From BBC News:
The Bewdley Express is an eight-week trial taking travellers from Bewdley to Kidderminster on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, where they can change to a Birmingham service.
The trial, run by the Severn Valley Railway and West Midlands Railway, is intended to test demand for a regular rail connection between Bewdley and the wider West Midlands network.
I can't remember a single bus turning up late during my 10 days of outings in Shropshire, which is an impressive record.
And let's hear it for concessionary travel for pensioners. Family legend has it that I learnt to read from the West Hertfordshire bus timetable, and I can't help thinking how wonderful getting a card that gave you free travel on any bus would have seemed when I was six. Well, now I have one.
My train to Newport was seriously late because of a track fault north of Shrewsbury, and faced further delay between Ludlow and Leominster. But I had all day, and the recent derailments have emphasised that high temperatures are a risk to safety, so I wasn't going to complain.
I do have two moans about public transport from the holiday. The first is that I had to go through two ticket barriers at Birmingham New Street to change between the train from Leicester and the train to Shrewsbury. Who thought it was a good idea to redesign the station so that is necessary?
A bit of googling this morning has taught me that the way to avoid this is to use the escalators or lifts at the B end of New Street's long platforms, when you don't encounter any barriers within the station. I did it inadvertently on the journey home.
And the second is that when I got on my West Midlands Railway train to Shrewsbury I had to listen to an announcement warning me that three other railway companies sell tickets for this route and that if I had bought one it might not be valid on this train.
I don't think anyone designed this ticketing system: it has just grown like fungus on an October morning.
So, overall, I had a good experience with public transport and an outstanding one with the buses.
Most people I meet have an opinion on HS2. Different opinions. It has been expensive. It goes to Euston. It was a plot by Labour or the Tories. It goes too fast. Or not fast enough. It was a sop to the North or a scheme to divert economic activity to London.
What are the most useful points? Was it anything but a muddle? Some acquaintances have advised me to use these new GPT-LLM-RAG machines to produce a summary (AI). However, I know too much about how they work, so will politely decline. Instead I might read a human-written review of a human-written book that has been deemed somewhat informed.
So off to the Literary Review for some opinion. Transport expert David Leeder reviews Off the Rails: The Inside Story of HS2 by Sally Gimson. I was looking for something with lots of numbers, geography, requirements, political objectives, strategy, analysis, risk-management, expertise and national benefit. Who am I kidding? It was Oxbridge debating with itself and Natural England being paid off one change at a time.
Leeder tells us that at least 40 per cent of the population (of what ?) lives in a quadrangle formed by London, Bristol, Liverpool and Leeds. The distance between London and Birmingham is only around 160km while London and Manchester are around 260km apart. It is proposed to operate HS2 at 320 kph. Forty-nine minutes. Barely time to scan the Guardian, and tell the buffet assistant twice that there is no milk in Americano. There never was.
We can skip the bits about Blair and Adonis (who?) and the aspersions about Roy Jenkins and claret. You might as well take Avanti West Coast from Euston and find a good forward-facing seat in Coach C. They have USB and the Project Reach cellular upgrade should be working in 2028, even at Piccadilly and Euston. It would take most of 49 minutes to get Teams working and find that the AI sent you the wrong meeting minutes document. Was that £38bn or £80bn? At least the No.1 circular bus at Manchester Piccadilly is both free and powered by electricity.
Much of the rest of the review takes on a tour of the group-think of the rotating cast of London-based decision-makers. Leeder describes them as "Britain’s political class, which comprises a narrow pool of upper-middle-class types who share many of the same vague assumptions."
This seems plausible as the stated requirements used vague language and rotated with administrations. The very basic cost-benefit analysis that would link national growth with having a high-speed railway at all seems missing. The two most dynamic nations do not encourage us: the US does not bother with high-speed rail, the PRC has long distances between major cities and poor legacy transport networks. We do not compare with either.
Perhaps the most concise criticism is that the low productivity of most of the UK outside London and the Home Counties may well be due to factors having nothing to do with transport. A high pound, managed decline, class struggle, City bias, disdain for STEM, and the privilege of the Oxford Union will be suggested by a quick-lazy search engine.
HS2 functions as a 'shiny' and could be useful as a distraction from unpalatable political action. It is rather expensive for that though.
Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.
Here's the great Stanley Unwin on Pebble Mill at One in 1985. He had the sense to know that his unique act worked best in short doses. That way he kept his audience comftybold, two-square on their botties.
The latest news from Long Buckby is that a blue plaque has been installed on the bungalow in the High Street where Unwin lived for many years.
I once went to the village to photograph his and his wife's grave. I feel another journey coming on.
Warning issued as beach closest to Leicestershire shuts amid health fears
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| Transport for West Midlands |
The LNER "Rhubarb Express" was a 209 mile non-stop overnight run seasonally from Leeds to London Kings Cross (or St. Pancras). Conveyed hundreds of tons of early-season forced rhubarb originating from various locations in the West Riding of Yorkshire for sale in London (Covent Garden/Spitalfields) and the South, the following day. ...
The rhubarb trains were cancelled in early 1940 following the onset of WW2. Not sure if, or when, they were ever subsequently resumed ... following the end of the war.
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.
Once again, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.
Mills Dyer, who spent several years working in the Liberal Democrats' membership department, gives three reasons why they membership surges like the one the Greens are currently experiencing matter – and three why they're completely irrelevant.
Tayo Bero is worried by the explosion in online content promoting the use of antidepressants: "Antidepressant use can be messy, stressful, confusing and seemingly interminable (don’t even get me started on my experience with withdrawal symptoms). It is not the kind of experience that vulnerable young people should be socially coerced into, especially via the machinations of capitalist vultures. Young people need way more than a two-minute TikTok to figure out what they should do to get better."
"Before socialism even had a name, the poet and painter William Blake saw how the Industrial Revolution’s 'dark Satanic mills' harmed humanity. His visionary work condemned the forces of commodification and cold calculation in emergent capitalism." Jonathan Agin argues that William Blake was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation.
"When Pebble Mill opened in 1971 ... it was the most sophisticated in the country, the largest outside London, and the first to combine TV and radio operations under one roof. It was conceived as the regional counterpart to the Television Centre in Shepherd’s Bush." Jon Neale remembers Pebble Mill Studios and the golden age of Birmingham television.
Andy Murray explores the Manx folklore that inspired Nigel Kneale, including his Halloween III script that never saw the light of day.
This is part of a film shown in the BBC's documentary series One Pair of Eyes in 1970. We see the last days of commercial carrying and the early days of leisure boating existing side by side, while around them the new Birmingham has arisen.
Soon Cliff Richard will arrive to make Take Me High.
If you like this, you may enjoy my posts on Bill Grundy's children's series Flower of Gloster.
The report of the inquiry, which Masterman led, failed to accept many of the allegations published in John Bull, with the result that Bottomley regarded it as a whitewash and used the magazine to attack Masterman ever afterwards.
As Bottomley spent some of his childhood in a Birmingham orphanage, I suspect he might have had a better knowledge of the abuses that can take place in residential institutions than the average Home Office official.
What I didn't appreciate until recently was that Masterman was also a target of the far-right antisemites Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, brother of the better known G.K.
Here's Peter Howarth reviewing Richard Ingrams' book The Sins of G.K. Chesterton for the London Review of Books – the “volcano” is Belloc:
The volcano’s first eruption was The Party System, an exposé co-written with Cecil, which claimed that, despite the opposition to Lloyd George’s introduction of National Insurance, the Tories and Liberals were a political cartel.
Cecil and Belloc took particular exception to the Liberal politician and journalist Charles Masterman, an old friend of the Chesterton family, and characterised his marriage to Lucy Lyttleton (the Liberal-voting daughter of the Tory chief of the general staff and a childhood friend of Frances Chesterton) as the act of an insecure and unsuccessful journalist inserting himself into “the little governing group which has the salaries and places in its gift”.
They issued scurrilous leaflets during the 1911 Bethnal Green by-election, which Masterman narrowly won, and joined the Daily Express in smearing him again in 1914, when he lost two by-elections (one after being appointed to the cabinet). The New Witness crowed that Masterman, as the lackey of “Lloyd George ... the Jews and their hangers-on’, should have been ‘excluded not merely from Parliament but from the society of decent honourable men”.
If Belloc was motivated by rancour at a more successful MP than he had been, Ingrams argues, the only explanation for Cecil’s venom can have been to force his brother to declare his allegiance to the attackers, not the Mastermans or his own wife. When H.G. Wells wrote to the New Witness to protest against the vendetta, Cecil replied: “I think it very probable that my brother and I should disagree to a considerable extent ... on Masterman’s character and motives.”
But G.K. could not defend Masterman in public without calling Cecil’s motives into question. “By allying himself to Belloc, and insulting Masterman in the most vicious attacks imaginable,” Ingrams writes, “Cecil could force his brother to change sides.”
He succeeded. Chesterton had dedicated a book to Masterman less than two years earlier, and Frances and Lucy had loved to go to parties together; the friendship disintegrated when he wrote to Masterman that he could not defend him in public, since he believed “the new and mutinous camp” formed by his brother and Belloc were right.
There's a tendency to treat G.K. Chesterton as a sort of holy innocent, but I find him a perfectly worldly writer when he wants to be. So it's hard not to think less of him after reading this.
My happiest memory of him is at the Alternative Summit that took place alongside the G8 Summit in Birmingham in May 1998. This was so long ago that the Alternative Summit produced, not a Bluesky account, but a daily printed newspaper.
David was the editor, and he asked me to come to Birmingham to write a column for him each day. I remember him being in his element as he dealt patiently with crises and contributors, and ordered taxis, only to keep them waiting while he solved some new problem. Clad in a pale linen suit, he resembled a very English Tom Wolfe.
It was when he asked me to write for Lib Dem News, the weekly newspaper published by the party until 2012, that I first got to know David. As an editor he was always encouraging, and when I noticed that he removed all the brackets I put in my writing, I stopped using them.
David was an immensely productive writer, yet always thoughtful and entertaining. His label on this blog brings up dozens of links to explore. I can't promise they will all work now, but many of them will.
He had the ability to notice social trends early and to sense where they might lead. You see this in what was perhaps his best book - The Tyranny of Numbers: Why counting can’t make us happy, which was published in 2001, the heyday of Blairite targets and benchmarking.
For an introduction to David's work and personality, I recommend you listen to the documentary he made for BBC Radio 4 in 2015: Clinging On: The Decline of the Middle Classes.
I knew David had been unwell for some time, but news of his death still came as an awful shock. My thoughts are with his wife Sarah and their sons Robin and William.
The British have been using waterways for a long time: we are told that the canal called the Fossdyke was created by the Romans.
Things started to get busier as entrepreneurs such as the Duke of Bridgewater and Josiah Wedgewood raised capital for specific ventures that would pay for something that by-passed the toll roads of the day – iron mining and pottery in their cases.
This was the start of the first Industrial Revolution in the
1700s. Once these connections existed, the marginal cost for other uses dropped
and more firms used them. The logic of places such as Birmingham became
evident, as you were taught in O level Geography. The more you link, the more profitable
it is to link more.
At the time. each new major canal required an Act of Parliament. Limited liability companies solicited funds, and shopped around for an MP to propose another Canal Bill. The canal age had started. The emergent network was a strange one. Different fees, widths, depths, keys, windlasses, heights and naming conventions. It topped out at about 8000 miles. Today we have the best 2000 in preservation.
The canals survived into the 20th century. They played a part in winning the two world wars, helped by a big public works programme run by Herbert Morrison in the 1930s.
Then reality caught up. The combination of the post-war car economy and the railways removed most of the profitable trade. The network was taken into public ownership under the British Transport Board. The canal network was put under the British Waterways Board (BWB). Even today there are artefacts stamped BWB.
The Department of Transport debated the future of the waterways with its boards. However, despite attempts at running high-latency cargo, leisure was the only viable long term use identified. The BWB settled in for a long stretch running a national ‘linear leisure park’.
During this time a large number of restoration societies restored hundreds of additional miles to use. They then handed over the restored mileage to the BWB, often during ceremonies involving the Queen. Or Prunella Scales.
This led to a happy time for many people. The canals had been built by thirsty 'navvies' for whom real-ale pubs had been constructed. These pubs were retained for the thirsty boatmen who worked the boats during and after the first Industrial Revolution.
Generally, blond continental beer was kept away from key waterway junctions for decades. Additional supplies of real ale could be supplied by breweries such as Wadsworth's at Devizes on the Kennett and Avon Canal, which operates today and runs tours ending in a small shop only a short walk from the Caen Hill flight of locks.
The restoration effort even benefited from additional charitable funds from the National Lottery. An umbrella body – The Waterways Trust – was formed in 1999 to use charity funds to open new facilities and attract new interest and spending to the waterways.
Restorers entered a peak activity phase, linking up old routes, and pushing into Wales with the Montgomery Canal past Offa’s Dyke. The "Monty", as it is known, is only a few miles away from the award-winning real-ale pub The Bailey Head in Oswestry (dogs welcome).
Time, however, moved on. In 2012, during the time Justine Greening was transport secretary, all of British Waterways responsibilities and assets in England and Wales were transferred to a new charity, the Canal & River Trust (CRT). This had the advantage of removing the liabilities of the waterways from the books of the government.
The CRT was endowed with the assets of the BWB. It was also intended that it would receive tapered funding from the state. It would continue to provide a public benefit, but would increasingly stand on its own thousand feet. One day licence fees and other charges would have to rise, and the ageing physical infrastructure of the endowment would require gradually increasing maintenance charges.
The restored plant of the waterways had been stabilised, but no programme of replacement or upgrade was baked into the system. There would be no refresh, only an endless set of repair patches, done in priority order. The staff and facilities of the BWB started to age out. After a while the maintenance capability became increasingly contractorised.
Following the Covid pandemic, many old canalside pubs closed. They lacked the financial 'bottom' of large chains, and often served distinct local clienteles. A victory for continental lager seemed certain,, with blond 'craft beer' often substituted to tempt the unwary.
In 2025 there exist many unplanned remedial works that will consume millions in unbudgeted funds. This will mean that planned work to partly remediate the effects the pandemic will not happen, and the deficit of the CRT will rise above £10m. A general review of fees is promised, with all up for grabs – widebeam fee increases, loss of green initiatives, possible closures.
In addition to the effects of long-postponed asset failures, the long-term effects of climate change are making themselves felt. Several waterways this year have restrictions or stoppages due to low water conditions. The Pennines are all but closed. The Macclesfield is in doubt. The Rochdale looks rather dry. The Trent is low, but usable. When planning journeys in these areas, the bleating of the fossil-fuel shills sound particularly self-serving.
Finally, I could mention the pollution levels and the water companies. It is enough to say that you should wash your hands every time you go indoors afloat. I mean it.
Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.
I've heard stories about Steve Winwood, as a young teenager, had played with the some of the American blues greats when they visited the UK.
Now I've found some detailed information in an interview with him from 1982 - it's on his own website.
In the first extract here he talks about his involvement in those years with Jamaican musicians in Birmingham
As for Chris [Blackwell], I met him in 1964 at Digbeth Civic Hall in Birmingham, which has always been a big center for Jamaicans in England; they used to hold their dances there, and naturally Chris was in on the ground floor in terms of Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Business-wise, he and Island were the ground floor.
Anyhow, I'd been playing at Digbeth since I was 14 with the Muff Woody Jazz Band, my brother's group. And that was where I met Spencer Davis, too. But my own Jamaican connection goes back to Digbeth Hall in 1961, when I jammed there with Rico, the trombonist who had worked with the Skatalites and all the other great early Jamaican acts.
I was just 13 but I used to go there and play with Owen Grey, Tony Washington, and Wilfred 'Jackie' Edwards. Jackie, you'll recall, wrote the Spencer Davis Group's first number 1 hit in England, Keep on Running, and a followup, Somebody Help Me. I wrote When I Come Home with him for the group.
And the second, on American musicians starts with the interviewer:
There must have been some unheralded live backup work in the early days, when the Spencer Davis Group and the early Yardbirds were doing gigs at haunts like the legendary Crawdaddy in Richmond, Surrey.
Sure! I did backups for Sonny Boy Williamson - as everybody did - but also for T-Bone Walker, Charlie Foxx, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim. John Hammond, too.
I met John on a train, while going down from Birmingham to London; this would have been about 1963 and I was 15. He told me he had a gig in Birmingham the next week at the College of Advanced Technology and I showed up and played piano behind him.
Those kinds of spontaneous musical meetings were special back then, and definitely helped shape my growth.
A thousand thanks to the Classic British Telly YouTube account - like and subscribe - for posting this television play from 1975
Julie Walters, in her very first screen appearance, works behind the bar in a club, while the star is Don Warrington, already famous from Rising Damp. Their exchange about education looks forward to Walters' role in Educating Rita, and once again I am left mourning the disappearance of the single television play.
As Warrington was born in Trinidad and came to England at the age of six, it was a stretch for him to play a young Jamaican man newly arrived in Handsworth. But then, in Rising Damp. Philip knew no more of Africa than Rigsby did.
Club Havana was shot by the BBC at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham and screened as part of its series Second City Firsts. It was written by Barry Reckord, a pioneering Jamaican playwright whose work was widely produced in London.
I've heard of him because on of this blog's heroes, David Hemmings, appeared in his play Skyvers at the Royal Court in the early Sixties.
John Cromby complains that left-wing political commentators treat psychiatric diagnoses as uncontroversial: "This has the effect of reifying psychiatric diagnoses – of making them appear more real, more concrete, more legitimate. It also works to undermine critiques: of diagnosis, and of psychiatry more generally."
"G.K. Chesterton once wrote that journalism was, 'saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive'." A hundred-and-some years later that sounds rather quaint. Today, it’s asking three different sources with a vested interest in the matter whether Lord Jones is in fact dead, and posting their contradictory answers in real-time as you receive them." Martin Robbins argues that Donald Trump - and Robert Peston - have broken the news, and that it's probably time to rethink your information diet.
Many of the oligarchs who supported Hitler ended up in concentration camps, reports Timothy W. Ryback.
David Trotter reviews the new British Film Institute book on Ken Loach's Kes (1969): "Kes marked a conscious departure from the 'go-in-and-grab-it' style of Up the Junction. The aim now was to observe, sympathetically, at a distance, but still with a view to avoiding as far as possible any suspicion of extensive rehearsal."
"In the popular imagination, Birmingham isn’t thought of as an artistic bohemia. The city’s historic stereotype, judging by the backdrop to the likes of Peaky Blinders or the risible Tolkien biopic from 2019, is summed up by no-nonsense men bashing iron in huge factories, often to a heavy metal soundtrack." But there's more to the city than that, says Jon Neale as he looks at the role of the Arts and Crafts movement in its history.
It's not much to look at, but this notice from the Birmingham Mail for 23 October 1963 sets a new record for the earliest press mention of Steve Winwood I can find.
The previous record was 3 December 1963, and because new titles are being added to the British Newspaper Archive all the time, it's possible that this one will be broken too.
Here again, though he was only 15, Steve Winwood shares top billing with Spencer Davis. The band has not yet become the Spencer Davis Group.
This notice is on page 2 of the newspaper. Stories on page 1 include:
