Search results for ""Author Peter Cookson""

In 1925 a journalist on the Barcelona newspaper El Escandalo used the term Barrio Chino in a somewhat derogatory way to describe part of the older city. While the area in question represented a dystopian underbelly of the city, known for its impoverished living and working conditions together with its 'red-light' subcultures, it never existed as a 'Chinatown' in either a physical or social sense. However the name of this mythical community stuck from the 1920s onwards, appearing on maps and descriptions of the inner city but devoid of any hint of Chinese inhabitants or their culture. The book takes this as a starting point to chart the development of Barcelona over two hundred years using a series of 'diaries' and drawn images. These are set around four generations of a fictional Chinese dynasty and their imagined architectural participation in some of the major events in Barcelona's modern history. As residents of the Barrio from the mid-nineteenth century, they individually document diverse contributions to the city during periods of dynamic growth. This is set against a backdrop of cataclysmic political change and exemplary forms of urban regeneration which have provided Barcelona with its contemporary 'World City' status as it plans for the future.

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A disparate but exuberant group of scholars are brought together in Savannah by an eminent professor to explore and debate the history and characteristics of the city and its implications for a twenty-first century urbanism. This narrative represents a forceful and humorous interplay between formal discussion, informal interludes, irreverent comments, and less than academic relationships. Its serious purpose is to identify the urban challenges facing America in terms of containing and consolidating growth within livable communities. However like all such participatory events it is also an opportunity for informal personal agendas set against a backdrop of real life events. The text is interspersed with 90 drawings of Savannah, illustrating its unique and multilayered identity as a potential urban paradigm for the future.

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With photographs supported by introductory text, track layouts, operating instructions and timetables brought to life by the reminiscences of people who worked in the area, "Railway Memories No 15" recalls the busy railway network serving the West Yorkshire towns of Pontefract, Castleford and Knottingley during the 1950s and 1960s. It takes a fascinating and nostalgic look back at the stations, yards, signal boxes, colliery railways and the trains of such variety that no less than 46 differenct classes of locomotive are featured - not counting sub-classes or colliery and industrial locomotives.

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With bygone railway scenes from all over Yorkshire, 184 pictures - 11 of them colour - illustrate the wide variety of diesel locomotives and multiple units to be found in the white rose county prior to the end of British Rail steam on 11th August 1968.

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