 respectively
Thom Brooks - academic, columnist
Gavin Brown - academic
Vicki Bruce - psychologist
Basil Bunting - poet; Northern Arts Poetry Fellow at Newcastle University (1968–70); honorary DLitt in 1971
John Burgan - documentary filmmaker
Mark Burgess - computer scientist
Sir John Burn - Professor of Clinical Genetics at Newcastle University Medical School; Medical Director and Head of the Institute of Genetics; Newcastle Medical School alumnus
William Lawrence Burn - historian and lawyer, history chair at King's College, Newcastle (1944–66)
John Harrison Burnett - botanist, chair of Botany at King's College, Newcastle (1960–68)
C.
Richard Caddel - poet
Ann Cairns - President of International Markets for MasterCard
Deborah Cameron - linguist
Stuart Cameron - lecturer
John Ashton Cannon - historian; Professor of Modern History; Head of Department of History from 1976 until his appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 1979; Pro-Vice-Chancellor 1983–1986
Ian Carr - musician
Jimmy Cartmell - rugby player, Newcastle Falcons
Steve Chapman - Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University
Dion Chen - Hong Kong educator, principal of Ying Wa College and former principal of YMCA of Hong Kong Christian College
Hsing Chia-hui - author
Ashraf Choudhary - scientist
Chua Chor Teck - Managing Director of Keppel Group
Jennifer A. Clack - palaeontologist
George Clarke - architect
Carol Clewlow - novelist
Brian Clouston - landscape architect
Ed Coode - Olympic gold medallist
John Coulson - chemical engineering academic
Caroline Cox, Baroness Cox - cross-bench member of the British House of Lords
Nicola Curtin – Professor of Experimental Cancer Therapeutics
Pippa Crerar - Political Editor of the Daily Mirror
D
Fred D'Aguiar - author
Julia Darling - poet, playwright, novelist, MA in Creative Writing
Simin Davoudi - academic
Richard Dawson - civil engineering academic and member of the UK Committee on Climate Change
Tom Dening - medical academic and researcher
Katie Doherty - singer-songwriter
Nowell Donovan - vice-chancellor for academic affairs and Provost of Texas Christian University
Catherine Douglas - Ig Nobel Prize winner for Veterinary Medicine
Annabel Dover - artist, studied fine art 1994–1998
Alexander Downer - Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (1996–2007)
Chloë Duckworth - archaeologist and presenter
Chris Duffield - Town Clerk and Chief Executive of the City of London Corporation
E
Michael Earl - academic
Tom English - drummer, Maxïmo Park
Princess Eugenie - member of the British royal family. Eugenie is a niece of King Charles III and a granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II. She began studying at Newcastle University in September 2009, graduating in 2012 with a 2:1 degree in English Literature and History of Art.
F
U. A. Fanthorpe - poet
Frank Farmer - medical physicist; professor of medical physics at Newcastle University in 1966
Terry Farrell - architect
Tim Farron - former Liberal Democrat leader and MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale
Ian Fells - professor
Andy Fenby - rugby player
Bryan Ferry - singer, songwriter and musician, member of Roxy Music and solo artist; studied fine art
E. J. Field - neuroscientist, director of the university's Demyelinating Disease Unit
John Niemeyer Findlay - philosopher
John Fitzgerald - computer scientist
Vicky Forster - cancer researcher
Maximimlian (Max) Fosh- YouTuber and independent candidate in the 2021 London mayoral election.
Rose Frain - artist
G
Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster - aristocrat, billionaire, businessman and landowner
Peter Gibbs - television weather presenter
Ken Goodall - rugby player
Peter Gooderham - British ambassador
Michael Goodfellow - Professor in Microbial Systematics
Robert Goodwill - politician
Richard Gordon - author
Teresa Graham - accountant
Thomas George Greenwell - National Conservative Member of Parliament
H
Sarah Hainsworth - Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Executive Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University
Reginald Hall - endocrinologist, Professor of Medicine (1970–1980)
Alex Halliday - Professor of Geochemistry, University of Oxford
Richard Hamilton - artist
Vicki L. Hanson - computer scientist; honorary doctorate in 2017
Rupert Harden - professional rugby union player
Tim Head - artist
Patsy Healey - professor
Alastair Heathcote - rower
Dorothy Heathcote - academic
Adrian Henri - 'Mersey Scene' poet and painter
Stephen Hepburn - politician
Jack Heslop-Harrison - botanist
Tony Hey - computer scientist; honorary doctorate 2007
Stuart Hill - author
Jean Hillier - professor
Ken Hodcroft - Chairman of Hartlepool United; founder of Increased Oil Recovery
Robert Holden - landscape architect
Bill Hopkins - composer
David Horrobin - entrepreneur
Debbie Horsfield - writer of dramas, including Cutting It
John House - geographer
Paul Hudson - weather presenter
Philip Hunter - educationist
Ronald Hunt – Art Historian who was librarian at the Art Department
Anya Hurlbert - visual neuroscientis
I
Martin Ince - journalist and media adviser, founder of the QS World University Rankings
Charles Innes-Ker - Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford
Mark Isherwood - politician
Jonathan Israel - historian
J
Alan J. Jamieson - marine biologist
George Neil Jenkins - medical researcher
Caroline Johnson - Conservative Member of Parliament
Wilko Johnson - guitarist with 1970s British rhythm and blues band Dr. Feelgood
Rich Johnston - comic book writer and cartoonist
Anna Jones - businesswoman
Cliff Jones - computer scientist
Colin Jones - historian
David E. H. Jones - chemist
Francis R. Jones - poetry translator and Reader in Translation Studies
Phil Jones - climatologist
Michael Jopling, Baron Jopling - Member of the House of Lords and the Conservative Party
Wilfred Josephs - dentist and composer
K
Michael King Jr. - civil rights leader; honorary graduate. In November 1967, MLK made a 24-hour trip to the United Kingdom to receive an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law from Newcastle University, becoming the first African American the institution had recognised in this way.
Panayiotis Kalorkoti - artist; studied B.A. (Hons) in Fine Art (1976–80); Bartlett Fellow in the Visual Arts (1988)
Rashida Karmali - businesswoman
Jackie Kay - poet, novelist, Professor of Creative Writing
Paul Kennedy - historian of international relations and grand strategy
Mark Khangure - neuroradiologist
L
Joy Labinjo - artist
Henrike Lähnemann - German medievalist
Dave Leadbetter - politician
Lim Boon Heng - Singapore Minister
Lin Hsin Hsin - IT inventor, artist, poet and composer
Anne Longfield - children's campaigner, former Children's Commissioner for England
Keith Ludeman - businessman
M
Jack Mapanje - writer and poet
Milton Margai - first prime minister of Sierra Leone (medical degree from the Durham College of Medicine, later Newcastle University Medical School)
Laurence Martin - war studies writer
Murray Martin, documentary and docudrama filmmaker, co-founder of Amber Film & Photography Collective
Adrian Martineau – medical researcher and professor of respiratory Infection and immunity at Queen Mary University of London
Carl R. May - sociologist
Tom May - professional rugby union player, now with Northampton Saints, and capped by England
Kate McCann – journalist and television presenter
Ian G. McKeith – professor of Old Age Psychiatry
John Anthony McGuckin - Orthodox Christian scholar, priest, and poet
Wyl Menmuir - novelist
Zia Mian - physicist
Richard Middleton - musicologist
Mary Midgley - moral philosopher
G.C.J. Midgley - philosopher
Moein Moghimi - biochemist and nanoscientist
Hermann Moisl - linguist
Anthony Michaels-Moore - Operatic Baritone
Joanna Moncrieff - Critical Psychiatrist
Theodore Morison - Principal of Armstrong College, Newcastle upon Tyne (1919–24)
Andy Morrell - footballer
Frank Moulaert - professor
Mo Mowlam - former British Labour Party Member of Parliament, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, lecturer at Newcastle University
Chris Mullin - former British Labour Party Member of Parliament, author, visiting fellow
VA Mundella - College of Physical Science, 1884—1887; lecturer in physics at the College, 1891—1896: Professor of Physics at Northern Polytechnic Institute and Principal of Sunderland Technical College.
Richard Murphy - architect
N
Lisa Nandy - British Labour Party Member of Parliament, former Shadow Foreign Secretary
Karim Nayernia - biomedical scientist
Dianne Nelmes - TV producer
O
Sally O'Reilly - writer
Mo O'Toole - former British Labour Party Member of European Parliament
P
Ewan Page - founding director of the Newcastle University School of Computing and briefly acting vice-chancellor; later appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Reading
Rachel Pain - academic
Amanda Parker - Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire since 2023
Geoff Parling - Leicester Tigers rugby player
Chris Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes - British Conservative politician and Chancellor of the University (1999–2009)
Chris M Pattinson former Great Britain International Swimmer 1976-1984
Mick Paynter - Cornish poet and Grandbard
Robert A. Pearce - academic
Hugh Percy, 10th Duke of Northumberland - Chancellor of the University (1964–1988)
Jonathan Pile - Showbiz Editor, ZOO magazine
Ben Pimlott - political historian; PhD and lectureship at Newcastle University (1970–79)
Robin Plackett - statistician
Alan Plater - playwright and screenwriter
Ruth Plummer - Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine at the Northern Institute for Cancer Research and Fellow of the UK's Academy of Medical Sciences.
Poh Kwee Ong - Deputy President of SembCorp Marine
John Porter - musician
Rob Powell - former London Broncos coach
Stuart Prebble - former chief executive of ITV
Oliver Proudlock - Made in Chelsea star; creator of Serge De Nîmes clothing line[
Mark Purnell - palaeontologist
Q
Pirzada Qasim - Pakistani scholar, Vice Chancellor of the University of Karachi
Joyce Quin, Baroness Quin - politician
R
Andy Raleigh - Rugby League player for Wakefield Trinity Wildcats
Brian Randell - computer scientist
Rupert Mitford, 6th Baron Redesdale - Liberal Democrat spokesman in the House of Lords for International Development
Alastair Reynolds - novelist, former research astronomer with the European Space Agency
Ben Rice - author
Lewis Fry Richardson - mathematician, studied at the Durham College of Science in Newcastle
Matthew White Ridley, 4th Viscount Ridley - Chancellor of the University 1988-1999
Colin Riordan - VC of Cardiff University, Professor of German Studies (1988–2006)
Susie Rodgers - British Paralympic swimmer
Nayef Al-Rodhan - philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author
Neil Rollinson - poet
Johanna Ropner - Lord lieutenant of North Yorkshire
Sharon Rowlands - CEO of ReachLocal
Peter Rowlinson - Ig Nobel Prize winner for Veterinary Medicine
John Rushby - computer scientist
Camilla Rutherford - actress
S
Jonathan Sacks - former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
Ross Samson - Scottish rugby union footballer; studied history
Helen Scales - marine biologist, broadcaster, and writer
William Scammell - poet
Fred B. Schneider - computer scientist; honorary doctorate in 2003
Sean Scully - painter
Nigel Shadbolt - computer scientist
Tom Shakespeare - geneticist
Jo Shapcott - poet
James Shapiro - Canadian surgeon and scientist
Jack Shepherd - actor and playwright
Mark Shucksmith - professor
Chris Simms - crime thriller novel author
Graham William Smith - probation officer, widely regarded as the father of the national probation service
Iain Smith - Scottish politician
Paul Smith - singer, Maxïmo Park
John Snow - discoverer of cholera transmission through water; leader in the adoption of anaesthesia; one of the 8 students enrolled on the very first term of the Medical School
William Somerville - agriculturist, professor of agriculture and forestry at Durham College of Science (later Newcastle University)
Ed Stafford - explorer, walked the length of the Amazon River
Chris Steele-Perkins - photographer
Chris Stevenson - academic
Di Stewart - Sky Sports News reader
Diana Stöcker - German CDU Member of Parliament
Miodrag Stojković - genetics researcher
Miriam Stoppard - physician, author and agony aunt
Charlie van Straubenzee - businessman and investment executive
Peter Straughan - playwright and short story writer
T
Mathew Tait - rugby union footballer
Eric Thomas - academic
David Tibet - cult musician and poet
Archis Tiku - bassist, Maxïmo Park
James Tooley - professor
Elsie Tu - politician
Maurice Tucker - sedimentologist
Paul Tucker - member of Lighthouse Family
George Grey Turner - surgeon
Ronald F. Tylecote - archaeologist
V
Chris Vance - actor in Prison Break and All Saints
Géza Vermes - scholar
Geoff Vigar - lecturer
Hugh Vyvyan - rugby union player
W
Alick Walker - palaeontologist
Matthew Walker - Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley
Tom Walker - Sunday Times foreign correspondent
Lord Walton of Detchant - physician; President of the GMC, BMA, RSM; Warden of Green College, Oxford (1983–1989)
Kevin Warwick - Professor of Cybernetics; former Lecturer in Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Duncan Watmore - footballer at Millwall F.C.
Mary Webb - artist
Charlie Webster - television sports presenter
Li Wei - Chair of Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London
Joseph Joshua Weiss - Professor of Radiation Chemistry
Robert Westall - children's writer, twice winner of Carnegie Medal
Thomas Stanley Westoll - Fellow of the Royal Society
Gillian Whitehead - composer
William Whitfield - architect, later designed the Hadrian Building and the Northern Stage
Claire Williams - motorsport executive
Zoe Williams - sportswoman, worked on Gladiators
Donald I. Williamson - planktologist and carcinologist
Philip Williamson - former Chief Executive of Nationwide Building Society
John Willis - Royal Air Force officer and council member of the University
Lukas Wooller - keyboard player, Maxïmo Park
Graham Wylie - co-founder of the Sage Group; studied Computing Science & Statistics BSc and graduated in 1980; awarded an honorary doctorate in 2004
Y
Hisila Yami, Nepalese politician and former Minister of Physical Planning and Works (Government of Nepal
John Yorke - Controller of Continuing Drama; Head of Independent Drama at the BBC
Martha Young-Scholten - linguist
Paul Younger - hydrogeologist
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswan_Dam
The Aswan Dam, or more specifically since the 1960s, the Aswan High Dam, is the world's largest embankment dam, which was built across the Nile in Aswan, Egypt, between 1960 and 1970. Its significance largely eclipsed the previous Aswan Low Dam initially completed in 1902 downstream. Based on the success of the Low Dam, then at its maximum utilization, construction of the High Dam became a key objective of the government following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952; with its ability to better control flooding, provide increased water storage for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity, the dam was seen as pivotal to Egypt's planned industrialization. Like the earlier implementation, the High Dam has had a significant effect on the economy and culture of Egypt.
Before the High Dam was built, even with the old dam in place, the annual flooding of the Nile during late summer had continued to pass largely unimpeded down the valley from its East African drainage basin. These floods brought high water with natural nutrients and minerals that annually enriched the fertile soil along its floodplain and delta; this predictability had made the Nile valley ideal for farming since ancient times. However, this natural flooding varied, since high-water years could destroy the whole crop, while low-water years could create widespread drought and consequently famine. Both these events had continued to occur periodically. As Egypt's population grew and technology increased, both a desire and the ability developed to completely control the flooding, and thus both protect and support farmland and its economically important cotton crop. With the greatly increased reservoir storage provided by the High Aswan Dam, the floods could be controlled and the water could be stored for later release over multiple years.
The Aswan Dam was designed by the Moscow-based Hydroproject Institute.
The earliest recorded attempt to build a dam near Aswan was in the 11th century, when the Arab polymath and engineer Ibn al-Haytham (known as Alhazen in the West) was summoned to Egypt by the Fatimid Caliph, Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, to regulate the flooding of the Nile, a task requiring an early attempt at an Aswan Dam. His field work convinced him of the impracticality of this scheme.
The British began construction of the first dam across the Nile in 1898. Construction lasted until 1902 and the dam was opened on 10 December 1902. The project was designed by Sir William Willcocks and involved several eminent engineers, including Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Aird, whose firm, John Aird & Co., was the main contractor.
In 1952, the Greek-Egyptian engineer Adrian Daninos began to develop the plan of the new Aswan Dam. Although the Low Dam was almost overtopped in 1946, the government of King Farouk showed no interest in Daninos's plans. Instead the Nile Valley Plan by the British hydrologist Harold Edwin Hurst was favored, which proposed to store water in Sudan and Ethiopia, where evaporation is much lower. The Egyptian position changed completely after the overthrow of the monarchy, led by the Free Officers Movement including Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Free Officers were convinced that the Nile Waters had to be stored in Egypt for political reasons, and within two months, the plan of Daninos was accepted. Initially, both the United States and the USSR were interested in helping development of the dam. Complications ensued due to their rivalry during the Cold War, as well as growing intra-Arab tensions.
In 1955, Nasser was claiming to be the leader of Arab nationalism, in opposition to the traditional monarchies, especially the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq following its signing of the 1955 Baghdad Pact. At that time the U.S. feared that communism would spread to the Middle East, and it saw Nasser as a natural leader of an anticommunist procapitalist Arab League. America and the United Kingdom offered to help finance construction of the High Dam, with a loan of $270 million, in return for Nasser's leadership in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. While opposed to communism, capitalism, and imperialism, Nasser identified as a tactical neutralist, and sought to work with both the U.S. and the USSR for Egyptian and Arab benefit.[8] After the UN criticized a raid by Israel against Egyptian forces in Gaza in 1955, Nasser realized that he could not portray himself as the leader of pan-Arab nationalism if he could not defend his country militarily against Israel. In addition to his development plans, he looked to quickly modernize his military, and he turned first to the U.S. for aid.
American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight Eisenhower told Nasser that the U.S. would supply him with weapons only if they were used for defensive purposes and if he accepted American military personnel for supervision and training. Nasser did not accept these conditions, and consulted the USSR for support.
Although Dulles believed that Nasser was only bluffing and that the USSR would not aid Nasser, he was wrong: the USSR promised Nasser a quantity of arms in exchange for a deferred payment of Egyptian grain and cotton. On 27 September 1955, Nasser announced an arms deal, with Czechoslovakia acting as a middleman for the Soviet support. Instead of attacking Nasser for turning to the Soviets, Dulles sought to improve relations with him. In December 1955, the US and the UK pledged $56 and $14 million, respectively, toward construction of the High Aswan Dam.
Though the Czech arms deal created an incentive for the US to invest at Aswan, the UK cited the deal as a reason for repealing its promise of dam funds. Dulles was angered more by Nasser's diplomatic recognition of China, which was in direct conflict with Dulles's policy of containment of communism.
Several other factors contributed to the US deciding to withdraw its offer of funding for the dam. Dulles believed that the USSR would not fulfil its commitment of military aid. He was also irritated by Nasser's neutrality and attempts to play both sides of the Cold War. At the time, other Western allies in the Middle East, including Turkey and Iraq, were resentful that Egypt, a persistently neutral country, was being offered so much aid.
In June 1956, the Soviets offered Nasser $1.12 billion at 2% interest for the construction of the dam. On 19 July the U.S. State Department announced that American financial assistance for the High Dam was "not feasible in present circumstances."
On 26 July 1956, with wide Egyptian acclaim, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal that included fair compensation for the former owners. Nasser planned on the revenues generated by the canal to help fund construction of the High Dam. When the Suez War broke out, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel seized the canal and the Sinai. But pressure from the U.S. and the USSR at the United Nations and elsewhere forced them to withdraw.
In 1958, the USSR proceeded to provide support for the High Dam project.
In the 1950s, archaeologists began raising concerns that several major historical sites, including the famous temple of Abu Simbel were about to be submerged by waters collected behind the dam. A rescue operation began in 1960 under UNESCO
Despite its size, the Aswan project has not materially hurt the Egyptian balance of payments. The three Soviet credits covered virtually all of the project's foreign exchange requirements, including the cost of technical services, imported power generating and transmission equipment and some imported equipment for land reclamation. Egypt was not seriously burdened by payments on the credits, most of which were extended for 12 years with interest at the very low rate of 2-1/2%. Repayments to the USSR constituted only a small net drain during the first half of the 1960s, and increased export earnings derived from crops grown on newly reclaimed land have largely offset the modest debt service payments in recent years. During 1965–70, these export earnings amounted to an estimated $126 million, compared with debt service payments of $113 million.
A central pylon of the monument to Arab-Soviet Friendship. The memorial commemorates the completion of the Aswan High Dam. The coat of arms of the Soviet Union is on the left and the coat of arms of Egypt is on the right.
The Soviets also provided technicians and heavy machinery. The enormous rock and clay dam was designed by the Soviet Hydroproject Institute along with some Egyptian engineers. 25,000 Egyptian engineers and workers contributed to the construction of the dams.
Originally designed by West German and French engineers in the early 1950s and slated for financing with Western credits, the Aswan High Dam became the USSR's largest and most famous foreign aid project after the United States, the United Kingdom, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) withdrew their support in 1956. The first Soviet loan of $100 million to cover construction of coffer dams for diversion of the Nile was extended in 1958. An additional $225 million was extended in 1960 to complete the dam and construct power-generating facilities, and subsequently about $100 million was made available for land reclamation. These credits of some $425 million covered only the foreign exchange costs of the project, including salaries of Soviet engineers who supervised the project and were responsible for the installation and testing of Soviet equipment. Actual construction, which began in 1960, was done by Egyptian companies on contract to the High Dam Authority, and all domestic costs were borne by the Egyptians. Egyptian participation in the venture has raised the construction industry's capacity and reputation significantly.
On the Egyptian side, the project was led by Osman Ahmed Osman's Arab Contractors. The relatively young Osman underbid his only competitor by one-half.
1960: Start of construction on 9 January
1964: First dam construction stage completed, reservoir started filling
1970: The High Dam, as-Sad al-'Aali, completed on 21 July[18]
1976: Reservoir reached capacity.
Specifications
The Aswan High Dam is 3,830 metres (12,570 ft) long, 980 m (3,220 ft) wide at the base, 40 m (130 ft) wide at the crest and 111 m (364 ft)[ tall. It contains 43,000,000 cubic metres (56,000,000 cu yd) of material. At maximum, 11,000 cubic metres per second (390,000 cu ft/s) of water can pass through the dam. There are further emergency spillways for an extra 5,000 cubic metres per second (180,000 cu ft/s), and the Toshka Canal links the reservoir to the Toshka Depression. The reservoir, named Lake Nasser, is 500 km (310 mi) long[20] and 35 km (22 mi) at its widest, with a surface area of 5,250 square kilometres (2,030 sq mi). It holds 132 cubic kilometres (1.73×1011 cu yd) of water.
Due to the absence of appreciable rainfall, Egypt's agriculture depends entirely on irrigation. With irrigation, two crops per year can be produced, except for sugar cane which has a growing period of almost one year.
The high dam at Aswan releases, on average, 55 cubic kilometres (45,000,000 acre⋅ft) water per year, of which some 46 cubic kilometres (37,000,000 acre⋅ft) are diverted into the irrigation canals.
In the Nile valley and delta, almost 336,000 square kilometres (130,000 sq mi) benefit from these waters producing on average 1.8 crops per year. The annual crop consumptive use of water is about 38 cubic kilometres (31,000,000 acre⋅ft). Hence, the overall irrigation efficiency is 38/46 = 0.826 or 83%. This is a relatively high irrigation efficiency. The field irrigation efficiencies are much less, but the losses are reused downstream. This continuous reuse accounts for the high overall efficiency.
The following table shows the distribution of irrigation water over the branch canals taking off from the one main irrigation canal, the Mansuriya Canal near Giza.
Branch canalWater delivery in m3/feddan *
Kafret Nasser4,700
Beni Magdul3,500
El Mansuria3,300
El Hammami upstream2,800
El Hammami downstream1,800
El Shimi1,200
* Period 1 March to 31 July. 1 feddan is 0.42 ha or about 1 acre.
* Data from the Egyptian Water Use Management Project (EWUP)
The salt concentration of the water in the Aswan reservoir is about 0.25 kilograms per cubic metre (0.42 lb/cu yd), a very low salinity level. At an annual inflow of 55 cubic kilometres (45,000,000 acre⋅ft), the annual salt influx reaches 14 million tons. The average salt concentration of the drainage water evacuated into the sea and the coastal lakes is 2.7 kilograms per cubic metre (4.6 lb/cu yd). At an annual discharge of 10 cubic kilometres (2.4 cu mi) (not counting the 2 kilograms per cubic metre [3.4 lb/cu yd] of salt intrusion from the sea and the lakes, see figure "Water balances"), the annual salt export reaches 27 million ton. In 1995, the output of salt was higher than the influx, and Egypt's agricultural lands were desalinizing. Part of this could be due to the large number of subsurface drainage projects executed in the last decades to control the water table and soil salinity.
Drainage through subsurface drains and drainage channels is essential to prevent a deterioration of crop yields from waterlogging and soil salinization caused by irrigation. By 2003, more than 20,000 square kilometres (7,700 sq mi) have been equipped with a subsurface drainage system and approximately 7.2 square kilometres (2.8 sq mi) of water is drained annually from areas with these systems. The total investment cost in agricultural drainage over 27 years from 1973 to 2002 was about $3.1 billion covering the cost of design, construction, maintenance, research and training. During this period 11 large-scale projects were implemented with financial support from World Bank and other donors.
Effects
The High Dam has resulted in protection from floods and droughts, an increase in agricultural production and employment, electricity production, and improved navigation that also benefits tourism. Conversely, the dam flooded a large area, causing the relocation of over 100,000 people. Many archaeological sites were submerged while others were relocated. The dam is blamed for coastline erosion, soil salinity, and health problems.
The assessment of the costs and benefits of the dam remains controversial decades after its completion. According to one estimate, the annual economic benefit of the High Dam immediately after its completion was LE 255 million, $587 million using the exchange rate in 1970 of $2.30 per LE 1): LE 140 million from agricultural production, LE 100 million from hydroelectric generation, LE 10 million from flood protection, and LE 5 million from improved navigation. At the time of its construction, total cost, including unspecified "subsidiary projects" and the extension of electric power lines, amounted to LE 450 million. Not taking into account the negative environmental and social effects of the dam, its costs are thus estimated to have been recovered within only two years. One observer notes: "The impacts of the Aswan High Dam have been overwhelmingly positive. Although the Dam has contributed to some environmental problems, these have proved to be significantly less severe than was generally expected, or currently believed by many people." Another observer disagreed and he recommended that the dam should be torn down. Tearing it down would cost only a fraction of the funds required for "continually combating the dam's consequential damage" and 500,000 hectares (1,900 sq mi) of fertile land could be reclaimed from the layers of mud on the bed of the drained reservoir. Samuel C. Florman wrote about the dam: "As a structure it is a success. But in its effect on the ecology of the Nile Basin – most of which could have been predicted – it is a failure".
Periodic floods and droughts have affected Egypt since ancient times. The dam mitigated the effects of floods, such as those in 1964, 1973, and 1988. Navigation along the river has been improved, both upstream and downstream of the dam. Sailing along the Nile is a favorite tourism activity, which is mainly done during the winter when the natural flow of the Nile would have been too low to allow navigation of cruise ships.[clarification needed] A new fishing industry has been created around Lake Nasser, though it is struggling due to its distance from any significant markets. The annual production was about 35 000 tons in the mid-1990s. Factories for the fishing industry and packaging have been set up near the Lake.
According to a 1971 CIA declassified report, Although the High Dam has not created ecological problems as serious as some observers have charged, its construction has brought economic losses as well as gains. These losses derive largely from the settling in dam's lake of the rich silt traditionally borne by the Nile. To date (1971), the main impact has been on the fishing industry. Egypt's Mediterranean catch, which once averaged 35,000-40,000 tons annually, has shrunk to 20,000 tons or less, largely because the loss of plankton nourished by the silt has eliminated the sardine population in Egyptian waters. Fishing in high dam's lake may in time at least partly offset the loss of saltwater fish, but only the most optimistic estimates place the eventual catch as high as 15,000-20,000 tons. Lack of continuing silt deposits at the mouth of the river also has contributed to a serious erosion problem. Commercial fertilizer requirements and salination and drainage difficulties, already large in perennially irrigated areas of Lower and Middle Egypt, will be somewhat increased in Upper Egypt by the change to perennial irrigation.
The dams also protected Egypt from the droughts in 1972–73 and 1983–87 that devastated East and West Africa. The High Dam allowed Egypt to reclaim about 2.0 million feddan (840,000 hectares) in the Nile Delta and along the Nile Valley, increasing the country's irrigated area by a third. The increase was brought about both by irrigating what used to be desert and by bringing under cultivation of 385,000 hectares (950,000 acres) that were previously used as flood retention basins. About half a million families were settled on these new lands. In particular the area under rice and sugar cane cultivation increased. In addition, about 1 million feddan (420,000 hectares), mostly in Upper Egypt, were converted from flood irrigation with only one crop per year to perennial irrigation allowing two or more crops per year. On other previously irrigated land, yields increased because water could be made available at critical low-flow periods. For example, wheat yields in Egypt tripled between 1952 and 1991 and better availability of water contributed to this increase. Most of the 32 km3 of freshwater, or almost 40 percent of the average flow of the Nile that were previously lost to the sea every year could be put to beneficial use. While about 10 km3 of the water saved is lost due to evaporation in Lake Nasser, the amount of water available for irrigation still increased by 22 km3. Other estimates put evaporation from Lake Nasser at between 10 and 16 cubic km per year.
Electricity production
The dam powers twelve generators each rated at 175 megawatts (235,000 hp), with a total of 2.1 gigawatts (2,800,000 hp). Power generation began in 1967. When the High Dam first reached peak output it produced around half of Egypt's production of electric power (about 15 percent by 1998), and it gave most Egyptian villages the use of electricity for the first time. The High Dam has also improved the efficiency and the extension of the Old Aswan Hydropower stations by regulating upstream flows.
All High Dam power facilities were completed ahead of schedule. 12 turbines were installed and tested, giving the plant an installed capacity of 2,100 megawatts (MW), or more than twice the national total in 1960. With this capacity, the Aswan plant can produce 10 billion kWh of energy yearly. Two 500-kilovolt trunk lines to Cairo have been completed, and initial transmission problems, stemming mainly from poor insulators, were solved. Also, the damage inflicted on a main transformer station in 1968 by Israeli commandos has been repaired, and the Aswan plant is fully integrated with the power network in Lower Egypt. By 1971 estimation, Power output at Aswan, won't reach much more than half of the plant's theoretical capacity, because of limited water supplies and the differing seasonal water-use patterns for irrigation and power production. Agricultural demand for water in the summer far exceeds the amount needed to meet the comparatively low summer demand for electric power. Heavy summer irrigation use, however, will leave insufficient water under Egyptian control to permit hydroelectric power production at full capacity in the winter. Technical studies indicate that a maximum annual output of 5 billion kWh appears to be all that can be sustained due to fluctuations in Nile flows.
Resettlement and compensations
In Sudan, 50,000 to 70,000 Sudanese Nubians were moved from the old town of Wadi Halfa and its surrounding villages. Some were moved to a newly created settlement on the shore of Lake Nasser called New Wadi Halfa, and some were resettled approximately 700 kilometres (430 mi) south to the semi-arid Butana plain near the town of Khashm el-Girba up the Atbara River. The climate there had a regular rainy season as opposed to their previous desert habitat in which virtually no rain fell. The government developed an irrigation project, called the New Halfa Agricultural Development Scheme to grow cotton, grains, sugar cane and other crops. The Nubians were resettled in twenty five planned villages that included schools, medical facilities, and other services, including piped water and some electrification.
In Egypt, the majority of the 50,000 Nubians were moved three to ten kilometers from the Nile near Edna and Kom Ombo, 45 kilometers (28 mi) downstream from Aswan in what was called "New Nubia". Housing and facilities were built for 47 village units whose relationship to each other approximated that in Old Nubia. Irrigated land was provided to grow mainly sugar cane.
In 2019–20, Egypt started to compensate the Nubians who lost their homes following the dam impoundment.
Archaeological sites
Twenty-two monuments and architectural complexes that were threatened by flooding from Lake Nasser, including the Abu Simbel temples, were preserved by moving them to the shores of the lake under the UNESCO Nubia Campaign. Also moved were Philae, Kalabsha and Amada.
These monuments were granted to countries that helped with the works:
The Debod temple to Madrid
The Temple of Dendur to the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York
The Temple of Taffeh to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden of Leiden
The Temple of Ellesyia to the Museo Egizio of Turin
These items were removed to the garden area of the Sudan National Museum of Khartoum:
The temple of Ramses II at Aksha
The temple of Hatshepsut at Buhen
The temple of Khnum at Kumma
The tomb of the Nubian prince Djehuti-hotep at Debeira
The temples of Dedwen and Sesostris III at Semna
The granite columns from the Faras Cathedral
A part of the paintings of the Faras Cathedral; the other part is in the National Museum of Warsaw.
The Temple of Ptah at Gerf Hussein had its free-standing section reconstructed at New Kalabsha, alongside the Temple of Kalabsha, Beit el-Wali, and the Kiosk of Qertassi.
The remaining archaeological sites, including the Buhen fort and the cemetery of Fadrus have been flooded by Lake Nasser.
Loss of sediments
Before the construction of the High Dam, the Nile deposited sediments of various particle size – consisting of fine sand, silt and clay – on fields in Upper Egypt through its annual flood, contributing to soil fertility. However, the nutrient value of the sediment has often been overestimated. 88 percent of the sediment was carried to the sea before the construction of the High Dam. The nutrient value added to the land by the sediment was only 6,000 tons of potash, 7,000 tons of phosphorus pentoxide and 17,000 tons of nitrogen. These amounts are insignificant compared to what is needed to reach the yields achieved today in Egypt's irrigation. Also, the annual spread of sediment due to the Nile floods occurred along the banks of the Nile. Areas far from the river which never received the Nile floods before are now being irrigated.
A more serious issue of trapping of sediment by the dam is that it has increased coastline erosion surrounding the Nile Delta. The coastline erodes an estimated 125–175 m (410–574 ft) per year.
Waterlogging and increase in soil salinity
Before the construction of the High Dam, groundwater levels in the Nile Valley fluctuated 8–9 m (26–30 ft) per year with the water level of the Nile. During summer when evaporation was highest, the groundwater level was too deep to allow salts dissolved in the water to be pulled to the surface through capillary action. With the disappearance of the annual flood and heavy year-round irrigation, groundwater levels remained high with little fluctuation leading to waterlogging. Soil salinity also increased because the distance between the surface and the groundwater table was small enough (1–2 m depending on soil conditions and temperature) to allow water to be pulled up by evaporation so that the relatively small concentrations of salt in the groundwater accumulated on the soil surface over the years. Since most of the farmland did not have proper subsurface drainage to lower the groundwater table, salinization gradually affected crop yields.[31] Drainage through sub-surface drains and drainage channels is essential to prevent a deterioration of crop yields from soil salinization and waterlogging. By 2003, more than 2 million hectares have been equipped with a subsurface drainage system at a cost from 1973 to 2002 of about $3.1 billion.
Health
Contrary to many predictions made prior to the Aswan High Dam construction and publications that followed, that the prevalence of schistosomiasis (bilharzia) would increase, it did not. This assumption did not take into account the extent of perennial irrigation that was already present throughout Egypt decades before the high dam closure. By the 1950s only a small proportion of Upper Egypt had not been converted from basin (low transmission) to perennial (high transmission) irrigation. Expansion of perennial irrigation systems in Egypt did not depend on the high dam. In fact, within 15 years of the high dam closure there was solid evidence that bilharzia was declining in Upper Egypt. S. haematobium has since disappeared altogether. Suggested reasons for this include improvements in irrigation practice. In the Nile Delta, schistosomiasis had been highly endemic, with prevalence in the villages 50% or higher for almost a century before. This was a consequence of the conversion of the Delta to perennial irrigation to grow long staple cotton by the British. This has changed. Large-scale treatment programmes in the 1990s using single-dose oral medication contributed greatly to reducing the prevalence and severity of S. mansoni in the Delta.
Other effects
Sediment deposited in the reservoir is lowering the water storage capacity of Lake Nasser. The reservoir storage capacity is 162 km3, including 31 km3 dead storage at the bottom of the lake below 147 m (482 ft) above sea level, 90 km3 live storage, and 41 km3 of storage for high flood waters above 175 m (574 ft) above sea level. The annual sediment load of the Nile is about 134 million tons. This means that the dead storage volume would be filled up after 300–500 years if the sediment accumulated at the same rate throughout the area of the lake. Obviously sediment accumulates much faster at the upper reaches of the lake, where sedimentation has already affected the live storage zone.
Before the construction of the High Dam, the 50,000 km (31,000 mi) of irrigation and drainage canals in Egypt had to be dredged regularly to remove sediments. After construction of the dam, aquatic weeds grew much faster in the clearer water, helped by fertilizer residues. The total length of the infested waterways was about 27,000 km (17,000 mi) in the mid-1990s. Weeds have been gradually brought under control by manual, mechanical and biological methods.
Mediterranean fishing and brackish water lake fishery declined after the dam was finished because nutrients that flowed down the Nile to the Mediterranean were trapped behind the dam. For example, the sardine catch off the Egyptian coast declined from 18,000 tons in 1962 to a mere 460 tons in 1968, but then gradually recovered to 8,590 tons in 1992. A scientific article in the mid-1990s noted that "the mismatch between low primary productivity and relatively high levels of fish production in the region still presents a puzzle to scientists."
A concern before the construction of the High Dam had been the potential drop in river-bed level downstream of the Dam as the result of erosion caused by the flow of sediment-free water. Estimates by various national and international experts put this drop at between and 2 and 10 meters (6.6 and 32.8 ft). However, the actual drop has been measured at 0.3–0.7 meters (0.98–2.30 ft), much less than expected.[30]
The red-brick construction industry, which consisted of hundreds of factories that used Nile sediment deposits along the river, has also been negatively affected. Deprived of sediment, they started using the older alluvium of otherwise arable land taking out of production up to 120 square kilometers (46 sq mi) annually, with an estimated 1,000 square kilometers (390 sq mi) destroyed by 1984 when the government prohibited, "with only modest success," further excavation. According to one source, bricks are now being made from new techniques which use a sand-clay mixture and it has been argued that the mud-based brick industry would have suffered even if the dam had not been built.
Because of the lower turbidity of the water sunlight penetrates deeper in the Nile water. Because of this and the increased presence of nutrients from fertilizers in the water, more algae grow in the Nile. This in turn increases the costs of drinking water treatment. Apparently few experts had expected that water quality in the Nile would actually decrease because of the High Dam.
Appraisal of the Project
Although it is moot whether the project constitutes the best use of the funds spent, the Aswan Dam project unquestionably is and will continue to be economically beneficial to Egypt. The project has been expensive and it took considerable time to complete, as is usually the case with large hydroelectric developments, But Egypt now has a valuable asset with a long life and low operating costs. Even so, the wisdom of concentrating one-third of domestic saving and most of available foreign aid on a slow growth project is questionable. Since 1960, GNP has grown 50%, but mainly as a result of other investment.
Egyptian authorities were well aware that equivalent gains in output could have been achieved more quickly and more cheaply by other means. A series of low dams, similar to the barrages now contemplated, was suggested by Egyptian engineers as a more economical means of achieving up to 2,000 mW of additional generating capacity, US and WorldBank agricultural experts had long recommended improved drainage, introduction of hybrid seeds, and other such low-cost alternatives to land reclamation as a means of increasing agricultural output, In other areas, most notably the once efficient cotton textile industry, investment was needed to forestall an output decline, Implementation of these and other alternatives has been postponed rather than precluded by the High Dam project.
However, the decision to concentrate Egyptian savings and energies on the Aswan project for a decade was heavily based on non-economic factors. Nasser undoubtedly believed that a project of considerable symbolic appeal was needed to mobilize the population behind the government's economic goals, He also apparently felt that the East and West would be more easily persuaded to bid against each other for a project of this scope.
The Aswan High Dam made an appreciable contribution to Egyptian GNP, however the returns were well below what the planners had anticipated. The principal limiting factors on the High Dam's contribution to Egyptian output are a shortage of land suitable for reclamation, the high cost and long time required to bring reclaimed land to full productivity, and an inadequate water supply to meet power and irrigation goals simultaneously. The last limitation arises in part from the allocation in a 1959 agreement of more water to Sudan than was originally foreseen and in part from differences in the seasonal demand pattern of agriculture and the hydroelectric plant for the water. Irrigation requires very heavy use of water during summer months, while power generation needs peak during the winter. Ecological problems created by the dam, most of which were anticipated, have not seriously harmed the economy, although a few minor industries have been damaged.
The dam is, nonetheless, a viable project. Eventually the contribution to GNP equals as much as 20% of total investment. Moreover, the dam and associated projects provided returns that at least offset the cost of operation, repayment of foreign loans and amortisation of domestic loans.
Continuing my Southern Arizona Adventure 2024 and continuing my visit to Bisbee Arizona. This is stage 7 of 9.
I arrived just a little before the original Bisbee Breakfast Club opened so I walked around Erie Street. Then I ate a Harvest Omelette with egg whites at BBC. Then I walked around Erie Street a little more.
Lots of memories for me since I grew up in Arizona in the 1950's. Miami & Globe Arizona were a lot like Lowell.
This is a Greyhound Scenicruiser. I travelled on these with my Mom when I was a kid.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PD-4501_Scenicruiser
The GMC PD-4501 Scenicruiser, manufactured by General Motors (GM) for Greyhound Lines, Inc., was a three-axle monocoque two-level coach that Greyhound used from July 1954 into the mid-1970s. 1001 were made between 1954 and 1956.
The Scenicruiser became an icon of the American way of life due to its presence throughout the United States in cities and along highways and popularity with the traveling public. The name was a portmanteau of the words "scenic" and "cruiser".
The high-level design concept of Scenicruiser resembles some of the rolling stock of the passenger-carrying railroads of the United States and Canada, particularly their popular stainless steel dome cars. This type of two-level motorcoach body was common in the late 1940s in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where it was known as Observation coach.[1]
Overview
The Model PD-4501, as GMC called it, was the most distinctive American parlor bus design of the modern era. It was the result of seven years of effort by Greyhound and GM Truck and Coach Division. The first GX-1 prototype was based on a design by Raymond Loewy as U.S. patent 2,563,917. Originally conceived as a 35-foot (10.67 m) bus, Greyhound later used a tandem-axle 40-foot (12.19 m) prototype by Loewy called the GX-2 to lobby for the lifting of length restrictions of buses longer than 35 feet in most states at the time.
(Continued from previous photo)
After the crowning of King John Balliol, there followed a number of years of political and military tumult, during which the different factions fought each other when they weren’t busy fighting the English, and everyone tried to manipulate poor John Balliol for their own gain. Essentially, it was all about the different factions fighting for their own gain. It was largely not about nationalism, and therefore to side with England when it suited was considered to be quite justifiable.
Meanwhile English interests thrived in a country they had effectively divided and conquerored. It was only when William Wallace appeared on the scene that nationalism rose above self interest for a while, and the reason that Wallace eventually lost, was that generally throughout Scottish history, self interest has been more important to the (ruling class of) Scots than nationalism, and in this instance self interest eventually won out!
Following the death of Wallace and the irreconcilable differences that their support for an independant Scotland had placed between the Bruces and Comyns on the one hand, and Edward of England on the other, an uneasy truce emerged between the last two serious contenders for King John Balliol’s empty throne. Balliol had abdicated in 1296 and retired to his estates in France and it was clear he was not going to return.
On February 10th 1306, one of those single events that changes the course of history occurred at Dumfries in Galloway. Up until that point, it is reasonable to assume that the Comyns might eventually have become kings of Scotland, which would have changed the subsequent history of the British Isles. However, when Robert Bruce and John the ‘Red Comyn’ met at Dumfries to attempt to settle their differences, things went awry and Bruce, for reasons not fully known, stabbed Comyn, who died at the altar of the church in which they met.
Robert Bruce, whatever else he may have been, was a decisive man, and grabbing the initiative he had created (probably unintentionally), he promptly had himself crowned King of Scots. His next priority, before dealing with the English, was to remove any counterclaims from the likes of the Comyns, and while he had already removed the head of the family at Dumfries, John Earl of Buchan had just as much royal blood in him as his cousin the ‘Red Comyn’ had (or used to have!).
King Robert I invaded the North-east in late 1307 and in May 1308 The Bruce defeated John Comyn’s army near Old Meldrum in a decisive battle. Comyn fled to England, where he died later that year. Following the battle, Bruce subjected the earldom of Buchan to systematic devastation, in what has since been known as the “Harrying of Buchan”. It is probable that the Castle of King-Edward was destroyed as part of this process and was never rebuilt. Bruce's men proceeded to kill those loyal to the Comyns, destroying their homes, farms, crops and slaughtering their cattle. The lands of Buchan were subsequently granted by the king to those that had principally supported him, such as the Hays and the Keiths. Much of Badenoch, which had belonged to the Red Comyn, was given to a little known family from the Borders that had also supported Bruce, the Gordons!
So ended the power of a family, of whom, the Scottish historian Buchanan says in his History of Scotland, "the power of this family has never been equalled in Scotland, either before or since." John Comyn, Earl of Buchan’s heir was his niece Alice, who married Henry Beaumont, a Norman English nobleman, and his efforts to claim the earldom of Buchan in the name of his wife played a large part in bringing about the Second War of Scottish Independence 25 years later.