The Masque of Anarchy (in the UK)

Posted on 05/10/2019 by Bobby Seal

 

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

 

 

24th May 2004

Paper coin — that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

On this day in 2004 the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel opens in Manchester. It is located on the site of the former Free Trade Hall in Peter Street. I sit in the hotel’s reception area in September 2019 writing notes for what will become this piece. I have discovered that all that remains of the original building is the façade on Peter Street and a few artefacts incorporated into the hotel’s interior decor.

Radisson Blu Manchester

I feel out of place in this luxury hotel, especially as I feel weighed down by an awareness that such opulence is housed in a building that was originally constructed to celebrate the repeal of the Corn Laws. Meanwhile, something deeper cries out to me, for we are on a site where the infamous Peterloo Massacre took place and in a city synonymous with Chartism, the trade union movement and the work of Friedrich Engels. I shift uncomfortably on my plush seat in the hotel lobby. Perhaps this is the final triumph of Mammon; the story of the struggles of so many nameless men and women served up as local colour. As the Radisson’s marketing site puts it:

Finally, it was reborn in 2004 as a magnificent luxury 263 bedroom hotel, award winning restaurant and must visit spa. It retains its original façade, heritage and famous artefacts plus it is still at the heart of Manchester life. Located in Manchester’s historic Free Trade Hall and the original home to the Hallé Orchestra, Radisson Blu Edwardian Manchester has brought a new generation of award winning luxury to one of the city’s oldest and most iconic buildings over the past decade.

And as I sit and drink coffee and write up my notes on the train going home, the words of Shelley, written in fevered response to the Peterloo Massacre, come to mind. Just fragments really, ill-remembered fragments, but particularly the part that goes: ‘I met Murder on the way– / He had a mask like Castlereagh.’

19th May 1996

Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free–

After providing a home to the Hallé Orchestra for over a hundred years and serving as Manchester’s primary jazz and rock venue since the 1950s, the Free Trade Hall closed its doors for the last time in 1996. The interior had been destroyed by a Luftwaffe firebomb in 1940 but reopened in 1951 having been completely redesigned and rebuilt.

Free Trade Hall

From the 1960s right through until the end of the century the main hall staged concerts by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and many others. However, when the Hallé moved to the newly opened and state-of-the-art Bridgewater Hall in 1996 the patrons of the Free Trade Hall and local council decided that the older building was no longer required as a concert venue. It then stood empty and neglected for several years until it was acquired by developers who obtained planning permission to turn it into a luxury hotel.

4th June 1976

Then all cried with one accord,
`Thou art King, and God, and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!’

He travels to the gig by train from Chester with Steve. Steve’s leather jacket is so much cooler than his, with none of the elasticated fabric on its collar and cuffs that afflicts his own cheaper version. Steve works on the line at Vauxhall Motors, fitting radiators into a continuous procession of new Chevettes: five shifts a week, every week. Later he does an access course, goes to university and becomes a college lecturer. But that’s not part of this story.

Sex Pistols 1976

The gig isn’t even in the main hall; they are sent upstairs to a small, rectangular room that looks like it is normally used to store unwanted furniture. He only finds out afterwards, much later, that it is called the Lesser Free Trade Hall. There are only about fifty of them in the room. A few people manifest an awareness of there being something new in the air: a clutch of leather jackets, spiky hair and exaggerated eye make-up. he surreptitiously runs his fingers through his own newly cropped hair, wondering what product these lads and girls use to get those waxy spikes.

But most of the crowd are everyday prog-rock kids: all hair and flare. What strikes him most about all the people squeezed into this small room, however, is how polite and civilised everyone is. This is the case for prog-rockers and nascent punks alike. Even the weasel-faced bloke with the swastika arm-band smiles and says ‘Sorry mate’ when he accidentally bumps into his shoulder during the support band’s set.

Sex Pistols Tour

The Pistols come on late, obviously. If anything, they seem to have gone backwards musically from when he saw them the previous year. The whole set is wilfully shambolic. But what they lack in musical finesse they more than make up for with attitude. Glen and Steve look dangerously wired and in a state that he can only describe as chronically pissed off. Meanwhile John snarls and slathers at the audience, trying to goad them into a response by making fun of the local accent.

 

 

The band’s approach is breathtakingly audacious. But are the Sex Pistols an expression of genius or a bunch of charlatans? Perhaps they are both. All he knows is that this gig is the spark that sets him on a decades-long trajectory of musical appreciation that embraces three-minute songs, simple chords and shitty local bands. It doesn’t inspire him to go out and buy a guitar, unlike the hundreds of others who claimed to be at the gig. But it does instil in him a belief in do-it-yourself creativity, an attitude which later comes to be called the punk ethic, and this ethic is something that continues to drive his writing and political attitudes to this day.

But perhaps this is a reflection constructed with the benefit of hindsight and a later conventional cultural narrative. On this day in 1976 it is just another gig, so much so that the two friends walk out of it before the end of the Sex Pistols’ set. It is all very exciting and enjoyable, but not worth missing their last train for. Even worse, the pubs are closed by the time they get back to Chester. Welcome to the seventies, kids.

10th December 1975

And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

But they have history, the Sex Pistols and him. The evening is billed as a Christmas party, but in reality it is just like any other band night at City Poly students’ union, an excuse to drink lots of beer to the accompaniment of some loud rock music. Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts are top of the bill; he knows them from the London pub rock scene and they are the band he was looking forward to seeing.

Sex Pistols Poster

Fairholt House is a weird venue: it comprises the upper three floors of an old office block on the corner of Whitechapel High Street and Commercial Street, but it is home to some of the best live music he’s ever heard. he was a naïve young lad from the provinces, only just turned eighteen, and Fairholt House was the alma mater of his education in the joys of sex, substances and radical politics.

 

 

 

 

 

A band called the Sex Pistols are third on the bill, he watches them as he stands next to the pinball machines by the bar. To be honest they don’t seem like anything special and certainly don’t strike him as the band who will shake rock to its roots within twelve months. They play too many cover versions and not enough original material for his liking, though he thinks the guitarist is pretty good. The singer acts like a complete twat on stage, though later, when he joins a few of the audience in the bar he seems like a decent bloke. He has to confess, however, that he’d forgotten the singer’s name by the next day.

 

5th February 1972

Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.

A pair of pale blue loons, white cheesecloth shirt and purple cotton jacket. So fucking cool. John and I had booked the coach and driver from the local bus depot and bought forty tickets by post from the Free Trade Hall box office. Neither of us had a bank account so we bought a postal order with the cash we’d collected from our friends, and friends of friends, at school. We ended up out of pocket because we hadn’t realised there would be a charge for the postal order, something the guy at the counter called ‘poundage’.

We are off to see Wishbone Ash at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, my first big-name gig. We live in rural North Wales and John and I go on to organise trips to a dozen or more gigs during our time in the sixth form. We provide a coach and concert ticket package for local young people to go to see bands in Liverpool and Manchester. We always charge cost price; it never occurs to us that this was a potential money-making opportunity. We’re simply two sixteen-year-old lads who love music and want to go to see the bands we like with a gang of our friends from school.

Wishbone Ash 1972

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, for that couple of years before we all leave school we go to see the likes of Hawkwind, Stone the Crows, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Rory Gallagher and many more. But Wishbone Ash, supported by Glencoe, in February 1972 was my first gig, and it was also the first time I became aware of the Free Trade Hall.

We wander the corridors, then hover in the bar and wonder whether we can pass for eighteen and be served with beer. Which of us looks the oldest, you me or Alan? All the time I gaze at other people’s clothes and hair and wonder what they make of mine. My hair is long, but too curly. I’m tall, but I have spots and can’t grow a beard. I breathe deeply and the air smells of beer, cigarettes and patchouli.

We enter the concert hall; it’s smaller than I’d expected, but I have to crane my neck right back to see the topmost balcony. Someone stands at the rail of the balcony immediately above us and he’s shouting drunkenly, demanding that the band come on stage right now. We laugh then, with dawning embarrassment, realise that he is one of our group.

We see the band outside, near a back entrance to the hall, after the gig and they sign our programmes and chat politely with us. But a crowd is gathering, and the band are clearly eager to get away as soon as they can. I return to the Free Trade Hall many times in subsequent years but, not until much later do I come to be aware of the history of the building and the site on which it sits.

17th May 1966

A rushing light of clouds and splendour,
A sense awakening and yet tender
Was heard and felt — and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

Bob Dylan played the Free Trade Hall towards the end of his world tour in May 1966. John Cordwell from Glossop managed to get tickets and attended the gig with several of his mates. They had a few pints at the Wagon and Horses on Southgate and then a couple more at the Free Trade Hall. Their seats were in the front row of the lower circle and they had an unimpeded view of the stage. The gig is infamous for widespread heckling from audience members and, in particular, one very loud shout of ‘Judas!’ from the circle which visibly angered Dylan. The controversy centred on Dylan’s recruiting of a rock band to back him in playing some of his new Highway 61 Revisited electric material. Hardline traditionalists saw this as a betrayal of Dylan’s folk roots and, throughout the 1966 tour, they were not shy in making their views known.

Bob Dylan 1

Things went well for the first half of the Manchester set, with Dylan alone on stage with an acoustic guitar playing his older songs. However, when Dylan and the band reappeared for the second half of the show and launched into newer material at an amplified volume many of his folk fans were not used to, the protests began.

Bob Dylan 2

The night goes down in rock history as the final dinosaur roar of folk traditionalists against the inevitable progression of musicians like Dylan. An objection to artists who wanted to widen the range of their creative expression and to experiment with other instruments and new musical arrangements. John Cordwell, on the other hand, while admitting that it was him who was heard to shout ‘Judas!’, suggests that he and the people around him were not objecting to the use of electric instruments, but were simply upset by the volume of Dylan’s second set and the poorly balanced sound that just did not work in a classical music venue like the Free Trade Hall.

13th October 1905

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale

Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney attend a Liberal Party rally at the Free Trade Hall. The Liberals are campaigning to be elected to office. Christabel and Annie plan to confront the main speaker, Sir Edward Grey, to prevent any backsliding on the party’s commitment to women’s suffrage.

Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst

At question time Christabel asks Grey: “If you are elected, will you do your best to make Woman Suffrage a Government measure?” Grey makes a joke, drawing the other men in his audience into a conspiracy of laughter, and avoids answering the question. Christabel persists, raising her voice. A policeman intervenes and tells her to be quiet. She and Annie are grabbed by police and stewards and forcibly ejected. Later they are arrested outside for alleged obstruction. It was to be 1928 before all women in Britain were granted the vote.

16th August 1819

Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another

In March 1819 Manchester’s leading radicals formed a new organisation, the Manchester Patriotic Union Society, to campaign for political reform and universal suffrage. They organised a rally to take place at St Peter’s Field on 16th August 1819 and invited two of the most prominent national figures in the reform movement, Henry Hunt and Richard Carlile to speak.

In the build up to the rally, when it became clear that tens of thousands of people would attend, the authorities became fearful of a riot and an attempt at insurrection, despite the fact that the movement was sworn to peaceful mass action. On the day a group of local magistrates stationed themselves in a house overlooking the field and called up hundreds of special constables, regular soldiers and horsemen from the Cheshire Yeomanry and Manchester & Salford Yeomanry to be held in reserve.

The local campaigner and founder of the Manchester Female Reform Group, Mary Fildes, was one of the main speakers. Dressed all in white, she led a procession of women to the rally behind a white silk banner emblazoned with slogans demanding universal suffrage.

As the crowd at the rally swelled to an estimated fifty thousand the magistrates became alarmed and feared an outbreak of violence, although by all reports the gathering was good-humoured and orderly. They ordered in the Yeomanry to arrest Hunt and the other leaders and disperse the crowd. As the protesters closed ranks to protect the platform, the horsemen drew their sabres and tried to force their way through, slashing and trampling as they pushed on.

Peterloo Massacre

Hunt and several other leaders were arrested and the Yeomanry, local farmers and landowners, seemed particularly to target Mary Fildes, who presented a striking figure in her white dress. She received a sabre wound and was dragged away by special constables.

By the end of the day the Peterloo Massacre, as it became known, had resulted in the deaths of eighteen men, women and children and the wounding of at least five hundred others. The outcry over the massacre radicalised many thousands of others and led the creation of the Chartist Movement.

Red Plaque

 

 

Mary Fildes survived her wound and later became a prominent activist in the Chartists. She ended her days as the landlady of the Shrewsbury Arms in Frodsham Street, Chester.

 

21st May 1856

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

After the Peterloo Massacre, St Peter’s Field became a symbolic rallying point for radical causes in Manchester. Subsequent decades saw a number of gatherings by the Chartist movement and, later, the Anti-Corn Law League. The latter campaign built a wooden pavilion on the site in 1840.

Manchester Ship Canal Meeting

Then, in 1853 and funded by public subscription, a new building for the St Peter’s Field site was designed by the architect, Edward Walters. The building was designed in the Italian Palazzo style and comprised two floors, a concealed roof and a nine-bay façade with carved stone figures celebrating Manchester and the county of Lancashire.

Thus, on 21st May 1856 the Free Trade Hall was opened. The purpose of the hall was to provide a setting for Manchester’s political meetings and rallies and, in 1858, it also became the home of the Hallé Orchestra.

Stepping outside the Free Trade Hall, or the Radisson Blu Edwardian Hotel as it now is, I walk along Southmill Street towards Manchester Central, formerly a railway station, now a conference venue. A ribbon of police vehicles are parked along the kerb outside and on the front concourse small groups of police officers stand around chatting and looking bored.

Peter Street

No one stops me so I walk past the police lines and nearer to the front entrance of the conference hall. The banner outside tells me why they are here: some sort of security practice-run, no doubt, for the big conference next week. The Tory Party are meeting here in the historic home of English radicalism. A Prime Minister appointed without a public vote and a government with no mandate and no majority meeting just two minutes from where, 150 years before, eighteen men, women and children gave their lives for the right to vote. Hear their voices still:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number–
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you–
Ye are many — they are few.’

 

  • Lines of poetry quoted from The Masque of Anarchy (1819) by Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • Sex Pistols gig picture – David Nolan
  • Bob Dylan pictures – Mark Makin
  • With thanks to Mike at Free Manchester Walking Tours
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Car Park Life by Gareth E Rees

Posted on 19/08/2019 by Bobby Seal

Car parks are an intrinsic part of the landscape, like them or not, and if they are going to encroach on the space where our common grounds, marketplaces, municipal buildings, factories and marshlands once were, then we have a right to interrogate the space, find a way to embrace it, even learn from it.

Gareth Rees has a talent for taking the most unpromising and marginal features of modern life and using them as a lens to focus his writer’s eye on discovering the profound hidden amongst the prosaic.

Car_Park_Life_Cover

In his first book, Marshland, Rees wanders the post-industrial steppes of Hackney Marshes and discovers an hallucinogenic realm of myth and imagination. His next book, The Stone Tide, finds him decamped to Hastings, one of England’s decaying seaside towns. With a lesser writer this could be a conventional psychogeographic meander, but instead he unearths the negative psychic energy of the town and presents us with a case study in entropy.

Car Park Life is, let’s be honest, not a particularly inspiring proposition. Rees sets out to write about Britain’s car parks, then further hobbles himself by excluding multi-storeys, NCPs and private car parks, and limiting himself purely to chain retail parking zones.

I first heard about this book when Gareth visited me in connection with another project and sat at my kitchen table drinking tea and riffing excitedly about a multi-storey he had just visited in town and the shamanic graffiti he found on its upper floors. Basking in the waves of creative energy the guy was giving off, I decided then that, if anyone could make something interesting from this seemingly mundane subject, then it was Gareth E Rees.

Everyone has a car park story, according to Rees. In fact we all, he suggests, have at least one car park that has played a significant part in our lives.

Car parks are not only places for cars but also thoroughfares pedestrians. Hangouts for teenagers. They’re places to rendezvous. Bump into neighbours. Exchange goods. Get some cash out. Have an argument with your partner. Make an awkward phone call. Eat a quiet lunch away from your colleagues.

I struggled to remember my significant car park, spooling back through my memory to try to focus in on the very one. Then, when I read the section where Rees quotes from William Carlos Williams’s The Red Wheelbarrow to embellish his description of a car park in Scotland, I got it. My significant car park is not one lodged away in the past, but one very much in the present and in the town where I live. A car park where one of my favourite walks, along a disused railway track, starts and which once put me in mind of another Williams poem. It is also a place where a Morrisons supermarket car park encroaches into that of the local hospital, as if to allegorise the stealthy private takeover of the NHS.

Retail car parks, Rees discovers, are places of violence, dodgy deals, illicit affairs, substance abuse, fast-food binging and after-hours car racing. The least interesting use of such places is using them to park a car. In fact, the best way to view a retail car park, the way most likely to jolt you out of your induced consumerist dream walk, is to approach it on foot and to explore it in its entirety, including its outer margins. It is in these edgelands, the parts of a car park where one cannot park a car, that Rees makes his most interesting discoveries.Author_Portrait

Rees’s research, his wanderings through the car parks of Britain, takes place over a period of a couple of years or so and overlaps some of the events and personal backstory covered in The Stone Tide. It also coincides with the Brexit vote and the outbreak of our shared national psychodrama. But Car Park Life is a very different book to its predecessor, as indeed it is to Marshland. In both of Rees’s previous books his language crackles with inventiveness as it is dragged along by his flights of imagination. The writing used in Car Park Life, on the other hand, is somewhat more constrained; its tone is discursive rather than driven by a sense of narrative urgency.

But perhaps this is what the subject demands: a downbeat world needs to be described with downbeat prose. Brexit. Climate change. The rise of right-wing populism. We live in a time, Rees seems to suggest, when the end of the world as we know it is a very real possibility. We need to find our hidden sanctuaries.

Is that what I’ve been doing? Probing for hidden sanctuaries in the urban consumer landscape? Am I on a pilgrimage through retail car parks?

Rees’s pilgrimage takes us from the south coast, to the Midlands, South Wales and the West Country. Then piggy backing onto a family holiday, he explores the retail car parks of Scotland. Currys, B&Q, Asda, Boots, KFC and McDonald’s; the same names crop up wherever Rees travels, the whole nation seeming to merge into one giant retail park. But where is his place of sanctuary?

I have been seeking the magical possibilities of bland corporate space in the hope that there is a potential channel of escape from neo-liberal hegemony, even if that escape is purely psychological and subjective, a new way of seeing the urban landscape foisted upon us, and embracing it in a way that offers a possibility of a future…

Rees does not give us many answers to the meaning of life as viewed from a retail car park. But he does pose some interesting questions and, I have no doubt, he succeeds in encouraging his readers to look at their local retail car parks in a new light.

 

Car Park Life is published on 22 October 2019 and is available to pre-order from the publisher, Influx Press

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The Ghost Railway

Posted on 19/03/2019 by Bobby Seal

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter

T.S. Eliot – ‘The Waste Land’

A spring morning with an eerie stillness in the air and a sense of foreboding within me. Keep moving; reluctant to stop and linger I walk along the line. Is this a place of ghosts, or perhaps it is a haunting I carry within me. I lose my grip on where the memory resides, unsure as to whether it is in here or out there.

Ghost Railway1

Ghost Railway 2Ghost Railway 3The Mold to Denbigh Junction Railway, opened in 1869 and closed in 1962. A branch line of a branch line; now a phantom limb of twisted metal, grasping roots and overhanging trees. A hot August Bank Holiday at Mold station in 1959. The engine reverses into place in a cloud of steam. It locks it grip on the waiting carriages and the expectant crowd, seaside-bound, jostle their way aboard. Rhydymwyn, Star Crossing, Nannerch, Caerwys, Bodfari. Defunct stations, long gone. Change at Denbigh Junction for the train to Rhyl.

Ghost Railway 4

Ghost Railway 5Ghost Railway 6Then that summer, 1960-something, the only traffic goods trains twice a day carrying limestone from the quarry at Hendre to the cement works at Padeswood. The rails twitch and shimmer in the blazing heat. A youthful shoulder against the door and the lock on the trackside hut gives way. The stench of rotting sandwiches, someone’s forgotten lunch. A dusty overall hanging on a nail. They find a metal box and drag it outside into the sun and flick open the catch. Detonators, someone says, I’ve seen them before. The railmen put them on the track to warn trains to slow down, he says. The boys fill their pockets with handfuls of the wristwatch-shaped treasures, scale the fence and run towards the footbridge over the river.

Ghost Railway 7

Ghost Railway 8Ghost Railway 9In Mold I find a railway bridge, still soot-blackened, and a cutting converted into a car park. But the station is long gone, where it stood is now home to a branch of Tesco. And just yesterday, or so it seems, a group of boys drop heavy stones, river-wet, onto the detonator capsules lined up on the concrete bridge. With each loud report they cheer and bite on air filled with acrid fumes.

Ghost Railway 10Ghost Railway 11 Ghost Railway 12

                                                         this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give.

Philip Larkin – ‘The Whitsun Weddings’

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A Cage of Shadows by Archie Hill

Posted on 14/03/2019 by Bobby Seal

It’s the men of the Black Country who ever held me in bond, the native born. Between them, in a sort of composite form, they provided me with a substitute father. The simplicity of them, the strength, and sincerity. And their pride of self in personal craftmanship which nothing, not even the dark days of depression, ever seemed to daunt for long.

Archie Hill was born into a working-class family in the Black Country in 1928. He was the second eldest of nine children and his father was a violent, drunken miner, more often unemployed than not. Hill’s mother, whom he presents as a somewhat cold and distant figure in this memoir, was serially pregnant throughout Hill’s childhood.

A Cage of Shadows is the first of five autobiographical works by Archie Hill and covers the period from his childhood through to the 1950s. It is in effect two books: the first covers his early years of poverty and hardship in the economically-depressed Black Country, while the second describes his life as a young adult. Hill left home to join the military police at the outbreak of the Second World War and, after military service, joined the civilian police. But his drinking, which had always been heavy, led to his dismissal from the force and into a downward spiral of alcoholism.

The two parts of the book differ stylistically too. Hill describes his deprived, brutal childhood simply and without self-pity and puts the facts before the reader in the clear, frank manner of English social realism. The second section of the book, however, is a meandering psychological journey through the mind of a chronic alcoholic. Hill drinks, lies, cheats and fights his way into a vortex of disintegration which leads into time spent in a psychiatric hospital and prison and eventually to life on the streets and bomb-sites of 1950s London. The epilogue of this book charts Hill’s faltering climb back up from the edge of the abyss.

A gifted artist, photographer and writer, Archie Hill enjoyed some success as a writer and broadcaster in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, following his death by suicide in 1986, his books gradually drifted out of fashion and, by the turn of the millennium, they were all out of print. Tangerine Press, therefore, are to be congratulated for republishing A Cage of Shadows in 2017. What’s more, this is the full, original text. The 1973 version was withdrawn and pulped following a libel action by Hill’s mother and the revised second edition was heavily edited to remove most references to her.

Hill’s childhood was one of acute poverty and neglect. Home was overcrowded, filthy and comfortless and the whole family lived under the shadow of his father’s volcanic temper.

Then the bits of furniture would get smashed, the table tipped over, and there’d be a herd of brothers and sisters wailing at the head of the stairs. And I’d look at my gargoyle parents, at the nappies spilled over the hearth, at the broken furniture and cardboard stuck in broken window panes to keep the draught out, the dirty floor-quarries, and think to myself quite simply and cleanly ‘Fuck everything and everybody’.

Women seem to play no more than a peripheral role in Hill’s world, and most of those he mentions are described as stereotypes rather than fully-rounded characters. Reading A Cage of Shadows, one is left to wonder about these many untold female narratives, particularly the story of Hill’s mother’s life and how she came to end up as the cold, feckless character he describes. But he focuses lovingly on a handful of male figures that loom over his formative years, as if to replace the father he longed for rather than the one he suffered. There is Pope Tolley, his father’s friend and a two-fisted mountain of a man. When Archie is continually and unfairly picked on by the headmaster at his school it is Pope and not his own father who marches down to the school and warns off his persecutor. Rough-mannered, kind-hearted Pope Tolley, who goes off to Spain to fight with the International Brigade and later dies on the beach at Dunkirk.

Other father substitutes figure in Hill’s life too: Old Billy, the glassblower who creates intricate glass figures at his work bench in his shed and shares his skills with young Archie. He remembers from his early years too his Welsh grandfather, a kind, gentle old man. Then there is Konk, the old poacher and knowledgeable countryman, who teaches Archie how to catch game and instils in him a love of the Staffordshire woods and hills. Konk, as an inner voice in Hill’s head, features in his later meditative work, The Second Meadow.

A turning point in Hill’s life comes when in prison he meets Klaus Fuchs, or ‘Doc’ as he was known to his fellow inmates, the nuclear physicist and convicted spy. Fuchs drip feeds into Hill’s consciousness a love of music, literature and social justice. But the change is not immediate, after prison Hill sinks even lower and ends up as a homeless meths-drinker living on London’s streets. But gradually something from his talks with Fuchs germinates and grows inside Hill. The process is slow and painful, but over a period of several years he pulls himself back from the brink of alcoholic oblivion to a comfortable life with a wife, son and a moderately successful career as a journalist and writer. He evens reaches a kind of forgiveness, though not love, for his father.

 

A Cage of Shadows by Archie Hill is published by Tangerine Press

£12 plus shipping. 304 pages. Format approx. 6″/150mm wide x 9″/230mm tall. Cover image by the author retrieved from the archives; three b&w examples of Mr Hill’s photography included in the book itself; acid-free text paper. ISBN: 978-1-910691-11-3

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East of England by Eamonn Griffin

Posted on 28/02/2019 by Bobby Seal

I have to confess a personal interest in East of England: having enjoyed Eamonn Griffin’s work on Twitter for quite a while, I was one those who helped crowdfund this novel. I’m pleased to say that I am not disappointed.

The central character is Dan Matlock, a career debt-collector and enforcer. As the book opens Matlock has just been released from prison having served a sentence for manslaughter. The complication is that the person he killed was a member of the local organised crime family, the Mintons. They stayed their hand from exacting their revenge while Matlock was in prison; but surely, he reasons, it is only a matter of time before they act. Matlock has a choice: run to safety and establish a new identity somewhere, or return to his former haunts and await whatever may come.

Matlock’s turf is that narrow strip of his home county nestled between the Lincolnshire Wolds and the coast. The territory is bisected by the A16, which runs from Grimsby in the north to Boston in the south. Much of the action of East of England takes place on or alongside this road, indeed it is as much a character within the world Griffin creates as Matlock himself.

Louth By-pass

This is a land of caravan parks, amusement arcades, agri-industrial units and greasy-spoon cafes. But even in these shabby towns that have clearly seen better days, there is money to be made, and the Mintons have most of the angles covered. The pages of this book are splattered with violence: bloody, shocking violence. Griffin does not judge or condemn, he merely presents us with acts of savagery to respond to as we will. The writer this most reminds me of is Derek Raymond and his Factory series of novels.

East of England is a work in the tradition of English realism and never strays into any form of literary experimentation or deep psychological explorations of its characters. However, it does have a gripping narrative pace and energy, and a strong evocation of life in provincial England. Something Griffin does which I find slightly disconcerting is to change the names of real places to a recognisable approximation of the original. Thus, Skegness becomes Skegthorpe, Louth is Loweth and Mablethorpe is renamed Mableton-on-Sea. Other than an homage to Thomas Hardy, I’m not quite sure what this achieves.

Mablethorpe

Griffin is from this part of Lincolnshire, although he now lives in North Wales. East of England was written, apparently, in his local café in Llangollen. This perhaps goes to explain why so much of the action in the book is punctuated by Matlock’s eating and drinking.

I hear talk of this being the first book in a series; indeed a taster for the next book is offered up at the end of this one. It is a sequel I will read with interest.

Eamonn Griffin, East of England (London, Unbound, 2019)

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Return to Fieldgate Street

Posted on 29/01/2019 by Bobby Seal

Children playing in the courtyard of the squatted tenement in Fieldgate Mansions, Aug 1985 © David Hoffman

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

Patti Smith, Just Kids

When I was a student in London in the 1970s I lived in a tenement block called Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel. The area was pretty run-down but had a fascinating history and a really exciting ‘alternative’ vibe.  In the seventies Whitechapel was just on the cusp of transforming from a traditional Jewish neighbourhood into the home of one of London’s largest Bangladeshi communities.  Whitechapel was also the scene of the notorious Ripper murders and our street was home to Rowton House, Europe’s largest night shelter for the homeless, or ‘dossers’ as they were known those days.  In his ‘The People of the Abyss’ Jack London called it ‘the monster doss house’.  Browsing through some old London pictures for another project I came across a gallery by a photographer called David Hoffman. I don’t recall ever meeting David, but I do recognise most of the places and some individuals in his pictures. Inspired by the images and the memories they stirred in me I wrote a kind of stream of consciousness piece, completing the first draft in one breakneck sitting. I have written it in the second person as it is essentially me addressing my younger self.  There are no paragraphs as I don’t think our memories work in that way.  Memories are not ordered but simply tumble out as a stream of thoughts and images. Neither does this piece have any particular narrative thread, other perhaps than allowing my mind to wander from one end of Fieldgate Gate to the other in order to see what memories are stirred up. There are numerous digressions, a bit like turning down one or other of the numerous side streets and alleyways branching off from Fieldgate Street.  All the events and people mentioned are real. I am so grateful to David for agreeing to collaborate on this piece and for allowing Gareth to use some of his pictures. The piece ends up being quite a bit darker than I expected it would be.  I think of this as a formative and essentially very happy period in my life, but I guess Whitechapel has darker undertones than were apparent to my teenage self.  And the memory of the young heroin addict who was murdered does indeed still haunt me. We were just kids.

*               *               *

The streets haunt you, just as echoes of you haunt them.  You walk past the bell foundry, an insinuation of holy smoke and sonorous alchemy, and into Fieldgate Street.  Drunken nights walking home arms around shoulders, your talk bubbling out excitedly with butterfly ideas and suddenly-clear insights, all forgotten by the morning.  You tell Sarah about the book on relativity that you just read: words, unmediated and ill-understood tumble from your mouth and vanish like soap bubbles in the night air.  She feels sorry for Nixon over yesterday’s resignation, she says, despite everything he’s done.  He’s just a flawed human being like the rest of us.  You come to the ghost-signed shop fronts at the turning into Settles Street.  Store fronts that are never open, whatever time of day you pass, yet often they echo with the sound of voices within.  On the next corner a fruit and vegetable distributor, its doors always shut fast, yet still the redolent smell of ripe onions.  No longer able to resist, your eyes are drawn to the other side of the road, a monolith of red brick, the fingers of its Gothic corner towers scratching at the sulphurous sky, a low canopy of purple and grey.  Rowton House, Jack London’s ‘monster doss house’, stares back at you, daring you to blink.  Men queue to be allowed in: a still, silent line, an air of resignation hanging over them like the aroma of an unbidden fart.  Meanwhile others, occasional and individual, burst out through the doss house doors, desperate to shake off its fetid air.  Here and in the surrounding streets émigré Bolsheviks still debate with Mensheviks and, smiling, secretly plot their moment of vengeance each upon the other.

Street drinkers, Commercial Street, Aldgate around 1974 © David Hoffman

Silent yet wakeful, Joseph Stalin lies in his bunk listening to the snores of Litvinov in the next cubicle.  While before you on the street, his head bowed, the boots of a passing dosser beat a loose-soled tattoo against the greasy paving slabs.  In your remembering eye the concrete is still slick with stir-fry oil.  Was it last night, last year or some other decade?  It could be any of those, but it was just here that Edinburgh Dave, he of the drooping moustache and swallowed consonants, dropped his Chinese meal as he raised an arm to greet you.  Paper carrier-bag wet with grease lets go of life and the tinfoil tubs within hit the pavement with an explosion of rice and noodles.  I prefer the soft ones, don’t you?  Next door to the doss house is the Queen’s Head, one of those pubs bigger on the inside that the outside, and so convenient I hear you say.  Katy, is that what she was called?  She runs a tight ship, the dossers are allowed in when they have money in their pockets.  Piss away your last penny but don’t you dare start your singing, or George will have you outside on your arse before the end of the first verse of Kevin Barry.  That young man at the next table, the one with the older woman, he’s just a boy really.  In his sleeveless t-shirt, he reeks of gin and testosterone.  Turns out he was one who broke into your flat in Fieldgate Mansions that first evening while you were out drinking with Charlie.  Leave the windows open to let in some air, he said.  Second-floor flat, edging along the ledge from the landing, the pavement waiting below and it can almost taste the blood. Fuck all worth stealing anyway, but you never make that mistake again.

Fieldgate Mansions, a 19th century tenement block due to be demolished in 1972 but preserved by squatters occupying it © David Hoffman

On the lintel above the front window of the basement flat, the one below yours, is another ghost sign: N.U.W.M.  An offshoot of the Communist Party, set up in the 1920s by Wal Hannington to organise against unemployment and the means test.  The campaign achieved its aims in 1939, but it took the exigencies of a world war for it to do so.  Take care what you wish for.  Fieldgate Mansions, three blocks of four-storey flats from the Edwardian-era, one block running the length of one side of Myrdle Street and the other two on Romford Street, with a midden yard in between the two.  The blocks are in a poor state and are initially ear-marked by the council for demolition.  Some flats are squatted and others are snapped up on a short-term lease by City Poly students’ union to provide cheap accommodation for students. You share a flat with Charlie, a room each, a kitchen and a toilet.  No bathroom and, for the first few weeks, no cooker.  You eat breakfast at Mick’s Café on Fieldgate Street, drink beer at lunchtime, more beer in the evening and then a late-night curry.  Some evenings you drink wine and learn to play bridge with Len and Claire from upstairs before Len goes off to his night shift at the BBC, speeding up west on his motorbike. You lose touch with Charlie and he goes on to become Gordon Brown’s press secretary.  Fieldgate Mansions are not demolished but are tarted-up and taken over by a housing association.  Social housing for the post-Thatcher generation with rents to match the level of aspiration.  Rob Puttick’s flat is on the first floor, the ‘Fuck Off, Whatever You Want, You Can’t Have It’ sign on his door is only half in jest.  Rob lives rent free in return for doing maintenance jobs for the student tenants, or at least those who shout the loudest.  Astrid doesn’t shout, she asks him shyly, reluctantly and Rob agrees.  A young woman, far from home, on the run and facing a punitive sentence for her peripheral role in the Rote Armee Fraktion.  They marry and go their separate ways.  He fixes fuse boxes and toilet cisterns for dope-mellowed students and she, as Anna Puttick, teaches East London lads how to mend cars rather than steal them.  Theirs is a love story, of sorts.  Rob, so kind and gentle, and Astrid, sweet-natured but lost in the aftershock of her youthful impulses.  In the Hollywood version they will end up falling in love for real; the audience will see it coming, but not so the players.  In the Good Samaritan with Charlie, he graduating from lager to Stolichnaya and lime, you sticking with the beer.  You speak to Ash, he sits alone drinking cider.  A brilliant PhD student conducting research into some unfathomable branch of physics, he has the unsettling air of someone living permanently on the edge.  But the anger within is implosive rather than explosive: only Ash is menaced by the shadow of Ash.

The Fieldgate Festival 1976 © David Hoffman

It’s a short stretch from the hospital over the road for the junior doctors to slide into the Good Sammy and wash away the daily taste of death and decay. You see a young doctor being urged, implored, coaxed by his colleagues.  After a show of reluctance he agrees and the yard of ale is ordered: two and a half pints of foaming bitterness.  The voices of encouragement are loud, they all know how this nightly ritual will end.  Only the victim, the compliant victim, changes each evening.  Joseph Merrick comes willingly; Dr Treves cannot offer him a cure for his condition at the London Hospital, but he can offer him sanctuary, a safe place to live out his remaining days.  Even the joshing students fall silent when they stand before his skeleton, the distorted frame that determined the course of his life.  The skeleton stares back.  Merrick’s hollow eyes suck in the room’s dim light and urgently, insistently he asserts his essential humanity.  For this is not the plastic facsimile in the public museum, but it is Merrick’s real bony essence, locked away in a room behind the anatomy lab.  Gently the young man puts the glass to his lips, a long shaft with a bulbous end, he tilts it violently and throws back his head.  He swallows some, spills more and, without a word, stumbles straight outside to vomit over his shoes.  When Sarah wishes to pass unnoticed, to wander the streets like a fleeting shadow, she stuffs her flowing red locks into a faded green bush-hat.  This summer you and she have become so close.  But you hold back.  Her boyfriend, George, is supposed to be your mate and, despite him being marooned up in Sheffield until September, you insist to yourself that he will resume both roles when he returns.  Only afterwards do you realise that Sarah was in love with you too.  She often stops to speak to lone dossers, though you sense she makes a point of doing so when you are together.  A kind of test.  In one way or another we all play to our audience, do we not?  In his fifties perhaps, he is sheltering in the goods bay just along from the Good Sammy.  He is from Scotland he tells you and all he possesses, you already know, is the coat on his back and the bottle of cider cradled to his breast.  He wants to share his bottle with you.  Sarah drinks first, just a small sip without breaking eye contact with her host, and then she passes it to you.  You give the neck of the bottle a discreet wipe with your thumb as you tilt it, put it to you lips and swig.  He expresses appreciation, says most everyday people would wipe the bottle before drinking it after him but he noticed, he says, that you two didn’t, and you feel guilty.  Walking back to her flat you are greeted by Duncan.  He kisses Sarah’s hand and bows a benediction to you both. Duncan is resourceful, a veteran of the evictions of the early seventies.  He understands the power of the spectacle, a power he knows you can use against the forces that created it.  When the first squatters were evicted and faced the prospect of sleeping on the streets that was precisely what they did, making sure the press and TV were there to record it.  There were no more evictions.  For Duncan it’s not just about squatting, it’s about enabling other people to squat: getting them into the property, dealing with the law, getting the services connected.  He’s seen it all before; done it before.  Everyone knows Duncan, he is the heartbeat of Fieldgate Mansions.  You say your goodnights to him, standing on the pavement outside the Bangladeshi café which sits between the Queen’s Head and the butcher’s shop.  Here, with Saif, you sit at a formica table and try your first samosa and jalebi.  It is Saif who shows you to eat curry rolling it up into a rice ball with one hand.  He teaches you how to say ‘Hello brother’ in Bangla.  He regularly goes off to see his friend in West London to ‘buy money’.  Saif who deserted the Pakistani army in the west and travelled across India, helped by the Naxalites, to join the Bengali rebels in the east.  Saif for whom the height of praise for anyone or anything is to say that it is: ‘good enough’.

Squatters living in an old jeweller’s shop in Black Lion Yard, Whitechapel relax outside on a hot summer night © David Hoffman

Night descends.  Purple and grey turns to black, the air turns chill.  A metallic taste in your mouth and your eyes liquid with tears.  You don’t even know her name, or if you did you’ve forgotten it, but she is a familiar figure in Fieldgate Street, selling her body to middle-aged men at cut-price rates to buy the next hit of smack.  She is about the same age as you and your friends, certainly no more than twenty, a short girl with curly brown hair.  One night in Myrdle Street, as you walk home late with Claudia, you see her running up the street in tears.  She is naked from the waist down and tells you she has been raped: ‘a boy raped me’.  The two of you comfort her and a guy you recognise comes up and puts his coat around her.  An act of simple kindness swallowed up in the turmoil that ensues.  A crowd gathers and someone calls the police.  They arrive, take charge and, reluctantly, people drift away.  The next you hear, months later, the girl with curly hair has been murdered and a man arrested.  And just to the south, in Dutfield’s Yard on 30th September 1888, Elizabeth Stride is butchered by the Ripper.  Years afterwards you search the records and can find no trace of the Fieldgate murder and the girl for whom this street was once home.  Her name is forgotten, yet her face haunts your memories.  Walking south towards the river feels like entering another realm, a place where the Kaddish is still recited and battles still fought on Cable Street.  You buy a cheap but reassuringly heavy Zenit camera from the back pages of the Morning Star: a promise of ‘quality Soviet technology’.  You want to record docklands before it’s all gone. You have a sense of what is about to happen to the docks and a vision of an exhibition of your work a and glossy volume of monochromatic nostalgia.  You see some of these locations years afterwards rolling by as gritty car chase backdrops in episodes of The Sweeney.  John Thaw, our favourite cockney copper, born in Manchester and educated at RADA.

Bengali children in the Romford Street part of Fieldgate Mansions 1978 © David Hoffman

On your second outing with your camera you wander nameless dockland streets capturing images of disused warehouses and cobbled quaysides.  But you become aware of a rising uneasiness within yourself; indefinable but insistent.  Soon you cut short your exploration and hurry away back to more familiar streets.  You shelve the docklands project to spend more time studying for your end of year exams.  Remembering only now that you never did get round to having those pictures developed.  But the streets remember.  Cold shadows, a creeping dread, and a brush with something you fight to lock away and keep from entering your dreams.  On foggy nights, lying in bed in the room painted dark purple, you hear the ship’s horns from the Pool of London.  Later, much later, you see footage of Iain Sinclair standing on Fieldgate Street in 2010 being interviewed about the refurbishment of Rowton House: Victorian poverty commodified for twenty-first century living.  In the background, just within shot, a shadow of your younger self passes by.  Sinclair’s left eyelid twitches in momentary awareness of a stray echo.  A flickering light, a feathery brush against the skin, the hint of an evocative smell.  It drifts through the streets, and you try to ignore the cry of anguish that resonates somewhere out there in the night.

 

This piece was first published in Unofficial Britain: Britain Uncovered in August 2018.

 

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Motivated by documenting what’s become increasingly overt state constraint on our lives, David Hoffman has spent some 40 years documenting a range of social issues from policing and racial and social conflict to homelessness drugs, poverty and exclusion. Protest, and the violence that sometimes accompanies it, is the theme that stitches his work together. Visit his website here.

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Mothlight by Adam Scovell

Posted on 25/01/2019 by Bobby Seal

 

I scraped away a line of dust from the glass to reveal the moth inside. It had faded too, its lower left wing detached almost entirely and now disintegrating at the bottom of the frame. Something struck me about the moth that I had not noticed before.

 

Many followers of this blog will know Adam Scovell’s work from his Celluloid Wicker Man site and his film, Holloway; the latter being made in collaboration with Robert Macfarlane. Scovell’s first book, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange was published in 2017.

Mothlight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mothlight, due to be published in February 2019, is the story of a young researcher whose present is haunted by the influence of a figure from his past. Thomas’s research focuses on the work of the late Dr Phyllis Ewans, an eminent lepidopterist whom he first met when he was a child. As he researches her writings and pictures, her grip on him grows and becomes ever more palpable.

Dr Ewans seems to grow inside Thomas like, Scovell seems to suggest, the grub of a parasitic wasp eating away at its host. Written in the first person, Mothlight has an atmosphere that is claustrophobic to the point of suffocation. We share Thomas’s grief at Dr Ewan’s death and live with him as his psyche gradually comes apart at the seams.

As he examines his late friend’s work Thomas appears to find patterns, but as quickly as the pieces of the puzzle come together, they fall apart. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Scovell writes with the eye of a cinematographer: his prose sweeps broadly across hilly landscapes and then closes in sharply to focus on the human face and the mind behind it.

Dr Ewans’s house is a place of dust, decay, memories and echoes. Thomas inhabits the house while he works on her papers and, as he does so, she in turn inhabits him. Adam Scovell’s first novel is a disturbing and haunting work and is a welcome addition to the English folk-horror oeuvre he has done so much to promote.

 

 

This review is based on an electronic advanced review copy of Mothlight provided by the publisher, Influx Press.

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Of Ice and Fire: January 2019 Book Reviews

Posted on 22/01/2019 by Bobby Seal

The Library of IceThe Library of Ice: Readings from a Cold Climate – Nancy Campbell (Scribner UK, 2018)

Nancy Campbell is a poet and a printmaker. She ascribes her fascination with the world’s icy places to the snow globe she had as a child: within in its curved walls, glimpsed through a storm of snowflakes, there existed a whole other world.

To conduct the research that went into The Library of Ice Campbell spent time at writers’ retreats in Iceland, Greenland, Canada and Switzerland. She also read extensively of the works of other writers on the subject matter of ice. But not just writers, Campbell also considers the responses of musicians, artists, film-makers and even curling enthusiasts.

Glacier

Most of us do not live in the icy regions of the world; but Campbell argues that ice is integral to the lives of all of us. She writes about the bore-holes she visits in the Antarctic and the drilled cores that are revealed by the operation, each successive layer showing part of the history of our planet. Our past is recorded in the ice but, unless we act decisively on global climate change, the ice will also bring an end to our current way of life.

CrimsonCrimson – Niviaq Korneliussen, translated by Anna Halager (Virago, 2018)

Until I read this, Niviaq Korneliussen’s second novel, I wasn’t aware that there was a Greenlandic literary scene. With a population of just 56,000 Greenland has produced few home-grown writers. But through Crimson, and 2014’s Homo Sapienne, Korneliussen has gained a large readership in Denmark, Greenland’s former colonial power, and with further translations she is beginning to find an audience in the wider world.

Crimson tells the story of four young gay characters living in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. Their experiences are universal: they party, they study, and they work. They make relationships and then experience the pain of breaking up. But the particular joys of this book are the verve and urgency of Korneliussen’s writing and her fascinating descriptions of Nuuk’s nascent queer scene.

 

Crimson2

At its heart this is a book about clinging on: Korneliussen’s characters are engaged in a struggle to make a life, to establish an identity. At a wider level the people of Nuuk, and Greenland’s other small, isolated communities cling on too. They are balanced between their ancient island home, in all its icy austerity, and the new, but equally challenging demands of the modern world.

The Immeasurable World

The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places – William Atkins (Faber, 2018)

William Atkins’ previous book, The Moor, the story of a quintessentially English landscape, was reviewed here in 2014. This present work looks beyond these shores and explores, both physically and spiritually, the world’s desert regions. The Oxford English dictionary defines a desert as a ‘waterless, desolate area of land with little or no vegetation, typically one covered with sand.’ Atkins’ travels through deserts in five of the world’s continents identifies ample evidence of there being far more to these regions than a simple lack of water.

He discovers deserts as places of spiritual retreat in Egypt, regions of banishment in China and, in Australia, Kazakhstan and the United States, areas for testing the nightmare weapons of the twentieth century.  He also ruminates on the role of deserts as ‘permissive spaces’ where, for example, the Mormons were able to find a home in the nineteenth century and, at the Burning Man Festival, people interested in alternative lifestyles are able to engage in ‘spontaneous self-expression’.

Mojave Desert

Atkins’ idea for this book grew, apparently, when he was staying at a monastery on Dartmoor and fell into reading about the Christian ascetics of the deserts of the Middle East. In time he came to study the world’s deserts more extensively and he writes about coming to see them as one continuous place and all the books about them as one all-consuming account.

T.E. Lawrence in Arabia and D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico both found deserts to be places of asylum away from their difficulties in England. The reverse side of this particular coin is a syndrome known as accidie, a kind of desert-induced depression. Atkins experienced this condition when he returned from Oman. Thankfully for us he was able to channel his emotional trials into this fascinating work.

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Misty Morning

Posted on 20/01/2019 by Bobby Seal

Misty-MorningMisty morning

Damp, clinging blanket

Icy wheedling fingers

Into every crevice and crack

The trees a hazy, spectral vision

Winter-breathed image upon smoked glass slide

 

 

 

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Croft Peace Garden

Posted on 10/01/2019 by Bobby Seal

The Croft Peace Garden is a small parcel of land in Holt Street, Wrexham. It is built on ground that was formerly a burial site for members of the Society of Friends (Quakers). In 1963 the site was gifted to the local authority in exchange a piece land nearby in Holt Road where a new Friends’ meeting house was built.

PeaceGarden1

A Friends congregation was first established in Wrexham in 1661 and meetings were held in a house they hired. In 1708 they purchased premises in Holt Street to be used as a meeting house and burial ground. The Friends ceased meeting in Holt Street in the mid-eighteenth century and by 1800 the old meeting house had been demolished. The burial ground, however, remained in use.

PeaceGarden2

PeaceGarden3Today the Peace Garden is a small, green oasis of trees, shrubs and grass in the centre of town. Up until 2002 it was a regular haunt for the town’s outdoor drinkers, but that year the garden became part of the town centre alcohol exclusion zone and the drinkers had to move elsewhere.

PeaceGarden4

PeaceGarden5When I visited the garden on a dry, bright January morning the place was completely deserted. Perhaps the lack of any seats or benches makes taking time-out in the Peace Garden a difficult proposition. A sleeping bag and bivi behind one the trees was evidence of some poor soul sleeping rough the previous evening on one of the coldest nights of the winter. In Britain, in 2019.

PeaceGarden6

PeaceGarden7

The Croft Peace Garden is still occasionally used for peace-related events such as this one in 2007.

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