Grand Designs
“Big Big Train is not standard. It’s not a run-of-the-mill thing. It’s different just by the very nature of what we do.”
David Longdon
“There’s no political message to it at all. It’s about people, it’s about culture, it’s about learning, it’s about discovery.
Greg Spawton
July 8, 1822, Italy. The body of Percy Bysshe Shelley washes up on the shores of the Gulf Of La Spezia. Shelley’s boat, Don Juan, was caught in a sudden storm and he drowned. Shelley was one of the great Romantic poets of the age, a shooting star whose journey had taken him from sleepy Horsham and English manners to fame, notoriety and, ultimately, tragedy, half a continent away. He wasn’t even 30 when he died, but his name still echoes two centuries later…
November 1, 1611, London, England. The first recorded performance of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest takes place at Whitehall Palace in Westminster. This dreamlike fable sets rationality against magic on an unnamed island in the Adriatic. At the play’s denouement, one of its central characters, the spirit Ariel, is freed from imprisonment by the island’s magician-ruler Prospero to ride the air until the end of his days, a metaphysical journey of a different kind…
August 20, 1977, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The Voyager 2 probe is launched. Sixteen days later its twin, Voyager 1, follows it into the furthest-flung reaches of this galaxy and beyond, the greatest journey in the history of humankind. Both ships carry copper records
