"Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub"

So said Jack Kerouac in his Lonesome Traveler. We join John Rogers as he retraces a walk the Beat Generation novelist once took through London.

As the blurb on YouTube says:

American Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac, visited London in April 1957 while on a big trip just before the publication of his most celebrated book, On the Road. He recorded his trip in his book, Lonesome Traveler. 

This video follows the walk he took when he arrived by train at Victoria Station and walked past Buckingham Palace, up the Strand to Fleet Street to St Paul’s Cathedral. He then went to the King Lud pub for a ‘sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout’, before taking the bus back to Buckingham Gate. 

In Lonesome Traveler Kerouac wrote, ‘Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub’.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

You may also enjoy a post on Kerouac and Lonesome Traveler by C.G. Fewston.

By 1954 not even Dickie Attenborough was safe on a bombsite

I've been reminded of another children-and-bombsites film to fit into my schema of these postwar British productions. And it suggests that by 1954 these unofficial open spaces were just as dangerous to adults as they were to children.

Talking Pictures TV showed The Eight O'Clock Walk the other day. This was a film born out of concern at the death penalty and reliance upon circumstantial evidence.

As you can see in the clip above, Richard Attenborough has an April Fool trick played on him by a little girl who says she's lost her doll on a bombsite. Being in a happy mood, he tries to help her.

Later, she is found murdered on the same bombsite, And when that woman reports seeing Attenborough shaking his fist and chasing the girl, the police become very interested in him.

The original children-and-bombsites film was Ealing's Hue and Cry from 1947, which portrays the bombsites as an unofficial playground for all the boys of London - and the children shown are all boys, except for Joan Dowling.

But within a few years, British films; view of bombsites had changed completely - terrible things happened to small boys who wandered on to them.

The only substantial exception to this pattern I've found is Innocent Sinners from 1958. This film suggested that bombsites provided working-class children with the space and privacy they lacked in their overcrowded homes. It is also the only children-and-bombsites film with a girl at its centre.

What was so threatening about bombsites? The way Rose Macaulay painted them may give us a clue:

This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

It’s here among the "dripping greenery that grew high and rank, running over the ruins as the jungle runs over Maya temples, hiding them from prying eyes," that Barbary finds what Macaulay, in a letter about her novel to her friend Hamilton Johnson, calls the girl’s "spiritual home." These "broken alleys and caves of that wrecked waste" offer the traumatized, homesick Barbary a safe haven.

The Eight O'clock Walk is not on Talking Pictures catch-up service TPTV Encore, but you can find it on one of those dodgy Russian sites.

And - don't worry - Attenborough escapes the noose, but it takes an absurd, Perry Mason courtroom coup to save him.

Rare 1950s film of Thomas Cubitt's stuccoed streets in Pimlico

The billing on YouTube says of this film:

These pieces of originally silent film appear to have been either outtakes, film made for atmosphere or just as a recce of the area.

They were made for two British feature films made in the 1950s.

Most of the clips are connected to the film Hunted which starred Dirk Bogarde, and was released in 1952.

Some are connected with the later film Innocent Sinners starring Flora Robson and David Kossoff, and released in 1958.

Both these films use extensive outside shots in and around the Pimlico area, and for lovers of this unique "village" in the heart of London, they are well worth looking out for.

Both Hunted and Innocent Sinners are among my children-and-bombsites films. The first two clips here are clearly outtakes from Hunted, because you can see young Jon Whiteley in them.

Incidentally, most of the Pimlico scenes in Passport to Pimlico were shot in Lambeth - some on a set built on a bombsite off the Lambeth Road.

The music hall songs the poster has used as a soundtrack, have reminded me that, when I was young, my mother sometimes sang She Was Poor But She Was Honest.

And she included a verse that I cannot find anywhere online:

See 'im riding on an 'orseback
With his friends in Rotten Row,
While the victim of his passion
Slinks away to Pimlico.

That would have fitted well here.

Bramber Green: From bombsite to stone circle

I photographed these stones, which you can find off Judd Street to the south of St Pancras International, on the way to a Liberator drink one evening. I looked up their history when I got home.

The open space they grace is called Bramber Green. Until the second world war, says Ian Visits, it was an area of Georgian houses - you can see a photograph of an ornate house that stood there on London Picture Archive.

Then came the German bombers, after which the area lay derelict until the early 1960s, when it was cleared to create the park we see today.

I can't find the sculptor of these stones - the large one seems designed to encourage children to climb it - or when they date from, but the last major renovation of the site was in 2019.

The Joy of Six 1289

"Biden should have been managed off the stage in time for the party to have proper primaries, introducing a new generation of Democratic party politicians to the American public. Instead, the president clung on to the point where only Kamala Harris could realistically be the nominee. She was left having to campaign as a “change candidate”, trying to define herself as a new face while also defending her government’s record." Alistair Carmichael says the Democrats made one of the worst political mistakes in modern history.

Robert Saunders discusses the supposed role of the monarchy in times of political crisis: "In a democracy, the monarchy can only survive if it stands outside political contention. Yet that makes it a broken reed when it is the constitution itself that is in crisis. The logic of this situation is not that the monarch should be more politically active, but that we cannot rely on a ceremonial monarchy to protect the constitution from attack."

"If I say something is 'typical Boris Johnson', you have a mental picture. But what is 'typical Keir Starmer'? Worse, what is 'typical Jonathan Reynolds”' (He’s the Business Secretary, but you knew that.)" Robert Hutton on why itanto will take the satirists and sketchwriters time to get to grips with Labour.

Ella Creamer and Lucy Knight report on the glut of children's books written by celebrities and ask if the trend pushes aside genuine writers and makes it harder to find great children’s fiction.

Elizabeth Tingle introduces to Anthony Jenkinson, who was born in Market Harborough: "the records of his travels and his surviving letters comprise the first English descriptions of the lands and peoples of Muscovy and Tartary. With recent historical interest in travel, life writing, and perceptions of ‘other,’ the story of Jenkinson adds a Leicestershire and Rutland dimension to the processes of globalisation and empire that made the modern world."

"Now they’re almost gone, some of us have started to feel nostalgic for those wastelands. They were dangerous, mysterious and wide open. Those that remain, pending development, are invariably locked down tight, with heavy security and surveillance." Ray Newman cpnsiders love and death in the rubblescape.

Hue and Cry and the 'Dead End Kids' of the London Blitz

Embed from Getty Images

In my original article on children and bombsites in postwar British films, which really needs to be updated with my later discoveries, I noted how children's command of these spaces was celebrated in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry, but later films came to see them as freighted with danger.

One reason for this positive early view, I now believe, is the role played by London urchins during the Blitz.

In an article on the History Press site, Ian Parson reveals that many of the children evacuated to places of safety in the countryside soon voted with their feet and came back to London. Just before the Blitz:

evacuees, or to give them their proper title, ‘unattended children’, were returning to Liverpool Street Station at a rate of two and a half thousand every week.

What happened next is remarkable:

The youngsters who only a few months before had been tucked away, in England’s green and pleasant and safe land, were as it turned out, brave way beyond their years, and they had a name. They were the ‘Dead End Kids’ and they were the brain child of 17 year old Patsie Duggan, son of a Poplar bin man. 

Soon a gang of scruffy urchins, including Patsie’s 13 year old sister Maureen, and recruits as young as ten, had equipped themselves with an assortment of tools, buckets of sand, rope and axes. Night after night, raid after raid, they were out there. Scouring the area for people in distress, hoping to perform the most daring rescue this time round. With no adults to supervise them, the game very quickly got seriously out of hand.

During the Blitz they were responsible for a series of life saving missions. On one really bad night, as reported in the London Fire Journal, an eye witness describes, ‘They rushed up the stairs, ready it seemed to eat fires!’ The same witness then described them as ‘emerging from the building, some of them with their tatty clothes smouldering.’

They became known as unofficial fire-fighters across the East End. But it was a dangerous game.

During the Blitz children accounted for one in ten deaths, and unfortunately, or perhaps inevitably, two of Patsie’s group were killed on duty. Ronnie Ayres and Bert Eden died together on a night when Patsie himself was also badly injured. They were putting out incendiary bombs when without warning three heavy bombs came down the other side of a wall to where they were furiously working away. They died instantly, killed by the falling wall.

This sounds too good to be true - a case of heroes being found at the darkest hour of the war - but there are other sources that tell the same story. One example is Frank Lewey, who had been mayor of Stepney during the Blitz, writing in John Bull magazine (23 October 1943):

We had some bombed-out children billeted at the "People's Palace." One night a cluster of incendiaries fell in the gardens and started to blaze up against some buildings. The resident caretaker, Mr. Crawley, who himself won a reputation as a fire fighter, told me, next morning, how those small boys "went over the wall like a pack of monkeys, and dowsed the bombs as if they were snuffing so many candles." They ought to have been in bed; but their action probably saved the "People's Palace." 

The Stepney Scouts deserve a word to themselves. Into one of our shelters a woman came crying, with five tiny children trailing crying after her. Her house had caught fire, and, in the rush to escape, she had left one of her babies behind. Two small Scouts, almost extinguished beneath steel helmets, instantly raced out through shrapnel and bomb-bursts, calmly entered the blazing house, and brought the little girl back. She looked very proud of her escort. And well she may have been! There were over 700 people in the shelter at the time.

No wonder Hue and Cry was a "notable box office attraction" at British cinemas in 1947.

The Joy of Six 1239

"The UK and EU cannot help but matter to each other. Regardless of the formal terms of the relationship, developments on one side of the Channel do affect what happens on the other." Brexit boredom is one thing, but there’s a real problem when Britain’s leaders won’t even talk about Europe any more, says Simon Usherwood.

Anusha Singh profiles Hina Bokhari, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats in the London Assembly. Hina is the first ethnic minority woman to lead a group at City Hall since its establishment in 2000, and also the first ethnic minority woman to lead a group in any of the UK’s devolved institutions.

"The idea that Labour’s electoral success depends on its ability to win back imagined hordes of socially conservative voters in the distant north and Midlands remains central to the party’s self-image." Alex Niven on the myth of the 'red wall'.

Hannah White argues that whether a government’s majority is enormous or merely substantial the more significant factor for democracy is the attitude a government takes to the role of parliament and the value of scrutiny.

Ben Highmore discusses the postwar adventure playground movement: "What if you gave children and young people their own space? A third space that wasn’t school and wasn’t home. Somewhere not orchestrated by obedience ... . A place where young people might have a great deal of autonomy in how they occupied the space and what they did with their time."

"Bringing psychoanalysis into the conversation explains so much, not only about Mitchell’s 1970s preoccupations, but about the looping, overflowing structure of her songs as the decade progressed. I wasn’t surprised to discover that Mitchell's own experiences with therapy were at best mixed." Ann Powers finds that the preoccupations of Joni Mitchell's work mirror those of American society throughout her career.

All 19 Ealing Comedies ranked by the Guardian

Andrew Pulver has ranked all 19 Ealing Comedies for the Guardian. In the process, he notices some films that even I have not seen. But I've seen most of them, so here are a few thoughts on his reviews and rankings. 

Following his counting up the list up from 19th and last place, my first comment is that Hue and Cry is ranked far too low at 16th place. The film a celebration of the way boys ruled London and its bombsites - this would never be seen in such a positive light in a British film again - and there are fine performances by Jack Warner and Alastair Sim.

I can't make much of a case for The Magnet, which stars an 11-year-old James Fox, being placed much higher than the 14th place where Pulver has it, but he gets some things about the film wrong. Fox did not go near a drama school until he was 16: the accent he has in the film is that of a prep school boy of the day, and this is just what he is playing here. Parts of  The Wirral were very posh in 1950. 

Barnacle Bill is at 13. Pulver, quite fairly, says Alec Guinness never gets out of third gear in this film, but then Guinness in third is better than most actors in fifth. When you see his walk at the start of the film you believe absolutely that he is a former Naval officer. The film also sees Ealing take the side of teenagers against the stuffy establishment of the seaside resort where it is set. And where else will you see Guinness boogying with Jackie Collins?

Harry Secombe's star vehicle Davy is too high at 10. As Pulver admits, he isn't much of an actor and the film's approval of his character's surrender of his operatic ambitions for the sake of the family variety act is a bit Ealing-by-numbers.

I'm pleased to see the The Maggie (which is rather like a harder-edged Local Hero) in seventh place, which is one above the more celebrated The Titfield Thunderbolt. For me, the latter film's awareness of its own quirkiness is a sign of the studio's decline. The train must be saved because its quaint, not because it helps anyone get to where they want to go.

From now 6 down to 1, Pulver gets it pretty much right:

6. Passport to Pimlico

5. Whisky Galore!

4. The Man in the White Suit

3. The Lavender Hill Mob

2. The Ladykillers

1. Kind Hearts and Coronets

They are all celebrated films, though maybe The Man in the White Suit deserves to be even better known. Its satire hits the spot more accurately than the Boulting Brothers ever managed, perhaps because it doesn't star Ian Carmichael.

It's also worth noting that Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its period setting, is far from being a typical Ealing film. And Pulver gets it right in saying that Dennis Price is its real star.

The Intruder (1953): A companion piece to The League of Gentlemen and another children-and-bombsites film

This is not a proto version of Royston Vesey, but another film about how soldiers fared after the  second world war in which Jack Hawkins plays the Colonel.

But, unlike in The League of Gentlemen, its not Hawkins who has turned to crime at the start of the film but one of his wartime NCOs, played by Michael Medwin. Hawkins comes home from an afternoon of golf to find that Medwin has broken into his house with burglary on his mind.

The rest of the film uncovers what has happened to Medwin to place him on the wrong side of the law.

It's a sad story, but there is humour along the way too. I can't think of a single film with Dora Bryan in the cast that isn't much the better for her presence.

The reason I am writing about The Intruder is that it is another children-and-bombsites film. Medwin comes home from the war to marry Susan Shaw (who turns out to have found another man) and take care of his young brother, who has been living with an aunt and uncle of theirs.

We first see the boy playing with a gang of others on a bomb site, happy and dirty. But when he returns home he is told off for playing with common boys and Medwin has to intervene to save him from a beating. It's clear this has been the uncle's way of dealing with the boy.

The bombsite scene is a short one, but the boys' play there is seen in a wholly positive light, perhaps for the first time since Hue and Cry in 1947. Medwin's uncle, who disapproves of children who play on bombsites, is a prig and a bully.

Thanks to Reelstreets, I know that this scene was filmed on a London E1 bombsite between Pennington Street and St George's in the East. Remarkably, the site remains undeveloped to this day.

The Intruder was on Talking Pictures TV the other night, but does not appear to be on its online catch up service TPTV Encore. It's certainly worth watching if you get the chance.

I wrote a long post on children and bombsites in September 2022, and my major discovery since then has been the 1958 film Innocent Sinners. One day I will rewrite that long post, incorporating my later finds.

The real bombsites of A Canterbury Tale

Study the bombsites in A Canterbury Tale closely and you realise that a lot of matte painting and model-making has gone into producing them.  

I wrote that back in the summer. So here are some photographs of life in Canterbury after the German 'Baedeker' raid of 1942.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Cycle speedway: the sport that flourished on bombsites

Back to the bombsites. Thanks to Talking Pictures TV, who showed this film the other day, I have discovered a sport that was invented on them in the years after the war. It's cycle speedway.

The Cycle Speedway History says:

The sport of Motor Cycle Speedway was allegedly introduced to this Country in 1928, and it is from these humble beginnings that the sport of Cycle Speedway emerged, with a form of racing taking place before the second World War. However, it was not until the end of this war that the sport emerged in a controlled and recorded manner, and the "Skid Kids" were truly born. 

In 1946 Control Boards and Local Leagues were formed throughout the Country, these being run by interested adults, many of whom had their own sons and daughters in the teams. The tracks themselves were built on cleared bomb sites, where previous devastation and despair were replaced by the sounds of enjoyment and laughter. Bricks and timber from the bombed houses were used to mark the inner and outer perimeter of the tracks, whilst mother's knicker elastic was used as the starting tape, this being pulled across the start line to the outside of the track, so as not to give the inner gates that extra advantage. 

Once the sport got on it's feet, a number of go-ahead Councils began to donate corners of recreation grounds on which tracks could be built, some even financing this venture, from the building of the track, to the supply of all the equipment required.

One of the early Cycle Speedway Control Boards was that of London, and when the National Association of Boys Clubs joined forces, their numbers topped the three thousand mark.

A very early magazine for the sport was called "Cycle Speedway Monthly", which covered the whole Country, and sold well over 4,000 copies per edition.

In 1950 a national association was established for the sport, and by 1958 there was a British Cycle Speedway Federation. The two bodies proved to be rivals until they merged to form the Cycle Speedway Council in 1971.

I can't recall coming across the sport before, but the British Cycling site assures us that:

Cycle speedway is accessible, affordable, family-oriented and taking place in clubs throughout the country.

10 British films that should be better known

Here are some notes on 10 British films that are not as well known as I think they ought to be. It's not a top 10 - they are in chronological order - and I'm sure there are plenty more, particularly from recent years decades, that could fairly be included in such a list.

With those caveats entered, let's go.

No Room at the Inn (1948)

Inspired by the death in Shropshire of the foster child Dennis O'Neill, the same scandal that led Agatha Christie to write The Mousetrap, this had already been a huge success as a stage play. The star of the play was Freda Jackson as the voracious Mrs Voray, who took in war orphans for the money and abused and corrupted them. So hated was she by audiences, the story goes, that she needed a police guard.

Jackson repeats the role in the film, and her skill at playing monsters was so great that she became rather stuck with them later in her career. Before No Room at the Inn, she had played Mistress Quickly in Olivier's Henry V and Mrs Joe in David Lean's Great Expectations.

The tragic Joan Dowling, who was to take her own life at the age of 26, is notable among the children. A word too for Dora Bryan who, in her first film appearance, steals both Freda Jackson's date and the scene.

This dark film ticks so many of this blog's boxes that it has its own label.

Gone to Earth (1950)

The Shropshire hills filmed in Technicolor by Powell and Pressburger? There's no way I was going to dislike this one. Gone to Earth was a novel by Mary Webb, who had the misfortune to be deeply obscure in her lifetime and become hugely popular soon after her death. In the 1930s you would see coaches in these hills with 'Mary Webb Country' on the front.

Gone to Earth is melodrama whose plot has similarities with Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Jennifer Jones brings Hollywood glamour to the role of the tragic heroine and makes a brave attempt at a Shropshire accent, while David Farrar makes a splendid wicked squire. Look out for George Cole in his first adult role.

The 'Maggie' (1954)

The greatest Ealing comedies are still widely known, but there are some that have been all but forgotten. The Maggie is the best of this second group, and in its dramatisation of an encounter between wily Scots and American big business it looks forward to Bill Forsyth's Local Hero.

An American millionaire makes the mistake of hiring a decrepit Clyde puffer to carry furniture to his holiday home in the Hebrides. He ends less happily than Burt Lancaster in Local Hero.

Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)

The disorganised Yvonne Mitchell considers herself happily married to Anthony Quayle, but discovers that he is having an affair with the stylish Sylvia Syms.

Because this is a British film from the Fifties, the family has to defeat all threats to it. But the scene in Mitchell tries to change her image to compete with Syms, only to find that everything goes wrong, is horribly painful to watch.

Innocent Sinners (1958)

Ignore the title, which makes it sound like a particularly tacky porn film, this is the most interesting of the children and bombsites films I have yet found. Unlike the others, it has a girl at its centre, and the enemies the children encounter are not the murderers they encounter in those other films but snobbish residents and unsympathetic officialdom.

Here, bombsites are not a place of danger but somewhere working-class children can express themselves and find the privacy they lack in their overcrowded homes.

Tunes of Glory (1960)

Alec Guinness playing a red-haired Scottish officer who has been promoted from the ranks in wartime may sound ridiculous, but he is wholly believable here. Tunes of Glory reminds us what a peerless actor he was.

The film is about the lethal clash between Guinness and John Mills, who plays the upper-class officer who is appointed over his head now that the war is over. Both are flawed but appealing characters, and their tragic battle takes place in front a remarkable supporting cast: Susannah York, Gordon Jackson Dennis Price, Duncan MacRae, Allan Cuthbertson.

You'll recognised the last-named from gourmet night at Fawlty Towers.

West 11 (1963)

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

Our Mother's House (1967)

A fatherless family of children hide the death of their mother from the authorities by burying her in the garden because they fear being sent to an orphanage. 

Among the children are Pamela Franklin, Mark Lester, Phoebe Nicholls (immediately recognisable as Cordelia in the famous television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited) and Louis Sheldon Williams, whose mother wrote a weekly column for Liberal News in the Sixties, as I did for Liberal Democrat News 40 years later.

If all this sounds tacky or exploitative, the wonderful score by George Delerue - innocent, lilting, compassionate - lifts the film to a wholly different level. Add in Dirk Bogarde in a very atypical role, Yootha Joyce and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, and there's lots to enjoy.

Comfort and Joy (1984)

This is the film Bill Forsyth made after Local Hero and for some reason it appears to have been forgotten. Bill Paterson, who play a local radio DJ, is left by his girlfriend just before Christmas and then finds himself sucked into the Glasgow ice cream wars after witnessing an attack on a van.

I saw this in a cinema when it came out (which is a worryingly long time ago) and have never seen it again, yet I still remember it.

The Last Resort (2000)

Another one I saw in the cinema - the Renoir at Brunswick Square near St Pancras, since you ask. It taught me that Russian is the sexiest accent in the world and that Paddy Considine is a brilliant actor.

Dina Korzun plays a Russian woman who arrives at Heathrow with her young son, expecting to be met by her English fiancé, He doesn't show and, panicking, she asks for political asylum. As a result, she and her son are sent to a rundown resort and forbidden to leave it.

There they meet a bingo caller, played by Paddy Considine, who goes out of his way to help them. He is surely a good man, yet somehow we don't know whether we should wholly trust him. According to the reviews, he and Kozun improvised much of their dialogue.

Eventually Kozun decides she must grow up and return to Russia, a task in which Considine regretfully helps her.

Thames Water and the Liberal history of the Ham Lands

Over to the Save Ham Lands and River site:

Thames Water has outlined a scheme that would involve digging a tunnel to convey treated sewage from Mogden Sewage Works, via Twickenham, in a line that will lie under Ham Lands to the discharge location on the Surrey side of the River in the North Kingston/Ham part of Ham Lands and associated local nature conservation area.

Up to six construction sites each requiring an area of size of half a football pitch will be required for tunnel shafts. A total area of 3 to 4 acres.

And here is Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond and North Kingston, taking up the cause in Westminster Hall this week:

I congratulate my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for securing this extremely important debate. She mentioned Ham Lands, which is in my constituency of Richmond Park. 

It is a local nature reserve that the local community has spent decades trying to protect. It has a unique ecology; it is home to many rare plants, lichen and fungi. 

Yet incredibly Thames Water proposes to build up to six major construction sites on Ham Lands, each one half the size of a football pitch. The plans include the permanent - I emphasise permanent - destruction of five acres of vital wildlife habitat. In total, 24,000 people have signed a petition against the scheme. 

Does she agree that the community has made its views very clear and that the Government must now listen?

And Munira Wilson, who had called the debate on water resources proposals for Teddington, did agree.

Ham Lands is a nature reserve in Richmond upon Thames, between the river and the villages of Ham and Petersham.

Early in the 20th century there were gravel pits there. These were worked out by the time of the second world war and they were later used as a dump for rubble from London's bombsites.

This is a reminder that what are dismissed as brownfield sites can often be more valuable for conservation and recreation than your average piece of farmland. The rubble that came to the Ham Lands, for instance, brought with it soils and seeds from across London, leading to a particularly rich local flora.

I know a bit about the Ham Lands because I lived in Richmond for a while in the early 1980s, by which time they had become a political issue in the borough.

At some point the council had bought land there with the intention of using it for housing. Later, as the Ham Lands came to be valued as a local amenity, parts were sold off to private developers.

By 1983 there was a vocal campaign to protect the Ham Lands from further development. This was achieved when the Liberal-SDP Alliance took control of the council in the autumn of 1983.

I remember Alan Watson, the Liberal PPC for Richmond and a man not without a sense of his own importance, arriving at a meeting of the constituency party to find the new council leader, David Williams, passing round photographs of Ham Lands wildlife so we could all see what had been saved.

Watson had to wait until we'd all finished admiring them before he could tell us how he was going to be in the Alliance cabinet after the next general election.

We've Come Back: The bombsites of Canterbury in 1945

A sweet little film that shows the bombsites of Canterbury in 1945. Like Sheila Sim in my favourite film, young John struggles to recognise the city's old street pattern among the ruins.

But We've Come Back shows you the real thing. Study the bombsites in A Canterbury Tale closely and you realise that a lot of matte painting and model-making has gone into producing them.

The Joy of Six 1158

"Basic Income was proposed by Paddy Ashdown as a fundamental component of his Radical Agenda for the 1990s, a book published in the late 1980s. It is liberal because it recognises the agency of the individual and their contribution to society. A Basic Income, he said, 'gives security to each individual', and will also 'liberate power in the hands of the citizen'." Jane Dodds is encouraged by the success of a Basic Income in Wales and dismayed by Liberal Democrat backsliding on the policy.

Richard Sanders on the way the 2017 general election has been written out of Labour Party history because it does not fit into the narrative promoted by the party's current leadership.

"A very senior insider told me that there ‘has never been any proper management and accountability of the project. There have been constant changes to the specification with no understanding of the cost implications’. Remarkably, there is no overall budget, the business case has not been reviewed despite the changes in specification and rises in costs and the accounting is carried out, bizarrely, in '2019 prices’ - a subterfuge to disguise the soaring expenditure." Christian Wolmar explains why HS2 is costing so much.

Sarah Bakewell recommends five book on existentialism.

"Last year, I joined a group of intrepid plant hunters descending into the depths of the last remaining bomb site in the City of London. We climbed all the way down into the hole until we reached the level of the platforms of what was formerly part of Aldgate East Station, until a V2 bomb dropped nearby in the Second World War." That was The Gentle Author blogging in 2018.

"Typically set in a sprawling country house and populated by a cast drawn from the landed gentry and the well-to-do, 'Golden Age' detective fiction is not the most obvious genre in which to find two of the country’s leading socialist intellectuals." The Society for the Study of Labour History recalls G.D.H. and Margaret Cole, whose 28 detective fiction novels and four collections of short stories helped the publisher Collins achieve great success with its Crime Club imprint.

The Joy of Six 1154

"Both ideologies involve a shocking indifference to evidence and data. They reflect a bulldog belief that Britain will always be better off pursuing its own path, rather than engaging with supranational negotiations and institutions. They share a distaste for 'experts' - economists in the case of Brexit, the world’s scientists in the case of climate change. In many instances, Brexiteers and ecosceptics express the same paranoid suspicion of 'global elites' and 'globalist conspiracies'." Tory Eurosceptics are becoming ecosceptics, says Matthew d'Ancona.

Peter Wrigley thinks delusions about Britain's standing in the world mean we aren't tackling the many political and economic problems we face.

"A first-time reader of the Investigations may be struck by the frequency of the appearance of children. It is possible to read the Investigations as a reflection on how time spent in the hustle and bustle of a working schoolroom transformed his conception of what language really is - and therein what we really are. And even, then, as a kind of confession." Calum Jacobs sees Wittgenstein's experience of teaching in schools and at Cambridge as central to the development of his later philosophy. (Margaret Masterman, mentioned as one of his favourite pupils,was the daughter of this blog's hero Charles Masterman.)

Linda Flanagan looks at what young people gain from studying ethics in school.

Herbie Russell uncovers Southwark residents' memories of the lost Grand Surrey Canal: "Children would salvage debris from the blitzed ruins of houses and warehouses and make rafts to sail up and down the canal: 'Where the bombed houses were, we used to take the doors off and put them on the canal and use a bit of wood for a paddle and away we went… we had quite a good time in there!'"

Kenneth More's best work was seen in the theatre and on television rather than his films, argues Stephen Vagg.

Jago Hazzard on Barbican station and its many identities

Jago Hazzard explains the history and many names of Barbican station.

This is the John Betjeman poem he mentions.

Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station

Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,
Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.
City of London! before the next desecration
Let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.

Sunday Silence! with every street a dead street,
Alley and courtyard empty and cobbled mews,
Till “tingle tang“ the bell of St. Mildred's Bread Street
Summoned the sermon taster to high box pews,

And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing
With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls
Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing
On the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul's.

Then would the years fall off and Thames run slowly;
Out into marshy meadow-land flowed the Fleet:
And the walled-in City of London, smelly and holy,
Had a tinkling mass house in every cavernous street.

The bells rang down and St. Michael Paternoster
Would take me into its darkness from College Hill,
Or Christ Church Newgate Street (with St. Leonard Foster)
Would be late for Mattins and ringing insistent still.

Last of the east wall sculpture, a cherub gazes
On broken arches, rosebay, bracken and dock,
Where once I heard the roll of the Prayer Book phrases
And the sumptuous tick of the old west gallery clock.
Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate station,
Toiling and doomed from Moorgate Street puffs the train,
For us of the steam and the gas-light, the lost generation,
The new white cliffs of the City are built in vain.

Note the reference to the flora of bombsites, with no mention of buddleias.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page.

Invasion of the buddleias: When did it take place?

Since writing this, I have done what I should have done first and had a search in the British Newspaper Archive. It turns out there are plenty of wartime references to buddleias on bombsites. A second blog post will follow.

When did the buddleia invade England? I'm complicit in the invasion myself: I planted one because I like butterflies, but there are depressingly few of those to be seen now.

Buddleias, however, are everywhere, including places they shouldn't be - you often see them growing out of the masonry of neglected buildings. And they are everywhere on old railway land because the ballast resembles the riverside gravel where they grow in China.

But you never see buddleias mentioned in accounts of world war II bombsites. Here is a Guardian country diary from August 1946:

Many people in certain busy parts of London have recently looked about them in surprise at what at first appeared to be snowflakes drifting down before the breeze. 

But when the “snowflakes” settled on sleeves or hats they were found to be the small parachute-like seed-carriers of the rosebay willow herb, which grows so profusely on any waste ground and particularly favours the bomb-scarred areas of the City of London. 

A few days ago these dreary spaces were for a brief time magnificently clothed in rosy purple and here and there in gold where the Oxford rag-wort blooms. But now the beauty is fading and millions of seeds are being scattered far and wide by the wind.

No buddleias there, nor in this account of the exotic spaces the bombsites became from an essay on Rose Macaulay's novel The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

So the invasion of the buddleias appears to be a post-war phenomenon, but when exactly did it take place?

The Joy of Six 1138

"Leicestershire is home to the Lib Dem’s safest and longest-run council Oadby & Wigston (some might say best run too). After widespread gains in May the party achieved a safe hold in O & W, also in Hinckley & Bosworth, flipped the status of Harborough and Rutland (which we now lead), entered into an NOC coalition in NW Leicestershire and left the Tories hanging by a thread in ultra-marginal Blaby." Matthew Pennell celebrates our successes in East Anglia and the Midlands.

Laura Thompson backs the campaign for union recognition at Amazon's Coventry depot.

Nurbek Bekmurzaev says Kazakhstan is still haunted by Soviet-era political repression and famine.

"Today, rather than pay a playworker’s salary (however ludicrously small that is), local councils are probably more likely to use their resources to pay for expensive fixed devices on soft-surfaced ground. These are obviously great risk-free fun for your lively five-year-old, but totally dull for a twelve-year-old." Ben Highmore on the rise and fall of adventure playgrounds.

"Each possessing a cosmopolitan collection of friends and drawing lifelong inspiration from the devastation of the entire continent that they witnessed first-hand during service in the Second World War, Heath and Ustinov shared a passionate commitment to Europe." Tom Chidwick reveals an unexpected friendship.

Bus and Train User manages to catch the West Ealing to West Ruislip 'ghost bus': "I was greeted by a smiling driver who seemed a bit surprised to see me explaining it was her first time driving this route and she wasn’t entirely sure where she was going."

Hunted (1952): Another children-and-bombsites film

Embed from Getty Images

Robbie (Jon Whiteley), an orphaned 6-year-old boy in care, escapes into the London streets and takes shelter in a derelict bomb site, where he stumbles across Chris Lloyd (Dirk Bogarde) and the body of a man Lloyd has just killed. Aware that Robbie is the only witness to his crime, Lloyd realises that he will have to get out of London and that he has no option but to take the boy with him.

Yes, it's another children-and-bombsites film for my collection.

Hunted was released in 1952. It's one of Dirk Bogarde's best early films, while Jon Whiteley gives a wonderfully natural performance. 

This opening scene is all we see of bombsites in the film, but later on there are some striking industrial landscapes in the Potteries to enjoy.

According to my chronology, by 1952 British cinemas was pretty firmly against the idea that children should play on bombsites - Hue and Cry already seemed a long time ago.

So much so that Jon Whiteley wandered on to a bombsite in two films - Hunted and, from four years later, The Weapon - and got caught up with a killer in both of them.

A clutch of behind-the-scenes photos from Hunted has just appeared on Getty Images, and the one above shows Whiteley and Bogarde on their bombsite.