The Joy of Six 1514

Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."

"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.

Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.

Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."

"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).

"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.

The London Nobody Knows

This is an extraordinary film from 1967.

It is written by Geoffrey Fletcher, who (as Electric Sheep explains) was an illustrator and columnist for the Daily Telegraph in the 1960s who "documented the sights, sounds and scenes of a London fast vanishing beneath the grey concrete tide of redevelopment". He published several illustrated collections of these columns and I have a copy of the book that shares a title with and inspires this film.

James Mason narrates it, wearing the sort of dapper cloth cap I have taken to affecting myself. He takes in the street markets (rightly treated as survivals of Victorian London rather than an outbreak of the Swinging Sixties), the extraordinary ruined Bedford Theatre in Camden, a Yiddish Theatre that has become a bingo hall and Salvation Army hostels.

He visits Shoreditch, knocks at the door of a decrepit house and goes through to its yard to show us where one of the Ripper's victims was found. Mason says there are people still living in the area who remember the murders, and you believe him.

The London Nobody Knows shows the city at an important juncture. Victorian slums stand next to new tower blocks (which are welcomed in a commentary that avoids easy nostalgia). You can even see the sixties contending with an older world in the clothes of the children playing in the streets.

As Electric Sheep says, Fletcher anticipated the psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd by decades. And an imagined scene at an egg-breaking plant looks forward to Jonathan Meades.

The London Nobody Knows shares the DVD with Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, a bit of sixties whimsy shot in village Hampstead. At least it has a good theme song.

Finally, a scene from a time when there were no more than a dozen buskers left in London...

And Sid James must score!

A fascinating story and film clip from 1958 on the BBC site:

Singer Alma Cogan kicked off the game, which also included actors like James Mason, Sid James, Stanley Baker and Alfie Bass.

Learn more here.