Albertopolis: What's in a Word?
One of the joys of setting up TEDxAlbertopolis has been getting the opportunity to engage with our audience about what Albertopolis means to you. Over the past few months we've heard great suggestions for local speakers, received links to fascinating art-science collaborations going on in the area, and tried to answer a host of challenging questions.
The question that crops up most often, however, isn't about our speaker line-up or about being the largest TEDx event ever held in the UK. The question that we've been asked most often is, quite simply, what is Albertopolis?
It's a fair question, and we try not to get too offended when people mistake us for a town in Greece, or misspell our name in any of a variety of creative ways. The situation isn't helped by the fact that our own twitter handle refers to us as @TEDxAlbrtopolis, because of the character limit on usernames.
So what on earth - or, more appropriately, where on earth - is Albertopolis? For a long time it was difficult to get an official answer on this subject, as the word only made it into the Oxford English Dictionary last September (alongside classmates Alpha Centauri and Broadband). That distinguished work of reference now describes Albertopolis as "An informal name for: the area of South Kensington in London that is home to various cultural and educational institutions including the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Royal College of Music."
And that's probably as accurate an answer as you're likely to get. For all practical purposes, the term Albertopolis refers to an patch of SW7 less than half a kilometre square, bound by Kensington Gore in the North, Cromwell Road in the South, Gloucester Road in the West and Exhibition Road in the East. Institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum (strangely excluded from the OED's definition above), which peer across busy streets at this enchanted city block, are often included as well. The new Exhibition Road redevelopment plan, completed in time for the 2012 Olympics, also helped foster a greater sense of unity in the neighbourhood by creating what is the largest pedestrianised cultural area in Europe.
The comparatively recent inclusion into the OED is made all the stranger by the word's illustrious pedigree. Coined in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the word pays homage to Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort to Queen Victoria, whose vision and dedication to cultural advancement led to the area's rapid development.
The first recorded use of the term is in an article from The Times on April 12th 1860, in the context of a discussion on "What is to be done with the British Museum?". According to the author, "the two propositions that now divide the suffrages of the scientific world, or, as it is alleged, of the scientific versus the political world, are the extension of the Museum and the transference of the natural history collection to the rising suburb of Albertopolis, south of the Kensington-road. In this new region are to be the new gardens of the Horticultural Society, with a winter garden, splendid arcades, and other buildings in character; and, no doubt, a site and space could be found here for a Museum of Natural History. That is just the situation assigned to this purpose at Paris. As a vast collection is in that neighbourhood already, in the Brompton Museum, and the Fine Arts Exhibition is to be somewhere thereabouts, nobody could dispute the propriety of making the birds, and beasts, and fishes migrate to a region so evidently prepared for them."
And indeed nobody did dispute it, with construction on just such a museum beginning thirteen years later. Three years before the NHM building site was to open, however, and while London's cultural heartland was still developing, Albertopolis had made its way into J.C. Hotten's "Slang Dictionary". The 1870 edition references "a facetious appellation given by the Londoners to the Kensington Gore district. Now obsolete."
We may complain about the rapid evolution of language in today's world, but for a word to go from newly-coined to obsolete within a decade is speedy by anybody's standards.
Google Ngrams, a useful tool for broad-brush analyses of word frequency, seems to bear out Hotten's conclusions. Use of the word was in decline by 1870, a fact possibly attributable to the opening of a London Underground station with the name of "South Kensington" in the area in 1868. The altogether more estate-agent-friendly South Kensington dominates for much of the next century, until a surge of nostalgia brings Albertopolis back into circulation in the 1980s. After the V&A's 2012 exhibition 'Albertopolis' on the history of the area, however, the name is firmly back on people's lips.
So what do we hope to accomplish by reviving a word declared obsolete more than a century ago? Why are we associating ourselves with such an archaic term? Well, I don't know about you, but I fell in love with Albertopolis the first time I heard an acquaintance use it. There's a magic woven into the rhythm of the word which seems to transcend the century and a half since its first use. It's a name equally suited to the imposing splendour of the Victorian period as well as the bustling imagined cities of the future. Without knowing the historical context, I don't think I'd be able to say which was being referred to.
And although the word itself may be old, the area it describes is one of the most modern and forward-looking in London. Within one of the most beautiful neighbourhoods in the world, state-of-the-art laboratories are operating next door to buildings where experimental music is being composed. Scientists, engineers, artists and musicians rub shoulders every day of the week as they walk along Kensington Gore, Cromwell Road, Gloucester Road and the shiny new paving stones of Exhibition Road.
And if the locals thought the word obsolete in the 1870s, well, that just goes to show how far ahead of their time they were.
@gileadamit is the Licenseholder for TEDxAlbertopolis.
Image: flickr | Dave Patten
