Some periods, some cities give rise to ideas and circles of thinkers, that are both of the time and outside it. Machine Age London has had a deep legacy on all our lives - on matters as disparate as education, sex, drugs, yoga and rock ‘n’ roll.
Stephanie and Fred head to the pub in Fitzrovia to carry out the post mortem on the series.
Amongst other pressing matters, they ask how our subjects hold up against their more famous Bloomsbury contemporaries. How much should individuals be forgiven for being products of their time? And, is anyone too important to be cancelled?
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5 Feb 2025
Episode 13: Escape to the Future
In this episode we attempt to wrap things up by returning to conversations with several academics we heard from in earlier episodes.
We ask them why it was that our subjects are so much less known than their Bloomsbury set contemporaries? We focus on the end of the Machine Age and its anticipation of the Space Age to come, and ask how our subjects fared in the run up to World War 2 with the competing totalitarian pathways to the future.
In particular, we return to the artist and writer Wyndham-Lewis and his short-lived sympathy… for Hitler.
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29 Jan 2025
Episode 12: Escape to the Past… or, Magic Bowmen and Scary Fairies
Machen was a great influence on HP Lovecraft, and the development of the fantasy and horror genres. Stephen King is a fan.
There is a direct line from Machen's writing to Dungeons and Dragons, grail quests such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Game of Thrones.
Machen bemoaned modernity, the mechanised slaughter of the Great War and especially the dreary Church of England, which had lost all sense of magic. Instead he took refuge in the past, a fantastic and eternal realm of changelings, fairies and monstrous beings.
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21 Jan 2025
Episode 11: Roadman
Immensely talented and good looking, in the years leading up to the Great War Augustus John was a celebrity. London restaurants named dishes after him. But now he has faded into obscurity.
The man who might today have been as famous as Picasso was unable to live up to his artistic promise. Yet the bohemian lifestyle he led, his dress and commitment to non-conformity was his true great work and was hugely influential.
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14 Jan 2025
Episode 10: Roman Road
Stanley Spencer and David Jones, two devout Christians, share how their faith deeply influenced their artistic expressions as a painter and engraver, respectively.
6 Jan 2025
Episode 9: Yoga, Stars and Self.
We round off our investigation into the ways the occult has impacted the present.
Yoga was an “exotic” practice that percolated into the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It re-emerged as a fringe New Age hippie craze, before becoming the global industry, valued at many billions of dollars, that it is today.
These days yoga and mindfulness are seen as central components of “self-care.” Yet it wasn’t long ago that the thought that our “selves” are unique and valuable and that we should express our special individuality, even in the face of societal pressures, was itself radical, going against Victorian codes of morality, with their emphasis on control, repression, and duty.
But, as Aleister Crowley declared: “Every man and woman is a star.”
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20 Dec 2024
Episode 8: Drugs... and Rock 'n' Roll
Havelock Ellis and Aleister Crowley join host to explore the wild history of London's early 20th-century drug culture, where experimentation and excess laid the groundwork for future subcultures.
14 Dec 2024
Episode 7: Sex Magic
Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare's sex magic philosophies, rooted in their unconventional lives and practices, continue to shape modern attitudes towards relationships and consent.
11 Nov 2024
Eccentric Circles: Back soon!
We'll be covering the modern holy trinity of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll, along with other more traditional religious devotion. We'll look into the popularity of the occult and its lasting legacy. And we'll be asking: "Where better to escape to: the future, full of progress and space travel, or to the comfort of the past?"
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3 May 2024
Episode 6: Orgasms are Good for Empire
WARNING: this episode uses explicit language almost from the start.
In 1918, the year that the First World War ended, a slim little book was published. Its title was Married Love, and it was going to change the course of Western sexuality forever.
Its author was Marie Stopes. She believed that mutual orgasm was an essential component of a successful marriage. This was a radical, progressive view, at a time when many doctors and scientists ignored or denied altogether the existence of the female orgasm. And yet much of Stopes’ motivation was decidedly reactionary: orgasms made women healthy, and healthy women conceived healthy babies…. and healthy babies were needed to defend and administer the British Empire. The very social fabric of the Empire itself depended on what happened between the sheets.
25 Apr 2024
Episode 5: Blast Off
London sees the arrival of Italian Futurism with its glorification of machinery, war, and above all, the motor car. The Futurists, in turn, engender Vorticism, possibly Britain’s only homegrown avant-garde movement.
The Vorticists believe that artists should be supreme representations of the individual, that they should make challenging art which rattles the cage of bourgeois society, that art could be an agent for change. Chief among their number is Wyndham Lewis, the self-styled bad boy of British art.
19 Apr 2024
Episode 4: Stirrings and Straw men, Nude and Naked
At the turn of the 20th century, in Britain establishment tastes in art prevailed and leaned traditional. Despite being the heart of a global empire, the country suffered from an island mentality. The fall of Oscar Wilde and his subsequent escape to Paris only added to a suspicion of all things French. Decadence itself had been a French import.
The English, according to the painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, were philistines "in their bones."
Paris had brought impressionism and post impressionism to the world. London was lagging badly.
But in 1910 the city would finally begin to catch up.
11 Apr 2024
Episode 3: The Edwardians: The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Part 2)
The Edwardian period tends to get a bad rap - legitimately in the case of human zoos - but is there anything for which we ought to be grateful?
Because of how it ended, with the carnage of the First World War, it’s easy to see the time as the quiet before the storm. But as we saw last episode, this was far from the case. There was rampant culture war, a crisis of confidence about the Empire and what it meant to be British. But there was also an increasing willingness to assert individual freedom and challenge taboos.
We will see that the period helped give birth to today in fundamental ways: from Eugenics to Psychedelics and even to what has come today to be called intersectional politics.
4 Apr 2024
Episode 2: The Edwardians: The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Part 1)
We tend to think of the Edwardian period as a dull interlude, where a complacent ruling class lazed away in blissful ignorance of what was coming: industrialised warfare and the dissolution of empire.
In reality, this was a time of huge upheaval. There was the fight for Irish Home Rule, suffragism, socialism and vegetarianism. Telegraph cables stretched around the world. Darwinism had dealt creationism and the Judaic religions that championed it a severe blow. This left a gap for other faiths to fill, as people turned elsewhere to meet the human need for the mysterious.
It was a time of occultism, sex novels and human zoos. It was also when the wheels began to come off the imperial project. And in 1912, this proud maritime nation was able to celebrate a true feat of engineering: the launch of the unsinkable Titanic.
29 Mar 2024
Episode 1: The Belly of the Beast
Right at London’s centre is Trafalgar Square, presided over, from his column, by the wounded figure of Admiral Nelson. Running into the Square from the East is The Strand. It has been a thoroughfare since Roman times. Along with the trams and omnibuses, carts and cattle, walked our cast of mad, bad and brilliant thinkers whose ideas and energy helped to build the world we know today.
Over the course of this series you will hear from leading writers and academics on London in the Machine Age. But in this first episode you can immerse yourself in the period. You will meet the characters that populate our episodes. Many are flawed, some deeply. Most are consigned to relative obscurity. Yet their work has changed all our lives.
1 Mar 2024
Eccentric Circles - Coming Soon!
Some periods, some cities give rise to ideas and circles of thinkers, that are both of the time and outside it. Machine Age London has had a deep legacy on all our lives - on matters as disparate as education, sex, drugs, yoga and rock ‘n’ roll.
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