On a gloomy late November day (but at least it's not raining, quite, here), two different types of horses in motion. On the top, the rearing, vaguely Parthenon-esque horses on Kingston's Guildhall, built by Maurice Webb in 1935 (he was also responsible for Bentalls, the big department store in town, where we used to make very, very occasional excursions (on a trolley bus) when I was a child. They also look decidedly monumental, mid-1930s, European in style. I can't find out on line whether Webb designed them as well as the building. In any case, the registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths is in its basement, and I had to go and wait there behind a whole lot of newborns to register my mother's death, since she'd died in Kingston Hospital (registration is determined by the geography of the event, not convenience). But when it came to geography, I was surprised (I'd brought along her birth certificate) that she'd not been born in Dewsbury Hospital, as I'd thought, but at home. "Masonic Villas, Hanging Heaton" is a pretty good birth address.
As an antidote, I thought I'd go and find evidence of a different kind of birth: the birthplace of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge - I knew it had to be just round the corner. And here ... one blue plaque, and a string of his trotting horses, stretched across what claims to be a computer shop, but in reality (and I think Muybridge could have been amused) largely contained American comic books.
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