Coming events cast shadows before,
Fings are wot they used to be,
Not so much a la recherce des temps perdu
As deja flippin’ vu:
London on Thomas Spence’s birthday,
(June 21st 1750)
Today June 21st 2019:
No need to try and slip through wormholes of time,
The present has caught up with the past:
Central London still owned by the aristocracy,
Not so much the old Paris Situationists’ cry,
‘Underneath the pavements the beach!’
As ‘Pavements owned by the dukes!’
Record numbers sleeping rough,
Nicked for ‘Loitering’ and ‘begging’
Under the 1824 Vagrancy Act,
‘Royal Ascot’ (Queen Anne 1711);
An antique selection method of an antique prime minister …
But the longest day dawned well,
With a message from Keith Anderson
At the Thomas Spence Society,
Wishing him a happy birthday,
With poems and songs and well wishes for our walk;
I read the email and boarded the train for London,
Warmed and cheered by this instant letter,
A textual and oral culture for today,
An echo of Thomas Spence’s ‘free and easies’;
We met near what was once Robert Wedderburn’s radical chapel,
Near what was once a hayloft in Brewer Street, Soho,
Watched the world go by while chalking ‘Spence’s Plan’,
Just as they did back in the days of William Pitt:
‘No Landlords You Fools!’
‘The People’s Farm’;
Saw the ghosts of spies in the Ham and Windmill,
Wandered a ‘free and easy’ passage
Past the radical inns of the Spenceans
And the London Corresponding Society
(A maze, of course, un-memorialized),
On a pilgrimage from Soho to Long Acre,
Along the Strand to Chancery Lane,
Where William Hone once saw Thomas Spence
Assaulted by two Bow Street Runners,
To what once was The Hive of Liberty book shop
In Little Turnstile, High Holborn;
We exchanged facsimiles of Spence’s radical tokens,
Met David Rosenberg (‘Rebel Footprints’)
For a tour of radical Clerkenwell,
Bade farewell at Spa Fields’ information board –
The 1816 monster meeting of course unmentioned,
Despite the wealth of words on the board –
Pondering on how Mr. Thomas Spence
And all that associated history might be memorialized,
He is remembered in Newcastle
https://keithyboyarmstrong.blogspot.com/2019/06/thomas-spence-birthday-21st-june-1750.html
And that ‘Jacobin fox’, John Thelwall,
Is remembered in London
http://www.johnthelwall.org/2018/04/john-thelwall-blue-plaque-event-in-london-may-24/
Perhaps we could fashion our own unofficial blue plaque?
Perhaps I could visit the Little Venice café in Little Turnstile,
And see if we might place it there,
As an act of homage,
So all who pass by will see the name
Of Thomas Spence, The Hive of Liberty;
And some might then google those names,
Then talk and read and discuss further,
In a recreation of an oral and textual culture,
And who knows where those ‘free and easies’ might lead?
A Hive of Liberty meets Extinction Rebellion:
‘No Landlords You Fools!’
‘The People’s Farm!’
‘Spence’s Plan!’
