Tagged with Exeter
Captain John Cooke: ‘a public character and John Bull tradesman’
Amber Flood has written about some works relating to Captain John Cooke for February’s Book of the Month. This piece focuses on Cooke’s 1819 pamphlet titled “Old England For Ever” […]
Weather reporting at the Devon and Exeter Institution
Rain, rain, go away, come again another day ... Are you wondering where summer is? From January 1817, one of the most important tasks of the Librarian at the Devon and Exeter Institution was taking twice-daily readings from the Institution's barometer and thermometer and recording them in a meteorological register.
A ‘Cornish boy, in tin-mines bred’: the legend of John Opie (1761-1807)
Born in Mithian, St Agnes, Cornwall, John Opie (1761-1807) overcame his humble birth to become a Royal Academician and one of the foremost portraitists and landscape artists of his day. He was introduced to the London art world as a self-taught Rousseauian 'noble savage', raised in a ‘remote and secluded part of the island’, who rose to fame ‘unassisted by partial patronage’. However, little of this was true.
Lithographs of the Great Western Railway by John Cooke Bourne (1814-1896)
From his home in London, John Cooke Bourne (1814-1896) witnessed the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway, the first main-line railway to enter London. The London and Birmingham Railway Company was founded in 1833 and work soon began on a London terminus. Engineers George and Robert Stephenson chose a site on the edge of the city; a station with two platforms and two hotels was designed by Philip Hardwick (1792–1870) with a huge 70-foot Doric portico marking the gateway to the north. London Euston station officially opened on 20 July 1837. The following year a temporary terminus opened on Bishop’s Bridge Road in Paddington heralding the expansion of the railways to the west.
