Choosing the future | Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo

April 19, 2020 / First Night Design

A few months ago, with what now appears to be an uncanny and uncomfortable prescience, we began a workshop in the Derbyshire village of Eyam. The village is one of those pretty places of old stone and cottage gardens… but it is best known for its response to the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665.

Source: Choosing the future | Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo

In shadow of the plague

July 10, 2015July 10, 2015 / First Night Design / 3 Comments

The Plague Year (Samuel Pepys, 1665)

April 29, 2015April 29, 2015 / First Night Design / 1 Comment

Death is All Around Us: The Plague Pits of London

November 20, 2014November 20, 2014 / First Night Design / 1 Comment

The Chirurgeon's Apprentice

If you walk down Victoria Street in London on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, you’ll find dozens of picnickers sitting in Christchurch Gardens. Some will be suited up in jackets and ties, clutching briefcases in one hand and local supermarket sandwiches in another. Others will be tourists taking a moment to rest their wary bones before heading down the road to visit Parliament Square or Westminster Abbey. And then there are ‘the loungers’—youths sprawled out on bed sheets, iPods blasting in their eardrums, books pushed up to their noses.

Most if not all of these people will be unaware that they are sitting atop a 17^th-century plague pit.

‘Death is all around us’ is not just a turn of phrase. It’s an actual fact, at least for those living in London. When the bubonic plague swept through the city in 1665, over 100,000 people perished. Those more poetically inclined…