The Pogues are an English or Anglo-Irish Celtic punk band fronted by Shane MacGowan and others, founded in King's Cross, London, in 1982, as Pogue Mahone, an anglicisation of the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning "kiss my arse". Initially poorly received in traditional Irish music circles—the celebrated musician Tommy Makem called them "the greatest disaster ever to hit Irish music"—the band were subsequently credited with reinvigorating the genre. They later incorporated influences from other musical traditions, including jazz, flamenco, and Middle Eastern music.
Hampton Court Palace is a Grade I listed royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, 12 miles southwest and upstream of central London on the River Thames. Opened to the public, the palace is managed by Historic Royal Palaces, a charity set up to preserve several unoccupied royal properties.
Alistair Charles McGowan is an English impressionist, comic, actor, singer and writer best known to British audiences for The Big Impression, which was, for four years, one of BBC1's top-rating comedy programmes – winning numerous awards, including a BAFTA in 2003. He has also worked extensively in theatre and appeared in the West End in Art, Cabaret, The Mikado and Little Shop of Horrors. As a television actor, he played the lead role in BBC1's Mayo. He wrote the play Timing and the book A Matter of Life and Death or How to Wean Your Man off Football with former comedy partner Ronni Ancona. He also provided voices for Spitting Image.
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was an English-Irish singer-songwriter, musician and poet best known as the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of Celtic punk band the Pogues. Noted for his heavy alcohol and drug use as well as his exceptional songwriting talent, MacGowan wrote lyrics that frequently focused on the Irish diasporay experience and often London.
The University of Reading is a public research university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as University College, Reading, a University of Oxford extension college. The institution received the power to grant its own degrees in 1926 by royal charter from King George V and was the only university to receive such a charter between the two world wars. The university is usually categorised as a red brick university, reflecting its original foundation in the 19th century.
Michael Fitzhardinge Berkeley, Baron Berkeley of Knighton, is an English composer, broadcaster on music and non-party political member of the House of Lords, speaking as an advocate for the arts, contemporary music and music education.
Richard Keith Robert Coles is an English writer, radio presenter and Church of England priest. He first came to prominence as the multi-instrumentalist who partnered Jimmy Somerville in the 1980s band the Communards. They achieved three UK top ten hits, including the No. 1 record and best-selling single of 1986, a dance version of "Don't Leave Me This Way".
West End theatre is mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres in and near the West End of London. Along with New York City's Broadway theatre, West End theatre represents the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London. Famous screen actors, British and international alike, frequently appear on the London stage.
Charles Alexander Jencks was an American cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie's Cancer Care Centres. He published over thirty books and became famous in the 1980s as a theorist of postmodernism. Jencks devoted time to landform architecture, especially in Scotland. These landscapes include the Garden of Cosmic Speculation and earthworks at Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh. His continuing project Crawick Multiverse, commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, opened in 2015 near Sanquhar.
Cathays Park or Cardiff Civic Centre is a civic centre area in the city centre of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, consisting of a number of early 20th century buildings and a central park area, Alexandra Gardens. It includes Edwardian buildings such as the Temple of Peace, City Hall, the National Museum and Gallery of Wales and several buildings belonging to the Cardiff University campus. It also includes Cardiff Crown Court, the administrative headquarters of the Welsh Government, and the more modern Cardiff Central police station. The Pevsner architectural guide to the historic county of Glamorgan judges Cathays Park to be "the finest civic centre in the British Isles". The area falls within the Cathays electoral ward and forms part of the Cathays Park Conservation Area, which was designated in 1975.
Tom Turner is an English landscape architect, garden designer and garden historian formerly teaching at the University of Greenwich in London. He is the author of books and articles on landscape and gardens and is the editor of the Garden History Reference Encyclopedia. Educated at the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, he studied landscape architecture under Frank Clark.
Sir Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe was an English architect, town planner, landscape architect, garden designer, landscape and garden historian, lecturer and author. His strongest interest was in landscape and garden design.
Buxus sempervirens, the common box, European box, or boxwood, is a species of flowering plant in the genus Buxus, native to western and southern Europe, northwest Africa, and southwest Asia, from southern England south to northern Morocco, and east through the northern Mediterranean region to Turkey. Buxus colchica of western Caucasus and B. hyrcana of northern Iran and eastern Caucasus are commonly treated as synonyms of B. sempervirens.
The Landscape Agency is a British landscape architecture company that was founded in 1998 by Patrick James. The company specializes in landscape design, landscape planning and landscape management with a focus on the conservation of historic landscapes.
Ben Harms was a German-born traditional woodcarver working in England. Some of his work can be seen at The Tower of London, Windsor Castle, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court and alongside the work of Grinling Gibbons at Petworth House.
Anthony John McGowan is an English author of books for children, teenagers and adults. He is the winner of the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal for Lark.
The Diana Fountain in Bushy Park, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England, is a seventeenth-century statue ensemble and water feature in an eighteenth-century setting with a surrounding pool and mile long tree lined vistas which honors the Roman Goddess Diana. Originally created for Somerset House in the 1630s, and remodelled about 1690, the fountain has stood since 1713 in Bushy Park, and now forms a large traffic island in Chestnut Avenue.
Brian Webb is a graphic designer and director of Webb & Webb Design Limited.
Malplaquet House is a Grade II listed Georgian house at 137–139 Mile End Road, Stepney, London.
Todd McGowan is an American professor of English at the University of Vermont where he teaches film and cultural theory. He works on Hegel, psychoanalysis, and existentialism, and the intersection of these lines of thought with the cinema. McGowan is the author of more than 15 books, editor of Film Theory in Practice series from Bloomsbury and co-editor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston. McGowan's work has been described as "A Politics of Death Drive". McGowan cohosts the podcast Why Theory with Ryan Engley.
