Landscape and Writing

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I had a brief visit to London over the Bank Holiday weekend, and ended up at the British Library for their Writing Britain exhibition. Now, I lived in London for seven years, and it is to my eternal shame that I only visited the British Library twice. It's often easy to overlook the British Library as a destination, overshadowed as it is by the likes of the National Gallery and the British Museum, and when you live somewhere, it can also be easy to take for granted what's sat on your doorstep.

The British Library is a fantastic space, and they seem to put a lot of thought into their exhibitions - a previous one that I saw was about photography, while the last one was about Charles Dickens and the supernatural (so clearly of great interest to me). The Writing Britain exhibition had at its heart the aim of exploring the ways in which the British landscape has inspired British literature over the years. In many cases, they'd included original handwritten copies of the texts, as well as early first editions - and it was interesting to see the actual handwriting of these literary greats. It somehow makes them more human when you realise that even they write like a crack-addled panda with a box of crayons.

The exhibition itself had two major effects on me. The first was in truly appreciating the diversity of the British landscape. I'm not one of those people who has travelled all over the world, filled with stories of the Far East or south America, but I am a person who has seen a great deal of Great Britain (I've never been to Northern Ireland so I shan't call it the United Kingdom). Weirdly enough, I still sometimes forget the range of locations that comprise our little island. Rural pastoral scenes, wild moorland, coastal escapes and our industrial past couldn't NOT inspire writers, and the exhibition made me long to explore the untamed landscapes of my native Northumberland.

The second made me examine my own work, to see how much of the landscape around me had inspired my writing. Strangely enough, I don't think it has inspired my writing to the extent that I might like. Elements of Victorian London can be seen in my steampunk Vertigo City, and Edinburgh provided a lot of inspiration for the Underground City in my work in progress, The Necromancer's Apprentice. Beyond that, I struggle to find any 'themes' related to landscape - and there is essentially nothing of Newcastle, my hometown, in my work. If I'm honest, I'm actually ashamed of myself for that.

I'm not really sure how to categorise my writing - normally my idea is formed from a 'what if', or it's related to something happening. I often have ideas for settings that I want to use but I only like to actually use these settings when I have a story that I can tell within them. After all, a setting is all very well, but it's nothing more than an empty set unless something is going on in it. I suppose you'd consider me a 'plot driven' writer, in that my stories have to be about a 'thing' or 'event'. If I was a character driven writer, would my work be different? Would I find it easier to use landscape to reflect conditions surrounding a character, or their own internal landscape?

It's something I think that I will endeavour to explore, and I highly recommend the exhibition for writers and bibliophiles alike.

Writing Britain is on until September 25 and you can find out more details here. Image is Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands, Top Withens near Haworth, Yorkshire 1977, by Fay Godwin © British Library.

Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition

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By now, everyone knows the story of the Titanic. It has been the subject of countless novels, films, documentaries and books, and has captured the public imagination ever since it sank on April 15, 1912, claiming more than 1,500 lives.

It's no surprise that a new exhibition would be staged at The O2 in London, but Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition, is a little different. Running from November 5 2010 until May 1 2011, it features over 300 items from the ship on display, including china dinner services, the ship's wheel, porthole frames, and objects belonging to the passengers themselves. The exhibition also features recreations of parts of the ship, including first class cabins, the boiler room and the hold. I went along on Friday 12 November 2010 to try to better understand one of the most famous maritime disasters.

Upon entry, you're handed a boarding pass giving details of a passenger, including their age, the reason for their trip, and which class they were in. At the end of the exhibition, a "memorial wall" allows you to discover if 'your' passenger survived, or was lost. Naturally the survivors' list is somewhat shorter, and the plethora of names of lost souls hammers home the scale of the tragedy.

My own passenger, Annie Clemmer Funk, was a 38-year-old from Bally, Pennsylvania. She was travelling in second class to be at the bedside of her sick mother, after working in India as a missionary. Sadly, Annie didn't survive. She gave up her seat in the lifeboat to a mother whose children had already been seated. When faced with such tales of selflessness, you do wonder how you would behave in the same situation. Could you give up your seat to allow a mother to stay with her children, knowing that doing so would seal your fate?

The exhibition is staged chronologically, and begins with the initial design of Titanic in 1907. Visitors move through the exhibition to see recreations of the ship's interior, and display cases of artefacts retrieved from the ocean floor. It's rather poignant, as well as a little eerie, to look at these handkerchiefs, stockings and notebooks, knowing their owners are never going to use them again. One passenger was a perfumier  and some of his perfume samples survived - you can even smell the potent aromas. The galleries grow colder and darker until you reach the iceberg wall, which gives you some idea of how cold the sea was on the night of the disaster. Most casualties died of hypothermia, as opposed to drowning.

Naturally, the exhibition tells the story of the people on board as well as the facts regarding its doomed voyage. You hear about pursers who hurriedly tried to save the contents of the ship's safety deposit boxes, with the intention of returning the valuables to their owners. There are the five mail clerks who desperately tried to save the hundreds of bags of mail on board. It's genuinely humbling to hear about the lengths these people went to, continuing to do their jobs in the middle of a disaster. I doubt workers today would display such dogged devotion, though all stories pale into insignificance alongside the band who continued to play as the ship went down.

The exhibition also tells the stories of those passengers who weren't even supposed to be on board. Some passengers booked tickets at the last moment when their plans changed, while others were transferred to the Titanic when the coal strike of 1912 prevented the departure of their own steamers. Few of these survived. Is this just simply bad luck, or does it raise more metaphysical considerations of fate?

Essentially the exhibition is a story of a great tragedy caused by human folly, but one coloured with great courage and sacrifice. As tragedies such as this, or the Great War, disappear into the mists of time it is easy to forget the people who suffered, or were lost. However I think it is important for us to remember, both to keep us in touch with humanity and those who have gone before us, but also so that we do not make the same mistakes again. Sadly history has shown that mankind and his warfare are not to be easily parted, but in the case of the Titanic, at least important lessons were learned. For that, at least, we can be grateful.