The Odeon Cinema - An Art Deco Building in Loughborough

Since 2011 this cinema in Loughborough has been The Odeon but it has been many other names since the original building was built in 1914. It is a great example of an art deco frontage somewhat spirit by the lower and very recent shopfront style signage.

It didn't look like this when it was opened in 1914 as The Empire Picture House operating both as a variety and picture house. The Art Deco refit came about in 1936 and was designed by architect Archibold Hurley Robinson. It opened as The New Empire on 30th March 1936 screening Will Hay in “Boys Will be Boys”.

Its catalogue of names down the years include: Empire Picture House, New Empire Super Cinema, Essoldo, Classic, Curzon Cinema, Reel Cinema and now The Odeon.

Paul Conneally
September 2016
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Château de Mouans

Chateau de Mouans - Mouans-Sartoux, France

"The original Chateau de Mouans was built in 1504-1510 by Jean de Grasse, and remained in the Grasse family until 1750, when the Villeneuves took control. In 1572 the Pompée de Grasse was assinated, and in 1597 the chateau of Mouans was destroyed. It was rebuilt by Suzanne de Villeneuve, the widow of the Pompée de Grasse. Suffering various amounts of destruction and rebuilding over the centuries, the chateau has finally been rebuilt, especially following the original basic design with its rare triangular form and three towers.

Today the chateau houses an art museum, L'Espace de l'Art Concret, with 25 rooms and two resident artists."

Text: Provence & Beyond http://www.beyond.fr/villages/mouanssartoux.html

Photograph: Paul Conneally 2016

Blossom Breeze

blossom breeze
firefighters play ball
in the station yard

Little Onion

Photograph: Paul Conneally, New Parks Fire Station, Leicester, 2016

House of Wax - Great Yarmouth

Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, achieved cult status with thousands of visitors – because none of the models looked like the people they were supposed to represent. Owners Jane and Peter Hayes closed the attraction in 2013 after running it for more than 50 years, and the entire collection was snapped up by an overseas buyer.

Photograph: Paul Conneally 2016

The Globe - Leicester

The Globe, Silver Street, Leicester, UK

"The Globe has been synonymous with serving fine ales and food since 1720, where quality ales were brewed using spring water drawn from its own well beneath the pub, which still exists today.

Prior to becoming a public house, the Globe had several interesting uses, including a cattle merchants and accommodation for women awaiting impending execution at the hands of the noose man in nearby Gallowtree Gate.

This may go some way to explaining the reported hauntings within the premises, which includes the ghost of a woman on the stairs, two disagreeing brothers that argue over the bar and a young boy in the cellar who turns off the beer!"

Text: Everards Brewery

Photo: Paul Conneally
October 2015

Soar Valley Netball Centre

Soar Valley Netball Centre - Leicester UK

The Soar Valley Netball Centre is the first of its kind in the Leicestershire region and offers two high-quality covered courts with spectator areas that can be used all year round.

Paul Conneally
June 11 2015

HELTER SKELTER - A Proposal To Alter Carillon Tower

HELTER SKELTER - Paul Conneally 1999

HELTER SKELTER is a splacist art work from 1999 where I faxed Charnwood Borough Council's Director of Planning and Technical Services, Jonathan Hale, a proposal to form a Helter Skelter for peace around Loughborough's famous Carillon Tower war Memorial.

The intervention was based around the fact that all planning proposals have to be responded to by the council. The piece generated several press reports and a number of responses from the public. Contrary to Jonathan Hale's view that the public might find it controversial and be against it many were broadly in favour of it, at least as an idea. The official Carillon player, who fisted out songs from the shows and such on the Carillon keyboard in among the bells at the top of the tower, told Loughborough Echo that it was a fun idea, the bells playing as Loughbohemians slid down the helter skelter in the name of peace and in memory of those who died in the First World War.

I'm now revisiting engagement with Loughborough's Carillon Tower, an amazing building and now on all the signs heralding entry to Loughborough by road. Watch this splace!

Extract from The Splacist Manifesto:

We will own this city.
We will take it back.
We will link and shift; across time, space, people, places and processes
We will weave throughout the fabric of people’s lives.
We will unpick it.

We will affect and be affected.
We will glory in the moment, the collage, the marking and then passing on.

We reject your shopping centre, your pavement, your cultural quarter;
We will undermine pre-defined spaces. We reject them.

We will reclaim the city, not for you, but with you.
We are you.

Splacism is a contemporary mode of practice proposed by Paul Conneally. A new set of ideologies defined by Hannah Nicklin and Nikki Pugh. A hop, skip and a jump away from phsychogeography and the works of the situationist international. Think space, place and splice. Developed empirically by whoever’s interested.

Paul Conneally
May 24 2015

Loughborough Carillon:


Loughborough Carillon Tower War Memorial, Paul Conneally, 2015

Trees Spreading Their Arms

Two women sit on one of the water drop shaped metal benches in Thurmaston made by sculptor Richard Thornton with a haiku fragment written during the Charnwood Arts project The Sound Of Water workshops that I led with massive support from Jemma Bagley. The words we decided upon are laser cut into the bench, in fact they are cut out of the bench.

The words that these young Muslim women sit on are 'trees spreading their arms'. I'd like to feel that our communities across Charnwood are like these trees, spreading their arms to welcome new members into them, wherever they are from.



Paul Conneally
April 2015

The Loughborough Echo Building

The Loughborough Echo Building

For a small town in the centre of England it's good that Loughborough still has its own weekly print newspaper 'The Loughborough Echo'.

The paper is no longer written and produced from the wonderful Art Deco building that carries its name in the centre of Loughborough town. The street level shop fronts in many ways ruin the effect of the building with no attempt made to fit in with the architecture and design of building. It's only when one raises ones head and looks up above the estate agents and holiday company fronts that the beauty of the Loughborough Echo building comes into view.

It's tiled front looks a little worse for wear but stand back in the now pedestrianised high street and the whole building is worth stopping at least a few moments for reflection. Letters proudly spell out 'The Loughborough Echo' and at the apex of the building a decorative horseshoe shaped motif with 'Loughborough' spelled out in the horseshoe shape itself with 'The Echo' in the centre. 'Est.' to the left and '1891' to the right prop up the horseshoe reminding us of just how long The Loughborough Echo has been reporting the news to, of and from the people of Loughborough and the wider area of Charnwood, the Leicestershire borough in which Loughborough sits.

Paul Conneally
March 31st 2015

Paul Conneally

The Good Shepherd

The Good Shepherd
Paul Conneally
Loughborough
March 30 2015

Brutal Beauty - Lee Circle Car Park - Leicester

The brutalist rotunda double helix concrete Lee Circle car park in Leicester, is a beast of a building.

Today, in the late September sun, it purrs more than roars and takes on a kind of beauty that I haven't clocked before.

Only one of its spiral roadways, the Blue route, is now in operation and it is rarely full.

Drivers choose to park the other side of the city centre, nearer or even in, the modern Highcross shopping complex.

lengthening shadows

the pigeon's coo melds

with a car alarm

Paul Conneally

Leicester

2014

Kill

Kill

Paul Conneally

Nice 2014

Le Kiosque Offenbach

Kiosque Offenbach, Les Arcs sur Argens, France

The term Kiosque or in English, Kiosk, is an interesting one and throws up images and memories of ticket booths and ice-cream huts. Small semi-permanent looking sheds which are open on one side for the purpose of selling goods or giving information, that's what kiosks are for the most part to me.

This kiosk, the Kiosque Offenbach in Les Arcs sur Argens in France, is more like the kiosks that the word's Turkish origin, köşk, describes, a building in a garden or park with a roof but with open sides, a little more like what we might call a large gazebo perhaps. Kiosque Offenbach reminds me more of a park bandstand than anything else and of course that's what it is. The clue is in its name, Le Kiosque Offenbach, named after the composer of the Can Can, Jaques Offenbach.

Jaques Offenbach

Some time ago Gavin Wade introduced me to the modernist kiosks of Berthold Lubetkin in particular the kiosks he designed for Dudley Zoo. They are very different to the Kiosque Offenbach. Gavin along with fellow artists Simon Bloor and Tom Bloor has recreated versions of Lubetkin's Dudley Zoo Kiosk and installed them at various sites. Tom and Simon in a statement say: 

"Kiosks are a wonderful invention. You can live your life the geometric way framed within a diametric ellipsoid composition designed to make things better” 

In 2008 Gavin, Simon and Tom worked with Nils Norman to make and exhibit 'Kiosk No.5: Kite Kiosk' at the Folkestone Triennial. Here it is:

So let's salute the kiosk in all it's forms from garden pavillion to bandstand to retail outlet!

Long live the kiosk!

Paul Conneally

Les Arcs sur Argens

2014

A Stranger's Hand

Salle Jacky Mathevet, Lorgues, France

cinema

a stranger's hand

on my thigh

Paul Conneally

Jesus on Jarrom Street

three pints happy 

we leave The Font 

on Gateway Street

head towards 

The Sir Robert Peel

and turn right

against red bricks

behind a black spiked fence

hangs Jesus 

stadium bound

fans genuflect and

ask for a win

Paul Conneally

Leicester 2013

The photograph is St Andrew's Church, Jarrom Street, Leicester. The church was designed by the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott who also designed London's St Pancras Station.

Fennel Street Club - Loughborough

Fennel Street Club, Loughborough - Paul Conneally

Sent from my iPhone

Curtain Show - Birmingham Eastside Projects New Exhibition

The latest exhibition at Birmingham's Eastside Projects gallery space is Curtain Show.

It opens on the 13th March and promises to continue down the innovative path that curator Gavin Wade, here with Céline Condorelli, has led the art world of Birmingham and beyond.

"Curtain Show revolves around Lilly Reich’s Silk and Velvet Café at the Women’s Fashion Exhibition in Berlin, in 1927.

The trade fairs of the 19th century and early 20th century were places of great innovation in the fields of art and design, and a phenomenal example is Reich’s ‘Café’; but they were also inevitably sites of alliance between political power and design.

Reich’s bold exposition of gold and silver silk and black, orange and red velvet draped over chromed-steel tubular frames created a maze of spaces in which visitors and traders were enveloped in a pioneering example of a temporary environment formed by the content of the exhibition.

Starting from the installation’s complex spatial position and ambiguous political one, Curtain Show unfolds this dual role as curtains form background and foreground in a meeting of curtain works."

Curtain Show

13 March – 17 April 2010

Launch: 6-9pm Friday 12th March 2010
Open Thursday 12-6.30pm, Friday-Saturday 12-5pm

Céline Condorelli, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Holub, Hannah James, Grace Ndiritu, Lilly Reich, Erik Satie, Ines Schaber, Albrecht Schäfer

art architecture space place time