Hannah Wurzburger obituary
Born in Berlin to assimilated Jewish parents, Edith (nee Herrmann) and Max Gibianski, a violinist and teacher, Hannah arrived in the UK in September 1939, aged five. Her brother, Manfred, had died of measles as an infant. Both her parents, as well as aunts and uncles, would be killed by the Nazis.
Hannah stayed first in an abusive children's home, but completed her education at Stoatley Rough boarding school in Haslemere, Surrey, where she thrived. The school famously became a haven for hundreds of Jewish refugee children.
From 1950 until 1954, Hannah studied painting at Farnham School of Art, known for its vibrant artistic community, then attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She completed her studies despite suffering a mental breakdown due to childhood traumas.
After graduating, Hannah taught art in secondary schools in Nottingham and London, worked on a kibbutz in Israel and, through a fellow German-Jewish refugee, Daniel Wurzburger, met his brother Walter, a musician and composer, who had settled in London. Hannah and Walter married in 1966 and their twin daughters, Ruth and Madeleine, were born in 1967. The marriage was extremely happy, despite a 20-year age gap.
During the 70s and 80s, Hannah continued teaching, raised her daughters and produced many designs for etchings and linocuts; one of them, Cockerel, is held in the V&A Prints & Drawings Collection. She enthusiastically supported the Kingston Philharmonia, Kingston's local orchestra, founded by Walter in 1974.
An exhibition of her paintings was held at Kingston Museum in 1994. Hannah's still lifes, portraits and landscapes became increasingly abstract; she cited Cézanne: 'Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone'.
After Walter's death in 1995, she rediscovered textiles, joining a weaving group and producing many exciting pieces (exhibited at the Rose theatre, Kingston, in 2019). Her loose, experimental approach employed muted colours and yarn-layering to build up surface texture.
Hannah later contributed to the Association of Jewish Refugees' Refugee Voices project as a Holocaust survivor.
Throughout her life, my mother lacked confidence in herself and her creative talent. However, Hannah was a survivor, overcoming great odds to become artist, mother, teacher and create a loving and artistic home environment. She will be remembered as warm-hearted, eccentric and non-conformist with a great sense of fun.
She is survived by her daughters, Ruth and me, and two grandchildren, Elan and Yael.
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Telegraph
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The English countryside is paying the price for net zero
Jo Chapman lives in a two-storey red-brick semi on the edge of Leiston Common, close to Sizewell beach, Suffolk. There are vegetable beds and a polytunnel out front, and a studio in the garden where she sculpts with steel and clay. Her long, narrow garden stretches almost to the edge of the pine-fringed common, where gorse and heather cling to dry tussocky grass and sandy soil. Beyond that, the gently undulating land dips into water meadows speckled with wild yellow irises at this time of year, and then rises again towards Kenton Hills, a wooded area scarcely more than 40ft high. But in Suffolk's coastal flats, that's enough to be considered a hill and given a name. It's a landscape she knows intimately, one that she loves and even depends on. 'I have to go out into nature every day,' she says over a cup of coffee in her cosy kitchen. Chapman, who is 60 with a grey-flecked dark bob and a twinkling nose stud, lived in Leiston town until a few years ago when she seized the opportunity to move closer to the woods and heathland, to a place where she can step out of her house and enjoy what she calls her 'daily observational ritual walk and meditation'. Chapman used to go with her dog, a mixed terrier, but after he died, she mostly walks alone with her sketchbook. She often pauses to draw trees. 'I look for the structures and architecture in things,' she says. When she shows me round her artist studio, I can see echoes of their entangled branches in her abstract ceramics and sculptural models. Until recently, the walks were restorative, a time for quiet reflection, careful observation and attentive exploration. Lately, they have become more like a funeral procession. Directly in front of her home, a barrier of 2m-tall mesh fencing snakes along a rough track. It's the type of urban industrial fence used to contain crowds or keep people out, and it separates Chapman from a section of the heath she used to walk. But that hardly seems to matter, because the field itself has been transformed into a barren wasteland. When she gets up in the morning, it's the first thing she sees. Across a nearby road, there is more of this Heras fencing, this time replacing a 1,600ft stretch of old hedgerow that has been flailed and uprooted. The building site on the other side roars and belches with bulldozers and backhoes, their diesel engines drowning out the birdsong. It's the first thing she hears. Half a mile in the opposite direction, beyond the common, the water meadows and Kenton Hills, another seemingly endless fence has appeared, marking the abrupt edge of the woodlands and the start of a large building site full of excavators and front loaders, scraped berms of disinterred soil and gangs of men in high-vis vests scurrying about like industrious Doozers. At least the trees on Kenton Hills still stand; the once-contiguous woods of Goose Hill and Dunwich Forest are entirely gone. The reason for it all is the building of Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station. Chapman feels hemmed in, kettled by the new barriers, and anxious. 'It's very unsettling,' she says. She had paid attention to the plans, looked at the computer-generated imagery (CGI) and attended public meetings, so when construction began, she thought she was ready. But, she says, 'I feel shocked by the speed and the level of destruction. There's a constant feeling of being quite vulnerable, because you just don't know where it's going to happen next. You become hyper-vigilant.' Later, as we walk down the track that leads to Sizewell beach, with a row of pines on one side and galvanised steel on the other, Chapman tries to explain her sense of loss over the months as trees have been cut down, hedgerows ripped up and fields and heath flattened. ' It's like grieving. When you lose someone but then, as time passes, you carry on – and you realise that you can carry on – but that the world is different.' Twenty years ago, the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht studied communities living on the edge of new open-cast coal mines in Australia's Hunter Valley, people who stayed in the same place but saw the world around them transformed in distressing ways. Albrecht coined the term 'solastalgia' to describe their feelings of anguish and grief caused by this environmental change, the pain of lost solace. He wrote, 'Solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at 'home'.' In an era of climate change – as ice melts, seas rise, floods surge, wildfires burn, rains fail and heat increases – the world everywhere is being transformed, and Albrecht's term is gaining currency. The irony of Chapman's particular sense of loss is that the rapid environmental transformation she is witnessing is the result of UK efforts to forestall the slower environmental changes caused by climate change. The new nuclear power station is intended to help Britain achieve net zero emissions while meeting the insatiable demand for energy. This month, the Government announced it would contribute £14.2bn towards the cost of Sizewell C, but the project, to be built by French company EDF, still lacks both secure funding and a firm start date. Nevertheless, 'enabling works' have been underway since early 2024, felling 22,000 trees, removing long stretches of hedgerow and fencing off farmland and forest to clear the way for roads, park-and-ride sites, accommodation and other infrastructure. When full-scale construction begins, it will likely last for a decade or more. Compounding the landscape's turbulent reshaping are separate plans for substations and power cables to bring Britain's expanding North Sea wind energy ashore, along with new networks of high-voltage pylons. Whether caused by climate change or human efforts at mitigation, dramatic environmental disruption is a price we will all have to pay in the years to come. In the absence of concerted efforts to reduce individual energy consumption, the spread of solar farms, wind farms, converter stations, pylons and nuclear power stations is an inevitable necessity, not an option. The costs borne and sacrifices made by communities around Sizewell show what will be required of everyone to secure a clean energy future and limit the worst impacts of a changing climate. Will Jones was born on his family's 50-acre arable and dairy farm near the village of Yoxford. Lean, with the tanned skin of someone who spends more time outside than in, the 56-year-old is easy-going, with long grey hair tied up in a messy topknot and a tattoo peeking out from the sleeve of his T-shirt. 'This was our playground when we were kids,' he says, gesturing towards a patch of lawn, a series of vegetable beds, a jumble of outhouses, sheds and barns, a field of spring barley and the encircling mature hedgerows spiked with old oaks. As he grew up, his connection only deepened. 'Most of the land around here isn't our land, but I've roamed this land, it's our backyard, the wild place that we live in, and it's meant a lot to me. To see it devastated in this way…' his voice trails off, and his partner, Laura Gwynne, rests a hand gently on his chest. 'This area of Suffolk is in a state of shock,' she adds. Five miles inland from Sizewell C and Chapman's house, the changes around Jones and Gwynne's home are less extreme but scarcely less painful. A new roundabout, big enough to handle large lorries, is being built at Yoxford, and a link road is under construction a few hundred yards from Jones's home. Bright yellow diggers and graders trundle across the cleared land, causing the walls of their bungalow to vibrate. Jones confronts the shock head-on with regular walks to and along the building site. 'It's helpful for me to see the process, even if it's devastating to watch, because it's still a part of me, even if it's changing.' Gwynne finds it hard to look directly at the destruction. 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On the margin of one of their fields, close to a meadow of grasses and wildflowers they have reclaimed from crops, dozens of oak saplings, elder, sycamore and Scots pine are taking root. The acorns came from different places, including one that Gwynne collected from the church graveyard where her father is buried, in the nearby village of Theberton. 'Each means something to us,' she says. The young trees are now as tall as she is and, in years to come, will form a new fragment of mixed woodland. For Gwynne and Jones, it's about creating some space for nature and doing 'a small bit' to compensate for the destruction caused by Sizewell C. It's also about restoring meaning to the landscape, declaring their attachment and committing to the future. 'We're lucky to have all this, really lucky,' Jones says. EDF has its own plans to mitigate the impact of its construction, compensate for the damage, and repair the land. It has built a new nature reserve, named Wild Aldhurst, and says it will restore heathland, plant trees and recover wetlands. Residents remain sceptical, however. Gus Farnes has lived all his life in his family's 13th-century Suffolk pink longhouse next to the river Fromus. A figurative sculptor wearing a trucker hat and a chore jacket with 'Gus' on the pocket, Farnes has a foundry that looks out across the garden to what was once a medieval water meadow. 'My point of inspiration is how human activity over millennia influences the environment we live in and the landscapes we inhabit,' says the 41-year-old. With the coming of Sizewell C, Farnes has seen the velocity of human activity accelerate, and over the last two years, the water meadow of his childhood has been replaced by a Disneyland version, sculpted by the developers to compensate for the removal of marshes elsewhere. 'When I was a child, the fields were grazed in rotation by a dairy herd, the drainage ditches were all free-flowing, full of watercress, and we'd go dipping for stickleback, mucking about, doing the things kids do. All of that's gone,' Farnes says. We walk along a truck-wide road of compacted grey rubble, past neat fences and bright orange life rings installed next to 1ft-deep ponds, and reach a large plastic culvert through which the old stream now flows. Farnes calls it 'a municipal interpretation of what the countryside is,' replacing the 'bucolic, English, [John] Constable scene' of his memory. Farnes finds the removal of one environment to create a new one baffling, and describes his feelings as 'curiosity, anger, frustration, confusion, loss, and a feeling of contempt from the powers that be, directed at the landscape and those who live in it'. He acknowledges that the disruption he has suffered is 'quite minimal' and the new fen, in time, might even achieve the promise of greater biodiversity, but he can't help seeing the work as a form of mutilation and 'a sorry apology' for what came before. 'I try to be pragmatic – to stave off the anger – I'm not anti-progress, but it's at what cost?' says Farnes. For Chapman, Jones, Gwynne, Farnes and many others, the suddenness and scale of the environmental changes unfolding around them are an assault on the imagination as much as on the landscape; the bulldozing of places that inspire, offer comfort and calm, and where memories reside. It creates sadness, anxiety and confusion. But these are places of ecological as well as emotional importance. The Suffolk 'Sandlings' – named for the sandy, acidic soil and the purple-flowering 'ling' heather that grows there – is a rare ecosystem shaped by natural evolution and millennia of human intervention. A dry, rolling lowland heath of gorse, heather and grass, the Sandlings reaches its eastern edge at the low sandstone cliffs that crumble onto Suffolk's shingle beaches and are washed away by the encroaching silt-brown waves of the North Sea. Interspersed with mixed woodland and conifer forest, it bursts with biodiversity: birds, butterflies, moths, snakes, lizards, bees and beetles. On dusk walks, it is not uncommon to spot glowworms illuminating the bracken or hear the high-pitched drill of the nightjar's call. It is a place of startling variety and 'very soft edges', Chapman tells me, which makes the contrast with the new metal fences and denuded land all the more stark and jarring. Not everyone loves this landscape; to some, it appears desolate. The German writer WG Sebald found himself lost – geographically and psychologically – in the 'labyrinth' of the Sandlings in his discursive travelogue, The Rings of Saturn. There, he observed with a rising sense of panic the 'low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell; the flies buzzing about'. Sebald discerned entropy and decline here 30 years ago, and now, as building sites replace woods, fields and heath, his view seems prophetic. Sizewell C will be built alongside its predecessors, Sizewell A (1966-2006) and B (1995-present). What remains of A is a hulking, 100ft-high grey concrete and corrugated metal structure encasing two decommissioned gas-cooled Magnox reactors that had a combined output of 420 megawatts. Next door is the mosque-like Sizewell B, with its white reactor dome arcing over a sky-blue hangar containing a single pressurised water reactor that produces 1.2 gigawatts of energy – almost three times as much as A. Sizewell C will be bigger still in every way: taller, occupying more land and producing 3.2 gigawatts from its twin reactors – enough to power six million homes, according to EDF, which operates B and will build C. Construction is anticipated to take about 10 years and cost £38bn, but EDF's Hinkley Point C power station – which is the same design and model – has been under construction since 2017, has doubled in price, and is not likely to be completed until the end of the decade. It is easy to imagine the visual impact of Sizewell C's construction, partly because EDF has produced visualisations showing a thick forest of cranes and piercing floodlights illuminating the dark skies over Sizewell, and partly because the building site at Hinkley Point is a corollary. Harder to resolve is the impact construction will have on the soundscape of Suffolk's coastal heath. How will the rushing of wind through leaves, the call of owls and nightingales, or the rhythmic wash of the sea on shingle compete with the machines? A leading authority on the Sandlings was Lee Chadwick, who lived on the heath in a bungalow she built with her husband, Paxton, an artist who provided an intricate gatefold illustration of local reptiles for her 1982 book, In Search of Heathland. Communist Party members and local councillors, the Chadwicks are still renowned in Leiston, and their son Peter, 77, lives in the family bungalow with his wife, Bridget. Six months ago, Peter suffered a breakdown that the couple attribute partly to the stress and anxiety of the spoliation around them, and Peter struggles to get his sentences out, so when we meet, Bridget does most of the talking, with Peter listening carefully at her side. 'The week that all the hedging came down, we were absolutely devastated,' says Bridget, for whom the by turns frustrating and satisfying tasks of gardening, coaxing plants from the infertile soil or wrestling the bracken and brambles back from the field of heather, keep her outdoors often. The view from the couple's house of curiosities – full of Peter and Paxton's art, Lee's books and all their own accumulated belongings – is now Heras fencing. 'The awful thing, of course, is you get used to it,' says Bridget. They suggest I join them for their daily walk to Reckham Pits Wood. It's a warm early summer morning, cooler in the woods, with sunlight filtering through leaves and branches swaying in the light sea breeze. Bridget points out a towering spruce among the birch and oak, and a slender young pine that has threaded itself neatly up through the spreading branches of a much older oak in search of sunlight. Peter's ill health and the environmental destruction around them have become entwined, yet an attentive walk still soothes both. 'We have been very distressed at different times, [but] Peter and I are having to learn not to look at all the negatives; we're having to learn to really appreciate all the beautiful things around us.' Theirs is a purposeful striving towards acceptance when faced with the shock of a loved landscape disfigured. On the long path between sadness and acceptance of a future that is different, but a future nevertheless, they are finding a way to process the grief of what has been lost by focusing on what remains. 'I'm really paying attention,' Bridget says as we walk through the woods. 'I'm appreciating what we've got.' Recommended Labour's nuclear dream has destroyed my home: inside the Sizewell C planning row Read more
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Seven things to do with your leftover chip-shop chips
So you've had a lovely evening at the beach, with a glass of something cold and huge portions of fresh fish and chips – but what do you do with the leftovers? Specifically, if you can wrangle them away from the seagulls, the chips. There's nothing like a bag of chip-shop chips eaten outdoors, and although many may claim that there can never be leftovers of such a treat, reality begs to differ. And here's where, for cooks, it gets interesting. Because chip-shop chips have myriad possibilities, to the extent that the topic once went viral when historian Lucy Worsley shared a kitchen tip from a follower on social media. 'I have received a kitchen tip that would be HUGE IF TRUE,' she wrote. 'Can you really put leftover chip-shop chips in the freezer then use them as oven chips?' The intriguing post notched up huge numbers of likes and comments, with many respondents stating that instead of binning their greasy leftovers they enjoyed them second time round, finding reheated chips 'even tastier and more crispy' than when fresh from the chippy. 'Yes! Yes! Yes! I do it all the time,' wrote one chip-lover, 'and they're much better than frozen packet chips.' Recommendations for the best way to store and reheat the cold fries were varied. Dry frying is a popular method for renewing former glory. 'They'll fluff up like new,' said one of Worsley's followers. The air fryer, however, was undoubtedly the preferred method for most commenters. 'Store them in Tupperware in the fridge, cook them in an air fryer the next day,' advised one with another promise that they'll be 'better than when they came from the chip shop'. Tempted? Here's the lowdown on how to revitalise your old chips. Skip to: How to store leftover chip-shop chips The best ways to reheat Seven uses for yesterday's fries How to store leftover chip-shop chips If planning to eat them the next day, just chill the chips overnight. If not, freeze the chips in a bag. There is no need to freeze them flat on a tray first. Their oil coating doesn't freeze solid so they won't clump together. The best ways to reheat Leftover chips reheat nicely in the oven from both chilled and frozen. Spread them out on a baking tray in a single layer and roast at 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6. You'll need to judge how long to cook them depending on their thickness and how well done they were in the first place. I find the lighter-coloured, larger chips warm up best, becoming crispy, rather than too hard or dark. I get the quickest and crispiest results using my energy-efficient air fryer, but am unimpressed with microwaved fries, which turn out floppy and soggy. A large non-stick frying pan also works well, as long as they fit in a single layer. No need to add extra oil, just cook over a medium-high heat turning regularly until crisp. Seven uses for yesterday's fries Chip butty Reheat your chips in the oven or air fryer until piping hot. Give them a fresh toss with a little salt – and vinegar – if you like. Stuff between two slices bread (white is best, generously buttered) and serve immediately with your preferred sauce for dipping. Battered chips Toss in flour then dip them into a batter made from self-raising flour and sparkling water. Heat 2cm vegetable oil in a frying pan and cook for 3-4 minutes. Hash In a hot pan, fry some diced chorizo until crispy. Add a sliced onion and cook until soft, then stir in a red pepper and a chopped chilli. Cook for about 5 minutes. Chop up the leftover chips and mix them through the hash. Cook for a few minutes more, until everything is piping hot. Serve with a fried egg and a sprinkle of coriander. Tortilla Stir into beaten egg. Add herbs, onions or cheese. Cook over a low heat, turning until golden and set. Dirty fries Spread the chips out in a baking dish and sprinkle with paprika. Spoon over chopped tomatoes, grated cheese, sliced red onion and chillies. Bake at 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6 until bubbling. Alternatively, just melted cheese will do nicely. Poutine Reheat then cover with gravy. Scatter with diced curd cheese or mozzarella. Chaffles Take a handful of leftover chips and press them into a waffle iron. Cook over a low heat until golden and crisp. Serve savoury – with ketchup or your favourite sauce – or go sweet with a drizzle of maple syrup.
