Thread by @readingmuseum

in 1941, the College of Estate Management (then in London's Lincoln's Inn Fields, now in Reading) was devastated by incendiary bombing.

Into the ruins moved in ... pigs. Thanks to a local fire department, keen to supplement their rations.

Please join us on a very wild ride.

'Pigs In The Ruins' - the headline from coverage of the farm in the Picture Post, a photojournalistic magazine that ceased production in 1957.

And when you delve deeper into the article, you realise what a shame that is.

The writing emanates a fierce poetic aura. It's apocalyptic. It's Cormac McCarthy, but even more wired. Like he was made of Meccano. Or string.

• a monument to human failure
• snuffling among the debris
• the shadow of broken bits of wall

It's The Road. You can almost feel Viggo Mortensen wading through the prosody, carrying the fire.

The fire of literary menace.

'The pigs [...] are back again on the old farmlands just outside the city walls'.

'The ground has reverted [...] to the original tenants of the land'.

The writing captures the devastation so vividly and succinctly, with deliberately Biblical notes. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

It also features a very substantial claim:

'Keats would have written a sonnet about it'.

Keats 🤔 would 🤔 have 🤔 written 🤔 a sonnet 🤔 about it 🤔

The problems is Keats didn't. Keats couldn't. Keats was long gone. Which is the point.

So guess what we did.

... Correct.

ODE TO A RUIN OF PIGS

(by Reading Museum's Twitter account)

In Lincoln's Inn, in 1941, amid the Blitz
A house of knowledge burned
Brick turned to dust, the glass to bits
A building lost where building once was learned

And ruin moved its teachers in
The classes spoken from the stone
The lectures folded into din
As land reclaimed the land its own

Although the college left, the people stayed
(The darkness couldn't put out every light)
And there they searched, for water, food and aid,
To stay the spirit's tired flight

And from that plot of stone and twigs,
They raised a farm, and built a sty

...for pigs.

-fin-

(Ashes to ashes
Tweets to Keats).

though it's not quite Keats. But it is a sonnet about pigs. Ish. And we hope that if the photojournalist is still alive, that they're somehow able to see this. Even if their response is a complete, vehement disgust. Which would be written with a bravado we can only dream of.

(We have an exhibition all about the history of the College of Estate Management in our community cases. It's really great. And not a sonnet).