In which I find Jonathan Meades's Severn Heaven

The first programme on The Jonathan Meades Collection DVD is Severn Heaven, which looks at the plotlands beside the Severn near Bewdley. (I can find no trace of it on Youtube, even at the MeadesShrine.)

Plotlands? The London Grid for Learning Redbridge page explains:

During the 1890's, agriculture declined because of a series of poor harvests and cheap grain imports from America. Fields were sold off to land agents, who auctioned them off as small plots.
After the First World War, the British Government promised 'a land fit for heroes' and building one's own home in the countryside was encouraged. Later, the Depression of the 1930s drove people to settle in the Plotlands and build themselves a place to live.

As the Bewdley plotlands have their own halt on the Severn Valley Railway, I decided to find them for myself.

They turned out to be extensive, occupying one side of a wooded valley. The buildings were not quite as ramshackle and anarchic as Meades made them seem. I did not find any former railway carriages, for instance.

Perhaps the most decrepit have been replaced in the 20 years since the programme was made, or perhaps he chose the ones he filmed with great care.

Anyway, the setting is idyllic and this settlement is a reminder that planning laws curb individual creativity as well as protect us from big business. Today the lands appears to be owned by something called the Alfred Halford Trust.

Nearby, an aqueduct crosses the river. It carries the 73-mile pipeline from the Elan Valley reservoir in Wales to Birmingham. This remarkable piece of engineering opened in 1906 and any pre-war book about the Welsh Border will have it marked on its maps.

You can also find these aqueducts in the woods above Ludlow and crossing the lanes beneath Cleehill.

Later. The film has at last appeared on Youtube.

Even later. And then disappeared again.

Later still. A short excerpt has reappeared.

Strange tales from the Bewdley plotlands

"Bewdley is, perhaps, the crown jewel of the plotlands movement - it’s one of the biggest UK sites, home to roughly 163 households," writes Samuel McIlhagga for The Dispatch:

After days of research, a trip to rural Worcestershire and lots of unanswered emails, I’d uncovered a saga involving dead horses, a legal case no one will - or can - talk about, and a landlord allegedly disrupting the water supply to push tenants out - a potentially criminal offence. Clearly, trouble was afoot.

I visited the Bewdley plotlands myself back in 2010, inspired by one of Jonathan Meades's television programmes, and these are some of the photographs I took that day.

If you want to know more about the plotlands movement, you can listed to a recent Uncanny Landscapes podcast on it.

Northwood Lane, Bewdley: The Elan Valley Aqueduct, The Singing Detective and Jonathan Meades

Fire broke out beside the Severn Valley Railway (SVR) bear Bewdley yesterday, reports the Shropshire Star. I don't know if it was caused by a spark from a train, but many preserved lines have gone over to diesel-only operation because of the tinder-dry state of lineside vegetation this summer.

This fire took place near Northwood Lane, which is a long road that runs beside the River Severn north of Bewdley. And this post  is about three things you can see along its course.

The first is an aqueduct that carries drinking water from the Elan Valley reservoir in Mid Wales over the River Severn on its way to the Frankley Reservoir in  Birmingham. This 73-mile pipeline, which opened in 1906, was a wonder of its day. 

You'll find it marked on the endpaper maps of many books about the Welsh Border, and I suspect it was the inspiration for the plot about a Shropshire reservoir being blown up by German spies in the first of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine books, Mystery at Witchend.

You can see the Aqueduct over the Severn and the rails of the SVR in the photograph above. Now on to two television connections...

There is a station beside Northwood Lane, and it was used as a location for Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. It's in the scene where the young Philip Marlowe returns to the Forest of Dean after his mother's death in London and is met by his father, who is played by Jim Carter. You can see a photo of them above along with photos photos of the station and level crossing.

And then there's Jonathan Meades...

You may remember his film Severn Heaven, which visited the Bewdley plotlands. This is an interwar community of some 160 self-built properties, which appears to be under threat at the moment. 

I had a wander round it some years ago myself, getting off the train at Northwood Halt.

The Joy of Six 1367

The government needs to look beyond the 'bonfire of red tape' narrative if it's to solve the housing crisis, argues Labour MP Chris Hinchcliff.

Erica Jackson lives in a country where her neighbours can be dragged off by masked men: "From the start, the administration set their sights on targeting marginalised and minority groups. They propagated false narratives to incite prejudices, violence, and convince their supporters to justify the unjustifiable. The biggest scapegoats and, in MAGA’s mind, tools for pushing more tyrannical edicts and actions are America’s vast immigrant population."

Hannah Cloke says that England's water crisis calls for more than just a few new reservoirs: "We need a complete overhaul of the way we use water. We need to plug leaks, cut down on waste and use water more than once in our homes and buildings before sloshing it down the drain. We need to catch more water wherever it falls – not just in the river basins that are linked to big reservoirs."

Secret cameras are marketed as harmless gadgets but are used by stalkers and abusers, reports Anna Moore.

Richard Blair - George Orwell's adopted son - remembers his childhood: "At the beginning of June, following his wishes, I left Jura and was placed in the care of Lilian Wolfe, who ran a ‘colony’ at Whiteway, near Stroud. Whiteway had been an anarchists’ colony during the First World War and was a strange place to accommodate me but as far as I can recall I was perfectly happy there and even attended a local kindergarten for a few weeks."

Newly published by Little Toller, Brightening From the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory by Ken Warpole tells stories of arcadian dreams among the plotlands of Eastern England.

Jonathan Meades in the New Forest

Embed from Getty Images

The great man has reviewed New Forest: The Forging of a Landscape by Hadrian Cook for the Literary Review:

There have also been clearances. The forest’s gypsies suffered the ignominious fate, almost a century ago, of being herded into compounds, which Augustus John described as concentration camps. John, unmentioned by Cook, also railed against fences, hedgerows and enclosures as manifestations of land theft, to be corrected by squatting - hence places such as Nomansland. 

All along the beguiling, ragged forest edges - within or without the boundaries, according to which agency’s map and regulations you consult - there were proto-villages and scrappy hamlets that have been lost forever. They were precious and perhaps inevitably destined to be provisional. There was some affinity with plotlands and even Appalachian dirt farms.

The 1931 floods and the history of Winchelsea Beach

This is an interesting little video. Winchelsea Beach, where we had a family caravan holiday when I was seven, is a small resort that has developed on land that was reclaimed as the sea retreated.

Winchelsea, which was once a major port, now finds itself a couple of miles inland, but the sea used to lap at the foot of the cliffs on which it stands. It is Winchelsea Beach that stands by the sea and is at risk from its moods.

I suspect these floods in 1931 inspired the plot of Malcolm Saville's third Lone Pine story, The Gay Dolphin Adventure, which was published in 1945.

You will see at least one old railway carriage in the video, which makes me think that Winchelsea Beach may have begun less as a holiday resort than as plotlands of the sort which Jonathan Meades led me to at Bewdley.

A post on English Buildings suggests I was right.