24 hours in Svendborg, Denmark

About a month ago I spent exactly 24 hours in the small harbour town of Svendborg for a course development meeting for one of the places I teach, I say course development meeting, but it was way more than that, good food, good jokes and a lovely hotel room that was stripy:



When I looked out the window I could see a stripy building and when I took a walk on the harbourside, I saw a star surrounded by stripes. This town is all about sailing and shipping and the building of ships and it's all over town. This place is filled with drunk ghosts brawling and Gods trying to save their souls, its workmanship and its tall tales and sights you wouldn't believe.



This place holds its history dear, there's a part of the harbour reserved for tall ships, but they move on too - it's not a tacky tourist trick, this maritime back story, it's just part of what this place is, many a Danish town, including the one that's currently my home, could learn from this.



Something I've found in several of the smaller towns I've been to, is that developers are beautifully absent - developers are currently destroying the soul of my town, everything is made slick and pretty, so most things that are left alone gains a certain interestingness here - merely because there's so little of it. (Which is sad from a creative point of view.) I walked around the next morning to explore before heading home, chatted to the amazingly friendly people of this town and stumbled across this old-shop-turned-subconscious-artwork:



Two drunks approached me and told me that the guy who owns it made the door our of an old fireplace, but that he'd never really done any more work on it.



There are good shops too, possibly the most interesting bookstore I've seen in Denmark is here, it's called "Troels"and the geeky staff was throwing pop-cultural references at me as if they were Kevin Smith characters, there's heaps of ornamental architecture everywhere and there's a bakery with no less than three signs out for reasons that escape me.



From this place you can sail to a number of small Islands and I'm very tempted to take a secret club around them, but we'll need a bigger boat, or just any boat.

hidden gems

This summer, we went to a small island off the east coast of Jutland (Denmark.)
On our way there we passed a building that caught my eye - it was an odd mix of different building styles and looked something like this:



In passing, I saw a sign that said Glud Museum. After a bit of googling I found the website and on leaving the island on our way back we decided to pay a visit, mostly because of a certain folk-arty influence that flows through our work at the moment, but also because a bit of reading had convinced me that the founder of this museum was an interesting fella - he built the strange house and produced work like this:



At various points of his life, he had been submitted to mental hospitals and he had been banned from teaching drawing to a group of students. This guy was not technically mentally ill - he was just hot-headed and had strong opinions (Anti drink, smoke, coffee, meat).

He had a great love of architecture, of crafts and of preserving buildings for the past and because of that we had the chance to see this hidden gem of a museum. I had never heard of it before, but it would leave an impression and would directly influence the building of our Signalling System: We based the colour scheme on objects seen at Glud Museum - being a non-dane Annabelle was better at noticing things I had been accustomed to all my life - it takes an outsider to notice.



We'd like to return with a secret club, we'd like to organise some event there - these things shouldn't just be for big cities. Of course the eternal problem of funding will arise, but we will see if we can figure that out.

We will also need to investigate - if this little wonder escaped our eyes for so long, what other amazing stuff is out there? There's a communication task here too - why haven't we heard of it? there's a similar, but higher profile museum a bit further north - should these cooperate? Should Glud Museum target people nearer to the other museum?