Rook Lane Blog

May 23, 2016

The British folk memory of the Battle of the Somme is dominated by one moment: 7.30am on 01 July 1916. It was a bright summer’s day, the sun well up, and falling from the east on the backs of the German defenders and into the faces of the British. Officers sounded their whistles, and their men scrambled up ladders to get out of the trenches and into No Man’s Land…

March 22, 2016

Lucinda Rogers works from life in the tradition of the artist as reporter. She immerses herself in an environment and records straight from eye to paper, which gives her drawings a particular spontaneity. Her work records the intimate details and broad views of the changing city she lives in, London, and others she is drawn to including New York and Marrakech.

March 22, 2016

Richard Wilding, creative director of GULAN, a charity which promotes Kurdish culture, is a London-based producer and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East. His dazzling photographs bring to life the landscape, history and culture of the Kurdish people, as well as the problems they face in the wake of the Syrian conflict.

March 22, 2016

Illustrated talk by Dr Michael Wood, one of the UK’s best loved historians and broadcasters, and author of numerous popular history books including ‘In the footsteps of Alexander the Great’, ‘In Search of Shakespeare’ and ‘The Story of England’.

March 8, 2016

In 2010 a metal detectorist, Dave Crisp, prospecting near Frome found what became known as the Frome Hoard – 52,503 Roman coins. The overwhelming significance of the Frome Hoard is the new light that it casts on the life of the emperor Carausius – Britain’s ‘forgotten emperor’.

February 22, 2016

Architect Peter Barber explores how space conditions and in turn is conditioned by society and culture and how Architecture can create the potential for social action & activity.

February 3, 2016

Join local, Regional and European experts to discuss how towns like Frome can support low carbon retrofit and renewable energy through finance, policy and planning.

January 13, 2016

Tracing how we got to our current crisis and how housing has come to reflect class and wealth in Britain, Danny Dorling shows that the solution to our problems – rising homelessness, a generation priced out of home ownership – is not, as is widely assumed, building more homes. Inequality, he argues, is what we really need to overcome.

January 13, 2016

Following the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013, killing almost 1200 people, Engineer Ruth Haynes of Build Collective worked for Tim Khan in Dhaka to survey factories that supplied clothing to two major British retailers. Find out what she discovered and why we need to push for good governance, transparency and professional Engineering.

January 8, 2016

Drawing on evidence presented in his new book, Leading the Inclusive City, Robin Hambleton will suggest that imaginative place-based leadership can enable citizens to make a difference.