There's no good news on the restoration of Ludlow's town walls

There's no sign of restoration beginning on the stretch of Ludlow's remaining medieval town walls that collapsed more than 13 years ago.

The latest new comes from the Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser:

Seven firms have declined to help the town council replace scaffolding at a partially collapsed section of Ludlow's historic town wall. ...

Last December, Longmynd Consultants produced a report examining whether the scaffolding provided structural support.

The firm concluded it "did not appear to offer any buttressing or structural support" and said it could potentially be removed if loose stonework was taken down or an alternative method of containing debris, such as netting, was installed.

However, members of Ludlow Town Council's policy and finance committee were recently told seven companies approached about replacing the scaffolding with netting had declined to assist.

As I understand it, this stretch of wall bordering the churchyard of St Laurence's collapsed because over the centuries soil (and dead Ludlovians) have been heaped up behind it. 

Responsibility for funding repairs is disputed by the Church of England and Ludlow Town Council.

Southwell Minster faces building repair bill of £20m

Southwell Minster is in financial crisis, with more than £20m of building repairs needed and concern over its long-term future, reports West Bridgford Wire:

The Reverend Canon Dr Stephen Evans, who became Dean in April, revealed the scale of the difficulties following a six-week review of the Minster’s accounts. An emergency meeting was held and a report submitted to the Charity Commission.

In a letter to the congregation, the Dean said the repair deficit for the Minster’s buildings exceeded £20 million. Water reportedly poured through the cathedral roof during the Southwell Music Festival, while lighting on the north side of the building had been condemned.

He also warned that, at the end of July, the Minster appeared to have only enough money to cover one more payroll.

Southwell is one of the less-known English cathedrals, but it's also one of the most remarkable. The stone carvings in the chapter house are its glory – you can learn all about them in the video above.

I once wrote after a visit to the town:

One of the great things about the East Midlands is how little the region is known. If Southwell were in the Cotswolds it would be crawling with tourists. Here the town caters for visitors but is not swamped by them. The result is that Southwell is a dignified place without being self-important.

But I sensed the Minster must be hard to keep afloat when I attended evensong ("the atheist's favourite service") there on a later visit. I found I was one of a congregation of only six and we sat in the quire.

I've been to evensong at York Minster a couple of times, and it can feel a little like another tick on the tourist trail – you can tell the choir is used to being photographed. At Southwell it's as though you've chanced upon a miraculous after-school club.

But none of that helps keep the lights on. I feel another trip to Southwell coming on.

"A little heaven here on earth": Launde Abbey in Leicestershire

Remember Thomas Cromwell's final words in the wonderful Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light?

"There is an abbey, Launde, in the heart of England. The air is always sweet there and it's quiet. A little heaven here on earth. And I think to myself: 'I'll live here one day, when all my work is done.'"

Launde Abbey is in Leicestershire – in Harborough District, indeed – and though Cromwell didn't get to live there, his son did and is buried in the chapel. Today it is a Church of England retreat and conference centre.

The BBC Radio Leicester's Secret Leicestershire series has two short programmes on Launde:

• History in the making
• The Cromwell connection

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Zöe Franklin celebrates the 98th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act, which gave women equal voting rights with men and calls for further reforms: "Today, barriers remain for women, disabled people, people from ethnic minority backgrounds and others who are underrepresented in public life."

Abandoning the triple lock on pensions  is more likely to condemn today’s younger generations to an old age of poverty than help them, argues Mark E. Thomas.

Josiah Mortimer on a study that finds the introduction of mandatory voter ID has damaged trust in British elections, not improved it.

"It’s not hard to see the appeal of a creed in which worldly success is a sign of God’s blessing to uncontrollably rich individuals like Marshall. And for a church that has become smaller and older, it offers energy, confidence and – perhaps most importantly of all – money." James Bloodworth says the weakening of the Church of England has empowered a new evangelical elite that includes Sir Paul Marshall.

"It’s become a cliché to talk about Ballard’s prescience – the so-called 'seer of Shepperton'. But it’s also an inescapable fact that even in his 80s, he could identify currents in our culture that were yet to break. " Louis Pattison finds that J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, which depicts an England’s sliding towards fascism, makes uncomfortable reading today. 

Melanie Bell examines the careers choices made by Julie Christie: "Always uncomfortable with stardom – which she later admitted she found ‘terrifying’ – her choice of films increasingly became a conscious decision on her part to exercise some control over her career, turning down high-profile roles in commercial cinema in favour of independent/auteur-driven projects with narratives that dramatised the contradictions of contemporary life, many of which were sharply gendered."

Church could get first toilet in more than 700 years

To the great relief of the parishioners of St Giles's at Hartington in Derbyshire, BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award.

Wells to Walsingham: The world's smallest public railway

I travelled on the Wells & Walsingham some 20 years ago and remember it as taking itself commendably seriously.

Walsingham had its heyday before the Reformation, which means that a great many ancient buildings are to be found there. Because it remains a place of pilgrimage for both Roman Catholics and Anglicans, there's also an awful lot of religious tat on sale in the village.

The original Walsingham station is now an Orthodox church.

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"Every large fire has two causes, the spark that lights it and the conditions that let it become so severe. Naming the fire, though, can hide this, as does reporting. A fire is named in hours, blamed in days, and attributed a true cause in weeks." Doug Specht argues that we should reterg 'wildfire' in favour of 'landscape fire', stating the spark where it is known and explaining the conditions that allowed it to spread.

"Judge Paul McCloskey scanned a group of immigrant children, none of whom had lawyers present, in his windowless suburban Virginia courtroom this past Thursday. Where’s the 7-year-old?' he asked." Eric Bazail-Eimil observes immigration proceedings in Trump's America.

Anilya Krishnan on concerns about the 'wilderness therapy' programmes, which often set back families thousands of dollars and form part of the US's lucrative 'troubled teen' industry.

Christian Wolmar says cycling is a feminist issue.

"What really troubled them was that putting the story of William into the context of a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents was creating a parallel between William as an innocent boy who was killed allegedly by the Jews, with the story of the boys under two years old in Bethlehem being killed by a Jewish king, Herod." Pat Ashworth on Norwich Cathedral's approach to its troubling unofficial local saint.

Alison Kerr celebrates Alastair Sim: "His rich, commanding voice and heavy-lidded, dark-shadowed eyes lent him an air of menace upon which he capitalised to memorable effect in Scrooge and as various other characters of dubious morals. Sim appeared to play these parts – the lecherous lodger (with dyed black hair combed over to one side) in London Belongs to Me, the initially frightening author in Hue and Cry, and the mysterious title character in An Inspector Calls – with relish and gusto."

Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.

The poor Lambeth church providing choristers for cathedrals

So many areas of our national life are now dominated by the products of private schools, from journalism via county cricket to film and theatre acting, that it's heart-warming to read this in the Guardian.

St Paul’s Cathedral school, one of the UK’s most prestigious private schools, has long been associated with the musical elite. So was seven-year-old N'raeah, from south London, nervous about auditioning for its internationally renowned choir?

"No," she said, beaming. "Everybody’s counting on me to sing beautifully."

And sing beautifully, she did. N'raeah is the fourth chorister from St John the Divine, Kennington (SJDK) to win a fully funded scholarship to one of the UK’s most prestigious musical institutions in recent years.

Other choristers from the church have secured scholarships at Westminster Abbey, King’s College, Cambridge and St John’s College, Cambridge, with some going on to perform at national events including the coronation of King Charles III.

What makes SJDK even more remarkable is serves an area of Lambeth marked by high levels of deprivation. Yet its success is taking place against a general picture of a decline in music teaching in primary schools – a decline that is doing nothing to widen the talent pool on which cathedral choirs draw,

I remember watching a documentary about York Minster years ago and being struck by how middle-class it all was. Couldn't they find even one working-class kid in the city with a good singing voice?

But there are now three cathedrals in England – Peterborough, Southwell, Bristol – where the choir is not attached to a fee-paying school, so other models are possible.

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Taylor Lorenz argues that there is little evidence that social media is driving a mental health crisis among young people and a banning them from it would effect us all: "Removing anonymity from the web, which will inevitably happen when tech companies are required to identify and ban children, allows for easier government tracking and censorship of journalists, activists and whistleblowers, who rely on online anonymity."

Opponents of traffic-reduction measures in cities sometimes claim that such policies discriminate against people with disabilities because they need cars to get about. In reality, Julia Métraux finds, walkable communities are good for them too.

Jim Waterson, Sophie Wilkinson and Polly Smythe dissect the panic in London over 'school wars': "On Monday night the Metropolitan police confirmed to London Centric that there have been no reported incidents that the force has linked to the supposedly all-pervasive ;school wars'. Despite this, it said it would continue to provide reassurance in the form of a 'strong, visible presence around schools', issuing dispersal orders, and asking social media sites to remove videos."

Is there a Christian revival underway among young adults in the UK? Conrad Hackett thinks the recent surveys suggesting there is may be misleading.

"Research in the humanities is not confined to academic institutions. Particularly in history and archaeology there are many communities focused on the study and interpretation of the past that engage in different ways with academic research." Ben Earley challenges the simplistic view of research impact flowing from institutions to public users.

Leah Broad on the rediscovery of Dame Ethel Smyth and other women classical composers.

Sign language was used in a Leicester Cathedral wedding in 1576

Leicester Cathedral held a service on Sunday to commemorate the 450th anniversary of a wedding there in which sign language was employed. 

A document found in the Leicestershire Record Office shows that the language was used in a marriage ceremony at St Martin's Church – now Leicester Cathedral – on 6 February 1576.

The BBC News report helpfully transcribes part of it:

Thomas Tillsye and Ursula Russel were marryed: and because the sayde Thomas was and is naturally deafe and also dumbe, so that the order of the forme of marriage used usually amongst others which can heare and speake could not for his parte be observed… the sayde Thomas, for the expression of his minde instead of words, of his own accorde used these signs…

First he embraced her with his armes, and took her by the hande, putt a ring upon her finger and layde his hande upon her harte, and held his hands towards heaven; and to show his continuance to dwell with her to his lyves ende he did it by closing of his eyes with his hands and digging out of the earthe with his foote, and pulling as though he would ring a bell with divers other signs approved.

In Sunday's service readings and prayers were made in British Sign Language and songs were sung by a deaf choir from the Church of the Good Shepherd – a ministry for deaf and hard of hearing people based in Leicester.

St Martin's Church became a cathedral when Leicester regained its city status in 1919. Leicester was a city under the Romans and was treated as one by the Domesday Book, but lost the title in the 13th century.

The Joy of Six 1450

"Millions of teenagers would lose the freedom to enjoy games and social interaction in the name of 'safety'. Even complaining on family WhatsApp would be impossible, as they would be banned from that too. Such a restriction would severely impact not just young people’s ability to play games or socialise, but also access support services, or engage in or discuss political content or ideas." James Baker argues that Liberal Democrats should not support Baroness Benjamin's amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

Sophia Alexandra Hall explains why care leavers need better access to childhood records: "Among the papers was a photocopy of a photograph of Jackie and her sister. The council initially refused to give her the original, saying it belonged to them. She persisted. When she finally received it, she discovered a date and time written on the back. Those details had never appeared in the copy."

Anglican Ink has an anonymous post by an anonymous retired Church of England that paints an unflattering portrait of the young Justin Welby.

We hear a lot about making cities child friendly, but Max Western and Afroditi Stathi remind us that the modern urban landscape isn't kind to old people either.

"The public story of Google Maps is that it passively reflects 'what people like'. More stars, more reviews, better food. But that framing obscures how the platform actually operates. Google Maps is not just indexing demand – it is actively organising it through a ranking system built on a small number of core signals that Google itself has publicly acknowledged: relevance, distance, and prominence." Lauren Leek on how Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants and how she built a dashboard to see through it.

Scott Shea chooses six songs that tell the story of Sam Cooke.

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"The study, which examined nearly 300 child-arrangement case files and observed over 100 hearings, found that domestic abuse featured in almost nine in ten (87 per cent) of cases. Yet judges routinely treated it as background noise. In over half of those cases, courts ordered unsupervised overnight contact between children and alleged abusers." England and Wales's family courts aren’t just failing survivors, they are complicit in state-sanctioned abuse, argues Zoe Grunewold after a reading a report by two academics from Loughborough University.

George Foulkes says broadcasters are warping our politics by failing to subject Nigel Farage to the scrutiny that other politicians rightly experience.

"Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using 'coercive language' by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley." George Crozier on the many challenges facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

"Today, Denmark's wolf population is estimated to be just over 40 wolves, with at least seven breeding pairs known to have produced cubs. Yet even this small number has sparked fierce debates over livestock and public safety in one of Europe's most intensively farmed countries, with views on wolves seeming to reflect wider political divides across Denmark." Kristian Kongshøj and Troels Fage Hedegaard explain why 40 wolves have shaken Danish politics.

Ellen Hawley sets out the long history of curry in Britain.

Mike Taylor champions an undervalued Paul Simon album: "One of the most striking qualities of One Trick Pony as an album is how understated everything is. There are no big, heart-on-sleeve emotions, no vocal histrionics. Many of the songs have a stumbling quality, and almost all of them feel gentle. Every time a song starts to seem like it has a clear emotional shading, something undercuts it – whether it’s Simon’s idiosyncratic vocal delivery, a flash of colour from the band (and all of them are superb), or a switch in direction in a bridge or chorus."

John Rogers walks through 1300 years of London history in Fulham

This is such an appealing video that it makes me want to visit Fulham myself.

Its billing on YouTube explains:

Our walk starts Fulham Broadway and the old Walham Green Station. We then cross Eel Brook Common to New Kings Road and Parson's Green. 

After a quick browse in the brilliant Hurlingham Books we look inside All Saints Church Fulham before entering Bishop's Park. The park was noted for its fabulous plants and trees as far back as the 16th century and today is still one of London's finest parks. 

The mile-long moat was said to have been built by Danes in the 9th century to protect their camp from flooding. The land has been in the possession of the Bishops of London since 691 and was their country home from 704 to 1972  - an incredible 1300 years. The current Fulham Palace boasts a magnificent Tudor courtyard and a beautiful walled garden. 

From the palace we stroll and the Thames riverside walk to Craven Cottage home to Fulham FC. 

Talking of the football club, it's worth noting the asymmetry of the relationship between Chelsea and Fulham. Chelsea fans have a soft spot for Fulham and may go to watch them if their club doesn't have a game. Fulham fans hate Chelsea.

John has a Patreon account to support his videos and blogs at The Lost Byway.

William Wallace: Reading Biggles in Westminster Abbey

Liberal Democrat Voice has a thoughtful post by William Wallace - Lord Wallace of Saltaire - on the relation between Liberalism and religious faith.

But I was most taken by this personal reminiscence:

I grew up as a Protestant Anglican. I learned what I now understand as social liberalism from the sermons of Canon Marriott, preaching the 'social gospel’'in Westminster Abbey (putting down my Biggles book, which choristers were allowed to take in to keep us quiet during sermons).

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Susie Courtalt says the rise of toxic masculinity and the war on 'woke' threaten women’s rights around the world: "For whatever reason, and there may be many, a new archetype of leader has emerged in the world and is fuelling this trend. Pressure put on the Romanian authorities to free the Tate brothers and allow them to fly to the USA can only be explained by the new incumbents in the White House and Elon Musk’s continued support of them." 

"The most striking aspect of the new guidelines is the missing subject: class. The word 'class' does not appear once in the document. Nor does 'poverty'. Yet, few issues are more pertinent in evaluating offenders’ social background." Kenan Malik on the real two-tier justice system.

"This is a rollicking good read, written in an informal style, and enlivened by cartoons, which works as a scholarly and accessible account of the so-called reproducibility crisis in biomedical research." Dorothy Bishop reviews 'Unreliable: Bias, Fraud, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Biomedical Research' by Csaba Szabo.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams celebrates Robert Marsham’s 'Indications of Spring'. This 222-year record of flora and fauna events on one Norfolk estate still informs climate studies today.

Mark Carrigan warns academics that Bluesky will trap them, just as Twitter did in the past.

"It’s my guess that, even within ten years, the painting was an embarrassment to the Perrots - not because it was idolatrous, but because the Book of Tobit was relegated to the Apocrypha . ... The presence of Tobias’s dog, together with the exorcism of an evil spirit by burning a fish’s innards, added to idea that the Apocrypha was full of 'shameful lies, horrible blasphemies, vain vanities, plain contradictions, ridiculous fooleries'." Annette Rubery goes to see an Elizabethan wall painting in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Meeting told there's a risk Ludlow's town walls will collapse again

A length of Ludlow's medieval town walls collapsed 12 years ago and has never been repaired because the town council and the Diocese of Herefordshire cannot agree who is liable.

Now comes news that a meeting in the town has been told there is a risk of further collapse:

At the weekend the Ludlow Town Walls Trust told the meeting the wall extending from the collapsed section was "in a tenuous condition of stability". ...

The section still at risk, the meeting of about 80 people heard, was the part extending eastwards from the collapse to the rear of the Compasses Inn. 

According to that BBC News report, the parochial church council, which is part of the Diocese of Hereford, has said it plans to initiate legal proceedings for a judicial review and file a complaint of maladministration against Ludlow Town Council with the Local Government Ombudsman.

And BBC News has covered further developments today:

Ludlow Town Council said the ownership and responsibility for the walls were "complicated and contentious matters", but there was a clear path for progress.

It said it would take a full and active part, external in the work, on a no liability basis, and urged all other interested parties to discuss next steps.

The town council has named "water pressure in the subsoil, apparent degradation of the wall mortar and inadequate thickness of the masonry" among the causes of the collapse, which suggests it may attempt to sue some medieval cowboy builders.

Debate in Welsh Lib Dems over supporting Labour's budget

The Nationalist news website Nation Cymru has been passed a copy of an email sent to all member in Wales by the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats, Jane Dodds.

With Labour holding only 30 of the 60 Senedd seats, it needs the support of one more MS to get its 2025-6 Budget passed. 

Nation Cymru says Labour has been discussing with Ms Dodds, the only Lib Dem Senedd Member, what concessions it could make to secure her vote.

Jane sets out her thinking in the email, which you can read on the Nationl Cymru website (if you have not already received a copy yourself).

The website also quotes the inevitable "prominent Welsh Liberal Democrat" disagreeing with her approach:

"We should not be going into next year’s Senedd election having propped up a failing Labour government, That will not go down well with the electorate.

"It’s also pretty shocking that Jane Dodds is informing the party membership about what she intends to do rather than consulting us. At one time parties consulted their members before deciding on a course of action. That seems to be a thing of the past, certainly so far as the Welsh Lib Dems are concerned.

"This all started when Kirsty Williams was appointed to the Cabinet as Education Minister. She may have been a good minister, but her position in government did nothing for the party."

Jane Dodds was in the news last November, when Ed Davey hinted that she should resign over her part in the mishandling of allegations of abuse made against the late Bishop of Chester, Hubert Whitsey.

She did not act on his hint, but earlier this month she agreed that she had let survivors of abuse down.

Lib Dems will continue to back 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions to schools

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It may be unintentional, but as it stands the government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill allows the creation of a new generation of church schools that are not bound by the existing 50 per cent cap on faith-based admissions.

So I'm pleased that the Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Munira Wilson is to move an amendment that would make new schools subject to this cap too.

Pleased? Back in 2017, I blogged about a Sunday Times report that Muslim pupils outnumber Christian children in more than 30 church schools.

I said I regarded this as good news and quoted Timothy Garton Ash, in his book Free World, on the woolly duffle-coat of Britishness:

Gisela Stuart, herself a German-British MP, describes a neighbourhood in her Birmingham constituency that has a large Asian population. Since Asian parents want the best education for their children, and the best school in the neighbourhood is a convent school, they send their daughters there. Never mind the Catholicism; that can be expunged by Islamic instruction after school hours, at the local madrasah. 

So there they sit, row upon row of girls in their Islamic headscarves, being taught maths, British history and, incidentally, the story of baby Jesus, by nuns in their Christian headscarves. A complete muddle, of course, but Europe will need more such muddling through if it is to make its tens of millions of Muslims feel at home.

As to whether we should have faith schools at all, I remembered tackling this question long ago in an article for the Guardian website.

Reading it today, I find it better than I remembered - I'd still be happy to defend the views in it.

What I had forgotten completely is that it was written as a reply to the mighty James Graham. 

Those were the days. When the Guardian would invite one Lib Dem blogger to reply to another Lib Dem blogger and they both got paid for the privilege.

Peterborough Cathedral launches £300,000 appeal to allow it to stay open daily

Peterborough Cathedral has launched an emergency appeal to raise £300,000 by the end of March to avoid running out of money.

It costs over £2m a year - almost £6,000 a day - to run. About 15 per cent of that, says the Guardian, comes from the Church of England , and the remainder must be raised by the cathedral through events, rent, grants and donations. Nothing comes from the government.

The cathedral's dean. the Very Rev. Chris Dalliston, tells the newspaper:

"There have been three or four years of erosion of our reserves. Post-Covid, visitor numbers were low and events were slow to pick up. There has been a huge rise in the cost of utilities - our bill has gone up by more than £100,000 a year across the estate, a huge additional expense.

"Peterborough is not a wealthy city. It’s not a hotspot on the tourist trail, it’s not seen as glamorous. In recent years, footfall has not been high in the city centre. We’ve lost our big department stores. People have been badly affected by the cost of living crisis.”

"We’re a spiritual hub and a community space in the heart of the city. But we also have to run this as a business. We need people to recognise the urgency of the situation. We’re not crying wolf."