Islington
Islington is a district in Greater London and part of the London Borough of Islington. It is a residential district of Inner London, extending from Islington's High Street to Highbury Fields, encompassing the area around the busy High Street, Upper Street, Essex Road, Southgate Road to the east. Islington grew as a sprawling Middlesex village along the line of the Great North Road, has provided the name of the modern borough; this gave rise to some confusion, as neighbouring districts may be said to be in Islington. This district is bounded by Liverpool Road to the west and City Road and Southgate Road to the south-east, its northernmost point is in the area of Canonbury. The main north-south high street, Upper Street splits at Highbury Corner to Holloway Road to the west and St. Paul's Road to the east; the Angel business improvement district, an area centered around the Angel tube station, exists within southern Islington district and northern portions of two other districts in the London Borough of Islington – Finsbury and Pentonville.
Islington was named by the Saxons Giseldone Gislandune. The name means "Gīsla's hill" from the Old English personal name dun; the name mutated to Isledon, which remained in use well into the 17th century when the modern form arose. In medieval times, Islington was just one of many small manors thereabouts, along with Bernersbury, Neweton Berewe or Hey-bury and Canonesbury; some roads on the edge of the area, including Essex Road, were known as streets by the medieval period indicating a Roman origin, but little physical evidence remains. What is known is that the Great North Road from Aldersgate came into use in the 14th century, connecting with a new turnpike up Highgate Hill; this was along the line of modern Upper Street, with a toll gate at The Angel defining the extent of the village. The Back Road, the modern Liverpool Road, was a drovers' road where cattle would be rested before the final leg of their journey to Smithfield. Pens and sheds were erected along this road to accommodate the animals.
The first recorded church, St Mary's, was erected in the twelfth century and was replaced in the fifteenth century. Islington lay on the estates of the Dean and Chapter of St Pauls. There were substantial medieval moated manor houses in the area, principally at Canonbury and Highbury. In 1548, there were 440 communicants listed and the rural atmosphere, with access to the City and Westminster, made it a popular residence for the rich and eminent; the local inns harboured sheltered recusants. The Royal Agricultural Hall was built in 1862 on the Liverpool Road site of William Dixon's Cattle Layers; the hall was 75 ft high and the arched glass roof spanned 125 ft. It was built for the annual Smithfield Show in December of that year but was popular for other purposes, including recitals and the Royal Tournament, it was the primary exhibition site for London until the 20th century and the largest building of its kind, holding up to 50,000 people. It was requisitioned for use by the Mount Pleasant sorting office during World War II and never re-opened.
The main hall has now been incorporated into the Business Design Centre. The hill on which Islington stands has long supplied the City of London with water, the first projects drawing water through wooden pipes from the many springs that lay at its foot, in Finsbury; these included Sadler's London Spa and Clerkenwell. By the 17th century these traditional sources were inadequate to supply the growing population and plans were laid to construct a waterway, the New River, to bring fresh water from the source of the River Lea, in Hertfordshire to New River Head, below Islington in Finsbury; the river was opened on 29 September 1613 by the constructor of the project. His statue still stands; the course of the river ran to the east of Upper Street, much of its course is now covered and forms a linear park through the area. The Regent's Canal passes through Islington, for much of which in an 886-metre tunnel that runs from Colebrook Row east of the Angel, to emerge at Muriel Street near Caledonian Road.
The stretch is marked above with a series of pavement plaques so walkers may find their way from one entrance to the other. The area of the canal east of the tunnel and north of the City Road was once dominated by much warehousing and industry surrounding the large City Road Basin and Wenlock Basin; those old buildings that survive here are now residential or small creative work units. This stretch has one side accessed from the towpath; the canal was constructed in 1820 to carry cargo from Limehouse into the canal system. There is no tow-path in the tunnel so bargees had to walk their barges through, braced against the roof. Commercial use of the canal has declined since the 1960s. In the 17th and 18th centuries the availability of water made Islington a good place for growing vegetables to feed London; the manor became a popular excursion destination for Londoners, attracted to the area by its rural feel. Many public houses were therefore built to serve the needs of both the excursionists and travellers on the turnpike.
By 1716, there were 56 ale-house keepers in Upper Street offering pleasure and tea gardens, activities such as archery, skittle alleys and bowling. By the 18th century and dancing were offered, together with billiards, firework displays and balloon ascents; the King's Head Tavern, now a Victorian building with a theatre, has remained on the same site, opposite the parish c
Public transport bus service
Public transport bus services are based on regular operation of transit buses along a route calling at agreed bus stops according to a published public transport timetable. While there are indications of experiments with public transport in Paris as early as 1662, there is evidence of a scheduled "bus route" from Market Street in Manchester to Pendleton in Salford UK, started by John Greenwood in 1824. Another claim for the first public transport system for general use originated in Nantes, France, in 1826. Stanislas Baudry, a retired army officer who had built public baths using the surplus heat from his flour mill on the city's edge, set up a short route between the center of town and his baths; the service started on the Place du Commerce, outside the hat shop of a M. Omnès, who displayed the motto Omnès Omnibus on his shopfront; when Baudry discovered that passengers were just as interested in getting off at intermediate points as in patronizing his baths, he changed the route's focus. His new voiture omnibus combined the functions of the hired hackney carriage with a stagecoach that travelled a predetermined route from inn to inn, carrying passengers and mail.
His omnibus had wooden benches. In 1828, Baudry went to Paris, where he founded a company under the name Entreprise générale des omnibus de Paris, while his son Edmond Baudry founded two similar companies in Bordeaux and in Lyon. A London newspaper reported on July 4, 1829, that "the new vehicle, called the omnibus, commenced running this morning from Paddington to the City", operated by George Shillibeer; the first omnibus service in New York began in 1829, when Abraham Brower, an entrepreneur who had organized volunteer fire companies, established a route along Broadway starting at Bowling Green. Other American cities soon followed suit: Philadelphia in 1831, Boston in 1835 and Baltimore in 1844. In most cases, the city governments granted a private company—generally a small stableman in the livery or freight-hauling business—an exclusive franchise to operate public coaches along a specified route. In return, the company agreed to maintain certain minimum levels of service. In 1832 the New York omnibus had a rival when the first trams, or streetcars started operation along Bowery, which offered the excellent improvement in amenity of riding on smooth iron rails rather than clattering over granite setts, called "Belgian blocks".
The streetcars were financed by John Mason, a wealthy banker, built by an Irish-American contractor, John Stephenson. The Fifth Avenue Coach Company introduced electric buses to Fifth Avenue in New York in 1898. In 1831, New Yorker Washington Irving remarked of Britain's Reform Act: "The great reform omnibus moves but slowly." Steam buses emerged in the 1830s as competition to the horse-drawn buses. The omnibus extended the reach of the emerging cities; the walk from the former village of Paddington to the business heart of London in the City was a long one for a young man in good condition. The omnibus thus offered the suburbs more access to the inner city; the omnibus encouraged urbanization. The omnibus put city-dwellers if for only half an hour, into previously-unheard-of physical intimacy with strangers, squeezing them together knee-to-knee. Only the poor remained excluded. A new division in urban society now came to the fore, dividing those who kept carriages from those who did not; the idea of the "carriage trade", the folk who never set foot in the streets, who had goods brought out from the shops for their appraisal, has its origins in the omnibus crush.
John D. Hertz founded the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company in 1923 and sold a majority of shares to General Motors in 1925. From the 1920s General Motors and others started buying up streetcar systems across the United States with a view to replacing them with buses in what became known as the Great American Streetcar Scandal; this was accompanied by a continuing series of technical improvements: pneumatic "balloon" tires during the early 1920s, monocoque body construction in 1931, automatic transmission in 1936, diesel engines in 1936, 50+ passengers in 1948, air suspension in 1953. The arrest of Rosa Parks in 1955 for not giving up her seat to a white man on a public bus is considered one of the catalysts of the Civil Rights Movement within the United States; the names of different types of bus services vary according to local tradition or marketing, although services can be classified into basic types based on route length, the purpose of use and type of bus used. Urban or suburban services is the most common type of public transport bus service and is used to transport large numbers of people in urban areas, or to and from the suburbs to population centres.
Express bus services are services that are intended to run faster than normal bus services, by either operating as a "limited stop" service missing out less busy stops and/or travelling on faster roads such as freeways rather than slower moving local roads. Park and ride bus services are designed to provide an onward passenger journey from a parking lot; these may express services, or part of the standard bus network. Feeder bus services are designed to pick up passengers in a certain locality and take them to a transfer point where they make an onward journey on a trunk service; this can be a rail-based service such as a tram, rapid transit or train. Feeder buses may act as part of a regional coach network. Bus rapid transit is the application of a range of infrastructure and marketing measures to produce public transport bus services that approach the operating characteris
Kennington Park
Kennington Park is a public park in Kennington, south London and lies between Kennington Park Road and St. Agnes Place, it was opened in 1854 on the site of what had been Kennington Common, where the Chartists gathered for their biggest "monster rally" on 10 April 1848. Soon after this demonstration the common was enclosed and, sponsored by the royal family, made into a public park. Kennington Common was a site of public executions until 1800 as well as being an area for public speaking; some of the most illustrious orators to speak here were Methodist founders George Whitefield and John Wesley, reputed to have attracted a crowd of 30,000. The common was one of the earliest London cricket venues and is known to have been used for top-class matches in 1724. Kennington Park hosts the first inner London community cricket ground, sponsored by Surrey County Cricket Club whose home, The Oval, is close to the park. In the 1970s, the old tradition of mass gatherings returned to the park, host to the start of many significant marches to Parliament.
Today, a number of commercial and community events are held in the park each year and the Flower Garden was restored with a Heritage Lottery grant. The Friends of Kennington Park, FoKP, was founded in 2002 and provides a local forum for park issues as well as fundraising for improvements. Although there are no available written records of the area before 1600, analysis of the area's archaeology and landscape reveals its earlier history. Discovered post stumps in the south Thames foreshore near Vauxhall Bridge point to a ritual jetty or the first London bridge, by the outlet of the River Effra, from around 1500 BC; the Effra formed the southerly boundary to the common. Three related geographic features defined the area of Kennington Common as sacred in ancient times: the sharp bend in the river Effra before it flowed into the Thames, a strategic mound or tumulus, an important fork in the main road from the river crossing, now known as London Bridge; this made it a sacred place of ` national' assembly which may have related to the bridge.
The mound may have been used by the locals of the South London marsh community as a refuge from tidal flash floods. As the flood water receded, the river silt left a level playing field, ideal for grazing animals or playing team ball games. 1600 gives the first record of the common. "The common was bounded on the South West by Vauxhall Creek" It seems that the common extended over marshy land to the South West of the Roman Road Stane Street, now Kennington Park Road. When the common became bounded by the Kennington Park Road is not known. There is a 1660 record of a common keeper being paid for grazing. 1661 The famous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens are laid out nearby. 1678 First recorded execution at Kennington Common was that of Sarah Elston, burnt for murdering her husband on 24 April. Kennington Common was the South London equivalent of Tyburn. 1678 John Masters and Gabriel Dean, executed on 24 April. 1679 Dorothy Lillingstone was executed for murder on 7 April. 1685 William Disney was executed for High Treason on 29 June.
"During the holiday season, Kennington Common in the last century was an epitome of "Bartlemy Fair", with booths, tents and scaffolds, surmounted by flags. It had one peculiarity, for, as we learn from "Merrie England in the Olden Time", it was a favourite spot for merryandrews, other buffooneries in open rivalry, competition with field-preachers and ranters, it was here that Mr. Maw-worm encountered the brickbats of his congregation, had his "pious tail" illuminated with the squibs and crackers of the unregenerate." 1724 London v Dartford is the earliest known first-class cricket match on Kennington Common 1725 First record of the Green Man and Horns tavern near Kennington Common. The cricket played on the common used the Horns as a base. Other sports including quoits and bowling were played. 1739 Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield preach to 30,000. Whitefield is remembered in the nearby'Whitefield House' home of the Evangelical Alliance. Dissenting Methodists, such as the son of a slave Robert Wedderburn, spoke in a more radical voice on Kennington Common speaking out against the enclosures and slavery.
Kennington Common was a key South London place for public speaking, acting as a kind of open air free university of the day. 1739 John Hannah executed for perjury. 1743 James Hunt and Thomas Collins hanged for sodomy at Kennington Common gallows. 1746 Col. Francis Towneley and eight men of the Manchester Regiment who had taken part in the Jacobite rising were hanged and quartered on 30 July. 1749 Richard Coleman executed. 1751 A road was "cut through gardens 80-foot wide" from Kennington Common to Westminster Bridge.. The road comes up to the common next to the Horns tavern. 1767 The common was flooded by a high tide coming up Vauxhall Creek. 1785 Last known use of the Common as a venue for first-class cricket. 1790 William Blake moved to North Lambeth and may have attended commons meetings in the 1790s, in all likelihood with Thomas Paine. 1792 Mungo, a black prize fighter breaks the jaw of his opponent, a carpenter, in a boxing match on the common. 1795 Lewis Jeremiah Avershaw an infamous highwayman, was executed for shooting a Peace Officer on 3 August.
1799 The last person to be hanged at the common was a fraudster from nearby Camberwell by the name Badger. "The Gymnastic Society" met at Kennington Common during the second half of the eightee
Colombia
Colombia the Republic of Colombia, is a sovereign state situated in the northwest of South America, with territories in Central America. Colombia shares a border to the northwest with Panama, to the east with Venezuela and Brazil and to the south with Ecuador and Peru, it shares its maritime limits with Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Colombia is a unitary, constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments, with the capital in Bogota. Colombia has been inhabited by various indigenous peoples since 12,000 BCE, including the Muisca and the Tairona, along with the Inca Empire that expanded to the southwest of the country; the Spanish arrived in 1499 and by the mid-16th century conquered and colonized much of the region, establishing the New Kingdom of Granada, with Santafé de Bogotá as its capital. Independence from Spain was achieved in 1819, but by 1830 the "Gran Colombia" Federation was dissolved, with what is now Colombia and Panama emerging as the Republic of New Granada.
The new nation experimented with federalism as the Granadine Confederation, the United States of Colombia, before the Republic of Colombia was declared in 1886. Panama seceded in 1903. Beginning in the 1960s, the country suffered from an asymmetric low-intensity armed conflict and rampant political violence, both of which escalated in the 1990s. Since 2005, there has been significant improvement in security and rule of law. Colombia is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse countries in the world, with its rich cultural heritage reflecting influences by indigenous peoples, European settlement, forced African migration, immigration from Europe and the Middle East. Urban centres are located in the highlands of the Andes mountains and the Caribbean coast. Colombia is among the world's 17 megadiverse countries, the most densely biodiverse per square kilometer. Colombia is a middle power and regional actor in Latin America, it is part of the CIVETS group of six leading emerging markets and a member of the UN, the WTO, the OAS, the Pacific Alliance, other international organizations.
Colombia's diversified economy is the fourth largest in Latin America, with macroeconomic stability and favorable long-term growth prospects. The name "Colombia" is derived from the last name of Christopher Columbus, it was conceived by the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda as a reference to all the New World, but to those portions under Spanish rule. The name was adopted by the Republic of Colombia of 1819, formed from the territories of the old Viceroyalty of New Granada; when Venezuela and Cundinamarca came to exist as independent states, the former Department of Cundinamarca adopted the name "Republic of New Granada". New Granada changed its name in 1858 to the Granadine Confederation. In 1863 the name was again changed, this time to United States of Colombia, before adopting its present name – the Republic of Colombia – in 1886. To refer to this country, the Colombian government uses the terms Colombia and República de Colombia. Owing to its location, the present territory of Colombia was a corridor of early human migration from Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to the Andes and Amazon basin.
The oldest archaeological finds are from the Pubenza and El Totumo sites in the Magdalena Valley 100 kilometres southwest of Bogotá. These sites date from the Paleoindian period. At Puerto Hormiga and other sites, traces from the Archaic Period have been found. Vestiges indicate that there was early occupation in the regions of El Abra and Tequendama in Cundinamarca; the oldest pottery discovered in the Americas, found at San Jacinto, dates to 5000–4000 BCE. Indigenous people inhabited the territory, now Colombia by 12,500 BCE. Nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes at the El Abra, Tibitó and Tequendama sites near present-day Bogotá traded with one another and with other cultures from the Magdalena River Valley. Between 5000 and 1000 BCE, hunter-gatherer tribes transitioned to agrarian societies. Beginning in the 1st millennium BCE, groups of Amerindians including the Muisca, Zenú, Tairona developed the political system of cacicazgos with a pyramidal structure of power headed by caciques; the Muisca inhabited the area of what is now the Departments of Boyacá and Cundinamarca high plateau where they formed the Muisca Confederation.
They farmed maize, potato and cotton, traded gold, blankets, ceramic handicrafts and rock salt with neighboring nations. The Tairona inhabited northern Colombia in the isolated mountain range of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta; the Quimbaya inhabited regions of the Cauca River Valley between the Western and Central Ranges of the Colombian Andes. Most of the Amerindians practiced agriculture and the social structure of each indigenous community was different; some groups of indigenous people such as the Caribs lived in a state of permanent war, but others had less bellicose attitudes. The Incas expanded their empire onto the southwest part of the country. Alonso de Ojeda reached the Guajira Peninsula in 1499. Spanish explorers, led by Rodrigo de Bastidas, made the first exploration
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Part of the county of Midlothian, it is located in Lothian on the Firth of Forth's southern shore. Recognised as the capital of Scotland since at least the 15th century, Edinburgh is the seat of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament and the supreme courts of Scotland; the city's Palace of Holyroodhouse is the official residence of the monarch in Scotland. The city has long been a centre of education in the fields of medicine, Scots law, philosophy, the sciences and engineering, it is the second largest financial centre in the United Kingdom and the city's historical and cultural attractions have made it the United Kingdom's second most popular tourist destination, attracting over one million overseas visitors each year. Edinburgh is Scotland's second most populous city and the seventh most populous in the United Kingdom; the official population estimates are 488,050 for the Locality of Edinburgh, 513,210 for the City of Edinburgh, 1,339,380 for the city region.
Edinburgh lies at the heart of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland city region comprising East Lothian, Fife, Scottish Borders and West Lothian. The city is the annual venue of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, it is home to national institutions such as the National Museum of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish National Gallery. The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1582 and now one of four in the city, is placed 18th in the QS World University Rankings for 2019; the city is famous for the Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe, the latter being the world's largest annual international arts festival. Historic sites in Edinburgh include Edinburgh Castle, the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the churches of St. Giles and the Canongate, the extensive Georgian New Town, built in the 18th/19th centuries. Edinburgh's Old Town and New Town together are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, managed by Edinburgh World Heritage since 1999. "Edin", the root of the city's name, derives from Eidyn, the name for this region in Cumbric, the Brittonic Celtic language spoken there.
The name's meaning is unknown. The district of Eidyn centred on the dun or hillfort of Eidyn; this stronghold is believed to have been located at Castle Rock, now the site of Edinburgh Castle. Eidyn was conquered by the Angles of Bernicia in the 7th century and by the Scots in the 10th century; as the language shifted to Old English, subsequently to modern English and Scots, The Brittonic din in Din Eidyn was replaced by burh, producing Edinburgh. Din became dùn in Scottish Gaelic, producing Dùn Èideann; the city is affectionately nicknamed Auld Reekie, Scots for Old Smoky, for the views from the country of the smoke-covered Old Town. Allan Ramsay said. A name the country people give Edinburgh from the cloud of smoke or reek, always impending over it."Thomas Carlyle said, "Smoke cloud hangs over old Edinburgh,—for since Aeneas Silvius's time and earlier, the people have the art strange to Aeneas, of burning a certain sort of black stones, Edinburgh with its chimneys is called'Auld Reekie' by the country people."A character in Walter Scott's The Abbot says "... yonder stands Auld Reekie--you may see the smoke hover over her at twenty miles' distance."Robert Chambers who said that the sobriquet could not be traced before the reign of Charles II attributed the name to a Fife laird, Durham of Largo, who regulated the bedtime of his children by the smoke rising above Edinburgh from the fires of the tenements.
"It's time now bairns, to tak' the beuks, gang to our beds, for yonder's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on her nicht -cap!"Some have called Edinburgh the Athens of the North for a variety of reasons. The earliest comparison between the two cities showed that they had a similar topography, with the Castle Rock of Edinburgh performing a similar role to the Athenian Acropolis. Both of them had fertile agricultural land sloping down to a port several miles away. Although this arrangement is common in Southern Europe, it is rare in Northern Europe; the 18th-century intellectual life, referred to as the Scottish Enlightenment, was a key influence in gaining the name. Such luminaries as David Hume and Adam Smith shone during this period. Having lost most of its political importance after the Union, some hoped that Edinburgh could gain a similar influence on London as Athens had on Rome. A contributing factor was the neoclassical architecture that of William Henry Playfair, the National Monument. Tom Stoppard's character Archie, of Jumpers, said playing on Reykjavík meaning "smoky bay", that the "Reykjavík of the South" would be more appropriate.
The city has been known by several Latin names, such as Aneda or Edina. The adjectival form of the latter, can be seen inscribed on educational buildings; the Scots poets Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns used Edina in their poems. Ben Jonson described it as "Britaine's other eye", Sir Walter Scott referred to it as "yon Empress of the North". Robert Louis Stevenson a son of the city, wrote, "Edinburgh is what Paris ought to be"; the colloquial pronunciation "Embra" or "Embro" has been used, as in Robert Garioch's Embro to the Ploy. The earliest known human habitation in the Edinburgh area was at Cramond, where evidence was found of a Mesolithi
Natural History Museum, London
The Natural History Museum in London is a natural history museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the others being the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Natural History Museum's main frontage, however, is on Cromwell Road. The museum is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 80 million items within five main collections: botany, mineralogy and zoology; the museum is a centre of research specialising in taxonomy and conservation. Given the age of the institution, many of the collections have great historical as well as scientific value, such as specimens collected by Charles Darwin; the museum is famous for its exhibition of dinosaur skeletons and ornate architecture—sometimes dubbed a cathedral of nature—both exemplified by the large Diplodocus cast that dominated the vaulted central hall before it was replaced in 2017 with the skeleton of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling.
The Natural History Museum Library contains extensive books, journals and artwork collections linked to the work and research of the scientific departments. The museum is recognised as the pre-eminent centre of natural history and research of related fields in the world. Although referred to as the Natural History Museum, it was known as British Museum until 1992, despite legal separation from the British Museum itself in 1963. Originating from collections within the British Museum, the landmark Alfred Waterhouse building was built and opened by 1881 and incorporated the Geological Museum; the Darwin Centre is a more recent addition designed as a modern facility for storing the valuable collections. Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Natural History Museum does not charge an admission fee; the museum is an exempt charity and a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture and Sport. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge is a patron of the museum.
There are 850 staff at the Museum. The two largest strategic groups are Science Group; the foundation of the collection was that of the Ulster doctor Sir Hans Sloane, who allowed his significant collections to be purchased by the British Government at a price well below their market value at the time. This purchase was funded by a lottery. Sloane's collection, which included dried plants, animal and human skeletons, was housed in Montagu House, Bloomsbury, in 1756, the home of the British Museum. Most of the Sloane collection had disappeared by the early decades of the nineteenth century. Dr George Shaw sold many specimens to the Royal College of Surgeons and had periodic cremations of material in the grounds of the museum, his successors applied to the trustees for permission to destroy decayed specimens. In 1833 the Annual Report states that, of the 5,500 insects listed in the Sloane catalogue, none remained; the inability of the natural history departments to conserve its specimens became notorious: the Treasury refused to entrust it with specimens collected at the government's expense.
Appointments of staff were bedevilled by gentlemanly favoritism. J. E. Gray complained of the incidence of mental illness amongst staff: George Shaw threatened to put his foot on any shell not in the 12th edition of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae; the huge collection of the conchologist Hugh Cuming was acquired by the museum, Gray's own wife had carried the open trays across the courtyard in a gale: all the labels blew away. That collection is said never to have recovered; the Principal Librarian at the time was Antonio Panizzi. The general public was not encouraged to visit the Museum's natural history exhibits. In 1835 to a Select Committee of Parliament, Sir Henry Ellis said this policy was approved by the Principal Librarian and his senior colleagues. Many of these faults were corrected by the palaeontologist Richard Owen, appointed Superintendent of the natural history departments of the British Museum in 1856, his changes led Bill Bryson to write that "by making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for".
Owen saw that the natural history departments needed more space, that implied a separate building as the British Museum site was limited. Land in South Kensington was purchased, in 1864 a competition was held to design the new museum; the winning entry was submitted by the civil engineer Captain Francis Fowke, who died shortly afterwards. The scheme was taken over by Alfred Waterhouse who revised the agreed plans, designed the façades in his own idiosyncratic Romanesque style, inspired by his frequent visits to the Continent; the original plans included wings on either side of the main building, but these plans were soon abandoned for budgetary reasons. The space these would have occupied are now taken by the Earth Galleries and Darwin Centre. Work began in 1873 and was completed in 1880; the new museum opened in 1881, although the move from the old museum was not completed until 1883. Both the interiors and exteriors of the Waterhouse building make extensive use of
Guerrilla gardening
Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property. It encompasses a diverse range of people and motivations, ranging from gardeners who spill over their legal boundaries to gardeners with political influences who seek to provoke change by using guerrilla gardening as a form of protest or direct action; this practice has implications for land reform. The land, guerrilla gardened is abandoned or perceived to be neglected by its legal owner; that land is used by guerrilla gardeners to raise plants focusing on food crops or plants intended for aesthetic purposes, like flowers. Some guerrilla gardeners carry out their actions at night, in relative secrecy, to sow and tend a new vegetable patch or flower garden in an effort to make the area of use and/or more attractive; some garden at more visible hours for the purpose of publicity, which can be seen as a form of activism.
The earliest recorded use of the term guerrilla gardening was by Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group in 1973 in the Bowery Houston area of New York. They transformed a derelict private lot into a garden; the space is still cared for by volunteers but now enjoys the protection of the city's parks department. Two celebrated guerrilla gardeners, active prior to the coining of the term, were Gerrard Winstanley, of the Diggers in Surrey and John "Appleseed" Chapman in Ohio, USA. Guerrilla gardening takes place in many parts of the world - more than thirty countries are documented and evidence can be found online in numerous guerrilla gardening social networking groups and in the Community pages of GuerrillaGardening.org. The term bewildering has been used as a synonym for guerrilla gardening by Australian gardener Bob Crombie; the International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day, scheduled on the 1st of May of every year, is an annual international event when guerrilla gardeners plant sunflowers in their neighborhoods in public places perceived to be neglected, such as tree pits, flower beds and roadside verges.
It has taken place since 2007, was conceived by guerrilla gardeners in Brussels. They declared it Journée Internationale de la Guérilla Tournesol, it has been championed by guerrilla gardeners around the world, notably by GuerrillaGardening.org and participation has grown each year since then. Although sunflower sowing at this time of the year is limited to temperate parts of the Northern Hemisphere, this day is marked in other parts of the world by planting plants appropriate to the season. From the mid-1970s, Adam Purple created and tended a circular garden in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in an abandoned lot. In 1986, when it was bulldozed by the City of New York, the garden had overtaken many lots and reached a size of 15,000 square feet; the short film "Adam Purple and the Garden of Eden" tells its history. People's Park in Berkeley, California is now a de facto public park, formed directly out of a community guerrilla gardening movement during the late 1960s which took place on land owned by the University of California.
The university acquired the land through eminent domain, the houses on the land were demolished, but the university did not allocate funds to develop the land, the land was left in a decrepit state. People began to convert the unused land into a park; this led to an embattled history involving community members, the university, university police, Governor Reagan, the national guard, where protest and bloody reprisal left one person dead, hundreds wounded. Parts of the park were destroyed and rebuilt over time, it has established itself into a permanent part of the city. Greenaid is a Los Angeles based organization founded in 2010 by Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud of Common Studio; the organization converts vintage gumball machines to dispense seed balls, a combination of clay and region-specific seeds. Once dispensed, seed balls are planted in any area that may benefit from wildflowers. Greenaid partners with business owners and citizens to distribute seedbomb vending machines in various communities worldwide.
With region-specific seedbomb mixes, Greenaid aims to integrate and beautify rather than disrupt traditionally bland urban areas such as sidewalks and highway medians. In July 2010, Greenaid received $10,398 in funding from the Kickstarter community; this funding will be used to support current operations. Designer Ron Dunn pioneered the growing produce on a strip of parkway lawn but came into conflict with the city council, he was successful in maintaining this urban market garden and has promoted the idea with a TED talk and appearances at international conferences such as the Stockholm Food Forum and MAD in Copenhagen. Developing the Clean and Glean method of Guerrilla Gardening Scott Bunnell has been refining guerrilla gardening methods for over 30 years. In 2008 he started the SoCal Guerrilla Gardening Club adding more drought tolerant gardens. Having dozens of guerrilla gardens in Los Angeles County. Several gardens in each of the cities of Hollywood, Eagle Rock, Pico Rivera, Long Beach, Artesia, the Skid Row area of Los Angeles.
In 2015 SoCal planted a guerrilla "satellite" garden in Morro Bay, Ca. with our sister club the Morro Bay Guerrilla Gardening Club. In Northern Utah, apple trees grow along the banks of canals. Asparagus grow
