Furnival's of Fleckney, Nina Stibbe and Bryan Magee

Nina Stibbe, another member of the Market Harborough school of literature, once wrote about Fleckney in the Guardian:

Fleckney became industrialised in the late 19th century when hosiery companies fled the city. Rowley & Co, whose Leicester works had been stormed by weavers in riots in 1885, built a factory on Saddington Road. Its red brick design included a high wall along the street for protection in the event of further unrest. This wall (itself now protected) reinforces Fleckney’s identity as working-class compared with its more cottagey neighbours. 

Leicester’s second best pop, Furnival’s of Fleckney, was still bottled in the village when we arrived; Thorn Lighting had a factory there and the new industrial estate was home to Pukka Pies, where my brother worked part-time during his O-levels - and was once locked in the freezer for being pretentious (he was reading a book).

Fleckney is still an industrial village - the photo above shows one of the older factories there. Because industry came late, it was never on the railway and the canal passes by a couple of fields away.

Furnival's of Fleckney made me [rick up my ears, because the firm used to have a warehouse in Highfield Street, Market Harborough, directly opposite our house. (Don't look for it: It's not there any more.) I think I remember kids climbing over the fence to steal empty bottles so they could claim the deposit back on them. Think of it as enhanced recycling.

But that building wasn't always a warehouse: it had once been a factory. And for a description of it during the war I turn again to this blog's hero Bryan Magee.

This passage comes from his book Growing up in a War - Magee was evacuated to Market Harborough during the war and lived literally round the corner from where I used to live:

The factory in which Kath worked was a few yards beyond the end of our garden, its chimney visible to someone sitting in our back room. Previously it had manufactured swimming costumes, but now it was packing parachutes. 

Its chimney emitted not just smoke but noise: about every five seconds it gave a loud, vibrant belch that was a nerve-racking nuisance for everyone living near it. At one level of my mind I got used to it, and ceased to notice it, yet at another I was conscious of it all the time. 

The people in the neighbourhood complained to the local authority, but were told that nothing could be done: the chimney had once had a silencer, but this no longer worked, and a replacement was unobtainable in wartime. The factory had to carry on because it was involved in essential war work. So the people around it would have to put up with it. ('Don't you know there's a war on?')

Yesterday I posted a video of Magee reporting on the satire boom in 1963.

Harborough District Council goes to No Overall Control

Gold would have been a Liberal Democrat majority on Harborough District Council. We didn't manage that, but did win silver by depriving the Conservatives of a majority.

The balance of the new council looks like this:

Conservatives 15 (-7)

Lib Dems 13 (+2)

Labour 3 (+2)

Greens 3 (+3)

Two gains elsewhere in the town were balanced by our losing two seats to the Greens in Market Harborough Welland ward - they also captured the one Tory seat there. This was the result of excellent targeting and, in the longer term, of social and boundary changes. 

Meanwhile, Labour's residual strength in Lutterworth resulted in two gains in the town for them.

But we did win new seats in Lubenham and Fleckney, and came close to gaining two more in Misterton and Kibworth.

I'm not party to the negotiations, but I imagine the non-Conservative parties will now look to run the council between them.

Market Harborough buses under threat from Conservative chaos

Some bus routes serving Market Harborough could be scrapped because of the the budget crisis facing Leicestershire County Council.

HFM News, with a clip from an interview with Liberal Democrat councillor Simon Galton, reports:

The authority has warned its financial outlook is ‘dire’ and ahead of budget proposals being made public next week, some details have been shared with councillors.

Cuts could be made to bus services subsidised by the authority, which include the number 33 town service in Market Harborough and route 44, which links the town with Foxton and Fleckney.

Conservatives are now a complete shambles. Only last year the government announced a £3bn scheme to improve bus services outside London.

We were promised hundreds of miles of new bus lanes, fares with daily price caps so people can use the bus as many times a day as they need, more services in the evenings and at weekends, integration with train tickets and that all buses would accept contactless payments.

The Guardian caught the rapturous tone of the announcement:

The DfT said it expected to see local authorities and operators working together to deliver bus services so frequent that passengers could just "turn up and go" - no longer needing to rely on a traditional timetable and no longer having to wait more than a few minutes.

Boris Johnson said: "Just as they did in London, our reforms will make buses the transport of choice, reducing the number of car journeys and improving quality of life for millions."

Leicestershire County Council did put in a £58m for more government funding for bus services earlier this year, apparently because it "lacked ambition".

How things have turned out is a classic illustration of Boris Johnson's ability to identify issues that matter to voters and his inability to be arsed to do anything about them, and also of the damage done by too many changes at 10 and 11 Downing Street.

Because Market Harborough is not alone in facing cuts to its bus services. 

Back in July, the Guardian reported that at least 135 bus routes across England were due to be cut or scrapped altogether.

And in case you thought "levelling up" would save the North of England from cuts, 25 routes in Liverpool and 40 across the North East were affected.

But that's the modern Conservative Party for you. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing, and you can be sure that, if it ever finds out, it will do its best to stop it.