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... )

But, honestly, I sometimes think the Dutch get a pass as being much more progressive and cooler than they are, because 'coffeeshops', enlightened sex ed, etc?

Quite apart from the ongoing annual mutterings over Zwarte Piet (which is not even 'tradition since time immemorial', but mid-C19th in origin), today I came across this charming thing in a ( Read more... )

And I am really not sure that when GK Chesterton was going on about the people of England and whether they had or had not spoken yet, whether he included making direct debits to institutions one deemed worthy of support or pulling down statues or civil protest or, being on jury duty, acquitting people who did the latter, as the sort of speech acts ( Read more... )

Well, yay for the British Academy, what: Historian David Olusoga awarded President’s Medal: The writer and broadcaster has brought diverse stories from Britain’s past to a wider audience: Olusoga, a writer, broadcaster and film-maker, best known as the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, is the 39th person to be given the President’s ( Read more... )

Reminders of the longer history, a little behindhand of Black History Month:
The story of a man who became one of Britain's first black gardeners is being marked with a rose named in his honour.
I’m a fourth-generation black British man. Yet still I’m made to feel I don’t belong. My great-grandparents came here in the 1800s. Too few people realise ( Read more... )

Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat: still making that come back from the brink
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River of life: zoo’s yearly count finds seals thriving on Thames: In the 1950s, the Thames was declared biologically dead, and the Guardian reported in 1959: “The tidal reaches of the Thames constitute a badly managed open sewer.” But now seals can enjoy a varied diet of ( Read more... )

This sounds fascinating, but I am aghast at the price (though it's par for the course for that particular academic press): Ryan Hanley. Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830: 'the Royal Historical Society deemed Beyond Slavery and Abolition worthy of its annual Whitfield Prize, an award that this novel work most ( Read more... )

Lately encountered in the spam-trap of my email account with my former workplace:

***Manhood»» Elongation Secret: African Tribesmen Ritual***

Given that I have had had some historical interest in the kinds of concerns that might lead to being taken in by such solicitations, I succumbed to the temptation to open this in quarantine space, and ( Read more... )

Lucy Mangan speaks for me, and I am sure she (and her family) and I are not outliers in this:
I don’t know why, at the age of 46, ringing any kind of authority to make any kind of request or complaint fills me with apprehension, stress and tearful anxiety, but it does. I have tried to unpack my own root issue here in the hope of addressing it, but ( Read more... )

Augusta Fells Savage, a talented sculptor who had faced obstacles due to her sex and race at every turn: [L]ittle of Savage's work survives today. Because she couldn't afford bronze, she often had to make her sculptures out of plaster; most of these have crumbled over time. Other works, like The Harp, were destroyed because they could not be moved ( Read more... )