Light and airy main upstairs hall which can be used as a single space, or subdivided by foldable sliding doors to create two separate rooms. Ideal for parties and functions, as well as faith and activity groups. The hall has an ample supply of chairs and Go-Pak tables and has a sink unit within the hall. When split into two smaller rooms, the Melody Room is perfect for educational groups or meetings and has an interactive whiteboard available for hire. The Melody room has toilets on the same floor although these spaces are not disabled accessible. Capacity is 70 people seated or 100 standing. Kitchen use is available for hire on the ground floor. Regular groups are welcome at preferential community group rates and storage is available if required.
Equipment for additional hire: Interactive whiteboard, flipcharts, projector with extra-large whiteboard/projector screen (dimensions 5ft x 8.5ft) Go-Pak tables 69cms width x 182cms length x 70cms height (included in hire) Function chairs (included in hire)
​The objectives of Sculpture I and II are to expose students to basic tools, process, sketchbook development, and safety practices while exploring a variety of techniques used to create three-dimensional works of art. Students will have the opportunity to explore materials such as: wire, plaster, tape, metals, paper, wood, as well as natural and found materials. Past and current styles and concepts of sculptural work are studied through various activities. Students will experiment with realistic, abstract, and functional concepts within the problems they solve.
Here at HUP, where we try to keep the flame for Walter Benjamin in some respects, we maintain connections with legions of Benjamin devotees throughout the academic world. One of them, Rachel Jacoff, Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literature and Professor of Italian at Wellesley College and the editor of John Freccero's book of essays on Dante (HUP, 1988), wrote to us about a recent trip to Berlin during which she set out to locate some of the sites remembered by Benjamin in "A Berlin Chronicle" and Berlin Childhood around 1900, his extraordinary psychic inventory of the lost spaces of his childhood. Jacoff detailed her efforts as follows.
When I agreed to take part in a Dante conference in Berlin this fall I found myself almost at once thinking about Walter Benjamin. I reread "A Berlin Chronicle" in Reflections and then read the whole of Berlin Childhood around 1900. This was going to be my first trip to Germany, a place I had scrupulously avoided, and the idea of turning the trip into a pilgrimage to Walter Benjamin’s home gradually took over my imagination. I thought about how he had not been able to return, and how he had written Berlin Childhood around 1900 precisely as a way of dealing with the irrevocable loss of the world of his childhood and its security. I thought, too, about another exile, Dante, whose cruel banishment from Florence comes to mind whenever I am in Florence and see that anyone can go there now, while he was never able to return. I was going to be able to visit Berlin, something Benjamin knew by 1932 that he would never be able to do again. Both Benjamin and Dante immortalized the cities that had rejected them, both writing bout their memories of earlier and safer times. When Dante meets with his great-great-grandfather at the center of Paradiso, Cacciaguida recalls the Florence of his time as "peaceful, sober, and chaste" (15. 99), a reposeful, beautifully civil and trustworthy community (15. 130-32) that no longer exists. This is the same ancestor who will predict Dante’s exile, defining it as "the loss of everything most beloved" (17. 55-56). Even though the Commedia is saturated with fierce attacks on the Florence, it is clear that Dante remains obsessed with it, longing to return to his "bel San Giovanni," the baptistery at which he imagines receiving the laurel crown. Benjamin, like Dante, is recalling a lost world. He selects a variety of places and spaces that contain or prompt memories of his childhood and the high bourgeois world that nourished his fantasies and predilections. By 1932 this world was gone, or at least inaccessible to Benjamin and other Jews like him.
Benjamin’s descriptions of the places dear to him in childhood made me eager to find the neighborhoods and the houses in which he had lived. Everyone assured me that the houses no longer existed, and it was difficult to find specific information. The neighborhood was Charlottenburg, still a wealthy residential area. From several sources I was able to gather that the family had lived first in Kurfurstenstrasse, then in Nettelbeckstrasse, and later in Carmerstrasse. It is easy to find Carmerstrassse since it runs out of Savigny Platz, a beautiful, leafy square with an elegant Spanish restaurant and a few upscale stores. Carmerstrasse is tasteful and serene, its domestic architecture both cozy and stylish. Walter Benjamin Platz is located in Kurfurstenstrasse, a commercial area west and south of Savigny Platz. As Benjamin’s father prospered the family kept moving further West, ultimately residing in Delbruckstrasse in the Grunewald district that bordered on the royal hunting preserve. It was to this parental villa that Benjamin, his wife and son, returned when he was unable to support the family in later years. Still later, in 1930, Benjamin came back to Berlin and lived in Prinzregentstrasse 66 in the neighborhood of Wilmersdorf where there is now a plaque in his honor.
Many of the other places about which Benjamin wrote—the Tiergarten and the zoo, the Victory column, and certain streets where various relatives lived—are still there. Whatever aura they have for me comes from their existence in Benjamin’s memory and his prose.
||| "A Berlin Chronicle" is published in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934, and Berlin Childhood around 1900 is published as a standalone paperback.
What does the term “Estate” on a wine bottle label really mean? In a few words--grown, produced and bottled--encapsulates the concept. However, these three words don’t really cover all that is entailed in producing an Estate wine.
To label a wine “Estate” you must make the wine from start to finish at the winery from grapes grown or controlled by the winery. At a small winery, that could mean that the guy who sells you the wine in the tasting room also pruned the dormant vines in January, worked the vineyards during the growing season, harvested the grapes in the fall, assisted in getting the precious clusters to the winery, crushed the grapes with complex (and expensive) equipment, performed fermentation management, handled the wine in barrel for its aging process, and put the finished wine delicately in the bottle.
Universities call it a “seamlessly integrated business model.” I call it a lot of hard work requiring a vast amount of knowledge, skills and abilities drawn from different industries. When I thought about examples of other businesses as complex and dynamic as winegrowers producing Estate wines, I came up with very few.
Christmas Tree Farm: The owner grows trees his property. The trees are processed (cut and loaded) on that same dirt and retail clients come to that farm to purchase their seasonal holiday centerpieces. This fits the rough definition; however, I would argue that this is hardly a complex business model.
Estate Designer Clothing: Imagine a woman (or man) growing cotton and other textile materials on her plantation. She picks the cotton and processes it to make fabric. From this fabric she crafts unique, small-lot jeans, shirts and socks on the property. People come from all over the country to try on her jeans and have them shipped to their homes, or she ships her products to distributors to sell. THIS is very similar to what we do, except it is wildly outlandish and currently not happening.
Whenever a part of the process is passed on to a different entity or person, there’s the room for the ball to be dropped. In winemaking, that means loss of quality, whether it’s muted aromas, angular taste, off color or weird finish. Wine growing and production is not for the meek, but it’s a career that rewards those who invest the time, energy and money needed to pull it off.
The point of this blog is to highlight the complexity of what small, family-run estate wineries deal with daily. Making Estate wines requires knowledge, skills and abilities to maintain equipment, train employees, and manage the facilities to make a unique product that stands out from the other 200 (friendly) competitors in the area.
So as a recap: "Estate" means the winery and vineyards have to be in the same AVA, have to be controlled or owned by the winery, and the wine has to be made from start to finish at the winery.