In the footsteps of Joe Pullen
Josiah Pullen liked to walk. Believing the exercise helped him stay ‘vigorous and healthy’, he made the same journey every day for 57 years. Sometimes both in the morning and evening.
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So long Peter Forbes, the brass man 1941-2025
Peter Forbes, has been setting up at Gloucester Green market since six thirty in the morning when I arrive at nine. You can’t miss him. “I’ve got the best pitch,” he grins from behind his peaked baseball hat. “I get to choose because I’ve been here the longest. When people come round the corner from George St, I’m the first stall they see – all these shiny things.”
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Francis Hamel and his Oxford Paintings
Painted during three intensive periods over a period of 25 years, to those who live in the city they are instantly familiar snapshots, illustrated vignettes that cleverly capture that sense of surprise that many of us feel at the sight of a soaring medieval spire over a modern rooftop, or a field of meadow flowers glimpsed through the railings of a bus busy high street.
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Tambours, Grilles and Unicorns
This was ‘real tennis’, played with a net that sags in the middle, on a funky inside court to a complicated but intriguing set of rules more akin to a game of ‘quidditch’ than that played on the lawns of Wimbledon. And although today I am heading to the one surviving court in the city, it seems the game is still alive and kicking.
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Cowley’s concrete mural
Firm believers in art made for public spaces, they were also keen that their work was accessible, sensory, tactile, carving the polysterene moulds by hand using household tools like potato peelers and nutmeg graters to produce a variety of concrete finishes.
