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23
May 15

The story of Billiter Street

Once upon a time Adam came over to see us. Being the history major that he was and the genealogy buff that he is, he has traced his ancestors migration to the new world.

He is descended from Richard Mynatt, who came over to the colonies from England in 1749. Mynatt, the son of a sailor, was a 20-year-old cook who signed a four-year agreement of servitude with Thomas Lee. He would go to Virginia and become the head cook of Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. (Thomas was his grandfather.)

When Thomas Lee died, Mynatt’s contract was passed to Philip Ludwell Lee. When Mynatt’s servitude was up, he asked for his freedom and the money he was owed. Philip said no, so Mynatt went to court. He became the first indentured servant in America to win his freedom in court.

Philip would serve in the House of Burgesses, but died before the Revolution. Two of his brothers, Richard Henry and Francis Lighthorse, signed the Declaration of Independence. Stands to reason that Mynatt knew them.

Now, Adam has been to Stratford Hall. He’s climbed into the attic space where Mynatt lived for four years. Some of his recipes are said to still be on file there.

But that might be about the only thing Mynatt left behind. He moved a few counties to the north when he gained his freedom in 1754. He started a family and later worked as a courier for George Washington, serving two tours of duty, in the Revolutionary War. Richard’s eldest son, William, is also on Revolutionary War rosters.

In 1787 Mynatt sold his Virginia land and moved the family to east Tennessee, where he bought several hundred acres of farmland. He worked as a doorkeeper for the Southwest Territorial House of Representatives.

He died in 1823 in Union, Tennessee and is buried there, in a family cemetery. He was 96 or 100 years old, depending on which record you like. He and his wife, Sarah, had 10 children.

Adam has been to the Mynatt cemetery. But he’s never been to where the ancestral roots began. Adam has found the document that showed Mynatt’s immigration and servitude. It lists the road where Richard Mynatt lived in England, in London.

Let’s find it on a map, we said, when he came to visit.

As these things do, one search led to a neighborhood, which led to looking over every street in the area and there it was. Billiter Lane is now Billiter Street. And it was very close to where we were.

So we went for a visit.

It is a small little road, and of course it looks nothing like mid-18th century London.

This is the oldest building on Billiter, and it is from the 1860s. No one Richard Mynatt knew when he left for the colonies would have ever seen this place. Nor would their grandkids. What I’m saying is, it has been some long time since Mynatt left.

It is a small little road. This is a photo taken while standing on one end of the modern Billiter. You can see the other end from here.

It was cool to see where it all started. A young man who left for reasons lost to history, worked hard and turned himself into a free man, a successful land owner in the new world. He worked on the edges of history and raised a family. And here’s one of his great-great-greats now, wondering where on this street an English sailor raised a future American cook.

And that’s the story of Billiter Street.

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22
May 15

Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey has more than a millennium of history behind it. Monks moved in around 960 AD. England have crowned royalty there since 1066. The structure reaches back to the 13th and 16th centuries. Seventeen monarchs are buried there, and more than 3,000 other people besides. Many of them especially important to the United Kingdom and the world. They could use a good dusting in places, but it is a beautiful church.

No photos inside, but here are some from the courtyard, including the famous west towers and flying buttresses.

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21
May 15

Tourism pictures

We enjoyed our afternoon tea today. We’ve been with a lovely guide who has been so kind and fun and cheerful — she’s an actress who does walking and bus tours on the side, so you can imagine the personality. We bought her high tea this afternoon and sat and chatted with her about this and that. And then she told us all of the places we should go shop.

Not that we are big shoppers, mind you.

You can see in the top left corner the salt and pepper shakers. These are the ones from the adjacent table:

So we walked around Liberty, a fancy-smancy place where we’d normally never go. But we found a huge selection of recovered Indian drawer pulls. Then we tried to mentally count how many drawers and doors we have in our house. We bought enough for both bathrooms and the laundry. They are going to look awesome when we install them. And they’re direct from India, by way of London. So cosmopolitan.

In Liberty, they don’t forget. These markers are placed in a prominent stairwell. People probably rarely stop to think of them, but they don’t forget.

We pass by the All Souls Church on Langham place on some of our walks. They get some nice light on their building in the late evening.

A water bottle I picked up somewhere, but with a message:

We saw this walking home from dinner tonight:

Why this car is ever parked is a mystery:

It just wants to go fast:

Or is that just me?

adventures / football / London / photo — Comments Off
21
May 15

Meeting with the Jacksonville Jaguars

In London, the Jags’ rep still pronounces it Jag-U-Ars. It is delightful. We mentioned that a few Auburn guys were signed by Jacksonville, and she discussed several of the recent acquisitions from the SEC. Not the S-E-C, but the “SEC.” It was delightful.

And Laura Oaks, director of the Jags’ UK sponsorships, knows her stuff. This was a fascinating chat.

So the Jags have the exclusivity deal in London. This works well because they have limited market demographics at home — new franchise, much of their geography is actually in the Gulf and a great deal of their presumed Jacksonville fanbase is made up of military folks, transient or otherwise engaged fans. When owner Shad Khan made a multiyear commitment it might have seemed odd to some observers. But when you hear about what they are doing, a lot of things will start to make sense.

For the raw numbers, one game in London is worth the same amount of money as two games in Jacksonville in terms of the ticket yield. There will be three NFL games in Wembley this year, and they’re expecting to fill the 85,000 seat stadium for each game. Some four percent of the fans will be American and six percent more will come over from Europe. The rest are from the UK. The NFL estimates they have 28 million “avid fans” in the country.

So the first question is, “How do we make ourselves a mainstream sport?”

It is a multi-layered problem.

To mainstream they’re trying to become a top five team among the UK fanbase. They’re currently ranked as the number 10 team among NFL franchises there, but they’re surging. When they started the Jags could count 508 fans there, now they have a list with 35,000 fans. This, Oaks says, is a solid commercial base.

So the Jags are the fastest growing fanbase in the U.K. That multi-year deal helps, and along with that the commercial exclusivity that comes with it. They’ve also done a great deal of player, veteran, cheerleader availability programs to create a sense of openness with the fans.

Some of the problems start with the basics of football. They’re educating fans and employees about the game. Oaks told us about how she was hired for the job with no knowledge of the sport. (She’s an accomplished sports marketer and a quick study, but on day one she knew nothing of the sport.) Also, London is hugely competitive in sports. There are 15 football clubs in the city, a pro basketball team, a handful of rugby squads, cricket and an active outdoors cultural to compete with.

So you’re teaching a sport to a new nation. You’re doing it with a team that is, hopefully, on the rise.

“We are dealers in hope,” Oaks said. “We must at least give people the hope that we could win.”

Jacksonville’s commitment means they are the only team with commercial rights in London, but they are a young team, they haven’t yet won anything to merit a great deal of attention and so on.

“You’re taking a product into a new market, how much do you Anglicize it? How much do you Americanize it?”

So we’re talking about culture of sport as much as we’re talking about the field or the branding or anything of that sort. Oaks said there’s definitely a “love affair with that Americana feel” that allows a fan to get beyond themselves and whoop and holler. But there is an aversion to the commercialization that we are accustomed to tuning out here in the States.

The Americana isn’t just limited to a huge play. They are having great success with the off-the-field fun. Oaks says they’re estimating 600,000 fans taking part in the pre-game tailgating festivities on Regent’s Street. I asked her how they mine those people as prospective fans. If you have 35,000 people in a Jags’ database and know you’re getting somewhere between 85,000 and 255,000 into Wembley (allowing for returning fans) then there are a lot of people left to consider.

So they’ve turned to a Fan Pass app. To take part in certain tailgating activities you have to have the app. To use the app you have to input data. That information about you goes back to the league and to the Jags.

There’s a big fan difference in the UK too, and Oaks says it leaves American fans amazed. They’re looking at this with the idea that players drive fans which drive teams, and so they are working hard to bring the two closer together. They’re pointing at those interactions as part of the success story. Oaks says they push 50,000 fans through Trafalgar Square in a four hour period for NFL events.

Successful as the grassroots efforts have been, traditional broadcast efforts remain a winner both in terms of teams and marketing. But Oaks said this global-NFL program is about more than 60 minutes on the gridiron.

“Fans have become die hard fans very quickly. This is about belonging and engagement. People want to belong to something. This is why sport is so powerful.”

Some of the most successful NFL brands in the UK are the Patriots — winners get recognition — and teams that were strong in the 1980s. Oaks said that three of the of the BBC channels back then were showing church programming on Sundays. One was showing football. So, if you are of a certain age, she said, you grew up and perhaps remained a fan of the Giants or Dolphins or the like. They were on TV. (I suspect Buffalo and the Niners land in that group, too.) Winners get recognition.

“Shad Khan wants this to be an internationally-recognized brand.”

Now think about this. The NFL has this inroad to London, but there are league efforts in Brazil, Germany and China as well. The question is, “How best to activate those markets?”

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20
May 15

Visual journalism at the BBC

Today we had the privilege of meeting Amanda Farnsworth, and Bella Hurrell, the editor and assistant editor of visual journalism at the BBC. They gave us a tour of their new, amazing, newsroom. Here’s the overhead map:

Farnsworth told us the BBC will be merging more of their products now that their national elections are over. She said it is already happening in video “with a vengeance. You can see even at the technical level TV and the web are coming together. We are trying to make that happen everyday.”

Visual journalism at the BBC is staffed by TV graphics personnel, editors, online designers, developers and coders. They’re faced with eternal challenges and goals of standing out distinctively, being lively and modern and creating understanding.

Here’s a glimpse of the newsroom from what would be the top-left corner of that graphic above:

There’s a challenge the BBC has that you don’t see framed the same way at home. Everyone in the UK pays 145 pounds annually and gets the eight channels, radio and on demand. That drives a lot of programming, Farnsworth said.

“We have to produce content that appeals to everyone. We have to produce content that does appeal to a narrow group.”

One of three identical control rooms the newsroom can use:

Farnsworth showed us a few apps they’ve developed, and then discussed how they’ve used those to create web and television packages. They have some called “personal relevance calculators,” like the “What class are you?” app. They put a reporter on the street and stood up passersby, asking questions from the app which were derived by sociologists work. The data then tried to help the audience determine where they fit in the social strata.

Hurrell showed us the video. “For us what was important is that it worked across (media) platforms.”

And of course all of that is shareable, linkable.

“We think of something that tells a story that’s reusable. That’s where the personal relevance comes back into play. How much property do you have? What’s your health like? How much money do you make compared to big sports stars?

Farnsworth showed us their green screen room and the interactivity they’ve created from it. They put a reporter in there for a piece on “How to put a human on Mars.”

The Mars model was made by a TV 3D designer and the video was a 3D virtual reality design. Farnsworth said that’s something they’re looking to do more of in the future.

She showed us another video of an interactive video using TouchCast — which I have and love and should actually use — that helped tell the Deepwater Horizon story. This was an interactive video, using the TouchCast technology that lets you manipulate things within the video rather than clicking items outside of the video box.

Farnsworth says they’ve done a great deal of experimentation with that sort of thing, but they aren’t very successful. (Yet, I’d say.)

“They’re not very popular because, I think, people don’t know what to do with it, but we want to lead the way.”

Aside: Do you know what I hear from media entities everywhere I go? (No matter what country I’m in … ) “We’re behind in that.” Daily Mirror and BBC would each tell you, for example, that they were late into jumping into the social media pool. Farnsworth essentially told us that today. But now, here, the Beeb is saying they want to lead the way. When a humongous property like the BBC, or some other national/global property, decides to make the imprint, they’re going to dictate usability terms, rather than the users doing it from bottom up. This is going to be fascinating.

One of the boards they use to observe realtime status updates on stories. It is like air traffic control:

She talked about some ISIS projects they’ve built with an in-screen graphic overlay that promotes interaction. This is about “putting users in control versus watching, giving users choices.”

The BBC was a big part of this incredible, incredible, Bob Dylan project. You can’t embed it, and I can’t do it justice, but go watch this presentation by Dylan and Interlude.

That’s an amazing promotional, entertainment tool. But it isn’t all fun and games. The BBC, of course, still does the heavy lifting of traditional journalism and the even heavier lifting of data journalism. Hurrell said they’re crunching huge sets of data, often down the postal code level. She said they’re also doing one global data project each month. One of their recent projects had to do with tracking global jihadist attacks.

And all of this has to be done with an eye toward designing across platforms. Which device for this? Which device for that? Here’s the note that makes you stand up in take note. On the weekends, the majority of the BBC’s consumption takes place on mobile devices. That’s a trend that started in 2013.

An overhead view of a portion of the BBC newsroom:

Then Hurrell talked about #BBCGoFigure, which was one of my favorite things about the meeting — and there was plenty to love. But this is a social first infographic strand, atomized data journalism with just two data points. This is a daily infographic. You can see examples of it here. Why everyone isn’t doing this escapes me.

The plan with social media, Farnsworth said, is that you go to the best place. (This varies by time and circumstance.) The best social media, she says, is one that engenders conversation. (See the #BBCGoFigure note above.)

“During the campaign,” Farnsworth said, “we did a lot more social media because we could see how important it has become.”

And this impacted their TV work. They used similar color palettes for the web and television, and put movable, shareable policy cards into action to help explain the political parties during election season. The interactive cards looked the same as the ones you could see on broadcast.

Then there was election night. It comes once every five years in the U.K., so the BBC pulls out all of the toys. They shot Downing Street and then put it up on their green screen for wonderfully immersive segments on explaining the election results. Here’s a short clip:

Here’s another one from “inside” the House of Commons:

The BBC is a great trip. They had to get back to work, but I want to see the entire operation. You get the sense that this is, perhaps, what a modern newsroom should feel like. And you wonder how many of them there are. Not nearly enough.