Under the Influence? A new report on alcohol at Westminster

When the newly elected Hannah Spencer – the Green victor in this year's Gorton and Denton by-election – voiced her shock at the role alcohol played at Westminster, other MPs and social media users queued up to patronise her and assure us that everything was fine there.

But perhaps they will pay more attention to a new report from the Institute of Alcohol Studies entitled Under the influence? Perspectives of alcohol in the parliamentary workplace among UK MPs and staff. 

You can read a media release on the institute's website and download the report from there too.

The release says:

Westminster is a unique workplace where alcohol is woven into the working environment. Staff members based in constituency offices were far less likely to report being offered alcohol at work meetings or events compared to staff based in Westminster and MPs, and participants also drew stark comparisons with the presence of alcohol in other workplaces.

The foreword is written by Beccy Cooper, who was a public health consultant before she won Worthing West for Labour in 2024. She says:

Two findings stood out to me. Almost one in ten respondents reported a negative experience because of someone else’s drinking at work, and 70 per cent either didn’t know, or weren’t sure, how to raise a concern about a colleague’s drinking. 

That combination – real, measurable harm, and no clear route to address it – is exactly the kind of gap we need to address. While social and networking elements are important in a healthy workplace, colleagues describing how the drinking culture plays a distinct role in career progression raises significant concerns about wellbeing, inclusion, and professionalism. 

The Guardian story on Under the Influence? emphasises its tales of excess and the claim by one MP that other members have had their stomachs pumped after consuming so much alcohol that they ended up in hospital.

I am reminded of another British institution that has seen better days: cricket.

This is from a blog post I wrote in 2017:

In the course of my day job I went to an event on the psychology and wellbeing of military personnel.

A session on mental health saw general agreement that the biggest issue facing the Forces in that field was alcohol misuse. ...

Cricket shares many features with military life – slightly awkward male camaraderie, periods of boredom followed by periods of nerve-shredding excitement, public school officers – and alcohol seems to play the same central role in it.

Alcohol is used as a reward and a consolation, to oil the wheels of socialisation and quite possibly to ease the nerves of the battle-scarred too.

One of the attractions of political activism for me, I will admit, was that after delivering, canvassing or committee meetings generally ended in the pub. In fact, there was a theory that political meetings all ended an hour before "Last orders", no matter when they began.

These days pubs are open later but no one can afford the beer prices, so I suppose everything has changed. By the sound of it, the only place where nothing has changed is Westminster.

You don't have to be a Puritan to think it has the wrong attitude to alcohol.

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"The idea that England has always been governed from a single political centre is surprisingly recent. Westminster may now appear almost inseparable from the state, but for much of English history, government was far more mobile." Stephanie Brown says Andy Burnham’s No 10 North has a precedent in medieval York.

Nafeez Ahmed examines the links between George Cottrell’s Reform UK network in Montenegro and sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

"When social workers become involved with a family, the focus is often on parenting, safeguarding concerns or family relationships. But new research suggests that one of the strongest drivers of repeated involvement with children’s services is something more basic: whether families have enough money to live on." Rick Hood explains the findings of his research.

Jennifer Rubin Grandis confronts the systemic bias in academic publishing: "I’ve been studying sexism in academic medicine since 2019, and I’ve learned from countless interviewees that my experience as a woman in medicine is common. Women are rarely mentored well—in fact, when they ask for advice from senior faculty, they’re often discouraged from submitting their papers to high-impact journals, despite making just as many scientific discoveries as men."

Boak & Bailey recommend pub crawling as a way of practising psychogeography.

"Few science fiction relationships stick in my mind better than the love/hate between Dr. Zachary Smith and Robot in the original 1960s version of Lost in Space." J.G. Follansbee on one of television SF's great double acts.

The Alcopops panic and other booze of the Nineties

The latest edition of Miranda Sawyer's Talk '90s To Me podcast is well worth a listen. It provides a history of the changes that took place through the decade both in people's taste for drink and in the economics of the pub trade. Peter Brown is a well-informed guest.

As to the panic over children and alcopops, it was largely unfounded. They were expensive, and as underage drinkers take it up because they want to look more adult, a product that was packaged like a children's drink didn't attract them anyway. 

I remember alcopops as a good after-work drink before you got the train home on a Friday.

Finedon was once one of Northamptonshire's four largest towns

At the time of the Domesday Book the four largest settlement in Northamptonshire were Northampton, Brackley, Rushton and Finedon. The first two are still towns (one a great deal larger than the other) and Rushton is now a small village near Desborough

Finedon, where I went today, is described as a town, though its population at the 2021 census was only 4552 and there are few shops left in its historic heart.

The pub proved to be closed until six – as it was a Friday, that suggests to me that it's more of a restaurant these days – and the cafe that was my fallback had the builders in. 

I was saved by a small Co-op branch, were I got a sandwich. Looking round for the refrigerated unit with the cans of pop, I found it had a whole cold room devoted to them. How neat is that? The owner offered to let me stay in there for a while to cool off, but it wasn't that hot outside.

Anyway, Finedon's many ironstone buildings – there were many quarries serving the steel industry here at one time – remain and here are some of them.

Later. In fact, as someone pointed out on Bluesky, the pub I mentioned (The Bell Inn) closed in January. I'd assumed there would be some more pubs on the very busy A6 – as seems common in Northamptonshire, the original centre of Finedon lies off the later main road – but there are none.

Finedon may soon resemble the Leicestershire village of Hallaton, which once tried to rival Market Harborough as a market town. It has what still feels like a high street, but there are no shops on it.

Oh, and the Finedon building in the photograph immediately below this text used to be a hotel.

GUEST POST The Red Lion, Evesham, and the Warwickshire Avon

River Avon and Workman Gardens, Evesham

Peter Chambers voyages along the Severn and Shakespeare's Avon, visits an Evesham pub and consults the accounts of the Avon Navigation Trust.

For the English boater who has completed the delights of the Trent and its disappearing power stations and riverside pubs other venues await. One such is a trip down the Severn and up the Warwickshire Avon, with a stay at the tourist trap of Stratford when leaving the river.

It is worth a stay at Evesham on the way. We had embarked a local guide with knowledge of both volunteer water pollution activism and the best drinking places. Before we were done I could identify a CSO (combined sewer overflow) and an Environment Agency solar panel, which indicates a remote monitoring system nearby. If I had watched the documentary Dirty Business before the trip, I might have understood better why they are located where they are.

After a thirsty tour of the Lower Avon we moored at Workman Gardens at Evesham. There is plentiful mooring there although it is not technically flood safe (for example, using tall poles to moor on). However, the weather forecast said we would be safe that week.

And so up hill to the Red Lion for drinks before dinner. This is an unusual pub, aiming not so much for real ale as real everything. Real cider, real music, real atmosphere. It has a shop front exterior rather than a faux olde worlde tourist appearance. The guest ales appear on a hand written list and the tables are small and mismatched. You can even have tea. Well behaved dogs welcome. 

This was a great place to spend an hour before going on to dinner at the River Avon Restaurant. Happily, being up the hill from Workman Gardens, it is not going to flood.

Evesham was a nice break between the Lower Avon starting with Tewksbury on the Severn and the Upper Avon ending near Stratford. A chance to pick up on some local knowledge.

It was also interesting to come across the Charity Commission filings from the Avon Navigation Trust (ANT) that document the state of the trust in 2020 and 2024. In 2020, ANT turned in £959,995 (larger than a parish council but smaller than a principal council) and had a single employee earning a reportable remuneration between £80,0001 and £90,000 (about 8.9 per cent).

By 2024, ANT had an income of £1,058,900 and reportable (individuals on £60+k) of one between £60,001 to £70,000 and one between £100,001 and £110,000 (about 16 per cent). The cost of governance seems to have nearly doubled. Happily there is a lot more detail on file to dig into.

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

The Joy of Six 1481

"Other guests at the party included Mandelson’s good friend Nathaniel (Nat) Rothschild, a financier and heir to the Rothschild fortune (Mandelson often stayed at his villa in Corfu), and Rothschild’s old schoolmate, the then shadow chancellor George Osborne." Tamsin Shaw looks back to the Yachtgate scandal of 2008 and argues that we misread it at the time.

"Across the country, thousands of children are quietly lingering in ORR [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities, unable to reunite with parents or relatives because of new Trump administration policies limiting who can sponsor them. According to a class action lawsuit filed by immigration advocacy groups last week, children are 'being separated from their loving families, while the government denies their release, unnecessarily prolonging their detention'." Julia Lurie on the cruelty of the Trump regime.

Tanya Park believes Liberals should care about the collapse of serious Conservative journalism: "Not because the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph were ever friends to progressive politics (they weren't), but because a functioning liberal democracy depends on a press that engages honestly with reality across the political spectrum."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols predicts that general-purpose AI will poison itself: "We're going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can't ignore it."

"Alcohol has its many downsides as I can attest having a childhood punctuated by my father’s alcoholism, but it lowers people’s inhibitions making them willing to talk. It’s why you’re more likely to spark up a conversation over an interesting cask beer instead of waxing lyrical to the person next to you about the smooth flavour of an Arabica coffee bean." When it comes to social cohesion, beer beats coffee, says David Jesudason.

Ian Jones reminds us that Kenneth Williams was never off the television: "Yet over the next two decades he failed repeatedly to be – in one of his catchphrases from the BBC radio show Round The Horne – 'properly serviced' by the small screen. Despite all that graft on stage, he never landed a leading role in a TV drama series. For all the comic virtuosity that poured out of him in the Carry On films and his radio series with Tony Hancock and Kenneth Horne, he not once played lead in a TV sitcom." 

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Martin Parr looks at successful and unsuccessful attempts to depose a prime minister: "Labour, significantly, has never toppled a prime minister. It’s not in the culture of so cooperativist a party: there’s no equivalent of the 1922 Committee. And whenever it might have happened, the challenger blinked: Herbert Morrison with Attlee; Roy Jenkins with Wilson; David Miliband with Brown; Wes Streeting may have just joined the roster of the rueful."

Sumaiya Motara on the brutal contest for low-paid work: "It’s like The Hunger Games, but you’re all trying to get a job in a shop where you’re going to be folding clothes all day, for just over minimum wage."

"The case took a dramatic turn in November when Erin’s teenage son ... ran away from his father’s home and hired his own solicitor. After a period in foster care and a series of urgent hearings, he was later reunited with his mother for their first Christmas together in six years." Hannah Summers reports on a hearing that highlights the issue of unregulated psychologists appearing in court as expert witnesses.

Some major news organisations are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. They are doing so largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using it as a back door for large-scale scraping. Mark Graham argues that these concerns, though understandable, are unfounded.

"Whilst Landlord continues to power its way across the country ... it has to be hoped that the company doesn't forget its roots and the locality that sustained it for much of its existence." Real Ale, Real Music visits Keighley, home of the brewer Timothy Taylor.

Robert Hugill praises the new Opera North production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes.

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Chris Dillow argues that if government wants to foster economic growth, it will have to fight for it: "Right now, the social transformation needed to raise growth requires the government to face down the powerful interests of, if not capital in general, then at least the more regressive elements of it such as rentiers, monopolists and media barons."

Virginia Heffernan investigates Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon, Edge. She finds that it infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science.

"'Free School Meals' and 'Free School Clothing' were an absolute lifeline for us ... That support meant I could walk through the school gates looking like everyone else, focusing on my education rather than the clothes on my back. It taught me that while education is a right, the cost of accessing it can be a barrier we must actively dismantle." Shaffaq Mohammed on the importance of the Lib Dem amendment, passed by the Lords, that will put a price cap on school uniforms.

Lauren Leek crunches the numbers to see why so many pubs have closed: "So here’s the political economy of pub closures. It is not: people stopped going. It is: pubs became collateral in leveraged buyouts, debt costs were passed down as higher rents and lower investment, and the pubs that couldn’t sustain the extraction closed, while the ones that could were reshaped into higher-margin branded concepts serving a wealthier clientele."

Did climate change lead to greater persecution of witches? York Historian weighs the evidence.

"Whenever a performer had a Muppet on their hand, they never broke character. So all the time in between takes, Gonzo would still be Gonzo and I was still talking to Gonzo, not Dave Goelz, who is the performer of Gonzo. I believed that Gonzo and Rizzo were my friends, and we were on an adventure together. Rizzo in particular, Steve Whitmire, was so funny. We would just play all day long." Kevin Bishop shares his memories of playing Jim Hawkins in Muppet Treasure Island with Brian VanHooker.

The political effect of our "silent epidemic of loneliness"

The Liberal Democrats have proposed a network of "Hobby Hubs" to combat what they call a "silent epidemic of loneliness", as a lack of community spaces is forcing people to find human interaction online.

These hubs could libraries, community centres and pubs where groups could meet for activities. The network would be integrated the into NHS social prescribing programmes, giving GPs additional options when recommending activities for their patients.

The BBC News report on this plan says the party estimates that £42m of funding per year could help hobby hubs in England stay open for an additional 300,000 hours.

It also quotes Ed Davey

"The Liberal Democrats want to breathe new life into British high streets and community centres to give everyone a place to do what they love, with other people who love it too. 

"It is so important that we do not allow isolation to become the new normal."

This is an important issue, and one that has political implications. Diane Bolet has written about her own research into the decline of community centres for The Conversation:

The decline of the high street has been hollowing out British town centres in recent years. When pubs, community centres, libraries and banks close, it adds to a sense of local decline. In my recently published research, I found that local decline contributes to a rise in support for radical-right political parties – and that the loss of local pubs plays a surprisingly important role in the shift.

A couple of other links seem relevant too. Here's Andrew Saint reviewing The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950. in the London Review of Books:

Edwardian Market Harborough, a town just short of 8000, boasted Sunday schools, friendly societies for young men and girls, a Church Lads’ brigade, a Territorial Army branch, a debating society, a reading society, a choral society, an opera society, a brass band, an angling 'society', clubs for cricket, football, tennis, golf, polo, water polo, bicycling and point-to-point riding, a swimming-bath and a roller-skating rink, and regularly put on carnivals, flower, produce and horse shows and swimming galas. I abridge. There can have been little room for masterly inactivity in Market Harborough.

And here is Simon Titley, writing in Liberator 331, on the world that the concept of "cool" is producing:

A world where it is no longer permissible to have hobbies or intellectual pursuits. A world where enthusiasm or erudition earns contempt. A world where, if you commit any of these social sins, you will immediately be slapped down with one of these stock sneers: "sad", "trainspotter", "anorak", "anal" or "get a life".

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Jess Asato, Labour MP for Lowestoft, says AI nudification is the latest weapon of violence against women and girls: "Using AI to strip a woman of her clothes is the modern equivalent of locking her in stocks in the town square and throwing rotten fruit at her. It is a weapon of shame, designed to humiliate. Like other pillories, it is meant to send a message to everyone else: do not do what this woman has done."

"The shortage of legal children’s homes across the UK is fast becoming a national crisis. Last week, a Public Accounts Committee report revealed that nearly 800 children were sent to live in illegal accommodation in 2024, staying an average of around six months each." Gareth Davies and Tom Wall report on a national scandal.

Chris Grey on Donald Trump, Greenland and Mark Carney: "Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism."

Emma McClarkin argues that Britain's tax regime is forcing pubs to raise the price of a pint.

"After she finished The Left Hand of Darkness in 1968, she worked for Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters in his Oregon field office. In 1972, recovering from the first draft of her novel The Dispossessed, she did newsletters for McGovern." Julie Phillips on Ursula Le Guin the political activist.

"As I walk, I wonder what one ought to put on the grave of a cat." Natalie Guest visits Ilford pet cemetery.

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"By restricting jury trials, removing protest rights and expanding surveillance, Labour is entrenching an authoritarian legal infrastructure that a far-right government will not hesitate to exploit." Karl Hansen says Labour is building Farage's state for him.

Phoebe Weston reports on the French ski resorts that are closing as the snow line in the Alps edges higher: "In France, there are today 113 ski lifts totalling nearly 40 miles (63km) in length that have been abandoned, nearly three-quarters of them in protected areas."

Catherine Rampell says Trump is misusing Norman Rockwell's art to promote Gestapo tactics and nativist ideas: "The works have been endlessly parodied since their introduction in 1943. In the internet age, they’ve become ubiquitously memed. (Freedom of Speech, for example, is nowadays widely known as the 'unpopular opinion' meme.) But originally, they served as wartime propaganda, meant to help rally support for America and its cause during the years of war against the Nazis."

"Take Me High's unexpected legacy is to act as a kind of Brummie Rorschach test: what do you see in its depiction of the angular 'new' Birmingham of 1973? An ugly, car-worshipping mess that, like Cliff's career, needed desperate reinvention? An ambitious feat of post-war planning? Or a nostalgic vision of your childhood? It’s a question that becomes more poignant with each landmark razed and every area redeveloped beyond recognition." Shaun Patrick Hand has discovered the Cliff Richard film from 1973.

"Raynor’s efforts simply render the magnificent landscapes of Devon and Cornwall as joyless, grey backdrops to her own ceaseless complaining. The South West Coast Path should sue for defamation of character." Finlay McLaren takes aim at The Salt Path.

Andy Marshall chooses and photographs his all-time best pubs.

The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle has reopened

Good news from the BBC News Shropshire pages:

A historic Shropshire pub has reopened under new ownership, five months after it shut and was branded by locals as an "embarrassment".

The Three Tuns Inn in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, closed on 11 July due to "unforeseen circumstances", former owner Heineken Star Pubs said at the time.

Now its doors are open again under the management of The Shed, a Shropshire-based events and hospitality business.

I visited Bishop's Castle this summer and found the Three Tuns closed and the town, partly as a result, rather depressed.

As Darren Dixon, one of the new landlords, told BBC News, "It's a great pub that should never really have closed."

He said there is investment planned with the neighbouring, Three Tuns Brewery that will "reshape the image" of the pub. Its appearance has been criticised in the town, as it has fallen into a state of disrepair.

Former nun Emma Smith's 101 days buried alive in Skegness

There's a sad and fascinating story in today's Guardian about Mick Meaney, and Irish labourer who in 1968 was buried alive in a coffin under a Kilburn builder's yard. 

He hoped the stunt would bring him riches and fame, but he was swindled by his manager and returned to Ireland with nothing to show for it:

No Guinness Book of Records representative recorded Meaney’s feat and a rival burial artist named Tim Hayes, who spent less time underground in a regular-sized coffin, disputed his champion credentials. Later in 1968, a former nun named Emma Smith had herself buried beneath a fairground in Skegness for 101 days.

I just had to look up Emma Smith in the British Newspaper Archive, and found this front-page photograph from the Daily Mirror (18 September 1968). You can read more about her on the Skegness Magazine blog. She came to no harm, unlike Harold Davidson, the Rector of Stiffkey, who was mauled to death in the town by a lion called Freddie.

Emma Smith's record lasted until 1981, when it was broken by an American who lasted 141 days in his coffin. In 1999 a man stayed buried under the garden of the Railway Inn, Mansfield, for 147 days to win the record back for Britain. He was Emma's son Geoff.

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"The real scandal here is the behaviour of the board. As Patrick Barwise and Peter York detailed in their 2020 book The War on the BBC, the British right has been trying to cow and weaken the BBC for decades, for both political and commercial reasons. But this time is different because the chief saboteurs were board members, chiefly Sir Robbie Gibb. On the Today programme, former Sun editor David Yelland justifiably described this week’s events as 'nothing short of a coup'. The call is coming from inside the house." Dorian Lynskey says the BBC is the biggest prize in the information war and the right may be about to destroy it.

Stacy Patton shows that Donald Trump is not the first US president to be accused of paedophilia.

"In 2024, Pershore and Thrapston became the first towns in the UK to twin their rivers, the Avon and the Nene, creating the Sister Rivers partnership. The idea is simple and scalable. Each town takes guardianship of its stretch of river, monitors it, and shares results, data, and strategies with its twin. Two councils, two communities, one purpose: to restore what regulation has failed to defend." Michael Chapman Pincher on a new initiative to protect our rivers.

Gordon McKelvie finds that historians must be alert to the dangers of AI and its potential to simplify, and ultimately impoverish, the study of the past.

"At one point the White Lady apparently benevolently watches over the father’s daughters as they sleep but she is revealed to be a form of predatory grim reaper when suddenly the silhouetted arc of a scythe she holds appears over their heads." Stephen Prince revisits White Lady, a lesser-known television play by David Rudkin that was broadcast in 1987

The Crow Inn has a guide to some of the best pubs in Derby.

New hope for Leicester's former Black Boy pub

Because I don't spend so much time wandering the back streets of Leicester these days, I was surprised to learn that the former Black Boy pub is still standing, but the Leicester Mercury reports that it may yet be saved.

Under plans approved by the city council two years ago, the Mercury reminds us:

Just the facades of the former public house as it looks into Albion Street and Chatham Street were to be retained and a new five-storey building built behind these.

Now, says the paper:

That proposal now appears to have been abandoned, however, and a new project has been put forward for the site. This latest plan would instead see the Black Boy "preserved" and "restored", maintaining its "strong presence" on the street corner, planning documents state. 

It also reports that planning documents say the scheme was discussed with the city council and the civic society before it was formally submitted, and positive feedback was received from both bodies.

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Helen Charman dissects the claims of the flag-bearing demonstrators. "One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George's Cross, is 'Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners'. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and 'foreign' women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted."

All good Liberals know the tale of Harry Willcock – "I am a Liberal, and I am against this sort of thing" – and his part in the abolition of national identity cards after the war, but there was another hero in his court case. It was the unexpected figure of the ferocious Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard. Neil Hickman explains.

"For over three years, the people of the UK have opened their homes to Ukrainian families and welcomed them into our communities. Offering them safety in the face of Russia’s indiscriminate shelling of cities and the illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory. However, at no point over these three years has our government provided Ukrainian families with certainty or stability." Rowan More looks ahead to a debate at the Liberal Democrat Conference.

Finlay McLaren finds that the chief effect of podcasting has been to give more publicity to people who were already famous.

James Wright suggests commercial interests may encourage the spreading of unverified stories and pseudo-archaeology connected to ancient buildings.

"Old Nick was so enraged he laid an everlasting curse upon them, and hence it was said that after Michaelmas Day, any blackberries on the bushes now belonged to the Devil Himself and it was most unwise to pick them." Jim Moon knows why you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michaelmas.

A Bishop's Castle blue plaque for the man who wrote Apache

The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle is currently closed, as I found when I visited the town on holiday.

I also found that this blue plaque has been put up on the outside of the pub since I was last there. Jerry Lordan, who died in 1995, was obviously a regular customer.

Lordan, who had three hits himself as a singer, wrote the classic Shadows tunes Apache, Wonderful Land and Atlantis. Like the Tornados' Telstar, they capture the optimism of their era, though you suspect the wonderful land he had in mind was America.

Seeing as I suggested a few months ago that Jet Harris smoking his cigarette at the start of this Shadows video of Apache is the coolest moment in British pop, we had better see it again.

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Denis Mikhailov, a Russian dissident lawyer now exiled to Poland, explains how Trump’s generosity to Putin only entrenches his tyranny: "For Putin, this meeting was not a platform for negotiations, but above all an instrument of political legitimisation. On the one hand, it was an opportunity to show the world that he is still being received, that he is capable of holding dialogue on equal terms with the President of the United States, despite the warrant of the International Criminal Court and his de facto political isolation."

"Your politically engaged supporters inhabit the networks where these narratives form. They populate the WhatsApp groups, the comment sections, the office conversations where political meaning gets made. When you demoralise them, you surrender these spaces to your opponents. The passionate few shape the context in which everyone else encounters politics." AE Snow discusses the government's failure to get its message across. 

Magda Osman says that though laws are being introduced across the world to reduce 'psychological harm' experienced online, there is no clear definition of what it is.

"Pubs help people feel connected to a local place. When they close, they can become sites of mourning, a painful reminder of change and decline. One resident of a former colliery village in Nottinghamshire said of the pub she had once worked in – now derelict, fire damaged and vandalised as it awaits redevelopment – that despite her wish that it had remained open it was now better to 'knock it down' to 'put us out of our misery'." Thomas Thurnell-Read and Robert Deakin have researched what is lost when pubs close.

"As editor of The Nation in Trinidad during the 1950s, C.L.R. James campaigned for the Barbadian Frank Worrell to be appointed as the first full-time black captain. The selectors' 'whole point was to continue to send to populations of white people, black or brown men under a white captain', James later wrote in Beyond a Boundary." Tim Wigmore on race, cricket and the history of the West Indies.

Dave Haslam champions a forgotten film  - The White Bus: "Scripted by Shelagh Delaney in 1965, it’s directed by Lindsay Anderson. The cast includes a very young Anthony Hopkins, and Arthur Lowe who had already played a role in Coronation Street but would go on to star as Captain Mainwaring in the hit TV series Dad’s Army."

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"Why did this person decide to open a home in my ward? Well, there is a lot of evidence around now that these are not people with altruistic ideas, they don’t want to change the lives of a frightened young girl, they don’t want to change society. What drives many people to move into this area of activity is pure simple greed. They see the opportunity to make money out of other people’s suffering." Richard Kemp says making profits from the needs of SEND children should be illegal.

Bill Wyman itemises without mercy the many mistakes that podcasters make: "Most podcasts begin with a few minutes of painful-to-listen-to impromptu banter amongst the hosts. I wish that they had a 'skip intro' button a la Netflix so folks could just get to the substance of the show. The solution to this is to think up something better to give listeners. This involves a thing called preparation."

Jo Jones, head of arts and museums at Leicester City Council, shares her thoughts on the city's reopened Jewry Wall Museum: "There’s ... a 90-metre interactive wall that covers the work of the pioneering archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, who led the excavations of the Jewry Wall site in the 1930s, as well the latest archaeological finds to be discovered in Leicester."

Andrea Ashworth published Once in a House on Fire, a a memoir of her working-class childhood in Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s, to universal acclaim in 1998. She has not published anything since, but Dave Haslam has tracked her down.

Steve Rose discusses the reasons behind the decline of pub food.

"The town later became home to Henry VII’s eldest son, Arthur, who lived there from the spring of 1493 until his death in April 1502. This, in the words of Ralph Griffiths, gave the town a 'unique profile among England’s provincial centres', and an importance far beyond its population of about 2,000." Simon Payling explains the importance of Ludlow.

Bishop's Castle: The Poetry Pharmacy and a shuttered Three Tuns

I went back to Bishop's Castle last Friday, when all the shops were open. The most important recent addition to the town is the Poetry Pharmacy which sells books (not just poetry books) and does cake and good coffee.

It's to be found towards the top of the High Street, where - as you can see - it gets really steep. 

Round the corner in Salop Street, you are met with the sad sight of a closed Three Tuns. I remember when it was boarded up in the early Nineties and then reopened by a consortium of friends led by Sir Louis Blom-Cooper.

The brewery next door is not affected, and you can buy their beers in the other pubs in the town.