Hammersmith in Popular Culture
Hammersmith features in Charles Dickens Great Expectations as the home of the Pocket family. Pip resides with the Pockets in their house by the river and partakes in boating on the Thames.
News from Nowhere (1890) written by William Morris is a utopian novel that describes a journey upstream the River Thames from Hammersmith towards Oxford; it is of growing interest to contemporary ecological and socialist political movements.
In 1930, Gustav Holst composed a work for military band (later rewritten for orchestra) entitled Hammersmith to reflect his impressions of the area, having lived across the river in nearby Barnes for nearly forty years. It begins with a haunting musical depiction of the River Thames flowing underneath Hammersmith Bridge. Holst was a music teacher at St Paul's Girls' School, where he composed many of his most famous works, including The Planets suite. A music room in the school is named after him.
Hammersmith has provided a location for several television programmes, including the BBC comedy series Bottom, Channel 4's TFI Friday, and the vampire drama Ultraviolet. The opening credits of Bottom show the Hammersmith Broadway (also mentioned in The Pogues' song Dark Streets of London) development, then called Centre West, when it was under construction. In addition, the Flying Squad were Hammersmith-based in the 1970s TV series The Sweeney. Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective contains scenes that appear to be under and adjacent to Hammersmith Bridge, and Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors includes scenes in and around Hammersmith Bridge. The popular Thames Television series Minder also features black and white photographs of Hammersmith Bridge and the Blue Anchor pub in the closing credits.
The BBC's 2008 Miniseries Lost in Austen stars Jemima Rooper (who was born in Hammersmith) as Amanda Price, a character who lives in modern day Hammersmith, but is transported (through a portal in her flat's bathroom) into Jane Austen's fictional story Pride and Prejudice. Amanda Price gets stuck in fictional Georgian England and upon returning to Hammersmith of the 18th century, discovers it to be a small village miles from London.
Read more about this topic: Hammersmith
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)