SALON NO.89: London Eyes - Specs and The City
Event Information
About this event
The talk will be held via the Zoom platform (details will be emailed to you one day and one hour before the event). A recording of the Salon will be available to ticket holders after the event.
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TRAVIS ELBOROUGH has traced the fascinating story of spectacles from their inception as primitive visual to the augmented reality of Google Glass.
Join him as he relates the particular part London and its spectacle-makers and opticians, some brilliant others mad, have played in their development. Learn why all spectacles in London were beer goggles until 1629, hear how the London Stone was used to police the sale of glasses in the City and discover how immigrants in Spitalfields and Soho helped shape the modern optical trade.
We peer into the problem of Samuel Pepys’ eyesight, open The Case of the Lambeth Poisoner, get ophthalmological with Arthur Conan Doyle in the foggy London of Sherlock Holmes and get hip to horn rims in the swinging 60s cockney company of Michael Caine.
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When Londoners have problems with their vision more serious than spectacles can address, the place they head to is Moorfields Eye Hospital, the last remaining of the many medical institutions in what was once a entire district of healthcare institutions around Old Street and City Road.
As it prepares to move to a new site, TOM BOLTON reflects on Moorfield's history, its neighbourhood of lost hospitals and eye medicine in general. We learn how the eye has particular sensitivity and significance to Londoners, and how, from treatment at the shrines of saints to alarming early surgery, the city has been at the centre of a long and strange journey towards modern eye healthcare, a journey that includes secret societies, cricketers, fighter pilots, presidents and New Zealand communists...
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TRAVIS ELBOROUGH, described by The Guardian as ‘one of the country’s finest pop culture historians’, has been a freelance writer, author, broadcaster and cultural commentator for two decades. His books include The Bus We Loved: London's Affair With the Routemaster, Wish You Were Here: England on Sea, The Long-Player Goodbye, (the book that inspired the BBC4 documentary When Albums Ruled the World), A Walk in the Park, a loving exploration of public parks and green space. Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, was published in 2021. The latest in his collaborations with the cartographer Martin Brown, Atlas of Forgotten Places, also appeared in 2021.
TOM BOLTON is an urban researcher and the author of five books – ‘Camden Town: Dreams of Another London’, ‘Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast’; ‘Vanished City: London’s Lost Neighbourhoods’ and ‘London’s Lost Rivers: A Walkers Guide Volumes 1 and 2’. He has presented multiple public walks and talks for the Royal Geographical Society Monday Night Lecture, Science Museum Lates, Radio 4, World Service, BBC London and written articles for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Quietus and others