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"Over the past decade the Conservative Party has taken millions of pounds from individuals and businesses with ties to Russia. Just this week it was revealed that JCB, which is owned by a major Conservative donor, continued to send equipment to Russia for months after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, despite publicly saying that they wouldn’t. This is not a one off. Over the past decade, Russia-linked donors have repeatedly been given access to senior Conservative ministers after donating to the party. This culminated in the absurd spectacle of former Prime Ministers David Cameron and Boris Johnson." Adam Bienkov reminds us how the Tories emboldened Vladimir Putin.

Giorgia Tolfo on Chiswick Women's Aid, who opened the world’s first safe house for women and children in 1971: "In the first month of opening the centre, a woman suffering violence at home arrived asking for shelter. Erin Pizzey, CWA's coordinator and spokesperson, didn't think twice. She quickly made arrangements to host the woman at the centre until her situation improved. Word spread and soon more women arrived seeking shelter."

Amid rising rents and closing businesses and venues, locals in South London are increasingly forming cooperatives to take charge of spaces and reinvigorate their communities, reports Kemi Alemoru.

"He discovered ... the fine perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures inflated reputations, vapid self-promoters and the slimy gibberish of PRs and journalists who pump them up to this day." Jonathan Meades reviews Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 by Gavin Stamp.

John Boughton has been to Thamesmead, where tenants are trying to fight off unwanted redevelopment.

Jonathan Denby discusses the importance of gardening to Victorian politicians: "Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet."

Jonathan Meades' eulogy for Gavin Stamp

The death of the architectural historian and journalist Gavin Stamp at the start of last month was widely mourned.

Jonathan Meades wrote a eulogy for his funeral and the London Review of Books has printed it:

Doctrinaire modernists armed with ancient progressive pieties were still just about in the ascendant in those days: to concern oneself, as Gavin did, with what a building actually looked like and what effect its presence might have on its surroundings was reckoned to be the height of frivolity, a sort of apostasy. 

The doctrinaire see what they believe in, the latitudinarian believe in what they see. Gavin looked. He had no programme, no theory, no ideology, little interest in movements or taxonomies. 

According to Nabokov there is only one school of writing – the school of talent. That is what Gavin increasingly believed about architecture. He found merit in the neglected and the threadbare and the jokey as well as in monuments of high seriousness.

It is almost as if Meades were writing a eulogy for himself.

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Peter Wrigley asks some pointed questions on the collapse of Carillion.

"Families who have never worked a day in their lives having 4 or 5 kids and the rest of us having 1 or 2 means it's not long before we’re drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters that we pay to keep!" Alex Spence introduces us to Ben Bradley, the new Conservative MP for Mansfield.

Mark Little welcomes the end of news in the Facebook news feed.

Gavin Stamp, architectural historian and campaigner died at the end of 2017. Here, in an article published in July, he discusses what we can learn from the homes architects designed for themselves.

"It does seem, from the outside, as though this warped dynamic is no accident, that it is designed to be unstable and that managers are not meant to get too comfortable in the dugout." Game of the People asks if the constant instability at Chelsea is there by design.

Farran Smith Nehme pays tribute to the French actress Michèle Morgan.

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"Like many Jewish journalists who reported on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, I spent the 2016 election being harassed by a motley crew of internet racists who coalesced around the future president. They sent me threats, photoshopped me into gas chambers and hurled an uncreative array of anti-Semitic slurs my way." Yair Rosenberg on why he helped create a bot to challenge Nazis on Twitter - and on how Twitter sided with the Nazis.

The philosopher Michel Foucault’s work on power matters now more than ever argues Colin Koopman.

Emerging Technology from the arXiv presents evidence that online dating is influencing levels of interracial marriage and even the stability of marriage itself.

No Country for Old Men pays tribute to Gavin Stamp.

"Death pops up throughout the film but, essentially, it is marked with a ritual within the landscape." Adam Scovell examines Peter Greenaway's 1988 film Drowning by Numbers.

Rob Parsons tries to account for the inconsistency of the England cricket team: "Over the last few years, I have often heard commentators say after a bad match that England haven’t become a bad side overnight. I have never heard them say the opposite after a good match – you don’t become a good side overnight."

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Gavin Stamp says Big Ben is the least of the Palace of Westminster's problems: "The House of Commons still will not commit itself to leaving the building to allow the restoration to begin. This is both selfish and financially irresponsible, for the longer the restoration is left, the further the deterioration becomes and the greater the expense of repair."

"The past has a value to the present, and you don’t have to scrub it all out and start again." Rowan Moore argues that the restoration of Liverpool's Welsh Streets offers a lesson for national housing policy.

Seventy years after it was made, Max Covill examines the allure and shock of the Powell and Pressburger film Black Narcissus.

Tim Holyoake has been to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - and he believes in the Loch Ness Monster.

James Alexander Cameron hates Westminster Abbey.

"The best compliment to the song I’ve come across was provided by Leo Moran of the Irish good time band The Saw Doctors who observed: 'One night for no particular reason we did Downtown and you could see people loved it. All ages. You could see it brought joy to people’s faces.'" Thom Hickey pays tribute to an ageless classic.

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Michael Mullaney analyses the Liberal Democrat performance in this month's general election: "Whilst increasing our MPs, and having four narrow misses, we have at this election still suffered a further loss of second places, a further loss of deposits, and a continuing fallback in large parts of Britain, particularly the North, the Midlands and Wales."

Political bots are poisoning democracy, say Hadley Newman and Kevin O'Gorman.

Gavin Stamp says we should not expect England great cathedrals to look after themselves.

"The spare performances ... add to the album’s intimacy, sparking a revealing listen that at times comes off like something maybe you shouldn’t be hearing. There are confessions, slipped-out secrets and the sense that the heart on display here was temporarily caught off guard." Michael Gallucci pays tribute to Joni Mitchell's album Blue.

"Are you a cavalier or roundhead?" Huw Turbervill revisits the tensions between David Gower and Graham Gooch. Me? I loved both of them.

Brian Sayle climbs Cadair Idris.

And finally a musical bonus...

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"Although the policy paper is called ‘Mending the Safety Net’, what it proposes is nothing of the sort. In fact, it actively endorses the current welfare system which is failing so badly that over a million people in the UK don’t just live in poverty but are actively destitute." George Potter argues that Liberal Democrat Conference should reject the social security policy paper.

Caroline Wright reports that a renowned Harvard psychologist Says ADHD is largely a fraud.

Gavin Stamp mourns the unhappy fate of Christopher Wren's London churches.

Thinking of faking your own death? It's harder than you think, explains Elizabeth Greenwood.

"That feeling extends to the battle scenes, as if a bunch of flower children have taken some bad acid and gone berserk. It's a sloppy, nasty tableau, anticipating the actual grubby decline of the sixties." A Classic Movie Blog views Alfred the Great from 1969.

" I like chess. That’s the main reason that I’m able to play at a reasonably high level - that I really love chess. Always have and always will (smiles). It’s the best game in the world!" Britain's Nigel Short explains why he is the only player aged over 50 in the world's top 100.

* Except that the numbering of this feature went haywire long ago. I've no idea which number this really is. One day I will find out.

You are welcome to suggest links to me, by the way.

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"Just look at them. Professional bloggers, Lords, media historians, 'social tech entrepreneurs'. People who have their own columns in the Guardian. These aren’t ordinary voters. They’re people who have never even *met* an ordinary voter, except the one behind the counter serving them their overpriced lattes." I think it's fair to conclude that Andrew Hickey is not impressed by MoreUnited.

Garry Kasparov finds that Donald Trump reminds him of Vladimir Putin - "and that is terrifying".

A shocking miscarriage of justice reveals the fallacy that we can always spot a liar, says Matthew Scott.

"As Hilaire Belloc wrote, 'When you have lost your Inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.'" Gavin Stamp mourns the loss of Britain's pubs.

Cinephilia & Beyond celebrates Wim Wenders' wonderful  film 'Paris, Texas'.

"Behind the cladding is an art deco cinema frontage that has not seen the light of day since the late 1960s. The former Dominion remains one of London’s hidden gems — one that is crying out to be restored," Londonist takes us to Harrow and an unexpected gem.

Ian Nairn: From Leeds into Scotland

Jonathan Glancey profiled the late Tom Nairn in 2010:

Writers and journalists, including JG Ballard, Will Self, Jonathan Meades, Patrick Wright, Iain Sinclair, Gavin Stamp (Private Eye's perennially outraged "Piloti"), as well as a younger generation of commentators such as Owen Hatherley and the mysterious blogger, Ghost of Nairn, have all been influenced one way or another by Nairn, who so wanted everywhere to be different when everywhere was threatening to be the same.

Ghost of Nairn did not last long, but you can see the real thing here as he explores the landscape and townscape through which the Settle & Carlisle passed.

Part 2 is also on Youtube if you want it.

Lost Victorian Britain by Gavin Stamp

I have just spent three nights at the Hotel Russell on Russell Square in Bloomsbury. It is a striking building by Charles Fitzroy Doll, clad in thé-au-lait terracotta and completed in 1898. Doll also worked on the Titanic, and it is said that his dining room on the ship was an almost exact copy of the one he designed for the Hotel Russell.

But there used to be an even more remarkable Charles Fitzroy Doll hotel on the east side of Russell Square. The Imperial Hotel. It opened in 1911 and was designed in a style Pevsner described as a "vicious mixture of Art Nouveau Gothic and Art Nouveau Tudor".

It lasted little more than 50 years, as it was demolished in 1966. Stamp tells us that its demise was partly due to a lack of bathrooms - though the restoration of St Pancras shows that can be overcome if there is a will - and to the Greater London Council's declaration that "the whole frame was so structurally unsound that there was no possibility of saving it if a preservation order had been placed on the building". However, he suspects that its loss had more to do with changing tastes in architecture than its structural condition.

The new Imperial is a notably grim building, but there are a few remnants of the original to be found if you know where to look. London Remembers tells us that the decoration from its Turkish baths can be seen:

Two groups of statues line the entrance to the underground car-park. There are six life-size, scantily clad allegorical women, two of them clutch books helpfully entitled "Literature" and "Chemistry"; one clutches a mask - indicating "Theatre" but the other three aren't telling. 

And there are ... 21 Tudor characters, each about 2 foot tall. The 5 bells, in decreasing size are embossed: United Kingdom MCMXII {1912}, India, Canada, Australia, South Africa. The bells and the galleon are on the casino facade.

I came across a second building from Lost Victorian Britain this morning in Ian Jack's Guardian column. He writes about the extraordinary Victorian philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts:

friend of Dickens and Disraeli, brazen proposer of marriage to the far older Duke of Wellington, and patron of dozens of good causes, including the charities that became the NSPCC and the RSPCA. Edward VII said that, after his mother, she was the most remarkable woman in England.

One cause she took up was providing the poor of Bethnal Green with better food by providing a covered market that traders could use without paying tolls. Jack continues:

Miss Burdett-Coutts never did things by halves. She spent £200,000 on a Gothic extravaganza that, on the evidence of old photographs, looks more like the college of an ancient university than a rendezvous for cabbage and cod. It had four-storey buildings arranged around a quadrangle, a galleried hall and a clock tower where bells rang out hymn tunes every quarter of an hour.

The market was not a success. It opened in 1869, but closed some time in the 1880s. That is according to Jack - the Wikipedia entry for Columbia Road market implies that it was open in some form long after that. The building survived until 1958, and the same entry says "the remains of railings can be seen in front of the Nursery School. Sivill House and the Dorset Estate replaced the Coutts buildings."

Lost Victorian Britain is full of photographs of extraordinary buildings like these, and not all of them in London. As well as the Imperial Institute in South Kensington, Stamp shows us Joseph Paxton's spectacular conservatory at Chatsworth (blown up with dynamite in 1920 by Paxton's own grandson), Preston Town Hall (demolished 1962) and Bayon's Manor in Lincolnshire (built for Tennyson's uncle and long derelict when it was dynamited in 1965).

Many of these losses, of course, were due to German bombing in Word War II - one of the most striking photographs in the book is of the ruins of St Faith's, Stoke Newington, after the church had been half-demolished by a flying bomb.

And many more were due to the blindness to the virtues of Victorian architecture that afflicted the powerful classes in the 1950s and 1960s. But we should not think that the problem ended there. The Church of England schemed to demolish George Gilbert Scott's Holy Trinity, Rugby, as recently as 1981.

We are brought up to think of ourselves as modern, open-minded and daring, and to laugh at the Victorians as stuffy and old-fashioned. Yet what strikes you about these photographs of lost Victorian (and Edwardian, though Stamp does not say so) buildings is how exotic, even fantastic, many of them are. Most modern architecture looks flat and uninspired by comparison.

If you doubt me, take a trip to Russell Square and compare the Hotel Russell with the modern Imperial.