A steam locomotive leaving Loughborough Central

In Loughborough today in connection with a thing, I didn't have time to visit the preserved Great Central Railway.

But I did strike lucky when I crossed a bridge just south of Loughborough Central station.

Labour's weakening of local government will do nothing for voters' confidence in the political system

So Harborough District Council is to disappear, subsumed into a single authority for the whole of the county outside the city of Leicestershire. And Leicester is to be expanded to make the hole in the doughnut bigger.

City boundaries have to be expanded from time to time, but I'm not sure the areas Leicester is taking will be delighted. For some years there has been criticism that its elected mayor Peter Soulsby, now in his fourth term, is keen on prestige projects in the city centre, but less interested in bread-and-butter issues like litter and the state of the pavements out in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, the abolition of all the district and borough councils in the county can only make government feel more distant, and this at a time when our democracy is being challenged from within and without. 

I was in Loughborough today. It's a large town with a university, but it will soon lose Charnwood Borough, the council that looks after it and its hinterland. And Leicestershire, of course, is not the only county seeing huge changes.

This revolution in local government was not mentioned in Labour's last manifesto and there has been little debate about it since the election. It does appear to have been set in place because Labour has a vision for revitalising local democracy, but simply because someone has told ministers that there is an ideal size for a council and many are smaller than this.

I am reminded of a comment by Lord Bonkers:

I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi. 

Gilbert Adair and when Jacques Derrida came to Loughborough

Today I thought of the writer Gilbert Adair, looked up his Guardian obituary from 2011 and found this gem:

He once told us on the arts desk of what had happened when he rang one of his publishers. "You aren't by any chance Red Adair," asked a secretary to whom his name clearly meant nothing. "No," he snapped back, "I'm unread Adair."

After I'd shared that on Bluesky, I dug out his book Myths & Memories, a collection of essays about and memories of British culture.

In one of the essays, 'Derrida Didn't Come', he writes about a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that made an uneasy attempt to come to terms with literary theory:

The third tactic, and undoubtedly the most radical, is that, simply, of non-appearance. It has, I venture to suggest, become so axiomatic of these events for the most prestigious guests to fail to arrive that their absence now qualifies as almost an intrinsic part of their experience. Thus, at the ICA, neither Jacques Derrida nor Nathalie Sarraute, the two stars of the seminar, 'disappointed' our expectations, if one may so phrase it, by making an appearance.

Derrida did turn up sometimes. I know that because I once heard him give a paper to a literary conference at Loughborough University. And, thanks to a news story on the university website about an academic who later wrote a play about the occasion, I can tell you that this conference took place in November 2001. 

Besides the essays, Adair's book contains 400 random memories of news stories and popular culture from when he was young: 

70. I remember reading Nineteen Eighty-four when the year itself seemed to belong to some dim and unknowable future.

192. I remember the Danish musical humorist Victor Borge, each of whose one-man shows seemed a tremendously prestigious affair.

265. I remember Michael Fagin, the intruder who breezed into the Queen's bedroom.

355. I remember Fyfe Robertson.

If I were setting down 400 of my own such memories today, 15 years after his death, I might include:

1. I remember Gilbert Adair

Grace Dieu: A railway, a canal and a priory in ruins

This video takes us to Thringstone in west Leicestershire to walk the disused Charnwood Forest Railway, which once terminated at Loughborough Derby Road station. It's a walk I've thought of doing myself.

There are glimpses of the short-lived Charnwood Forest Canal, which also ran towards Loughborough,  though not quite far enough to reach the River Soar, so it was connected the wider canal system by a wagonway.

And then we reach the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory. The Friends of Grace Dieu will tell you all about them.

The poet Wordsworth writes:

Beneath yon eastern ridge, the craggy bound,

Rugged and high, of Charnwood’s forest ground,

Stand yet, but, Stranger, hidden from thy view

The ivied ruins of forlorn Grace Dieu,

Erst a religious House, which day and night

With hymns resounded and the chanted rite.

Bridging Loughborough Gap to create an 18-mile heritage railway

I once described the the Great Central Railway – Nottingham as 

a bit of a mystery to those of us in Leicestershire. Rather like the Eastern Roman Empire.

Since then I've visited Constantinople and written three posts about it: Rushcliffe Halt, Above the Brush Works and Ruddington Fields.

The GCR in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire are separated by 500 yards of missing bridges and embankments at Loughborough. In this video Tim Dunn looks at the project, already well under way, to close that gap.

When it's done, there will be an 18-mile heritage railway running from the edge of Leicester to a transport museum near Nottingham.

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"Sounding like a mob boss when speaking at Trump’s press conference at the weekend, secretary of state Marco Rubio told the world that the message of the Venezuelan intervention was that when this president says he is serious about wanting something, he gets it. The problem for Europe is that the one thing that this President covets above all is Greenland." Simon Nixon argues that Donald Trump’s "Donroe Doctrine" poses an existential threat to NATO and Europe.

Cliff Mitchell accuses Northamptonshire's two Reform-run councils of ignoring the reality of climate change across the county: "As predicted by climate scientists, Northamptonshire is seeing drier summers as well as wetter winters. Droughts are happening more quickly and becoming more intense. When combined with frequent winter floods, this leads to soil damage and erosion, reduced crop yields, and impacts on livestock grazing and biodiversity."

"It might seem silly or not worthy of attention to look into the Trump administration’s aesthetic decisions, all of the gold ornamentations smeared all over the Oval Office and ballrooms and Arc de Trumps, and etc, but the aesthetic is a way to make the political physically present. It’s a way to rally people’s energies. It’s a way to make it seem like things are changing and like Trump is keeping his promises when he’s actually not." Erin Thompson says Trump’s gilded White House makeover is all about power.

Robin Eagles discusses his work identifying Black voters in 18th-century elections.

"The BFI website suggests that Hell is a City is 'unaccountably overlooked; and suggests that it was ‘as important a film as Room at the Top’ ... They put this down to 'critical snobbery towards its solidly commercial director Val Guest' as well the fact that it was one of the very few non-horror films made by Hammer Studios, not known for its high-brow output." David Rudlin watches Hell is a City, which was filmed  largely on location in Manchester and Oldham in the autumn of 1959. 

Lynne About Loughborough goes in search of the town's forgotten Football League club.

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"For 25 years, governments have been promoting executive elected mayors in English local government, an enthusiasm fully endorsed by the current government in a white paper in 2024 and bill in 2025. Existing legislation allows central government to transfer to these mayors all the functions of local councils, subject only to scrutiny arrangements which involve no more than a power to ask the mayor politely to think again. It empowers central government to turn all elected councils into functionless talking shops, and to create mayors who are local kings." David Howarth takes aim at Labour's demolition of local government.

Alison Bennett welcomes three-year financial settlements for children’s hospices, but warns that they will not resolve the sector's funding crisis.

Will Hurst reports that Labour ministers repeatedly overruling official advice that buildings should be listed: "In almost every one of the 10 cases of rejection, the site in question was subject to development proposals, raising the question of whether the government’s drive to remove the 'blockers; to economic growth is now imperilling England’s heritage."

"The figure of the 'girl-boy' – a girl masquerading in boys' attire – was a pervasive and evocative figure within late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. My sweep of digitised newspaper repositories has unearthed at least 51 reported cases of 'girls' dressing as 'boys' between 1867 and 1919 in the British Isles alone. These stories were widely circulated, picked up by both national and regional papers, and often republished with increasingly sensational details that lent them a larger-than-life quality." Hannah Stovin on her research into youth cross-dressing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

"The first time I saw a Mirror Scare was in Robert Hamer’s segment of the Ealing portmanteau chiller Dead of Night (1945), in which a haunted mirror reflects not its actual surroundings, but a murder scene from the past. Roman Polanski also makes terrifying use of the effect in Repulsion, when Catherine Deneuve’s wardrobe mirror fleetingly reflects someone who isn’t there. But nowadays the Mirror Scare is just another 'Boo!' device; there’s even a YouTube supercut." Anne Billson explains how to film a ghost story.

Lynne About Loughborough goes for an autumn walk in the town's Outwoods.

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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."

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"The speech made Labour and Starmer less popular, especially among Labour’s own voters. It significantly boosted immigration as an issue in people’s minds. There is no evidence it helped to reduce support for Reform, or convince Reform voters that they should vote Labour." Tarik Abou-Chadi and Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte have researched what happens when mainstream parties capitulate to the far right.

Claire Wilmot examines how the far right has embraced deepfake technology: "A Londoner spreading deepfakes of white women saying they don’t feel safe 'because of migrants' told me impatiently that everyone knows the videos aren't real, but I was missing the point: 'It's about us showing everyone what’s really happening.'"

"Alarmingly, the new data show an accelerating pattern of decline in our bird populations, whether on our farmland, wetlands, uplands or seas, as they are pushed past their limits. Notably, seabirds have crashed in number, many hit hard by avian influenza, on top of a cocktail of growing pressures." Helena Horton finds that wild bird numbers continue to fall in UK. with some species in dramatic freefall.

"Elizabeth I and Mary I are the only women named in the national curriculum, while in 2023 women appeared in just 6 per cent of GCSE and A-level history exam questions." Richard Adams reports on research from End Sexism in Schools.

Pamela Fisher on the days when Nanpantan near Loughborough was an inland holiday resort.

Seth Thévoz asks an important question: which London club did Doctor Who belong to?

New Leicestershire Reform councillor was sacked as a police officer last year

BBC News reports, nay reveals, that a newly elected Reform member of Leicestershire County Council was dismissed from Leicestershire Police in January 2024:

Andrew Hamilton-Gray won a seat in Loughborough for Reform, with almost 40 per cent of the vote.

It has now emerged that a police misconduct hearing in January 2024 found he had called in sick, to travel to Spain, when he should have been working as a PC.

The misconduct hearing found that was one of two occasions when he reported sick to pursue his outside business interests.

The BBC says Hamilton-Gray has told them he has been advised not to comment.

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"Since Putin’s illegal invasion began on 24 February 2022, at least 19,546 Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken from their families and their homeland, although the true figure is likely to be much higher because Russia frequently targets vulnerable children without anyone to speak for them." Johanna Baxter, Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, says there can be no true peace in Ukraine without the return of the children Putin has abducted.

Ricky Treadwell is not impress by the Liberal Democrats' Buy British campaign.

Will Forster, Lib Dem MP for Woking, wants the government to recognise the work of almshouse charities: "In Britain today, almshouses provide homes for over 36,000 people - fending off homelessness and loneliness, through having a history of facilitating supported living for the elderly, but also families and younger people."

Kanzi, a bonobo, who learned language, made stone tools and played Minecraft, died recently aged 44. Daniel W. Hieber asks what his remarkable linguistic abilities can teach us about language.

"In 1988, we lived in a monoculture. By the end of that summer, it seemed like pretty much everyone who had any interest in music at all had made a pilgrimage to Woolworths or Our Price and bought her debut album, Tracy Chapman. By autumn, those 11 songs had buried themselves deep into so many people’s lives, affecting our political thinking, romantic dreams, existential beliefs, Top 10 lists. All because of that one performance." Zadie Smith remembers Tracy Chapman's performance at the Free Nelson Mandela Concert.

Lynne About Loughborough celebrates the town's Art Deco industrial buildings.

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Doree Lewak on the 17 year old from New York who solved a family mystery on a recent visit to Auschwitz: "While touring an exhibit of children’s artwork at the notorious death camp,17-year-old Bronx native, Yuval, made a shocking discovery amid the drawings of guards with guns and trains. Alongside the artwork, he noticed the name of his grandfather’s brother, 13-year-old Freddy Popper, whose fate was lost to his family - and history."

"Wilkie is talking about something that has become an increasing refrain in Western capitals - that Ukraine’s military difficulties are not down to a lack of Western support but down to Ukraine’s failure to mobilise its population into the military." Arthur Snell finds that the West is already rehearsing the excuses for its coming betrayal of Ukraine.

Pam Jarvis argues that the jury is still out on the quality of England’s 'improved' state schools, and on the impact of large Multi-Academy Trusts, with their superannuated non-teaching chief executives and directors in particular.

When people have fewer places to socialise they are more likely to turn to populism, says Jeevun Sandher, the Labour MP for Loughborough.

"At the peak of his business Teesside-based court reporter Peter Holbert could make more than £5,000 per week (in 1970s money!). At the end of January 2025, at the age of 84, he will be covering his last case. He says in recent years demand for his services has almost completely dried up from both local and national media." Dominic Ponsford tells a tale that sums up the decline and fall of the regional press.

Andrew Male defends the genius of 'Allo 'Allo against a modern puritan critic: "As much as it derived its humour from the war itself, 'Allo 'Allo! was also lampooning the tropes of serious BBC drama. In fact, many of 'Allo 'Allo!’s archetypes – the covert beret-sporting female Resistance member, the kind Nazi, the bosomy waitress – are based on Glaister's original characters (in a sly moment of industry subversion David Croft even re-employed some of Secret Army’s actors within the 'Allo 'Allo! cast)."

Former Arsenal goalkeeper fined £113k after bizarre chainsaw incident

Our Headline of the Day is taken from Football London. Whirl those rattles guys!

The judges were anxious I should point out that, despite my illustration, the custodian of the net in question is Jens Lehmann, not Bob Wilson.

But this does give me time to make another award. Our Trivial Fact of the Day is that Barry Hines, the author of Kes, played in the same Loughborough Colleges side as Dario Gradi and Bob Wilson.

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"The Houses of Parliament are sinking into the Thames. Many dozens of offices were condemned upon their vacation by outgoing MPs. There are electrical and water hazards only a few metres underfoot, and the whole thing will cost billions to fix – not least because MPs are insistent they stay in the building while it happens." Steffan Aquarone says the physical state of the Palace of Westminster is a metaphor for the organisational changes that are needed there.

Richard Kemp promised to put the cause of carer leavers at the heart of his work as Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He writes about an event held yesterday that will help him honour this pledge.

"Dr Newman debunked the popular idea of 'Blue Zones' as regions of exceptional longevity and healthy lifestyles. Many, if not most of the centenarians in the ‘Blue Zone’ have turned out to be alive in the government records but deceased in reality." The press people at University College London on work by Saul Justin Newman that revealed fundamental flaws in research on extreme old age.

Pam Fisher has researched Loughborough's first workhouse.

Amy Boucher is intrigued by Shropshire's female ghosts: "Some of our female spirits have strong historical basis, one only has to peel back the layers to uncover a real woman. Other tales are harder to track down historically, but instead can come to symbolise the suffering and experiences of a collective womanhood. Some of their experiences may even be familiar to you, though your stories are separated by the centuries."

"Perhaps 'cooked' is too euphemistic a term. To be quite accurate, they had held the sausages over a smoking fire till completely blackened, and then consumed the charred remains with the utmost relish." Alwyn Turner offers an anthology of sausages in literature." 

Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire preserved lengths of the Great Central Railway to be reunited this weekend

Exciting news from the Great Central Railway:

Join us for this spectacular weekend as we reunify the Great Central Railway and the Great Central Railway Nottingham for a celebration of the 125th opening of the GCR London Extension. 

Our Rail Replacement Bus Service will reunify the two halves of our railway with a service between Quorn and Woodhouse Station and Ruddington Station to allow you to explore all of our attractions with one inclusive ticket that is valid for entry to all sites and includes train travel and the reunification bus service. Kids go for a Quid (aged 3-15 inclusive)

The weekend in question is 16-17 March, when the 125th anniversary of the Great Central will be celebrated.

The Great Central Railway was the last main line to be built, sending trains from Marylebone out to through Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield to Manchester.

Great Central Railway and Great Central Railway Nottingham are separated by a missing bridge and length of embankment at Loughborough. The video above gives you the latest news on the project to reunify the two lines.

Incidentally, the Great Central Railway Nottingham was originally constructed by the contractors Logan & Hemingway. That's Logan as in this blog's hero J.W. Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough 1891-1904 and 1910-1916.

Parts of the Brush works at Loughborough to be demolished

From the Leicester Mercury:

One of the most significant sites of Loughborough’s industrial heyday looks set to be changed forever, with the news that much of ‘the Brush’ could be bulldozed. The owners of the Falcon Works Industrial Estate hope to demolish a number of buildings on the Nottingham Road site, including parts of the former Brush plant, but intend to leave the iconic 1920s building referred to in planning documents as the Brush building, sometimes also called the Falcon Building, but known to former employees has ’24 shop’.

The Brush works is a large and sprawling site, and the best way to see it is from a train on the preserved Great Central (North) line.

As this line does not have a station in Loughborough, trains stop at the embankment above the Brush works and then reverse to go north again. This gave me the chance, a few years ago, to take some photos of the site - note the glimpses of rolling stock and a locomotive.

One day the gap at Loughborough will be bridges - work on this continues - and trains will be able to continue southwards to call at Loughborough Central and then continue to Leicester.

Work begins to save the last working bell foundry in Britain

Campaigners have not given up on reopening Whitechapel Bell Foundry, but its closure in 2017 left John Taylor's of Loughborough as the only working bell foundry in Britain.

Taylor's buildings are not in good condition, and there have been efforts for some years to put together a package of funding to secure the enterprise's future and make it more attractive to visitors.

So it's good to read in the Leicester Mercury that:

Work to save Loughborough's historic Taylor's Bellfoundry - the last of its kind in the UK - has begun. The work aims to protect and enhance the Grade II*-listed bellfoundry buildings and on-site museum.

The project is being led by the Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust, which is working in partnership with John Taylor and Company, which has made bells in the town since 1859. The Trust was set up in 2016 to begin the work of restoring the bellfoundry’s buildings to protect the ancient craft of bellmaking for generations to come, and redevelop the site’s museum.

Dr Chrissie Van Mierlo, director of the foundry museum told the paper:

"We are thrilled to see work getting underway. This project has been years in the making and will help preserve and protect our historic buildings for generations to come. Our vision has always been to create a place where people of all ages can visit and learn about the craftmanship and art of bell making, as well as the history of the Loughborough site. 

Thanks to generous funders, and National Lottery players, we can now address the most urgent repair and conservation works to bring our vision to life."

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David Frum finds Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union: "In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain - longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom."

"Holding politicians to account is crucial to democracy, but it’s also crucial to the provision of public services. When constituents are able to ask questions of politicians, and those politicians have to take the time to justify what they do in office, it slows the whole process down and can help avert or at least mitigate disasters of policy. It can save politicians from giving in to their worst instincts." Leigh Jones mourns the death of democracy on Teesside.

"The tragic death of Ruth Perry has brought extraordinary, unprecedented unity to the education community. It launched literally dozens of blog posts and articles in the press; it has featured in news and current affairs programmes; it has been the subject of radio phone-ins, a BBC documentary, and countless conversations in staff rooms all over the land." John Cosgrove says we are living English education’s 'Me Too' moment, with the focus firmly on Ofsted and its practices.

Who gets to play cricket in England is a question of class - Daniel Norcross reviews Duncan Stones's Different Class: The Untold Story of English Cricket.

Lynne About Loughborough on the Leicestershire town's connections with the Festival of Britain.

A London Inheritance follows his father to Ely in 1952.

Ladybird Books remembered in Loughborough

Between 1915 and 1973, Ladybird Books' printing plant was at Angel Yard in the centre of Loughborough. 

The small format for which the firm became famous was developed there during the second world war because of the difficulty in obtaining paper.

In 1973 they moved to larger premises elsewhere in the town and the Angel Yard area was redeveloped.

Today the firm is remembered there by a plaque and by a sculpture of a child reading a book in the nearby Carillon Shopping Centre.

The sculpture was designed and created by Loughborough University Fine Art student Paula Riley and put in place to celebrate the centenary of Ladybird Books in 2015.

Riley, who goes by her artist name Priley Riley, said:

“I’m absolutely delighted that I was chosen to design and create the sculpture, I have wanted to be an artist ever since I was a child so this is an absolute dream come true.”

New hope of electrification from Market Harborough to Sheffield

Harborough FM, which these days provides the best local news service, reports that the government is again looking at the idea of electrifying the railway from Market Harborough to Sheffield.

A Department for Transport spokesperson has told the radio station:

"Enabling and design work is currently taking place to progress electrification of the Midland Mainline beyond Kettering to Market Harborough, as well as to enable the introduction of the new bi-mode trains to be introduced on the route in 2023.

"Further electrification of the MML to Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield is currently being examined by the Department and Network Rail, and is at an early stage of development.

"This work will be subject to the development of a satisfactory business case."

And earlier this week Construction Enquirer had news of a "market engagement day" for potential contractors for this work.

The Conservatives said during the 2017 general election campaign that the wires would reach Sheffield, even though Chris Grayling had also taken the decision to scrap the project.

Visiting Derbyshire during the 2019 campaign, Boris Johnson suggested that it might go ahead after all.

Our prime minister has a well-established habit of saying whatever will get him through the next 10 seconds regardless of its truth, but maybe he was not lying here.