Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

Dept of: sex in the archives: ‘Corrupting public morals?’ Fitzroy Square and queer desire: We know little about these individuals after this snapshot in time; after all, they were not famous, just working class men who dared to love and live their sexual lives fully.

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Dept of birds and beasts:
I though you weren't supposed to feed bread to the ( Read more... )

I'm not sure if this is actually true - some of the things going around have a touch of the urban legendary about them - but people policing other people's shopping baskets for 'non-essential' items?
I don't think this is so much going back to muttering about 'having dealings with spivs for black market goods' as 'entering into somewhat dodgy ( Read more... )

More, something that we could have done without on the way home from shopping when we'd already started out late.
Police shut off busy shopping street after underground blaze.
Which meant a) no buses running in the direction we wanted and b) having to take what turned out to be a massive pedestrian diversion just to get to the Tube station instead ( Read more... )

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But, really? this? Am reminded of Winston Smith's compulsory and surveilled physical jerks.
The National Health Service is to put its own 1.35 million staff at the head of a new fight against obesity by encouraging them to join weight-watching groups and take out gym memberships, its new head will announce this week.
How about you reduce the ( Read more... )

Thinking further about Red Riding 1980, I can see, I suppose, that he's writing about a certain macho culture which was profoundly complicit with the serial killer of women that they were supposed to be catching (the real-life Yorkshire Ripper) -

Because it's depicted as all about dominance displays, dick-sizing, defending one's turf even against ( Read more... )

I've done some arches already: the railway kind, Admiralty Arch, and the quondam Euston Arch which there are plans to rebuild, but there are still some that I haven't yet touched on.

Besides, that is, the iconic Marble Arch, standing more or less on the site of the Tyburn Tree (not its original location, I note, taking down arches and putting them ( Read more... )

Burlington Arcade - the Survey of London being almost TMI about this structure. The Wikipedia entry has pictures.

Neither of those has anything apropos a half-remembered factoid about the policing powers of the Beadles as applied to ladies, who might be ladies of the night... (and the Survey of London suggests somewhat to the contrary:
Writing in ( Read more... )

I suppose this is riffing off people responding to comments in USA that the thing to do about mass shootings is for Decent Responsible People to be armed, and ready and able to take action when somebody starts firing in a public space...

And wondering whether even people who happened to be armed and capable in such a situation would necessarily and ( Read more... )