Boston, Lincolnshire

Our visit to  Boston presented many overlapping and even contradictory impressions. Which one is the real Boston?

The Market Place presented a prosperous 18th- and 19th-century town, with an enormous parish church visible from everywhere around. A few hundred metres away was Fydell House, an impressive 18th-century merchant’s residence, with a lovely garden. The house was preserved by the Boston Preservation Society, which indeed was founded to save this specific property.

Yet, revealed the warm and engaging curator, most of the garden disappeared when Boston build an inner-city bypass, John Adams Way, built as recently as 1976, but situated pretty much through the centre of the town. There does not appear to be any other bypass. There was an aroma of dope in most of the public spaces. In the Market Place, there were many adult males in ones and twos doing very little – I guess these were out-of-work immigrants. There were several employment agencies with people hanging around outside. There were people sitting or lying in doorways. Yet, as Jane pointed out, the immigrants, largely from when the UK was in the European Union, are still here, which suggests that what they left must have been worse. 

Just a few yards from Market Place, the parish church of Boston was busy with a wide range of people visiting, games available (there was a Lego model of the church, and people playing Connect 4), and a café. We were greeted on arrival. The church, one of the largest in England, has a stunning tower (the “Stump”), and some of the most fascinating misericords (carvings under wooden seats) I have seen anywhere. They date from the 14th century; I don’t think many people notice them.

The town had hanging baskets and planters everywhere. I saw two council workers collecting rubbish from the pavements. At various points in the town there are examples of street art; the one I saw was a repurposed buoy from the channel in the North Sea on the approach to the port.

One shopping area, around Rosegarth Square, seemed to be completely derelict, with a large empty B&M supermarket. There was a sign on the wall stating that the UK Government is investing £14.8m to regenerate the square. There was no sign of any progress to date.

Pescod Square shopping centre, in contrast, was a pedestrian walkway with pretty much full occupancy by shops.

 Many of the listed buildings were in a woeful state of disrepair. One eighteenth-century house had shopfronts inserted on the ground floor, and half the sash windows replaced (but only half).

Boston’s MP, the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, is a multimillionaire property investor, educated (and formerly vice chair of trustees) at Uppingham School. Boston and Skegness is the most deprived constituency in Lincolnshire (although only ranked 112th most deprived in the UK, which makes me worry about the 111 below it). You could ask what connection there is between the privileged background of the MP and the poverty of the constituency he represents. Why would people vote for him? You could of course point out that many of the people sitting on the benches in Market Place would not be eligible to vote; who would they have voted for? Until 2024 the seat had always been Conservative; Tice overturned a Tory majority of over 25,000. The constituency had the highest vote in favour of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.  

Before visiting Boston, I consulted guide books, and even a recent book about Lincolnshire (Edge of England, by Derek Turner, 2023), but there was no mention of the clear lack of work and opportunity here in Boston.

How can you sum up Boston, given all the above? Of course, there is no single vision of any place. But it’s a challenging question: if you were running the government, what would you do for Boston? What could you do for Boston? 

All Fours: the menopause is neither fun nor sexy

 

 

I wouldn’t mention this novel except that it seems to have become some kind of reference object, the novel about the menopause (although by no means the first). It was reviewed in the TLS, and then mentioned in the Guardian, in a piece about erotic fiction. As if that wasn’t enough, just after I had written this post, Zoe Williams, also the author of the erotic fiction article, in her regular Guardian column gave the novel a big write-up and asked, “Can menopause be fun and sexy? Yes, says Miranda July” [Guardian, 13 August 2024).

Reader, I warn you, this book is not erotic. It’s not fun, and it’s only sexy in the sense that it contains a lot of sex: most of it masturbation, if you find that sexy (and more about that later). Until I read Miranda July, I never realised how entertaining the world of Charles Bukowski was. There is no humour here.

The hero is a 45-year-old woman, a mother with a non-gendered child, Sam, aged seven, and a partner, the patient and long-suffering Harris. She starts a long drive to New York, but encounters a younger man, who works for Hertz Car Rental, and whom she fancies. However, her desire is not consummated, despite her frantic attempts, although she does manage to go to bed with one of his former partners. Panic-stricken because she believes the female libido drops off a cliff at the menopause, she agrees with her husband to have an open relationship, and has encounters with women. Some time later, she watches her non-boyfriend dance and has a kind of mystical experience. That’s it.

Most of the focus of the novel is about the concerns and anxieties of middle-aged American women, what the narrator describes as the perimenopause, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. FOMO is one of the anxieties: specifically, the fear that she might not want to have sex any more. The narrator pads out her self-absorption with regular exchanges with other women, finding out how they behave, and hence determining how she should behave (the author states in an afterword that the novel was partly based on a number of interviews with women).

So obsessed is the focus on the emotional state of the narrator that several aspects of the novel seem sketchy or inadequate:

• She requires a space where she can have her meetings with Davey, the would-be lover, and has a motel room refurbished at a cost of $20,000, with the work done by Davey’s partner, without (at least in the beginning) Davey’s knowledge. Her work seems to be occasional, but very well paid. There are no money concerns in the novel.
• I thought an open relationship was when you had sex with people other than your long-term partner, but for the most part, there is no sex with her partner. When the narrator achieves a sexual relationship with another woman, she behaves appallingly when her partner breaks it off.
• For the most part, the narrator behaves abysmally, taking everyone around her for granted, including her partner and child, and repeatedly texting her would-be lover in a way that would be considered stalking.
• The ending is a damp squib. Instead of consummating her desire, the narrator watches him dance in public, suggesting that the Hertz Rental assistant is really a consummate, world-class dancer; her dream man is a prince after all. In other words, this brutally realist novel, so blunt about the real-life problems of a middle-aged woman, drifts off into a vague fantasy at the end.
• Highly questionable is the hero’s attitude to stardom. She is some kind of artist, and later author, with an agent. Throughout the book, strangers approach her because of her reputation. The narrator expects special treatment as a result of her status – when she attends a performance by Davey as an invited guest, she is disappointed there is no designated area for her, but she has to sit in the audience.
• The narrator treats her child as a child-minder would: despite repeated protestations of love, the parent shows little interest in what the child does. The child is just an irritant and an interruption in the way of the narrator’s obsessions. For example, the narrator is on the phone to a friend:-           

“I have some questions about menopause and libido”.

“Where is my Lego book?” Sam screamed outside the garage door.

“Under the couch! Sorry, Mary.”  

You could not say the sex is sketchy. There is a lot of it, in a lot of detail. But sex, for the narrator, is not an equal activity. Sex is not about pleasure, it’s about winning and losing. As for the masturbation, there is a lot of it through the book, and it seems to have cast a spell over reviewers (and Zoe Williams), as if the idea that a woman might refer to masturbating as somehow liberating, rather than pleasurable. Yet the narrator doesn’t seem to masturbate for pleasure – she even admits to something I find difficult to imagine, angry masturbation (“I masturbated angrily to the thought of Harris fucking Caro”).

In short, I found the narrator an unpleasant character to be alongside. I found her neuroses tiresome, her obsession with herself very self-indulgent and unhealthy. Making the menopause the subject of your novel does not make it great. A serious theme is not invalidated by creating an enjoyable and entertaining work, and this is neither. The narrator would benefit from thinking about something (or someone) other than herself.

The Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden

 

The 1970s extension

What could be more enticing than a gallery in the middle of a vast wood, where (for the most part) you have to cycle or walk to reach it? What’s more, it has a vast open-air sculpture park, with over 150 objects spread over several acres. Finally, there is a ravishing café with views over the gardens outside. The Kröller-Müller Museum has all of these, plus one of the best collections of Van Gogh.

It turns out that the story of the collection is quite involved. Helene Müller, born in Essen,  married a Dutchman, Anton Kröller, and on her father’s death, he became director of the family iron and coal company (which later includes a shipping line). Helene, Now Kröller-Müller, starts to buy art from 1905 – mainly from the 1870s to the present day, but with a few older works. Between 1909 and1917, the couple buy a vast estate on the  Veluwe. They commission H P Berlage, architect of the fabulous Hague Kunstmuseum, to build a hunting lodge (1915), but their plans for a huge art gallery are never realised. In 1935, the collection was acquired by the Dutch state, while the park became the property of a new Kröller-Müller Foundation. In 1937, a much smaller building than originally envisaged, a “Transitional Museum” was designed by Henry van de Velde (with a sculpture gallery added 1952 with large windows onto the park). This is the older part of the building housing the collection today. Helene died in 1939, and after her death a new focus on collecting sculpture began; the sculpture garden opened in 1961, and includes the ravishing Rietveld Pavilion, a reconstruction of a 1955 work shortly after the architect’s death in 1964. But what the visitor notices first today is the major new wing, by the Dutch architect Wim Quist, finished 1977. However, neither the old nor the new building really provides the space I would expect for such a major collection.

The permanent collection was, like any collection built by an individual, rather subjective. I wouldn’t have had quite so many Van Goghs (he must be the only artist to have painted the potato harvest, hardly the most visually appealing of topics) but the experience of the magical spaces was magical. Coffee and cake while looking at the trees was ravishing. And there was one sculpture room with big windows, enabling both the indoor and outdoor pieces to be seen. To the credit of the trustees who now manage the foundation, the buying policy has continued with a lot of contemporary pieces, to provide discussion, rather than run the risk of the collection being seen as a fossil (apparently, the founder herself thought the collection was complete and would never need expanding).

On visiting, the other thing I noticed was, for a building surrounded so entirely by trees and parkland, it seemed paradoxical and rather unnecessary to have temporary exhibitions (“The Wood for the Trees”) about “conversations with nature” that were filmed in forests in Finland, rather than simply by walking outside the gallery. This doesn’t seem to me to be environmentally necessary – you could have plenty of conversations with nature in the surrounding park, and save the travel.

But why complain? The building was ravishing, the setting was ravishing, and almost unique (The Burrell Collection is the only art gallery in a park that seems similar). After visiting the museum and the sculpture garden, on a wonderfully hot summer day, it seemed the only appropriate thing was to lie on the grass for a few minutes and just enjoy the surroundings, before cycling back to the car park, and back to the real world.

Bringing up Baby (1938)

 

After a few weeks of watching films made in the past few years, it was a shock to see how accomplished Bringing Up Baby was - a film made almost ninety years ago! Remarkable too was the incredible journey of Hollywood movies from silent to sound – this film was made within a few years of the introduction of sound. Yet the whole movie is based around such exquisite dialogue! What makes it so appealing is the way all the major characters, but especially Gable and Hepburn, use hesitation, interruption, murmurs, and gesture to communicate. The quality of the print is poor, the resolution appalling, but the dialogue sparkles and is on a par with anything made today. 

The narrative is fairly simple to describe. The entire action takes place within a few days. David Huxley (Grant), a palaeontologist, is about to get married. His actions and intentions are hijacked by Susan Vance (Hepburn), who manipulates matters in seeming chaos to prevent him carrying out any of his plans, wedding included. The bulk of the film is occupied by madcap farce, involving not one, but two leopards, a big game hunter, a dog, a spell in jail, and so on. Eventually, Huxley decides he has had so much fun with Vance that he would rather marry her than his fiancée.

When you watch a farce, you willingly forego a lot of your critical attitudes. If a film or play can make me laugh and keep me laughing, I am happy to ignore problems with the plot or character. But I can’t help feeling that the underlying premiss of the film is somewhat misogynistic. A woman sets her eye on capturing a man, and stops at nothing, including stealing all his clothes and sending them off to be cleaned, to ensure her success. Anyone other than Grant (a James Bond character, for example) would not tolerate for a moment being ridiculed, dressed in a fluffy dressing gown, or falling in a lake, or being sent to jail. But although Grant is repeatedly exasperated, for the purpose of the continuing laugh, he has to go along with the lunacy. Nonetheless, it leaves a bad taste. Consider one (imaginary) reel after the end of the film, when the two are married. Hepburn has shown herself to be irresponsible (for example, a wildly dangerous driver, crashing cars repeatedly, and stealing cars without concern). This is not the sort of person you would want to marry.

This is where Grant’s character is so perfect. He is the perfect male sex symbol: tall, handsome, not a hair out of place, impeccably dressed. When a man has such incredible assets, the viewers don’t want to see too much perfection. They want to see his perfection jolted, which is why he is so often in drag, or having pratfalls, and looking ridiculous: because we all know that within a few minutes he can return to being a sex god. He has the looks that we will never have, but he’s not insufferable, and able to take a joke.

One reason for the zany, surreal air of the film was, as noticed by director Howard Hawks, “there were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I learned my lesson.” Certainly the staggering achievement of the carefully choreographed jail scene, where at various moments Grant is inside or outside his cell without anyone (including himself) noticing, is one of the funniest moments in all cinema. Without the Will Hay-like character of Constable Slocum, that scene would have fallen flat. It’s not surprising the scene took several days to film. So inured are we to the frantic action, that by the final scene, where Hepburn destroys an entire dinosaur skeleton and is held around fifteen feet up in the air by just one arm, we take it for granted, instead of being frightened.

One other aspect of the film struck me, something that is common to much Hollywood of the thirties (and later). The emphasis by Hollywood on popular entertainment is very visible here. Although Grant is a scientist, his knowledge is  mocked and he shows no ability to deal with a leopard. Even his job, palaeontologist, is mistaken by Hepburn, who calls him a “zoologist” – as if Hepburn establishes a line in the sand above which cleverness should not go. Her cleverness is all directed at getting her man, which (in populist terms) is an OK goal. Completing a dinosaur skeleton is something quirky and not really an accomplishment. Throughout the film, the populist tone is reinforced. If, like Hepburn, you are brazen enough in your actions, like stealing a car, you can get away with it without sanction. Laws are for idiots, Hepburn seems to say; if you exist on another plane, like (for example, Elon Musk) then everyday rules can be ignored. This disturbing background didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film, but I noted afterwards that the anarchy in the film is a rather right-wing, society-accepting anarchy. You can be wild, but you want to conform with the rich around you, and to be one of them. Your anarchy is not, in the end, revolutionary.

But let’s not get too serious. How many films could have lines like this. When Huxley finds out his precious dinosaur bone is missing, he complains:

• David Huxley: It took three expeditions and five years to find that one!
• Susan Vance: David, now that they know where to find one, couldn't you send them back to get another one?

The Food Museum, Stowmarket

     

A travellers caravan, restored and repainted at the Food Museum - but not much to do with food

Some museums change their name during their history, but few change their entire collection and display policy. The Food Museum is one of the few examples. It is really an open-air museum that changed its name, and its remit as it approached its 50th anniversary. It opened as the Museum of East Anglian Life, but in 2022 became the Food Museum. Their reason (according to the museum website) was “there was no food museum in the UK and we felt this was a gap we were well placed to fill.” However, despite a shiny new kitchen and display area, the museum doesn’t really cover aspects of food production outside of East Anglia. Nor does it really cover food very comprehensively. The change in title looks somewhat cosmetic – and confusing. When we visited, there was an exhibition of photographs of Lake District farms.

What’s in the Food Museum?

There is a fine collection of historic buildings, even if relatively few compared to other open-air museums: here there are 17, while the Chiltern Open-Air Museum has 37, and the Netherlands Open-Air Museum has 40. Perhaps the golden age of open-air museums is now over, as the trend has moved towards preserving buildings in their original settings. Whatever the case, it doesn’t look like Stowmarket has had any new buildings in the last ten years or so. But the focus now seems to have changed from old buildings – there is little mention of accepting new buildings in the museum five-year plan.

Does it have enough space?

One great asset of open-air museums is that you can spend all day there, take a picnic, and not feel hurried around to see all the sights. There is no shortage of space in Stowmarket: the Food Museum has 34 hectares, while the Netherlands Open-Air Museum has 44 – not so much bigger.

Is an open-air museum no longer relevant?

The Netherlands Open-Air Museum follows a similar pattern of demonstrations and working exhibits, including a dairy farm and a laundry. The Food Museum, when we visited, had a group of what looked like families and children doing some cookery, and there was feeding of the animals. But for whatever reason, the Netherlands equivalent is vastly more popular. Visitors to the Food Museum are just 63,000 per year, according to the Vision and Development Plan 2023,  while the Netherlands equivalent welcomed around 560,000 visitors per year in 2022.  That discrepancy is vast, and perhaps explains why the trustees (or the executive) decided to change the name, and the focus, of the museum: if the punters don’t come to see the old buildings, perhaps they will come for interactive encounters around food. But that’s a big if. When we visited, on a Saturday in August, there were more people on the site for a private wedding than there were visitors to the Museum.

 

The Food Museum is not just about food

It has a collection of Travellers’ caravans, wagons and memorabilia. It has a lovely non-conformist 19th-century chapel. It has a display about a local asylum. It has a 19th-century Fen drainage pump. What happens to all these? In a way, calling itself the Food Museum restricts the Museum to one theme, whereas the Netherlands Open-Air Museum is gloriously eclectic. They have a railway warehouse, a tram depot, working trams, a demonstration of 1950s healthcare, an Indonesian house – they interpret their brief very widely. The result is a glorious confusion, but it certainly brings the visitors in.

Lack of government support

Clearly, the UK is strapped for cash. The latest Charity Commission financial statement shows that the Food Museum had an income of £1.33m for the year ending March 2023. This compares with the Netherlands Open-Air Museum income of €12.5m, plus government subsidies of €14m, in all, a total of around €28m, or £24m, some 20x greater. It seems astonishing to me, given Suffolk County Council’s moratorium on any funding of museums, that the Food Museum survives at all. It certainly doesn’t get the level of subsidy available in other countries.

What is the future of the Food Museum? I wish it well, but I think the decision by the board to change the title and scope has increased the problems faced by the museum. Perhaps the answer is just to install a tram, like the Netherlands Open-Air Museum.

A vintage tram takes the visitors around the Netherlands Open-Air Museum

 

The Netherlands Open-Air Museum

 

A lovingly recreated 1970s Amsterdam cafe 

The Nederlands Openlucht Museum, near Arnhem, is huge operation. More than 150 reconstructed buildings, over an area of 44 hectares, in fact an area so big there is a regular tram service (with vintage trams) all around the site (staffed by very welcoming tram drivers, I should add). It is a whole-day visit, since it will take you several hours just to get round the site. A major bonus is that several of the buildings don’t just have volunteers to describe that house and activity, but several of the major buildings are fully operational, such as the butter factory, powered by a boiler driving a pulley system for all the various activities involved with making butter and cream, and the steam laundry.

Is it an unqualified success? Not quite. The scope of an open-air museum is incredibly broad. Sadly, one challenge of the open-air museum is because its very existence is the least of all evils. Open-air museums came into being to house the buildings that planners and authorities wanted to demolish. The resulting resiting of the building is often in a meaningless location, for example, a water pump where there is no natural need for water to be pumped. The most recent example for the Netherlands Museum is a residential block from Amsterdam that was for years inhabited by immigrant workers, largely Turkish. It was rebuilt here because Amsterdam didn’t want it at the original site. However, in recreating the buildings, it was difficult to recreate the original living conditions, which are in contradiction to the rather grand façade of the building. Only a handful of the rooms are open to the visitor; there is one room, with bunk beds for multiple workers, which is moving; but I can’t help feeling that some eye-witness and/or autobiographical accounts would be better still. Some things just can’t be recreated very well.

There is a guidebook, but this simply repeats the information on the captions for each building. This information is very light on regional patterns and variations, and indeed there does not seem to be any attempt to create a representative survey of all the regional building types. Nor, of course, are the buildings from one region placed near each other. But the Museum makes things more difficult still by trying to accommodate all views. Thus, they try to consider the users of the buildings, as well as the buildings. This means a 17th-century building used as a Chinese restaurant is recreated as the restaurant, not for its original use, and the result is quite confusing. Similarly, the first Italian ice cream parlour (from the 1960s) is loving recreated, even though it was situated in a fascinating 17th-century building. This takes the museum into anthropology and social history, and the result is something of a hotchpotch. The hotchpotch is summed up by a house devoted to Indonesians in the Netherlands, that doesn’t attempt to give any idea of Indonesian or Dutch colonial history, but instead includes a few items of nostalgic value for that community – popular LPs by Indonesian artists that were released or at least available in the Netherlands.

If you want to find out any more about the building history of the Netherlands, you will have problems finding anything in the bookshop. The Museum guide (available only in Dutch) tells you only what is already shown on the captions available at the site.

I could find nothing in the Museum shop that provided background information on the buildings, the social history of the Netherlands, the everyday life of the people. Such books (and websites and stories) no doubt exist, but the shop seems devoted to games and trivia.

Similarly a “Green Cross” building shows public health provision from around 50 years ago. The building is of little interest, but the recreated interiors and fascinating. You can smell the surgery-like atmosphere, and even see a man (discreetly arranged) having a bath in the bathhouse.

So, I loved the site. I loved the dedicated staff and volunteers, who were unfailingly helpful in answering questions in a foreign language. I can’t really complain if the incidental items overwhelm the bigger picture. Young people can get excited by the former and, hopefully, they can revisit the subjects in more detail later. I object to the story-book view of history, and the jumbling of periods between the original buildings and their later users. But I don’t doubt that the museum probably turned more people into historians than any number of textbooks. 

A painting by Rubens

 

Rubens and studio, Jupiter and Mercury at the home of Philemon and Baucis, c1620-22

The Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum has no fewer than three paintings by Rubens on the subject of Philemon and Baucis. The one I am looking at here is probably the least well-known of the three, and indeed the gallery states it is by “Rubens and Studio” rather than entirely by Rubens. But for me it has a magical appeal.

The painting stands out because of its everyday, yet arresting, assembly of people. I don’t think this is just my response; when people are shown this picture, not in a gallery, but by itself, they are interested. They ask questions about it: who is it by? What is going on? It is a sign of the painting’s achievement that it makes people sit up and take notice. So, what is going on, and why is the picture worth looking at?

The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Jupiter and Mercury are travelling the Earth in disguise, and the only people to offer them hospitality are a poor couple, with just one goose. Baucis catches the goose for supper, at which point Jupiter (on the left of the picture), reveals their identity. You can see the surroundings of the small house, with a single lamp. You see the elderly couple on the right, with Baucis caught in the capture of the goose. Overall, however, you would not describe the story as full of action.

For the artist, then, a pretty straightforward brief: four people meeting in a small room. Yet what catches the eye is the astonishing movement of the four figures in the painting. This is a painting in motion! The surroundings are cramped; we are almost squeezed into the same space as the actors themselves. The four figures comprise a kind of circle uniting them, with Mercury (wearing his hat) looking at Philemon, and Jupiter observing Baucis, who is catching the goose. Jupiter is seated, but looks incredibly tense, leaning back dramatically, with his right hand hovering over the goose, and his feet on tiptoe, not fully on the floor. He is wearing some kind of robe that reveals his muscular body as much as it hides it. You can see in a flash that this is no average country dweller.

Incidentally, the original story in Ovid states that Philemon and Baucis have no food in the house, so I don’t know where the inviting bowl of fruit that is seen on the table came from. They offer to cook themselves in the oven for their guests, another detail that this painting omits.

The look between Mercury and Philemon is especially intense, and seems to match the almost electric positions taken up by the actors. None of these people is relaxed. There is a kind of heightened reality about this moment  - it is very clear that the painting has captured a very precise and key moment in the story. All four actors are busy in some kind of motion, even Philemon, who does not appear to be speaking, but who must therefore be one of the most active listeners on the planet. He is concentrating fiercely on his conversation with Mercury.

So here is a small-scale scene, with none of the subject matter or grandeur usually associated with Rubens. Yet he brings to it such a Baroque swirl of movement that we, the viewers, are caught up in this magical, moving world, and for a brief moment we imagine ourselves right in the middle of this moving story. It shows how Rubens could bring the most mundane, everyday moment to life, and to immediacy.