Leicester's Great Central wagon repair works revived

The former Great Central wagon repair works on Upperton Road, which I went to photograph in 2011 when they were threatened with demolition, have won an award from Leicester Civic Society.

The Mercury quotes the society's chairman Stuart Bailey:

"Despite being locally listed in 2011 the wagon works was subjected to severe criminal damage, clearly aimed at hastening its loss to allow redevelopment of a valuable site. 

"It was at this point that it was acquired by Jamie Lewis Residential Lettings and work commenced on rescue and reuse. 

"There are retail units, including a Starbucks at the lower level and facilities in support of nearby student accommodation above, including meeting rooms, reading rooms and a gymnasium. 

He added: "This is an outstanding example of heritage led regeneration and a worthy win of the 2015 Restoration Award for this building, a part of the city's history that was very nearly lost.

So I went back to Upperton Road on Saturday for a coffee.

The wagon works are now rather sanitised, but if they can't be a picturesque ruin then I would much rather have them like this than demolished.

Around them the Lego-fashioned student accommodation dominates the area even more than it did five years ago as you will see if you compare the first photograph above (taken on Saturday) with the first one below (taken five years ago).

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The Saddleworth air disaster and Michael Prestwich

St Giles, Uley © David Purchase

The identity of the man who travelled from Ealing Broadway to the moors above Saddleworth to die remains a mystery.

When I wrote about the case at the end of January it was because police were pursuing the theory that he was one of the child survivors of an air crash that took place there in 1949.

That turned out not to be the case:

The boy survivors were Stephen Evans (5) and Michael Prestwich (2). 

Michael, the 2016 press agrees, died at the age of 12 in a railway accident. It sounds as though he did not have the misfortune to be caught up in two disasters but was hit by a train on the way home from school ... 

But could the body be Stephen Evans? 

No. Because, as Newsnight revealed, he is now a distinguished professor and lives on the south coast.

Since writing that I have come across a page on the 1949 disaster with some informative comments below.

I have also become interested in the fate of Michael Prestwich.

After seeing my original post John Dedman (one of the commenters on the page) emailed to tell me that he died at Birmingham New Street, and I have since discovered that there are two memorials to him.

One is in the church at Uley in Gloucestershire, where is one of three pupils of Stouts Hill prep school remembered on a plaque. It says he was on his way back to the school when he died.

The second is in the church at Swettenham in Cheshire where the entire Bryce Prestwich family is remembered.

Later. John Dedman tells me the Greater Manchester Police have given him the story of Michael's death on 24 September 1959 - a relative had kept the Daily Mail report of it.

He died trying to board a moving train, which was something we all did occasionally in the days before doors were centrally locked.

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The Line That Never Paid: Memories of the Bishop's Castle Railway

This treasure found on YouTube this evening combines footage of the remains of the Bishop's Castle Railway with the memories of people who remembered it in operation. It closed in 1935.

When was this film shot?

The 'Craven Arms and Stokesay' running in board at the end dates it to before 1974 and the first photo of the station without any buildings, as it appears here, dates from 1972 - see the Disused Stations site.

However, the start of the film shows the Six Bells in the town and it is a Wrekin Brewery pub. A story on the revival of the name says that brewery closed in the early 1960s.

I suspect that that early footage of the town is some years earlier than the footage of Craven Arms station at the end.

Whatever the truth of this, it is a wonderful find.

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Ian Jack on having belonged to a lost world

50 fabulous photos of Walmgate in years gone by https://t.co/9NKBRAqJ88 pic.twitter.com/MSBF32jZMM

— The Press (@yorkpress) February 26, 2016

If I had to choose a favourite newspaper columnist I think it would be Ian Jack, who writes for the Guardian every Saturday.

His most recent column, occasioned by an exhibition of old photographs of Glasgow, is a meditation on the strangeness of having lived a long time.

He writes:

This week, at the opening of a[n] ... exhibition at the Barbican in London, I looked at many pictures that might easily have included me in their monochrome scenes: as a baby in a pram, a boy in a school cap on a smoky station platform, a young reporter in a crowd at a royal wedding. 

It was unsettling and faintly unbelievable to think that I once belonged to that world of white prefabs, Senior Service adverts and steam locomotives, and yet I’d fitted in snugly, without a thought.

There is a piece of film the BBC shows whenever the idea of year-round British Summer Time is floated and makes the news. It dates from the late 1960s, when the experiment was briefly tried then discarded, and shows children trudging to school in the dark.

Fifty years on, and bundled up against the cold, they look rather quaint. And then I reflect that I must have looked like that too.

And in a post from 2012 I wrote about rediscovering York 30 years after I had been a student there:

Take a look at this 1980 photograph of Fossgate, a street that formed part of my walk from the university campus into the city. It seemed perfectly modern to me then, but now looks remarkably old fashioned.

York's newspaper The Press recently published a gallery of old photographs of Walmgate, which runs from Fossgate to the city walls at Walmgate Bar.

As the photograph above shows, when I was a student it was in the process of redevelopment. The new buildings that puzzled me in 2012 occupied the site of the boarded-up shops and vacant lots I knew in 1979.

The moral is one you grasp as you get older. Few things are as permanent as they seemed when you were a child.

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Schools are being nationalised so they can be privatised

As Stephen Tall rightly says, the announcement in the Budget that all schools will be obliged to become academies amounts to the nationalisation of education.

And as John Elledge shows, that nationalisation includes the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation.

What is going on?

I think I put my finger on it back in 2007 when I reviewed Reinventing the State - the social liberal riposte to the Orange Book - for the Guardian.

I suggested that Liberal Democrat activists would:

appreciate the way Huhne's vision of a rich diversity of local provision contrasts with the Tory idea of popular schools taking over the rest: "It's been a good half for the school: the match with Harrow was won, and St Custard's was purchased through a leveraged buy out."

That sounds like me attributing my own eccentric enthusiasms to the party as a whole, and I have forgotten what became of the idea of popular schools taking over the rest.

But it was clear back in 2007 that the Conservatives believes schools should be run as much like private companies as possible.

Hence the recent emphasis on chains of academies. Hence the Budget's removal of parent governors as part of its nationalisation of schools.

What I fear will come next is the gradual privatisation of what the Treasury has nationalised.

As John Elledge says,

Which schools have held out against academisation? They're disproportionately small (larger ones are more likely to be able to afford in house IT teams and so forth). They're disproportionately likely to be primaries (secondaries are larger). And they're disproportionately likely to be rated outstanding (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). 

And what type of schools are disproportionately likely to be small but outstanding primaries? Faith schools.

Taking on the churches my look a bridge to far even for George Osborne, but it is easy to imagine a campaign against small schools.

We will be told that they cannot offer the facilities and breadth of curriculum that our children deserve. Expect to hear the 'global race' invoked.

And what will become of these closed small schools? Just think of the prime building land they occupy in the centre of sought-after villages.

The forced application of a business ethos to education will result in narrowed educational provision and a diminished life in many communities, even if the schools stay in the public sector.

But is hard to resist the prediction that, at some point in the process, the Treasury will take the opportunity of cashing in and selling off schools to the private sector.

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A graph makes Nicky Morgan look even more surprised than usual

On last night's Newsnight Evan Davis ambushed Nicky Morgan with the facts about who will suffer from the government's attempts to reduce the deficit.

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Leicester ghost signs: Sid Mottram Cycles

I found these ghost signs while exploring the Narborough Road in Leicester, recently named (through gritted teeth) as Britain's most multicultural high street by the Daily Mail.

Sid Mottram Cycles closed in 1985 and the premises is now occupied by a barber's shop.

Confirming my theory that immigration often preserves or restores British traditions, the barber offers wet shaves to his customers.

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Six of the Best 582

George Osborne's budget announced the biggest appropriation of Church land since the Reformation, as John Elledge demonstrates.

"As anyone involved in the fight to save London’s council housing knows, the boroughs at the forefront of the social cleansing of our city over the last fifteen years are Labour boroughs." Architects for Social Housing are not taken in by Labour's rhetoric.

Michael Gerson says the Republicans are staining themselves by sticking with Donald Trump. 

Exposure to nature makes people happy and could cut mental health inequalities between the rich and poor, argues Natasha Gilbert.

The decline of Ricky Gervais is itemised by Joe Bish.

Dirty Feed shows that the first episode of Fawlty Towers was originally filmed as a pilot. That version differs significantly from the broadcast version: "In the reshot section, Danny’s grapefruit is far larger and has a cherry on top, compared to the rather meagre offer on display once we cut to the wide shot." Such obsession is to be applauded.

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The loss of 54-58 London Road, Leicester

After photographing the former Black Boy pub last Saturday I wrote:

I get the impression that most Labour councillors would be entirely content if the city consisted entirely of newly built supermarkets and blocks of student accommodation.

The truth is worse than that. The city council's policy is to see historic, characterful buildings demolished and replace by student accommodation.

At the end of last year the council voted to allow developers to demolish the oldest buildings on London and replace them with a seven-storey block of, you guessed it, student accommodation.

According to a Leicester Mercury report at the time:

The planning official's report had said the current buildings offer a "neutral" contribution to the street – the massive new block, meanwhile, "will make a positive contribution".

An earlier Mercury report quoted the developer's agent argument in favour of demolition:

"The buildings as you see them from London Road are not as they were originally."

Few buildings of any age are as they were originally. That is part of what makes them interesting.

Put those two quotes together and you will see that any building in the city that is not Listed could be demolished and replaced with student accommodation with the blessing of its council.

The Mercury (back to the first Mercury article made the effort to go and look at 54-58 London Road and talk to the current occupants:

Mr Azim Walters is a defence lawyer with a handsome office at 58 London Road, but, as you may be aware, his Georgian building, along with neighbouring properties at 52, 54 and 56, are now on borrowed time. 

"We don't want it demolished, for historic reasons," he says. 

Set a little way off the busy city centre street, the elegant brick and stone-fronted business was once office and home to city father Arthur Wakerley – social reformer, architect and Leicester's youngest mayor – and it doesn't end there. The building was also one of the first magistrate courts in Leicester. 

"Come on, I'll show you," says Mr Walters, enthusiastically leading the way through a busy office and down into a large dingy cellar into a room generously scattered with detritus. 

"I was told by the historian, who looked around, these were the cells and those doors," he says, pointing to the other side of the room, "that's where they took them up the stairs. This is a historical building. People don't realise the history of it."

Yesterday, which was when I took these photographs, the Mercury ran a feature on the buildings the city lost in the 1960s and their shoddy replacements.

I fear that future generations will be as dismayed by the choices we are making as were are at those made 50 years ago.

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Why is the BBC convinced that everyone loves Manchester United?

This afternoon, as I do every Sunday, I went over to my mother's house to cook her a meal.

I generally listen to the repeat of Choral Evensong on Radio 3. The music is sublime and the Old Testament lessons often barking mad, so it's great entertainment all round.

Today, after it was over, I switched to Five Live to see how Spurs were getting on in their attempt to catch Leicester City.

But Spurs were not on Five Live. You needed their Sports Extra channel to listen to that game. Five Live itself had the Manchester derby - the battle for fourth place, if you are being generous.

This is of a pattern with the BBC's conviction that everyone in the country loves Manchester United.

I can even recall Match of the Day deciding,n during the club's prime under Alex Ferguson, that every goal in its Goal of the Year competition should be from a United player. How other clubs' fans loved that!

There was a short period when Chelsea were cruising to their second title during Jose Mourinho's first coming when the BBC recognised that we were the leading team in the country. You could rely on Chelsea being the commentary game on Five Live and being first on Match of the Day.

Then we slipped a little. The BBC immediately pounced and restored Manchester United to first place in its affections.

Why this obsession? Maybe it's half-memories of the Munich disaster or of United winning the European Cup in 1968.

More likely it is because BBC staff live in Surrey like so many of the club's fans.

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