The glorious medieval leaves of Southwell Minster

Southwell Minster is at once one of England's least known cathedrals and one of its finest.

Its glory is the wonderful medieval stone carving of leaves, green men and more in the chapter house.

This video by Allan Barton gives a brief introduction to both the building and its carvings.

The big beasts of psychogeography visit Northampton

My latest video from John Rogers is a real treat. John and the daddy of psychogeography, Iain Sinclair, visit Northampton and walk its streets so that Sinclair can visit Alan Moore.

I have been to several of the sites they visit and can help on a couple of points.

St Peter's is looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust, and it is some years since I have found it open myself. 

The trust has been restoring the historic pub next door to the church with a view to moving its national office there. Perhaps the church will be open more often when that work is finished.

But I did get into the church in 2011, and here is the Green Man John Rogers and Iain Sinclair were looking for.

The other thing I can help with is the working men's club where the armed man turned up.

I can say with some confidence that the Whyte Melville club was far too respectable for that.

As I once wrote:

Around 1990 I occasionally played chess for Northampton Working Men's Club. They took part in the national club knock out championship, which was something the Market Harborough team did not aspire to.

The building where we played in Northampton was often referred to as "Whyte-Melville" because George [Whyte-Melville] had founded it.

While it would be nice to be able to make your opponent a draw offer he can't refuse, in my experience chess and firearms rarely go together.

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

J.K.Rowling, Cormoran Strike and Market Harborough's Green Man

I have never been a Harry Potter fan. As I was 37 when the first book was published that is not such a surprise, though I can read other contemporary children's authors with pleasure.

Fantasy literature is more derivative than most genres, but my impression is that Rowling is more derivative than most fantasy writers. And when I open a Harry Potter book at random a cliche generally flies out and hits me.

But there is a major point in her favour.

Her third Cormoran Strike novel has a scene set here in Market Harborough. I quote from StrikeFans.com and Career of Evil:

"The ornate and ages church of St Dionsius rose proudly in the heart of the town, and beside it, in the middle of the central thoroughfare stood a remarkable structure resembling a small timbered house on wooden stilts. 

"Once parking to the rear of the building on stilts, Strike left the car to have a smoke. He observed a plaque that told him the building was an old Grammar School built in 1614. 

"Biblical verses painted in gold ran around the structure. Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

You can see why I struggle with Rowling's prose style.

After their encounter with the Old Grammar School, Strike and companion see out to find the Thai massage parlour in St Mary's Road.

But where exactly is it?

The Tottenham thinks it knows and has posted the picture of a blameless office in St Mary's Road that you see above.

I remember this from when it was briefly a corner shop in the 1990s. More than that, it has appeared on this blog before as the home of Market Harborough's only Green Man.

It makes you think.

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Michael Mullaney says the Liberal Democrats must be a party for all of Britain.

"Face-to-face work is especially important for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. And they may find it harder to study in environments that are not conducive to learning. Remote learning must not allow these groups of students to become ever more remote." The former Conservative minister Chris Skidmore argues that universities must introduce extra financial and pastoral support to look after their remote students

"In Polanyi’s opinion, whenever the profit-making impulse becomes deadlocked with the need to shield people from its harmful side effects, voters are tempted by the 'fascist solution': reconcile profit and security by forfeiting civic freedom." Caleb Crain believes Karl Polanyi's thinking is newly relevant today.

Alan Morris finds that the Covid-19 lockdown has given Bristol people a sense of how much pleasanter their city would be if it was not dominated by motor vehicles.

Brendan Cormier looks at the home-made signs that have appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic.

What's the difference between Jack-in-the-Green and the Green Man? Icy Sedgwick explains.

A Market Harborough Green Man

Look what I noticed the other day - and near the railway station too.

The leaves of Southwell revisited

Years ago I blogged about a visit to Southwell and quoted Nikolaus Pevsner book The Leaves of Southwell, which is about the carvings in the Minster's chapter house:

Could these leaves of the English countryside, with all their freshness, move us so deeply if they were not carved in that spirit which filled the saints and poets and thinkers of the thirteenth century, the spirit of religious respect for the loveliness of created nature? 

The inexhaustible delight in live form that can be touched with worshipping fingers and felt with all senses is ennobled ... by the conviction that so much beauty can exist only because God is an every man and beast, in every herb and stone. The Renaissance in the South two hundred years later was perhaps once again capable of such worship of beauty, but no firm faith was left to strengthen it. 

Seen in this light, the leaves of Southwell assume a significance as one of the purest symbols surviving in Britain of Western thought, our thought, in its loftiest mood.

The leaves are indeed lovely, but there are green men in the chapter house too.

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"The first real sign of trouble began as early as October 2010 when there was a mini-rebellion by 37 Tory MPs on the UK’s financial contribution to the EU, and things just went downhill from then on." Tim Bale on David Cameron's doomed attempt to keep his party from banging on about Europe.

Adam Ramsay suggests Scotland could remain a member of the EU even without independence.

"The distrust of specialist, professional intelligence, abstracted from the 'real' world of tradition and experience, has a long tradition in British political culture, especially within what John Stuart Mill called ‘the stupid party’." Joe Moran looks at our scepticism about experts.

Ronnie Hughes goes for a walk through lost Liverpool with Stephen Roberts (whom I think I knew at university in an earlier life).

Unofficial Britain interviews Nina Lyon about her new book 'Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man'.

Curious British Telly watches The Changes, a children's serial from 1975.

Searching for the Jack in the Green in Pitsford

Gothick Northamptonshire by Jack Gould says of Pitsford:

Within living memory, on May Day there were chosen not only a May Queen and King but a mysterious figure called 'Jack in the Green'. 

A boy wore a cane construction about 4 feet ... high with leather straps inside to fit over his shoulders. This was made by a blind man in the village and covered by branches of laurel, barberry and other evergreens. It was possibly a reminder of the Elizabethan 'man in the oak'.

Gould goes on to say that the Jack in the Green should not be confused with the Green Men you find in churches, but other sources do connect them.

Anyway, I looked for the Jack in the Green in Pitsford yesterday, but I'm not sure I found him.

Psychogeography in Leicester

This afternoon I explored a deconsecrated church, found some Green Men and a foundation stone laid by J.W. Logan MP, and rediscovered the building where I drew with Nigel Short in a simultaneous display. My camera battery gave out just as I came across some Victorian factories to photograph.

As in previous years, I shall save up most of the discoveries from summer holiday until later in the year. (Reader's voice: I may be out in October.)

And there is a word for my explorations of Leicester:

Psychogeography is an ambiguous, debated and occasionally derided concept that in the last few decades has gone through cycles of discovery, rediscovery, acclaim, pretension, caricature and backlash. 

The most illustrative definition I have read is by Joseph Hart who describes it as “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities… just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.” Its main device for exploration is aimless, drifting ‘derives’ or wanderings through the landscape.

Read more about psychogeography on adcochrane.

The green men of Rawson Street, Leicester

I discovered a webpage about the green men to be found decorating terraced housing in Leicester a couple of years ago. The author (whom I met briefly at The Past Beneath Your Feet) says that the best place to hunt for them is off the Melton and Belgrave Roads.

But when I read that page again the other day, I saw that it mentioned a couple of streets in others parts of the city. And one of them is near where I work.

So here are the green men of Rawson Street, photographed in my lunch hour today.

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Writing in the Guardian, Clare Allan draws an important moral from the Savile affair: "The various inquiries into how he was able to continue his behaviour unchecked are likely to take some time. We don't need to wait for an inquiry, however, to tell us the most immediate and obvious truth: it is crucial to listen to people whose word it is easy to dismiss."

On the Wired Danger room site Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan examine the Kremlin's increasing surveillance of the internet.

The writer of Feeding My Intolerant Child feels the NHS has let her down. So she wrote to her MP. Trouble is, her MP is currently in Australia appearing in a reality television show.

Five Chinese Crackers unpicks an article by James Delingpole to demonstrate a number of common logical fallacies.

"The Normans called the guerrilla movement that resisted them after 1066 the ‘silvatici’ — the men of the woods. The English, it is said, called them the same thing in their own language: green men ... How would you show your loathing of them without attracting a penalty? Perhaps you would carve the face of a green man inside the church: perhaps you would bring the spirit of the silvatici into the temple of the enemy." Writing on Aeon Paul Kingsnorth, fancifully but intriguingly, suggests that the Green Men you find carved in Medieval churches were a symbol of Saxon resistance to the Norman yoke.

Spitalfields Life presents some vintage photographs celebrating the high days and holidays of old London.

I am being followed by Green Men

Earlier this year I wrote about the Green Men of Belgrave. Now those Green Men have taken to following me.

In Uppingham the other day I walked into The Rutland Bookshop to be faced with a copy of Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth by William Anderson. Clearly, I was expected to buy it.

Then last Saturday, wandering around Northampton, I came across St Peter's in Marefair. This is a fine Norman church, now in the hands of the Churches Conservation Trust. (At least this stops anyone ripping out the pews and singing "Shine, Jesus, Shine", as Lord Bonkers suspects Tim Farron of wanting to do at St Asquith's.)

One of the most interesting things there is a grave slab, a detail of which is shown in the photograph. It is believed to be from a shrine to St Ragener that Edward the Confessor had set up in the earlier Saxon church on the site.

This is interesting, because my other book on Green Men - Shire's The Green Man by Richard Hayman - is based upon the thesis that Green Men did not appear until the Norman era and wrongly dates the slab in St Peter's to the 12th century.

Whether Green Men were originally depictions of the devil or of lost pagan gods is hard to know. But in the 20th century they were adopted as a symbol of the spirit of the greenwood and modern man's alienation from it.