I photographed these stones, which you can find off Judd Street to the south of St Pancras International, on the way to a Liberator drink one evening. I looked up their history when I got home. The open space they grace is called Bramber Green. Until the second world war, says Ian Visits, it was an area of Georgian houses - you can see a photograph of an ornate house that stood there on London Picture Archive. Then came the German bombers, after which the area lay derelict until the early 1960s, when it was cleared to create the park ...
The latest edition of my weekly political polling round-up, The Week in Polls, is out. As it says: Long-time readers will know my fondness of using UNS as a handy baseline for what changes in party support may mean. Apparently much cleverer calculations have often bombed and for the larger parties UNS has a pretty good track record of getting the overall picture right for larger parties. Readers of Dylan Difford's work, however, will know that he has a rather different take on the value of UNS. I think this is mostly a case of me seeing the UNS glass ...
Around 20 years, there were two bands I heard about via music magazine sampler CDs and whose work I started to follow and by one route or another acquire their music as it was released. One was the Decemberists and the other the Felice Brothers. Both were very distinctive musical styles and lyrics that made them not really like anyone else. Colin Meloy from the Decemberists sounded as if he had swallowed a thesaurus from the extensive and arcane vocabulary appearing in his songs, which also had unusual subject matter, songs about pirates, people being swallowed by whales and the ...
I didn't discover that Nina Simone had recorded this Sandy Denny song until recently. It is on her LP* Black Gold, which was recorded in 1969 at the Philharmonic Hall, New York City. It's a beautiful performance, and I love the spoken introduction too. Even the play out at the end makes you wish you had been there. * Is using "LP" desperately old fashioned now? I still often write it and then replace it with "album".
That's the title for a new pamphlet I've co-authored with Jim Williams, drawing on polling evidence and a close analysis of the election results. We say at the start: As we write this, three important processes are underway in our party. The general election review, chaired by Tim Farron, is nearing its completion, while the party's policy review, chaired by Ed Davey, is at an early stage. So too is the party's next strategy process, to update our strategy for this new Parliament. All three are important, but this pamphlet is aimed primarily at contributing to the debate around the ...
With thanks to SJ Bogue and Dundee Memories, a photo from December 1978 of Christmas shoppers in John Menzies in the Murraygate.
The Guardian reports that the Liberal Democrats may force a vote on the government's refusal to compensate women, which has angered many backbenchers. They say that if this happens then up to 100 Labour MPs could vote against the government's decision to rule out spending £10bn compensating Waspi women, encapsulating the fury on Keir Starmer's own benches: The work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, announced on Tuesday there would be no compensation for women born in the 1950s who were not aware of changes to the state pension age, despite a recommendation from the parliamentary ombudsman in March that £1,000 ...
