Six of the Best 606

Photo by Keith Evans

Rhetoric has consequences and we cannot stand by and do nothing, says Ceri Phillips.

"I’m sick of people saying, “gosh, you must have thick skin". That’s not the way it should work." Daisy Benson on the threats political activists face today.

Peter Watts explains why Battersea power station is down to one chimney and asks if it could now be facing demolition.

"As things stand, English cricket is in danger of becoming a sporting version of the Church of England, with an ageing demographic who attend because they always attend, and believe because they have always believed. Meanwhile younger generations will barely notice its slow and graceful slide into irrelevance." Roy Greenslade quotes Sean Ingle while arguing that newspapers' retreat from cricket coverage reflects the game's demise.

Cara Buckley celebrates Garrison Keillor as he announces his retirement.

The Australian grandmaster Ian Rogers pays tribute to Viktor Korchnoi

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David Boyle gets to grips with Southern Railways.

"Children in the United States from the very earliest days of the Republic ... were raised with practices conceived in direct opposition to Old World notions of authoritarian power and natural hierarchy." Judith Warner reviews a history of American parenting from life on the frontier to the 'managed child'.

David Crystal says reports of the death of the full stop are exaggerated

Wilko Johnson discusses death, depression, cancer and Canvey Island with Every record tells a story.

"The interiors of Leighton House Museum in Holland Park are not only some of the most spectacularly beautiful in London; they are also the most completely unexpected." Let Nigel Andrew take you there.

David Runciman thinks England's reliance on Spurs players is a weakness: "The biggest reason Leicester finished ahead of Spurs is that their players spent a lot less time on the pitch (since the team had fewer commitments in other competitions) and so were able to hold their form to the very end. It’s not romantic, but it’s the truth: by the time you get to April and May, miles on the clock count for just as much as tactics and talent. And by the time you get to June and July, maybe for even more."

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Francis Pryor takes the long view on Britain and Europe: "Despite what some would have us believe, Brexit wouldn’t mark a return to a glorious past, so much as a dismal future, where our principal legacy would be the destruction of a truly innovative system of multi-national government."

"The British state, under Margaret Thatcher, committed one of its most violent acts against its own citizens, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when a group of travellers — men, women and children — who were driving to Stonehenge from Savernake Forest to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival were set upon by tooled-up police from six counties, and the Ministry of Defence." Thirty-one years on, Andy Worthington asks where the spirit of dissent is in Britain today.

Matthew Jenkin on how getting children out of doors can pay dividends in academic performance and also improves their concentration and confidence.

Ely Place is a street in central London that used to be part of Cambridgeshire, explains Flickering Lamps.

Caroline's Miscellany explores abandoned passages at Euston station that are a perfect time capsule from 1962.

J.K. Rowling just can't let Harry Potter go, says Sarah Lyall.

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"Like most wars, this one will end inconclusively with a narrow margin on a low turnout and the losers promising to keep fighting once they have regrouped and rearmed." Vince Cable takes a humorous look at referendum campaign.

Martin Hancox on the insanity of the badger cull.

A proposed new law would make it harder to criticise the ruling regime on Jersey. Voice for Children has the details.

"Reiner ends his memory with an envious observation: 'The word fuck is a perfectly good word now.' 'I never minded Richard Pryor saying it,' says Van Dyke, 'but so many comedians use it constantly instead of good material. That’s when it gets offensive.'" Katherine Brodsky interviews Dick Van Dyke and Carl Reiner, who are both past 90 but still crackling with ideas.

"If you’d have said that to us 50 years ago, that’d we’d be doing this still, we would have not believed it. That was the time Lennon said that he didn’t expect to be still doing it when he was 30!" Midlands What's On interviews Rod Argent from the Zombies.

Can you name the six London Underground stations named after pubs? Londonist can.

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Allison Keyes on a rediscovered manuscript that casts light on the Tulsa massacre of 1921 - an attack on a thriving Black neighbourhood.

Alexandra Lange contrasts the reactions to Garden Bridge and Pier 55 - "Two cities, one designer and one strategy – to build a privately funded park above a river."

"Thanks to my older brother, I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee." Ian Jack reviews a new life of the paper's editor David Astor.

"[Jack] Cardiff achieved many of the visual effects in camera by drawing inspiration from the use of light and colour by such artists as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh." David Parkinson looks back at Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus.

"One of the reasons I can’t stand United is the air of sanctimony that hovers over the club. If Mourinho takes them back to the summit it ought to puncture that – it’ll show they’re no better than anyone else, just another plaything for the great man’s ego." David Runciman is right about Jose's re-emergence at Old Trafford.

The Beauty of Transport celebrates Tynemouth Station.

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Iain Brodie Brown is the new Mayor of Sefton: "For 36 years I have worked alongside people with mental health issues on their journey to living a full and independent life. I hope to use the opportunity that the mayoralty gives me to continue to challenge the stigma and ignorance that so often blights their lives inhibiting them from playing their full part in our communities."

"The discovery that, if you cut a ‘winner’ enough slack, eventually they’ll try to close down the game once and for all, should throw our obsession with competitiveness into question. And then we can consider how else to find value in things, other than their being ‘better’ than something else." Will Davies takes issue with the unquestioning promotion of competitiveness.

Andrew Vanacore interviews Scott Santents, a campaigner for Basic Income.

Chrissie Russell talks to Richard Louv about 'Nature Deficit Disorder'.

"The 'great smog' of 1952 may have blighted the lives of thousands of children still in the womb at the time," says John Bingham looking at a new study from Alastair Ball, an economist at Birkbeck, University of London.

Paul Walter defends the BBC - and Bargain Hunt.

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Secrets of Croydon's tram system

Londonist heads to Croydon and the surrounding area to uncover the secrets of the tram network there.

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Boris Johnson buried report on air pollution near London schools

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From the Guardian today:

An air quality report that was not published by Boris Johnson while he was mayor of London demonstrates that 433 schools in the capital are located in areas that exceed EU limits for nitrogen dioxide pollution – and that four-fifths of those are in deprived areas. 

The report, Analysing Air Pollution Exposure in London, said that in 2010, 433 of the city’s 1,777 primary schools were in areas where pollution breached the EU limits for NO2. Of those, 83% were considered deprived schools, with more than 40% of pupils on free school meals. 

A spokeswoman for Johnson’s successor, Sadiq Khan, said the new mayor could not understand why the research had not been published when it was completed more than two-and-a-half years ago.

This reminds me of the campaign to end the use of lead in petrol.

I remember once hearing Des Wilson, who spearheaded it, saying that the key to victory was getting the research published. So damning was it that, once it was in the public domain, the battle was effectively over.

It has been argued, incidentally, that the fall in juvenile offending in recent years can be put down to the removal of lead, and its damaging effect on the brain, from the environment.

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Council leader accused of covering up a councillor's death to avoid a by-election

This morning I tweeted an extraordinary story from the Evening Standard:

The leader of one of Labour's biggest London councils faces a party investigation over allegations he tried to “cover up” a colleague’s death to avoid a by-election. 

A former Labour staffer claims Brent chief Muhammed Butt told her to keep the councillor's death secret to avoid the election, which sources claim was set to weaken his leadership. ... 

Councillor Tayo Oladapo suffered from a severe liver condition and was absent from meetings for months before dying on January 29. It took six weeks for the party to confirm his death, in which time most councillors believed him to be alive and even approved his allowances. 

But a whistleblower has now claimed that Mr Butt did know, and asked her to enquire about the death while keeping it secret.

The Standard also says that Butt denies the allegation and "insists it is part of a plot to topple him".

We may know more after the ruling Brent Labour group's AGM today.

Lord Bonkers tells me that he knows of at least one case where an MP died halfway through a parliament and was returned at the following general election. But then people were less demanding of their elected representatives in those days.

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Discovering Gideon's Way

I have a new weakness - or rather I have revived an old one.

The Gideon stories were a series of police procedurals written, under the pen name J.J. Maric, by the extraordinarily prolific John Creasey between 1955 and 1976.

For some reason I took to them while I was at school even though they were already dating markedly by then.

Now I have discovered that the whole of the Gideon's Way TV series has been uploaded to Youtube. There were 26 of them made for ITV and broadcast in 1965 and 1966.

John Gregson took the title role, playing him as a world-weary liberal who sometimes had to reign in his keener subordinates - a sort of prototype for Morse and Wexford.

Gideon's family feature regularly. Political trivia fans may like to note that his younger son was played by Giles Watling, who was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate against Ukip's Douglas Carswell in the 2014 Clacton by-election.

One of the pleasures of Gideon's Way is spotting familiar actors in unfamiliar roles. I have watched only a few of the shows so far, but already I have seen Inspector Wexford masterminding a bullion robbery, Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs running a gang of pickpockets and fences, and Arthur Daley committing arson,

Then there are the pleasures of spotting actors on the way up.

This, for instance, is a young John Hurt on the run from prison. (You can see an even younger Hurt on this blog as an undergraduate in The Wild and the Willing.)

And this young man is now in the House of Lords. It's Michael Cashman, formerly of EastEnders and the European Parliament, in his first role. At this stage of his career his chief means of conveying emotion was hunching his shoulders.

Above all, though, there are the pleasures of the location footage. This is London before turbocapitalism and moral relativism. It's a city of quiet suburbs and decaying warehouses where the villains are cornered and the police inevitably round them up.

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The former chairman of the United Kingdom's Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, makes the case for helicopter money.

David Boyle is characteristically illuminating: "I have no problem in principle with contracted out services, but note that the contracts tend to be won by companies whose main skill is the delivery of target data to their commissioners."

"Labour’s new members have arrived at the expense of the Greens and the assorted Judean People’s Front parties of the far left. Those new members are still fighting their #1 enemy, the 'Blairites', some of whom have decided, for various reasons, that enough is enough and have left." Jake Wilde dissects zombie Labour.

"Hancock, Fawlty, Partridge, Brent: in my mind, they’re all clinging to the middle rungs of England’s class ladder. That, in large part, is the comedy of their situations." Zadie Smith on her father and British comedy.

Rob Baker nominates his Top 8 Swinging Sixties London Films. Groovy!

Laura Reynolds maps London's lost lidos.

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"A Crosby-ified Toryism can eke out victories against average opponents, but it is no guide to winning well or winning at a time when the capitalist system is being questioned; when Thatcherite and Reaganite orthodoxies are being questioned or when, in such places as Scotland (and now London), the Conservative brand is weak and needs rebuilding." Tim Montgomerie on the defeat of Zac Goldsmith.

Lenore Skenazy condemns the use of parents' fears for their children as a marketing tool.

Tony Broadbent rediscovers a murder that scandalised postwar London: the shooting of Alec de Antiquis in 1947.

"As you visit the Polling Station today you may be struck by the rather anachronistic posters which identify those buildings designated as such. Some local authorities have held huge stocks of these paper banners for much of the 20th century, and in some parts of the country those on display today may have been printed many years before you were born." Bob Richardson examines election day typography.

Hope you enjoy this article by Katy Waldman on why we omit initial pronouns.

Kelefa Sanneh explores the benign ruthlessness of Paul Simon.

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Lost lines: Harrow to Stanmore

Another video from Londonist.

I remember crossing the bridge at Belmont by bus on the way to see my mother's aunt in Wealdstone.

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Zac Goldsmith: "I'm a Bollywood fan"

This must be most awkward exchange since Tony Blair was asked to name one of the Newcastle United players he claimed to have watched as a schoolboy in the 1960s.

Thanks to Tom King on Twitter.

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Lost lines: Addiscombe and Woodside to Selsdon

Another video from Londonist. This time there are plenty of interesting remains to seek out.

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Vinous Ali has visited the refugee camps of Northern Greece with Tim Farron.

The House of Lords by-election to replace Eric Avebury is ludicrous and should be boycotted, say John Lubbock and Seth Thévoz.

"There will be no incumbents, and few of the ex-MEPs are expected to run ... So, there is every possibility that new names may emerge and end up as Liberal Democrat MEPs." Mark Valladares says the forthcoming selections for Liberal Democrat Euro candidates will be the most open yet.

Kyra Hanson on guerrilla gardening and the battle against concrete paving and private development in London.

"Verification and fact-checking are regularly falling prey to the pressure to bring in the numbers, and if the only result of being caught out is another chance to bring in the clicks, that looks unlikely to change." Kevin Rawlinson on the new plague of fake news stories.

Flickering Lamps visits Brompton Cemetery and returns with tales of soldiers and adventurers - and rumours of a time machine.

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Palmerston: From Battersea to the Foreign Office

A star is born.

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Lynne Featherstone explains how the state killed her nephew. "The crucial papers were destroyed according [to] the Department of Health."

Max Seddon looks at Putin's new army: "Russia’s campaign to shape international opinion around its invasion of Ukraine has extended to recruiting and training a new cadre of online trolls that have been deployed to spread the Kremlin’s message on the comments section of top American websites."

"I had no idea small children could walk so far. We skipped three miles one day and two miles the next, albeit incentivised by fish and chips or ice creams. At night, the children fell asleep like well-exercised puppies." Patrick Barkham says we have betrayed our children from love of cars.

Kashmir Hill on how an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell.

London bombsites are photographed today by A London Inheritance.

Tom Cox explores Dunwich.

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Mill Hill East to Edgware

Another video about a lost line from Londonist.

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Andrew Grice reminds us that David Cameron and George Osborne should not forget the Lib Dems know where the bodies are buried.

Jeremy Corbyn is "acting as though he is the leader of a 3rd or 4th party, rather than leader of the opposition," says William Barter.

"As Milne walked down a corridor, the six-foot colleague approached from the other direction. They smashed into each other, sending Milne flying, along with the papers he was carrying. 'Seumas was in shock,' recalls an onlooker. 'No one had ever done that to him before. He expected people to show deference to him.'" Alex Wickham profiles the Winchester-educated Stalinist who is Labour's executive director of strategy and communications.

A reader sent me a link to Futility Closet, where Alfred Kahn's concept of the "tyranny of small decisions" is discussed.

Hunter Oatman-Stanford takes us to Scarfolk, a strange land built on the public information films made to terrify children in the 1970s.

"In the 1960s, trip boats from Little Venice would take extended tours across the Thames into the depths of Peckham and Camberwell, and even in the 1970s, some insisted the canal should be saved." Peter Watts on the loss of the Grand Surrey Canal.

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