As student Exhibition Interpretation Volunteers, we – Isla Defty, Alex Hull, Estie Gordon, and Paul Josi – have worked with the Galleries team to produce online content in support of Mohammad Barrangi’s exhibition, ‘One Night, One Dream, Life in the Lighthouse.’ The core aim of our project is to offer you an alternative way to connect with the exhibition, providing additional context to the themes explored in the artwork.
Using the links below you can navigate the content we have created. You can first read about the historical and literary contexts of the lighthouse, from antiquity to modern day. You can then listen to six recordings of poems, all exploring different interpretations of the sea. Finally, you can listen to two interviews with University of Leeds students describing their experiences with home and migration.
If you have any feedback about this project, we would love you to leave a comment on this page letting us know your thoughts.
Welcome to the Lighthouse
We were deeply inspired by the striking image of the lighthouse, what it can symbolise and how it has evolved through time. Through the online content we have prepared, we have briefly traced the history of the lighthouse from the famed, wondrous Lighthouse of Alexandria to the revolutionary engineering of John Smeaton’s Eddystone Lighthouse. We have also delved into how the lighthouse is explored in literature and film, from embodying hope and freedom to representing a psychological prison.
The Lighthouse of Alexandria
Built by the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Ancient Egypt in the 3rd century BCE, the Lighthouse of Alexandria on the island of Pharos is known as one of the wonders of the ancient world. While pre-Islamic literary accounts of the structure are rare, medieval Arab travellers paint a vivid picture of the mythical significance of the lighthouse.
The mythology of the lighthouse associated it with talismanic powers as well as with a treasure concealed in its base and a mirror (mir’ah) at its summit. This mirror was believed by some to offer a view as distant as Constantinople, and by others to focus the sun’s rays to burn hostile ships.
Behrens-Abouseif, 2006
At once it was both a structure from which the breadth of civilisation could be witnessed as well as a defensive fortress. Arab descriptions of the pre-Islamic structure are fully mingled with myth: al-Masudi describes the lighthouse as “resting on a foundation of glass in the shape of a crab”. The glass crab, the mirror, and the treasure at its base appear consistently in accounts spanning centuries of Medieval Arab travel writing. Although the lighthouse in its original Hellenistic construction likely did not survive into the Islamic period, due to it becoming the only monument from pre-Islamic Egypt to be restored continuously by Muslim rulers – its function of guiding ships to harbour and surveillance of the Mediterranean too much of a strategic necessity to ignore – the myths associated with it came to persist for centuries.
John Smeaton: The Engineer Who Revolutionised the Lighthouse
John Smeaton (born in Leeds in 1724) was the third engineer in 60 years to build a lighthouse on the Eddystone rocks, which lie 14 miles off the south coast of Plymouth. Smeaton’s meticulous planning and design revolutionised lighthouse engineering, leaving no room for the structure to fail. His unique design, inspired by the trunk of an Oak tree and comprised of interlocking stones cut in a dovetail shape, enthused and enlightened countless other engineers.
Battling harsh weather conditions and imminent war with France as part of the Seven Years’ War, Smeaton and his team completed construction on the lighthouse in 1759. Smeaton wrote a highly influential narrative and technical account of the building of his lighthouse. In a chapter describing the aftermath of its construction, Smeaton describes how the lighthouse transcended from a man-made creation to an inextricable part of the natural landscape, as solid and ancient as the rocks it was built upon:
The year 1762 was ushered in with stormy weather, and indeed produced a tempest of the first magnitude, the rage of which was so great, that one of those who had been used to predict its downfall, was heard to say; ‘if the Eddystone Lighthouse it now standing, it will stand till the Day of Judgement’: and in reality, from this time, its existence has been so entirely laid out of men’s minds; that, whatever storms have happened since, no enquiry has ever been made concerning it.
Smeaton, 1793
The structure stood strong for 123 years until it was dismantled in favour of a new, better positioned lighthouse. Today, the upper section of the lighthouse forms part of the Smeaton’s Tower monument on Plymouth Hoe and the remains of the base can still be seen on the Eddystone rocks next to the current lighthouse.
The Literary Lighthouse
A lighthouse is more than a lighthouse. In literature, film, and media, lighthouses represent personal and collective struggles, values, and historical events. The Pharos of Alexandria marks the beginning of a long history of lighthouses representing power – the power to create and defend borders, to explore the unknown, and to encourage trade (Gardiner, 2023). Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To The Lighthouse is one of the most well-known British representations of a lighthouse in literature. The lighthouse in the novel can be read as a symbol of personal freedom, hope, and psychological transformation (Stewart, 1977).
[Lighthouses] are the concrete symbol of our common humanity, of the fact that people we may never meet – at whom we may do no more than flash our lights in the dark — are also our concern.
Moran, 2014
In historical fiction, memoir, and poetry, the lighthouse has been used as a beacon, a light that guides one to safety. Though lighthouses have mostly been replaced by advanced navigation technology, they still hold strong symbolic importance in culture.
The Symbol of the Sea
We have been inspired by the poeticism of the sea being both dangerous and beautiful, guiding people to new homes, which we have expressed through audio recordings of several poems that each interpret the sea and its nature in unique ways. The final two poems are held by the University’s Special Collections.
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
I started Early – Took my Dog by Emily Dickinson
The Jumblies by Edward Lear
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An Ode Made by a Gentleman Upon the Conclusion of his Travels by Joseph Addison
An Ode by Anonymous
Personal Migration Stories
As part of this project we wanted to create a tangible connection between the University of Leeds student community and the artworks on display, allowing our student visitors to see themselves reflected in the exhibition. Several students have kindly provided us with short audio recordings detailing their personal migration stories and what home means to them. Transcripts for these recordings can be found at the bottom of this page.
Interview with Targol
Interview with Tawfiq
Further reading
The Lighthouse of Alexandria:
Behrens-Abouseif, D. (2006). The Islamic History of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Muqarnas, 23, 1–14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25482435
John Smeaton: The Engineer who Revolutionised the Lighthouse:
‘About Smeaton’s Tower’, The Box Museum Gallery Archive <https://www.theboxplymouth.com/outside-the-box/smeatons-tower/about-smeatons-tower#:~:text=The%20remains%20of%20the%20original,Light%20(1882%20to%20present)>
Mainstone, R. (1981). ‘The Eddystone Lighthouse’, in John Smeaton, FRS ed. By A.W. Skempton, London: Thomas Telford, pp.83-102.
Smeaton, J. (1793). A narrative of the building and a description of the construction of the Edystone Lighthouse with stone, Second Edition, London: Printed for G. Nicol, bookseller to His Majesty, Pall-Mall, p.177.
The Literary Lighthouse:
Gardiner, K. (2023). Love on the Rocks: Lighthouses in Literature as Gendered Geographies of Love. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 7(31), pp.1–13.
Moran, J. (2014). The lure of the lighthouse for our islanded souls. The Guardian. [online] 12 Apr. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/12/lighthouse-islanded-souls-symbols-humanity [Accessed 10 Mar. 2024].
Stewart, J.F. (1977). Light in To the Lighthouse. Twentieth Century Literature, 23(3), p.377. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/441263.
Woolf, V. (1927). To the lighthouse. New York: Columbia University Press.
Transcripts
Interview with Targol
TARGOL: My name is Targol Fayez. My mum came over here to England in 2000 from Iran. One of the reasons my mum came over here was because of the revolution that happened in 1979, I want to say. She was a teenager going into young adulthood. She always wanted to come to England because of all the prospects and less restrictions that the government had put on them, obviously with hijabs and what women could do and their rights. When she came over, she did her PhD at [Leeds] Beckett after me and my brother were born. That was another option she wanted to pursue because she always loved being in education. She did her studies on Iranian women. She got a book published on it, which was really cool. She always reaches out to her community and keeps friends. She does lots of cultural stuff still, like food, meeting with her friends, [reading] poems. She’s on apps like Telegram and Whatsapp. Modern-day [technologies] have helped keep her connected.
TARGOL: All I know about Iran is from my mum and dad. We went there when we were young but I’ve only been there twice. Through grandparents over FaceTime, videos on the news, or videos from family members. I feel connected but obviously I don’t feel fully connected because I wasn’t born there and I’m not living there. I try to practice Farsi with my parents. I speak Farsi with them at home. That’s another way it links to it. On the other hand with my brother, he talks in English with me so his identity might be somehow different to mine.
TARGOL: Home to me is having a good community, having friends and having a free environment where no one judges you and someone is always there for you.
Interview with Tawfiq
PAUL: Hello Tawfiq.
TAWFIQ: Hello.
PAUL: Would you like to introduce yourself?
TAWFIQ: Yeah, so my dad is from Bangladesh, my mom is from the UK, and I was born in the UK, moved to Bangladesh when I was two, then lived there until 2016, when I moved to Thailand for my GCSEs and A levels, and then came back to the UK to start uni.
PAUL: How do you remember any experiences that your dad may have told you about his experiences moving from Bangladesh to the UK?
TAWFIQ: He doesn’t talk about it a lot I think because it’s not so exceptional for him in his head because, I mean, he lived in Canada for a while. I don’t even know when he lived in Canada but he lived in Canada for a while for some undisclosed amount of time. And also [he] lived in the UK where he met my mum. But I think he was pretty well-integrated into those migrant communities because he grew up in Bangladesh and could speak Bangla and is a very sociable person. So I’m sure it wasn’t very hard for him to kind of find spaces for himself, but [he] never thinks it’s important to mention to me because, since my parents moved back to the UK with me, and my dad’s like only recently been talking about racism, but I don’t know if he feels like he experienced racism when he lived in Canada or the UK when he was younger, or if he just didn’t notice it, I guess.
PAUL: And how does that experience differ from how you may have experienced that?
TAWFIQ: I guess coming to the UK for me, it was weird because like, there’s a lot of stuff that they don’t tell you about in school. When I was in school, I went to British international schools and they would teach us about like Cockney rhyming slang, like as if it was really important. So then all my, most of my teachers were British and so those teachers and my mum were the main source of information about the UK for me, I guess, which was weird because a lot of it’s not how it actually is in the UK.
PAUL: So do you feel alienated from England, in a sense, only being English, having a British passport, but you’ve only really lived here since you moved back, as it were, for Uni?
TAWFIQ: Yeah, I, yes, uh, but also, I like to, I can’t speak, like, my English is really weird and very, I guess, flattened, because I’ve learned it very methodically. And I was always speaking to people who probably either didn’t have English as the first language or learned it the same way that I did where learning it at school or around, you know, a couple of family members who were speaking English. So I didn’t get a broad idea of how English was spoken.
PAUL: You didn’t get a social linguistic experience.
TAWFIQ: Yeah. Which I didn’t know was a thing until I came to the UK and people started speaking to me, like, I didn’t know English, which is weird, because it’s the only language I speak.
PAUL: Only speaking English, did you feel alienated in Bangladesh and Thailand?
TAWFIQ: Yeah, because like, in like international schools, they always kind of isolate you from the rest of the community. Not like on purpose, but that’s just how the community kind of works.
PAUL: That’s how it functions.
TAWFIQ: Yeah, um. But it’s, what’s weird is that most of these people were, that I knew were somehow affiliated with government or like the UK government or Western governments because they’d be like diplomats or something. But then coming to the UK, it’s been really apparent the disparity and living situation of just the general population [between] that you see in Bangladesh and the UK, like it’s, it’s quite, it was quite jarring for like the first two years that I’ve lived here, I couldn’t like look around and not look like a, look at a building and be like, oh man, those bricks, those bricks, those bricks are here because of my country, which I was so, I used to associate more with being Bangladesh. Bangladesh is my country and I’m now in England, even though I’m technically, legally, more English and I only speak English. I’m kind of culturally more English. I didn’t grow up with like Bengali culture in lots of ways.
PAUL: How do you mediate the notion of home between all of that?
TAWFIQ: Well, it used to be like Bangladesh used to be more home for me. But that’s because like we had, we lived in the same house for 12 years and then when I came to the UK my parents came with me. And for them it was like, okay, fine because they’ve lived here, lived in the UK before. They weren’t really gone for that long, I guess. But then they’re like, they were living in like rented housing. And it was weird because like then there was no history to any of it. So that wasn’t really my house, I guess. And I just felt, I don’t know anymore, I think, I more feel less, I feel less like I’ve got like a single home now.
PAUL: How do your parents feel about it?
TAWFIQ: I think, you know, I think my mom feels fine. I remember when we first, when like we first were staying in a hotel while they were looking for a place to live, they, my mum was like, it’s so nice to be back. Isn’t it? And I was like, ah, I don’t know what you mean by that, but okay. And my dad, I think. My dad likes doing the kind of like laddy British people speak. He’s really good at kind of, I think, assimilating like that. He’s very sociable and so he can kind of pattern match with people. I think so. I think he likes it, but yeah, I don’t know. I think also like for me, as a kid in Bangladesh, it’s a very different experience from being an adult.
PAUL: Yes.
TAWFIQ: And it doesn’t sound easy from what they’ve told me.
PAUL: And being a kid in an international school is different to being a kid. To some extent as well, of course. Very interesting. Thank you for all of what you just said.
TAWFIQ: You’re welcome.
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