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"If Morgan can beat the BNP in Barking, goes the argument, then surely he can do the same for Reform in Britain too. Yet in all the coverage of McSweeney’s supposedly unique ability to slay the far right, through deploying tough messages on crime and immigration, almost nobody has actually bothered to check whether it’s true." Adam Bienkov explodes the founding myth of Morgan McSweeney.

Nandi Msezane says migrant workers prop up the UK’s social care system, but are now being forced out.

Cameron Joseph argues that Donald Trump is borrowing a playbook from other elected leaders who have used the tools of democracy to destroy it: "Would-be autocrats often move to eliminate structural checks on their power. They intimidate opposition parties, threaten potential dissenters within their own ranks, and defy the courts. Autocrats punish and bully the news media, protect allies from legal prosecution while targeting political opponents, and purge senior military and government ranks of career staff in favor of loyalists."

"There were numerous attempts at creating Labour-affiliated clubs, as Labour became a serious party of government for the first time. It is also easy to see why the inherent contradictions around that gave these clubs a limited appeal within the Labour Party." Seth Thévoz on the attempts to establish a London club for Labour parliamentarians.

"It was a reminder of a time when democratic politics wasn’t viewed with contempt but was understood as a form of collective expression and - for some (for very many in the 1940s) - as a means of making a better world." Municipal Dreams looks at the at creation and reception of the 1943 County of London Plan.  

Katherine Stockton explores the problematic implications of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys.

St Paul's, Covent Garden: The Actors' Church

"George Smiley! Oh, but you lovely, darling man!"

Down in London on Thursday, I came across St Paul's, Covent Garden, which is known as 'The Actors' Church'.

I found some interesting figures remembered in the dedications on the churchyard benches.

London's lost underground lines - with a note on the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club

Jago Hazzard is our guide to a collection of lost lines, repurposed lines and abandoned oddments, some of them 50 miles out of London and deep in the Buckinghamshire countryside.

You can support Jago's videos via his Patreon page and follow his YouTube account.

One scheme that never advanced far enough to carry trains was the Waterloo & Whitehall Railway, which:

was authorised in 1865 to construct a pneumatic railway (that is, one where trains are pushed though a tunnel by air pressure) from Great Scotland Yard to Waterloo station. The single cast iron tube, 3.89 m (12'9") in diameter, would have crossed the river by being laid in a ditch dredged in the bed of the Thames. 

Though work did start, a general financial crisis prevented additional capital being raised, and the work was abandoned in 1868, with the company being wound up in 1882. The trench excavated at the northern end is now the wine cellar of the National Liberal Club.

To celebrate St Pancras Day: The Beatles at Old St Pancras and a 1983 Steve Winwood interview

Today is St Pancras Day. To celebrate it, here's another showing for this video recreating the Beatles' visit to Old St Pancras churchyard on their London Mad Day Out in 1968. You can read more about their time in the churchyard in an old Guardian article.

When you add in the fact that today is also Steve Winwood's birthday, it's clear 12 May should be a public holiday in the Midlands. 

Certainly, it's a big deal here on Liberal England. To celebrate, here's a 1983 interview with our favourite musician.

Winwood talks about his past with the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic and Blind Faith, and about his then burgeoning career as a solo artist.

The rich history of Kensington Olympia station

Wikipedia gives the basics:

The station was originally opened in 1844 by the West London Railway but closed shortly afterwards. It reopened in 1862 and began catering for Great Western services the following year. In 1872 it became part of the Middle Circle train route that bypassed central London. 

The station was bombed during World War II and subsequently closed. It reopened in 1946 but the limited service to Clapham Junction was recommended for withdrawal in the 1960s Beeching Report. The main-line station was revitalised later in the decade as a terminus for national Motorail, and upgraded again in 1986 to serve a wider range of InterCity destinations. 

The station's Underground connection after World War II was limited to a shuttle service to and from Earl's Court.

But Jago Hazzard adds all the interesting details. Support his videos via his Patreon page.

A pilgrimage to a lost holy well in Muswell Hill

Another walk with John Rogers. His blurb on YouTube runs:

A north London walk in search of Muswell Hill's lost holy well - the Moss Well, or Mossy Well, Mouse Well that gave its name to the area. A chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Muswell became a resort of pilgrims after a King of the Scots had been divinely directed there and was miraculously healed by the waters of the well. It is recorded as early as 1112. 

Our walk starts on Crouch Hill, goes down Crouch End Broadway, Park Road, Muswell Hill, Muswell Hill Broadway, Colney Hatch Lane looking for the first Wetherspoons pub, then Muswell Hill Road via Highgate Woods.

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

Police break into Quaker meeting house to arrest six women at political meeting

I'm blogging about this because the story does not seem to have been covered by any general news outlets.

From Quakers in Britain:

Police broke into a Quaker Meeting House last night (27 March) and arrested six young people holding a meeting over concerns for the climate and Gaza. ...

Just before 7.15pm more than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into Westminster Meeting House.

They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have criminalised many forms of protest and allow police to halt actions deemed too disruptive.

The website quotes Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain:

"No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory.

"This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.

"Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials are an essential part of free public debate which underpins democracy."

Later. The Morning Star has more about Youth Demand, the group whose meeting was raided.

Rumer Godden writes about a multiracial London street in 1956

I'm reading An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden - it's for a thing - and have come across another early celebration of multiracial London. The previous one, by Marjorie Allingham, dated from 1965: this one from Rumer Godden dates from 1956:

The ugly accents of the Street children were unmistakably English, but the older people could have belonged anywhere; a great many had come from somewhere else, all tongues were spoken in Catford Street, faces were all colours, but even the people who had been born there and lived and died in it were like any people anywhere. 

It was all perfectly ordinary; seen from above, from the back windows high up in some of the Square houses, No 11 for instance, from the old schoolroom at the top of the house, Catford Street. with Motcombe Terrace and Garden Row - which had no gardens - running to left and right of it, made the shape of a big cross.

The observer is Olivia, the most sympathetic of the novel's adult characters, but even her worldly younger sister Angela is worried by the social class of the Catford Street children who sometimes spill into the more genteel Mortimer Square, not their race.

And note that Godden doesn't see the assimilation of people from other cultures into English society as a problem. Instead, she wonders at how quickly it takes place.

An Episode of Sparrows is the book on which perhaps the most interesting of my children-and-bombsites films, Innocent Sinners, is based.

Reader's voice: Have you left in that last bit of the quotation because it contains a whopping great Christian symbol?

An impressed Liberal England replies: Not much gets past you, does it?

Looking after the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs

This is the trailer for the film documentary Our Dinosaurs.

The Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs site will tell you all about them:

Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins was the sculptor responsible for the statues that today are remembered as the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. He was a natural history artist of international reputation. His sculptures were set in a landscape designed by Joseph Paxton that also included hillside illustrations of economic geology created by Professor David Ansted. 

This section of the park was constructed 1853-1855 to accompany the relocation of the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to Sydenham Hill in south London following the Great Exhibition of 1851, and has remained largely as it appeared to visitors when the park opened. The statues are the first ever attempt to interpret paleontological discoveries as full-scale, full-bodied, living animals.

The freight-only line under London that was never built

Jago Hazzard looks at the 1949 plan to build a freight-only railway under the Thames. Two routes were considered: one ran from Farringdon to Loughborough Junction; the other ran from Hither Green, went under the river at Greenwich and surfaced in the marshalling yards of West Ham and Plaistow.

Neither was built, and the decline of bulk freight and the Port of London meant that this proved to be the right decision.

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

The Joy of Six 1333

Phil Brickell, Labour MP for Bolton West, argues that the rules on foreign donations to political parties must be tightened to help restore voters' confidence in politics.

"Perhaps we should think about the social workhouse, which is productive of stigma, fear, and forcing unwell people into work. This isn't primarily to make money out of the disabled and the ill, but to reinforce the discipline wage labour depends on. Clamping down on benefits is Labour's way of telling their bourgeois backers that the management of class relations is safe with them" A Very Public Sociologist on why Labour won't leave the disabled and long-term sick alone.

"A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way." Gaby Hinsliff says gen Z is logging off.

William Ralston visits the Rainham volcano - a waste dump is constantly on fire in East London: "By January 1999, dozens of tipper lorries were hurtling through Rainham every day, on their way to Arnolds Field. Unlike the lorries that would regularly collect gravel from local pits and transport it to construction sites, these ones were not emblazoned with a company name. Their trailers had high metal sides so you couldn’t see what was inside."

"I do remember O’Toole coming up to me. He’s taller than me, and I’m quite tall. And he goes [grabs by the shoulders], “Get into your light, son.” And he picked me up and plonked me where the light was because I wasn’t in the [right spot]. A lot has been said about Peter O’Toole, but he was a fabulous guy." Timothy Dalton reminisces to Vanity Fair.

Andy Marshall has been photographing the churches of Romney Marsh.

The secrets of Hawksmoor's St Anne's, Limehouse - the Cathedral of the East End

No psychogeographic rambling with John Rogers this month: rather, a visit to a single church to hear about the plans for its restoration.

But then St Anne's, Limehouse - the Cathedral of the East End - is one of the  Nicholas Hawksmoor churches that inspired the London writings of Iain Sinclair and the Peter Ackroyd. The latter's Hawksmoor remains a terrifying novel.

I once went to a comedy performance in the crypt of another Hawksmoor church - St George's, Bloomsbury. Sitting there, I couldn't help being aware of the tremendous weight of stone above our heads, but Hawksmoor obviously knew what he was doing as I'm here to tell the tale.

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

The Joy of Six 1328

"With just two days until we mark three years since the invasion, we need to talk about this man, because no one truly knows what could have happened if he hadn’t been there to lead. This is a man who could have left. A man who was expected to leave. The world was really expecting he would run." Victor Kravchuk pays tribute to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Jennie Kermode is worried that US politicians are again talking about mass sterilisation: "The US first began sterilising people with mental illness - requiring neither their consent nor that of their next of kin – in Pennsylvania in 1905, and in 1927 this was formally ruled to be in accordance with the constitution. Although never actually banned, it decreased dramatically after 1978, when new regulations ruled that consent was ... necessary."

When did rock 'n roll die? Chris Dalla Riva and Daniel Parris offer a statistical analysis.

"In an unnamed city, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) keeps his head down in the Department of Records, covering for ineffectual boss Mr Kurtzmann (a brilliant Ian Holm). Meanwhile in his dreams, he is a winged warrior, who soars amongst the clouds, battling a giant samurai creature and rescuing a Botticelli Venus from her aerial cage." Tim Pelan celebrates the chaotic genius of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Londonopia finds that the grazing of sheep in London's parks has a long and complex history: "Just when you thought sheep had permanently retired from their park-keeping duties, along came World War II. With food shortages rampant and every inch of available land needed for practical use, parks across London were repurposed for the war effort. Victory gardens sprung up in many green spaces, and in some cases, sheep were reintroduced to provide both wool and meat."

Ben Austwick takes us to Lud’s Church, a natural geological feature in the Staffordshire Peak District, with rich literary and religious connections.

Industrial steam locomotives at Beckton Gas Works

Operating between 1870 to 1976, Beckton Gas Works was variously described as "the largest such plant in the world" and "the largest gas works in Europe". 

After it closed, it became a favourite shooting location for films, television and music videos. Most notably, some of the Vietnam battle scenes in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket were shot there.

But while it was open it has an extensive railway network and its own steam locomotives. The atmospheric scenes in the video above were shot in the Sixties.

The site has largely been redeveloped - part of its railway system was taken over as a route by the Docklands Light Railway,

h/t Joe Brown on Twitter.

Ruth Shaw (1937-2024): Doyenne of Liberalism in Sutton

Mourning the death of Adrian Slade the other day, I initially wrote that he was the Liberal Party's first councillor on the Greater London Council.

I should have known that Stanley Rundle had been the member for Richmond upon Thames before him, because I heard many tales of the contribution he made to local politics when I lived there in the early Eighties.

But I had not heard of Ruth Shaw, who represented Sutton and Cheam between 1973 and 1977.

Ruth died in 2024, and Sutton Liberal Democrats have a page celebrating her life - I have borrowed the photo here from it.

The page lists her lifetime of work for the Liberals and then Liberal Democrats:

Ruth was one of a small group of people who kept the Liberal Party alive in Sutton & Cheam through the lean years of the 1950s. She: 

• was a founder member of Sutton & Cheam Young Liberals in 1950; 

• was the first ever Liberal councillor on Sutton & Cheam Borough Council in 1961 (finally winning a seat on her seventh attempt); 

• was elected to the GLC in 1973 to represent Sutton and Cheam, one of only two Liberals on the council. She put her victory down to "community politics" and the party's opposition to the Ringway 3 project. She was given a place on the GLC's transport committee; 

• was the first (and last!) Liberal Greater London Councillor for Sutton & Cheam 1973-77; 

• was Sutton councillor for Worcester Park North 1986 to 1990 and North Cheam 1990 to 2002; 

• was named an Honorary Alderman by Sutton Council in 2011; 

• held most Local Party offices, including Chair and President.

The page also records what Ruth said to the Sutton Guardian when she was awarded and OBE for her services to politics:

"I didn't see this coming at all.I was  absolutely astonished and obviously very pleased. To get this recognition is wonderful although I don't even feel like I've done all that much - although I must have been doing something right. 

"I just believed liberalism was the right way to go. In the '50s people on the doorstep told me it had no future but I couldn't see it that way. Now the Liberal Democrats have been in power here for more than 25 years."

It's obvious that Ruth's early work in Sutton and Cheam did much to make Graham Tope's victory in the 1973 Westminster by-election there possible.

Remembering Adrian Slade (1936-2025)

I knew that Adrian Slade had died because I saw we were discussing commissioning an obituary of him for the next Liberator. But I had not found any announcement of the sad news until this morning, when I saw this notice in The Times:

ADRIAN SLADE
Adrian died peacefully on 24th January 2025, aged 88. CBE, cabaret performer,adman and Liberal politician. Husband of Sue. Father of Nicola and Rupert. Much loved by friends and family.

The notice also links to a memorial page for him.

Discussing comedy with Adrian was one of the perks of helping out with production of Liberal Democrat News at party conference - I have mentioned his memories of Peter Cook, whom he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights, here more than once.

But Adrian was also a politician. He won Richmond at the GLC elections of 1981, defeating Edward Leigh in the process. to become its only Liberal member.

What was impressive was how well known he was. When we went down to the bar after a Liberal meeting, there were always people who came up to him to sat hello or ask for advice. If Adrian had been the parliamentary candidate, we might well have won Richmond earlier than 1997.

That GLC victory was not without cost for Adrian, as the Conservatives contested the election lodged an election petition, contesting the result because of technical errors in Slade's return of expenses. The election result stood, but he was left with potentially ruinous legal expenses. His showbiz friends organised a comedy evening to help pay the bills - sadly the link in my post that told you who was there no longer works.

His experiences of Ken Livingstone were more pleasant. When he went to see Ken, the GLC leader as a new councillor, and was asked which committees he would like to be on. They then fell to discussing where Adrian should sit so as to upset the Tories most.

So farewell to Adrian Slade. We shan't see his like again.

Nowhere to Go: Maggie Smith's first credited film role

Yesterday we saw the first television appearance by Julie Walters. Tonight it's Maggie Smith's first credited film role, which was in 1958.

Being Maggie Smith, she received what we'd today call a BAFTA nomination for it.

Talking Pictures TV showed it a couple of days ago, but it's not found its way to their catch-up channel TPTV Encore.

Nowhere to Go was the penultimate film made by Ealing Studios. With its jazz soundtrack and refusal to spell everything out for the viewer, it looked forward, not back.

You could call it 'Ealing Noir', and that's not a ridiculous concept. One of the best Ealing films, It Always Rains on Sunday, has a claim on the Noir label too.

In this trailer look for a brief glimpse of Andrée Melly, then Harry H. Corbett in the back of the car in his days as the British Brando (again, this is not a joke) and then we see Maggie Smith. Playing a rich girl looking for kicks, she lights up the screen.

You can find Nowhere to Go on a dodgy Russian site if you ask Google Videos, but I didn't tell you that, right?

If you watch it, here are three notes on the locations.

The disused railway platforms at the start are long since demolished. They were on the still operating North to East curve at Kew Bridge station.

When the villain and Maggie Smith arrive in Wales we see, not the Brecon Beacons, but Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. The chimneys do not belong to a steelworks in the valleys but to the old Tunnel Cement works at Pitstone.

And the big house is Gadebridge House, which was in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire. It was demolished long ago, and its grounds now form Gadebridge Park in the new town.

The surprisingly complicated history of Highbury and Islington

Jago Hazzard gives a thorough and entertaining history of this long-neglected, but now thriving, London station. I too have stood beside the Famous Cock and found that fragment of the original grand Victorian building.

The North London Railway's City terminus at Broad Street has disappeared into history, but in the early Eighties I was a regular user. 

The London Chess League matches, in which I played for the Richmond and Twickenham club, all took place at the nearby Bishopsgate Institute. When my game was over, I would catch a late train from Broad Street all the way home to Kew Gardens.

In case you don't believe me, here's the indicator board at Richmond in those days.

Anyway, you can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

The Joy of Six 1322

"Like in all families, there will be differences and even outright conflicts; still, its members feel the bonds of their family resemblance, orienting their ideas and inclinations, both domestically and on the world stage, to a shared ideological purpose." Victor Shammas on the growing club of far-right, hardline nationalist and fascist political leaders that is working hard to transform the world.

"Any assessment of the Reform-Tory battle leads inexorably to the conclusion that Badenoch has not only failed to alleviate her party’s existential predicament - she has deepened it. The Conservative Party’s polling since the July general election tracks on aggregate graphs as a bell curve. The party gained at Labour’s expense during its protracted leadership contest. It peaked as Badenoch assumed the mantle of leader. It has declined since." Josh Self foresees panic in Conservative ranks.

Ana Isabel Nunes writes in praise of legislative theatre: "A form of community-based theatre that gives participants an opportunity to actively explore, analyse and transform their lives through drama and roleplay."

"English cricket has always been a brutal thing, cruel even to its elite players. Mike Brearley’s remark that the Bazball attitude is a reaction to depression is still the most interesting thing anyone has said about it. ... Bazball seems basically to be about being in a group and feeling good. It’s deeply relatable. Don’t you want some of that too?" Barney Ronay on Bazball as a death cult.

Taylor Parkes enjoys The Professionals: "What The Sweeney is to worn-out mid-1970s Britain (tin ashtrays, floral headscarves, bent-faced men in grey slacks and platform shoes kicking each other in the bollocks), so The Professionals is to the very late 70s and very early 80s: huge microwaves, Harrington jackets, Eddie Kidd in a neon nightclub drinking Harp from a glass with a handle."

A London Inheritance visits North Woolwich: "A station, pier, pleasure gardens and causeway."

Ronald McDonald and the myth of the all-powerful Nimby

The habitués of the Westminster village live in a world where it takes only one Nimby with a petition to stop a housing estate.

A story in today's Guardian may have given them a glimpse of what life is like in the world outside:

McDonald’s has thwarted attempts to stop it opening new outlets by stressing that it sells salad, promotes “healthier lifestyles” and sponsors local children’s football teams.

Public health experts claim the fast-food firm uses a “playbook” of questionable arguments and tough tactics to force local councils in England to approve applications to open branches.

The disclosures, in an investigation published by the British Medical Journal (BMJ), set out how McDonald’s gets its way, especially when it appeals against councils’ decisions to block new openings.

Since 2020 it has lodged 14 such appeals with the Planning Inspectorate. So far it has won 11 of them and lost only one, and there are two others ongoing, the BMJ reported.

You can read the paper on the BMJ website.

Later on the Guardian reports Alice Wiseman, the director of public health in Gateshead, who makes it clear who holds the more powerful position in such planning disputes:

It’s very undermining in the role of local government in being able to shape a healthy environment. We haven’t got the resources that the likes of McDonald’s have got to be able to get into any legal battles with this. It’s David and Goliath."

The idea that the planning laws are holding Britain back from a great leap forward has been popular in right-wing think-tanks for years, and now seems just as popular with people who imagine they are on the left.

In reality, it is a prime example of what Chris Dillow (surely Rutland's most celebrated Marxist economist) has called "Scooby Doo ideology":

This week's remarks suggest that Labour seems to think this slowdown is because capitalism has been restrained by stupid government or by a defective working class. Which is not much different from the Tories blaming the deep state or bureaucratic class.

Both parties seem to have the Scooby Doo theory of capitalism: "I'd have succeeded if it weren't for those meddling kids."

There is, however, an alternative possibility. It's that capitalism itself has developed forces which reduce growth.

And he goes on to give five examples.

I'm not a great one for banning things: in the two planning disputes involving McDonald's that have gained national attention, I've been inclined to support them.

One was their attempt to open a branch in Hampstead, where I reasoned that a burger now and then was just what the pallid, muesli-fed children of the suburb needed. The other was a drive-through on the edge of Oakham, which was said, all by itself, to threaten Rutland's rural character.

Come of it! Rutland is not some bucolic fairyland. (I don't know how people can have formed the impression that it is.) People there want a chance to enjoy fast food as much as anyone else.

But where there are serious public health objections to the opening of a particular restaurant then they should be heard and should have a chance of winning the day.

That they don't have much chance at present shows how wrongheaded the myth of the all-powerful Nimby is.