Author: Stuart Butler

Trade Cloth

Trade Cloth: strouds, scissors and shrouds

We travelled track 32 from Grand Central,
The Hudson Line up to Beacon,
Where fires were once lit on the Fishkill Mountains,
To warn of British army redcoat movement;
The hills and woodland were all red fall tint,
On both sides of the catspaw, white horse Hudson,
Where the Wappinger tribe once roamed free,
Until a Dutch royal patent transferred their land
To fur traders, merchants and millers;
And as our train moved upstream,
Through clouds of leaves whipped down by the wind,
I dream-glimpsed two traders in their beaver hats,
Paddling up the Hudson,
Scarlet cloth and scissors packed in their canoe.

I waved a greeting from home,
From Claire Honeyfield in the Made in Stroud shop:
‘I visited a private collection of First Nation clothing and effects in the redwoods of Northern California. Every tribe had “trade cloth” included somewhere in their traditional dress … All the way from little Stroud.’

They waved back in return,
As they headed into the wilderness,
From my dream-time manuscript
I had left in lower east side Manhattan:

‘I sailed from Bristol with a witch’s hag-cough,
Spitting phlegm on the ropes and rigging
All through the Atlantic’s winter storms;
The River Hudson brought no relief,
Just fog and headaches, as we made our way upstream.

Our trade went well with all the tribes,
Stroud Scarlet cloth, their prize;
With knives, rum and scissors and guns;
Beaver pelts, land and bearskins, ours.

Stroud Scarlet gave scant shelter
From our colds, catarrh and shivering agues;
Their death-rattle was our invitation
To praise God’s Will – with fences, palisades,
And the cultivation of funeral virgin wastes,
As we advanced inland with Protestant virtue.

Our mirrors too were well received,
Until the squaws regarded their small poxed reflections,
And rushed into the forests to die by their own hands.

‘Tis God’s Will.’

I turned back from my reflection in the carriage window,
And picked up my copy of White Savage
(Recommended to me by Chris Moore,
When I bumped into him at Wallbridge) –
Fintan O’Toole’s book is about
‘William Johnson and the Invention of America’:

‘The biggest sellers were the coarse woollen blankets called strouds, which the Iroquois found to be lighter than fur or skin, easier to dry and therefore more suitable for a mobile life in a terrain of forest and river. They also came in bright colours which natural berry and root dyes could not match … The high quality and relatively low price … were so much appreciated by the Iroquois and other Indian nations that they represented perhaps the single biggest advantage the English enjoyed over the French colony in Canada in the competition for fur and allies.
When William Johnson began to trade in earnest from 1740 onwards, he provided woollens in shades of blue, red and black … suggesting that the Indians had very definite preferences … Crimson … red … ribbons in deep red, deep blue … deep yellow; scarlet, blue and green stockings for women; and coats of blue cloth with red cuffs.’

Stroud Scarlet, Uley Blue, Berkeley Yellow …
Stretched out on tenterhooks in the five valleys …

Stroud Brewery

 Stroud Brewery – Organic craft beer

www.stroudbrewery.co.uk

Stroud is a hotbed of innovation and art. At Stroud Brewery we have crafted a range of organic and vegan beers made with barley grown on the surrounding Cotswolds hills. We love to make delicious beer and bring people together to share good times and create community, in the most responsible, sustainable manner possible.

We try and celebrate the people and events that make Stroud great. Most of our beers are brewed to organic standards and are certified by the Soil Association. These standards support our ambition to produce the highest quality beers with care for people and planet.

Capel’s Mill

It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Mill from my house,
Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows,
Teazles here and there to raise your nap,
Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago:
Rack Hill, Thresher, Bacon Slad,
Spout Leaze, Lower Orchard, Upper Bacon Slad,
Calves Close, Sheep Furlong, Little Chapel Hill,
Freeze Land, The Park, The Island, Cobswell,
Side Long Piece, Fir Tree Ground, Wheatlands,
Cobbs Acre, Great Fromate, Spillman,
Well Croft, Birds Lagget, Home Ground, Broad Close,
The Mead, Old Well Close, Kitchen Close,
Barn Close,Dye House Mead,
Sweetmead, New Leaze –
The only names we now know and use are ‘Rodborough Fields’.

You pass an old oak sentinel to reach the Frome,
Railway viaduct and canal-bridge close at hand,
And there is the dell that once was Capel’s Mill:
Trees clambering down the steep riverbank to shroud the waters,
The remains of the mill sluice quickening the river’s pulse,
Rusting iron work still visible,
The steady drip down from the railway arches,
Sometimes, wild swimming in season,
Sometimes, picnics on high days and holidays,
Sometimes, groups of youth drinking and smoking,
Sometimes the turquoise flash of a kingfisher,
The splash of an otter or the curve of a dipper;
It’s hard to imagine that spinning jennies once clanked away,
With spinners clocking on and clocking off,
Clerks frowning at the figures in the ledgers,
As the world kept revolving and turning,
But James Hargreave’s 1763 Spinning Jenny
Could only stand still at Capel’s Mill,
And watch the world go by,
Spinning.

The Cloth Industry in the West of England from 1640 to 1880 J. de L. Mann
Page 188: ‘Advertisements and catalogues for machinery for sale in Gloucestershire up to 1842 show only jennies in several cases, though it is perhaps unfair to judge an industry by those members of it who got into difficulties.’
Note 3 Gloucester Journal 22 May 1841Capel’s Mill

We then ambled through Victoria’s reign,
To stand on the bank above Capel Mill,
We saw an Edwardian lady gaze at the waters,
Hands clutching the rustic fencing
That ran all along the bridge,
In a picture postcard pose and scene,
More seaside than Stroud,
Like the puff from 1902,
Selling land for building in Coronation Road,
“Near the GWR and Midland Railways”,
And the well known “health resort” of Rodborough Common.

The 1766 Food Riots and the Hangman’s Noose

 

The Stroud-water Food Riots and the Hangman’s Noose

Prologue:

Gilbert White, August 1st 1786:

‘The poor begin to glean wheat. The country looks very rich, being finely diversified with crops of corn of various sorts, and colours.’

John Keats, To Autumn – 1819:

‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid they store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook… ‘

Chapter the First:

Bread of Heaven, the Staff of Life,

A biblical motif of justice

For the miller who grinds so small –

And should thee not eat thy bread,

‘By the sweat of thy brow’?

Chapter the Second:

Thus, the Stroudwater food riots of the 18th and early 19th century

Have a provenance ground in Time Immemorial,

Hence the banner:

‘We might as well be hanged as starved’,

When poor harvests, high food prices,

Dealers, middlemen, speculators, and ‘corn-jobbers’,

All conspired to exploit shortages for private profit,

As local labourers, shepherds, spinners, weavers, smiths and so on,

Observed the transport of local grain to far-off markets

(Such as Lechlade, bound for London),

With a perturbed sense of injustice.

Chapter the Third:

So horns were blown, banners raised, flags waved,

Crowds gathered with their chosen ‘regulators’,

Gathering in lanes, fields and inns,

No malice aforethought,

But a spontaneous reaction after arguments over prices,

Hunger, want, profit and justice –

A crowd swelling

To determine prices at market,

In the city of Gloucester, the towns of Stroud and Cirencester,

Calling at village, hamlet, granary, mill, baker’s, huckster’s, factor’s, and warehouse,

Taking stocks of food such as corn, flour, bread, bacon, cheese, butter,

Paying a ‘fair’ price, for redistribution,

Sometimes destroying the flour of speculators,

As at a mill at Painswick;

Crowds, regulating themselves,

Sometimes a thousand strong,

As on the march from Stroud to Cirencester,

Across the fields of Rodborough and Minchinhampton,

Gathering supporters from Thrupp, Brimscombe, Chalford,

Eastcombe, Bisley, Oakridge, Frampton Mansell,

Sapperton and Coates,

Sub-dividing into smaller groups to comb the valley bottoms,

An algorithm of determination,

Whilst others listened to the tattoo of horses,

Observing the troops moving in detachment,

Lines of Stroud Scarlet moving with officers’ orders,

And there, the sheriff with his javelin men:

‘On Friday last a Mobb was rais’d in these parts by the blowing of Horns &c consisting entirely of the lowest of the people such as weavers, mecanicks, labourers, prentices and boys, &c’,

‘They proceeded to a gristmill near the town … cutting open Baggs of Flower and giving & carrying it away and destroying corn &c’,

But in the main, Sheriff Dalloway said, they ‘behaved with great regularity and decency where they were not opposed and violence where they was; but pilferd very little, which to prevent, they will not now suffer women and boys to go with them.’

Chapter the Fourth:

The crowd,

Observing a fall in prices,

As landlords and gentry responded to the crowds,

By suggesting to their tenant farmers, that corn should be sent straight to market,

The gentry,

Watching ringleaders claim that they were in fact maintaining the law

Rather than breaking it:

‘Many that are under sentence of death thought they were doing a meritorious act at the very moment they were forfeiting their lives’,

As bread and corn were intercepted not just on road and in lane,

Stopping cart or heavy waggon,

But also on canal,

Inland navigations,

And the River Severn,

When barges laden with corn would be boarded.

Chapter the Fifth:

I sometimes walk around Ruscombe, near Stroud,

When I pop out from school at lunchtime,

And there in the lane is Baker’s Cottage –

In 1766, Hester and Jane Pitt pushed Mary Cooke off her horse,

And made off with a good baker’s dozen of 16 loaves,

Just here;

And when I bike up to Minchinhampton after school,

If I concentrate hard, then I can hear the noise of the cheese rioting

At Farmer Collett’s,

When Mary Hillier shouted to her comrades:

‘Mr Butt was come home & had fired a gun and killed two children’,

‘Come back and pull down the house’,

And when the High Street in Stroud is deserted at night,

Do I glimpse Sarah Franklyn and her husband, John?

Stealing out of a shop door,

Their laps filled with glue and soap and candles and tapers and other sundry items?

‘You do, sir. We did do the stealing sir and John was transported to America with a seven-year sentence for grand larceny. As John’s wife, sir, I was held to be not responsible for my actions and so was acquitted, much to my surprise, sir. But any pleasure was tarnished by the loss of my husband, sir. Although that melancholy is nought to the anguish I went through the night before our sentencing when we were in Gloucester Gaol. My mind was an open thoroughfare and turnpike for phantoms all through that night and the only tolls they paid was to fray my nerves.

I saw us both on the execution cart, making our doleful way through the crowded lanes of Brookthorpe, Standish, Stonehouse, Ebley, Cainscross, Stroud and Rodborough, and so, eventually, to the gallows and gibbet standing tall at Tom Long’s Post.

And there, in their thousands, all clad in their solemn Sunday best or their starched white smocks, silent as the grave, stood our well wishers. And there in front was the Sheriff, Mr Dalloway, with his javelin men in all of their finery too, clip clopping their way with their customary pomp and condescension. And then we came, the two of us in the cart, with the vicar and the hangman. Then behind us, the special constables and the gaoler.

The cart inched its way to the gallows, where the noose was placed around my husband’s neck. I was instructed to drop my kerchief when my husband gave me the nod that he was ready. The vicar got himself ready and I heard him whisper to the gaoler that he should pull on John’s feet should my husband kick in his death throes, as he dangled, after the cart rolled on. I was then asked what I would like to see done with John’s body: the gibbet or dissection by the surgeons.

I was later told that having spent a considerable time screaming and crying in my sleep, I then seemed to compose myself, sweat dripping down my clammy brow, opened my eyes, and sat bolt upright as one possessed and spoke these words as if in a trance:

The assembly gathers all around

From hills and valleys nearby Stroud,

A ghastly hangman is the host

At Rodborough Common’s Tom Long Post,

The throng is reverent, full of fear,

The condemned man now sheds a tear,

All is silent as the kerchief falls,

The cart rolls off – and Heaven calls.

As I said to you, sir, the night before was far worse than even that lamentable day of judgement.’

Chapter the Sixth:

I shall take a walk to Tom Long’s Post and pay my respects to Sarah and John Franklyn and recall her over zealous imagination on that tortured night in Gloucester Gaol. There will be cars and golfers rather than phantoms and gallows. But I may catch a glimpse of the ghosts of another crowd, with their banners and flags and corn-emblems of justice, on their determined march to Cirencester market.

Books and articles used in this recreation and reimagining:

British Trades Unionism 1750-1850, John Rule;

Moral Economy and Popular Protest – ed. Randall and Charlesworth;

Customs in Common, EP Thompson;

‘For the Benefit of Example’: Crime-Scene Executions in England 1720-1830, Steve Poole;

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory

Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic

(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)

http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/vch/glos/vol11/pp184-190

There is an information plaque in Stroud:

The Shambles

‘Here is Stroud’s market, traditionally a place of plenty. But in 1766 it was the focus for bread riots by hungry Stroud cloth workers who couldn’t afford the price of a loaf. These rioters were severely put down by the Sheriff of Gloucestershire and his ‘javelin’ men – and the ringleaders hanged.

Perhaps these rioters inspired a group of Stroud boys to string up one of their friends – nine-year old Alexander Ball – as a prank. Luckily for him, he was cut down just in time by a passer-by. And luckily for posterity too, for he went on to become one of Nelson’s bravest and most talented naval officers, Sir J.A. Ball, who captured Malta and defended it against a French siege – achievements celebrated in Coleridge’s poem ‘The Friend’.

Four paragraphs then follow about the surrounding buildings and architecture, and then a chronicle-list of dates and events.

Raphael Samuel wrote how heritage and tradition can become ‘an expressive totality … projecting a unified set of meanings which are impervious to challenge … a fixed narrative which allows neither sub-text nor counter-readings … ‘, but, ‘History is an allegorical as well as … a mimetic art … We find occult meanings in apparently simple truths’.

“Non-fiction uses facts to help us see the lies. Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.”

Thoughts derived from a reading of

Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic

(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)

Doors of No Return,

Historic, documented, liminal places,

Not gone with the wind, but both visible and invisible,

Spaces and places in the Stroudwater hills and valleys

With messages and mementoes from a riotous past,

Open doors to the truth –

So how do we create a counter-narrative?

“A performative counter-narrative … a ‘guerrilla memory’”,

“Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history”

(Pierre Nora),

Memorialisation that moves beyond the empirical,

The documented, the evidenced and the historical,

To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation…

For further reinterpretations,

And re-imaginings,

As we move art and monument

From object to process,

And from ‘noun to verb’,

As we create new museums of the past, present and future…

 

Broadway Elegy

When you’re a slightly star struck English tourist,
Visiting NYC for the very first time
(‘It’s that Broadway Melody!’),
It’s easy to forget the Paris Situationists:
‘Underneath the paving stones, the beach!’
You might stare at the skyscrapers or the stars,
But sometimes you have to be in the gutter to know the truth.

So make a pilgrimage along Broadway
(‘It’s that Broadway Melody!’)
To number 290, NY10007,
To the African Burial Ground National Monument,
Where in a reverse echo of past city expansion
Of new plots, lots and infill on the site in 1795,
Federal construction work revealed the remains
Of over four hundred people,
Their coffins and their artefacts;
A fragment of a seven-acre burial ground,
A remnant and a revenant
Of the fifteen to twenty thousand
Slaves and free black citizens,
Interred there in the 18th century,
A shrunken fraction
Of the decorated coffins,
The beads, shells, coins and cuff links,
Remembering
And invoking
Life
Liberty
Happiness
Family
And distant African shores.

Building work ceased.
Memorialisation was planned.

The monument comprises seven grave like grass mounds;
A smooth polished Ancestral Chamber
(Standing in water, a mirror to the Atlantic),
Skyscraper modernity reflected in its glassy surface,
The past symbolised by its cardinal positioning,
Eastwards to the Door of No Return
In Dakar, Senegal,
A spiritual odyssey across the Black Atlantic;

There is also a Circle of the Diaspora,
With motifs and sankofa,
Beneath the level of the paving stones,
Our footsteps moving across a maritime imagination,
The anonymity of slavery detailed in a catalogue
Of dates and descriptions, such as:
‘Burial 99 Child between six and ten years’,
Reminding us that when we walk down Broadway,
Along the ticker tape sidewalks near Wall Street,
Underneath the pavement is a cry of exile and slavery,
Perhaps another twenty thousand imprisoned souls,
Mourning for their homelands in a rainbow lexicon,
In a landscape once mapped as The Negro Burial Ground,
Alongside Palisades, Fresh Water, and The Road to Boston:
A resonant counterpoint of history
And a present day corrective
To the modish hipster graffiti on Williamsburg Bridge:
‘Anonymity is king’,
And ‘We will be ephemeral’.

Instead:
‘For all those who were lost,
For all those who were stolen,
For all those who were left behind,
For all those who were not forgotten’.

When you’re slightly star struck English tourists
From Stroud and London and Bristol,
Walking through the lights on Broadway,
Put your ear to the paving stones:
Some of those cries you hear from the past –
The Broadway Elegy –
Are only there because of

Stroud Scarlet,
The Triangular trade,
The Bristol slavery ships,
And the capital of London:

Forget ‘Singing in the Rain’
And ‘It’s that Broadway Melody!’
Here, beneath your feet,
Is a Broadway Elegy:
Partly home spun.

The View from the Rock

The View From The Rock in NYC

The sign said that you could
‘Travel anywhere free in Manhattan for ten dollars’,
The best example of Marcusian unification of opposites,
Marxian false consciousness, and oxymoronic logic
I’ve seen anywhere;
But those advertisements help soften your mind
As a sort of hors d’oeuvre to Times Square,
The Rockefeller Centre, Rockefeller Plaza
And the Rockefeller world synecdoche,
Where the present tense meets Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,
Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984,
Where a cathedral of capitalism,
A tribute to consumption
And a monument to hedonism
Transport and process the market,
Beneath the giant biblical homily:
‘Wisdom and Knowledge are the Stability of thy Times’.

Nature and the world are playgrounds here,
Playgrounds to be conquered:
An ice skating rink, the flags of the world,
Grinning shoppers clutching their bags …
Queues for the Top of the Rock,
Queue for a view,
Where you pay for a view:
A panorama for 30 dollars,
360 degrees for 30 dollars,
The Empire State Building and towering icon upon icon
(But no biblical reference to the Tower of Babel),
Air conditioning – such a term – working everywhere overtime,
Oh look! There’s Central Park,
But too high to see the wood for the trees;
ANY
Point of view,
As long as you pay for it,
As long as it’s filtered
Through the Rockefeller propaganda machine:
You wouldn’t know from your visit
That he was a Social Darwinist,
That his firm Standard Oil,
Was assailed in the courts with anti-trust suits –
Even capitalist ethics questioned his monopolistic practices,
Who would know that Standard Oil
Waged war on trade unions and the Wobblies,
For when you enter the building,
Having been assailed by Disneyfication
Meet and greet performers,
A giant information panel tells us how grateful
A trade union leader was in 1932
For the construction of the building,
It brought work to the poverty stricken victims
Of the Wall Street Crash:
Rockefeller as beneficent philanthropist:
If it wasn’t for the rich, then the poor wouldn’t have any jobs,
This is what my gran used to tell me …
Outside St Patrick’s Cathedral,
Beggars on the streets and on the subway,
An incontinent young man in a wheel chair,
Head bent down,
Travelling God knows where
And for how long past Grand Central –
If you need private health care
Here for your physical health,
What of mental health?
How many mentally ill people did we see in the streets?
Shouting at no one in particular and nothing that made sense,
At crossing ways and subway entrances;
How many did we see aimlessly pushing trolleys,
Laden with black bin bags of clothing looking for a doorway,
Or some warm shelter for the night;
How many homeless did we see queuing for a bed for the night?
Sometimes you have to be in the gutter
To see the wood for the trees,
Rather than on top of the world,
You get false consciousness up there,
It’s a Fairy Tale of New York.

Mocking Birds Don’t Do One Thing Except

We were walking the New York High Line,
The old freight line of lower Manhattan,
On the hottest October day since 1928 –
So Trish took a breather on a bench
Beneath some tangled autumn branches;
A mocking bird immediately began to sing
‘Melodious at the noontide of the day’,
A couple of feet right above her head:
“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”…
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing
except make music for us to enjoy.”

We were walking the New York High Line,
The old freight line of lower Manhattan,
On the hottest October day since 1928 –
So Trish took a breather on a bench
Beneath some tangled autumn branches;
A mocking bird immediately began to sing
‘Melodious at the noontide of the day’,
A couple of feet right above her head:
“It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”…
“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing
except make music for us to enjoy.”

A crowd gathered to watch and listen,
Cameras clicking, selfy snapping,
Lost in the moment of preserving the present,
Oblivious to its elegy and lament:
Ghosts of the Lenape tribe slipped
Scarlet legged through the trees, and edgelands,
Through the penthouses, warehousing and freight yards:
Some harvesting squash, maize and beans,
Some foraging for wild leeks and onions,
Blueberries, walnuts, chestnuts and acorns;
Some hunting, some chanting:
Their songs echoing among the skyscrapers,
Their song of beaver, muskrat, otter,
Mink, marten, deer, elk, moose, bison, bear,
Fox, wolf, cougar, bobcat, lynx, crane, osprey,
Wild turkey, eagle, curlew, whale, wild oyster,
And the teeming shoals of spawning fish.

Trish got up and we resumed our walk;
The mocking bird stopped its song.
The Lenape disappeared,
The selfies stopped,
The crowd moved on.

Guiding Principles of Waterscape

WATERSCAPE: Inform, Educate and Entertain

Waterscape is the result of jottings, notes, recreations and re-imaginings after reading a number of texts, as well as navigating and walking canals and rivers, and cycling towpaths.

There is no fetishisation of documentary evidence and primary sources: in fact, a guiding principle of WATERSCAPE is to go beyond any available historical evidence, so as to recreate the lives of the anonymous, unrecorded lower orders. Waterscape is rather more about boatpeople and navvies, slaves, convicts and itinerants, rather than technology, weights, measures, the statistical and the numbered. We are, in the words of E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, rescuing the ignored ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.

I have concentrated on local canals and, in the spirit of oral culture and balladry, I have changed the words of a few old songs to fit with the rivers and inland navigations of Gloucestershire.

WATERSCAPE: Inform, Educate and Entertain

Waterscape is the result of jottings, notes, recreations and re-imaginings after reading a number of texts, as well as navigating and walking canals and rivers, and cycling towpaths.

There is no fetishisation of documentary evidence and primary sources: in fact, a guiding principle of WATERSCAPE is to go beyond any available historical evidence, so as to recreate the lives of the anonymous, unrecorded lower orders. Waterscape is rather more about boatpeople and navvies, slaves, convicts and itinerants, rather than technology, weights, measures, the statistical and the numbered. We are, in the words of E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, rescuing the ignored ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.

I have concentrated on local canals and, in the spirit of oral culture and balladry, I have changed the words of a few old songs to fit with the rivers and inland navigations of Gloucestershire.

Waterscape is a work of Fusion: the blending of Fact and Fiction: the Genre of Faction. The genres of psychogeography and mythogeography have also led the watery way: Waterscape is an exercise in Navigeography.

“Non-fiction uses facts to help us see the lies. Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.”

Thoughts derived from a reading of
Creating Memorials Building Identities The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic
(Alan Price Liverpool University Press 2012)

Doors of No Return,
Historic, documented, liminal places,
Not gone with the wind, but both visible and invisible,
Spaces and places in the black Atlantic archipelago
With messages and mementoes from the slaving past,
Open doors to the truth –
But we too have landscapes – and WATERSCAPES –
Which require re-reading,
Reinterpretations that acknowledge a history
That might be interwoven with the triangular trade,
But whose messages are obscured or buried –
The home of Stroud Scarlet, for example;
Or the lives of the forgotten and ignored
On our canals and rivers and oceans.

So how do we create a counter-narrative?
That is,
“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,
Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history”
(Pierre Nora),
Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’ and
‘The fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,
To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation…
Buildings and landscapes and Waterscapes
With hidden connections,
For further reinterpretations,
And re-imaginings,
As we move art and monument
From object to process,
And from ‘noun to verb’,
As we create new museums of the past, present and future.

The Upperlock Cafe

Pleased to be part of the revival of the canal, the Upperlock Cafe is open seven days a week. Located at Wallbridge on the Stroud Water Navigation, adjacent to the visitor centre of the Cotswold Canals Trust. The cafe provides a welcome and convenient place to stop on the towpath walk between Eastington and Chalford. From the café, Stroud Town Centre is easily accessible.

Run by Janette and her team, the Upperlock Café offers warm hospitality. The atmosphere is vibrant and informal, with a touch of the vintage about it. At any one time you might find friends catching up, customers reading over a cup of coffee, lycra clad cycliing groups taking a break, children playing quietly at the far end in the kitchen corner while their grandparents recuperate, poets musing, a knitting group quietly clicking, business people meeting with their laptops open (WiFi is free), well-behaved dogs keeping an eye on their owners, the council’s refuse collectors calling in for a takeway coffee. During the course of the week, the whole world is there. In summer customers spread out onto canal side picnic tables.

All tastes are catered for: omnivores, vegetarians, vegans and those who require gluten-free. The coffee is Italian, by Carrerro, and supplied by the Cornico Coffee Company in Padstow, who in turn provide expert barista training for the staff. Tea and a range of speciality brews are also available, as well as home-made cakes and a range of hot food. Locally sourced bottle beer can be served and a glass of wine can be had, along with a range of soft drinks.

The Upperlock Café offers a canal side ambience without the expense of maintaining and mooring a narrowboat.

https://www.facebook.com/upperlockcafe/

Twitter: @UpperLock

An American in Stroud

So, will this fog be gone by mid-day? No, I wouldn’t think so. Won’t the sun burn the fog off? Not really. No.

Off we go.

Cows, pastures, more cows, and a few sheep later. I’ve enjoyed yet another day of rainy-day walking in the local area. My guests apologize again for the bad weather but I point out that no weather is bad weather when you’re from Boston, and it’s January. Actually I’m from north of Boston. North enough of Boston to think that fog, rain and temperatures above freezing are considered nice weather. I am talking REALLY enjoyable. There’s no ice underfoot and I can feel my face. To me that’s nice weather for January.

An American In Stroud Photo
An American In Stroud Photo

So, will this fog be gone by mid-day? No, I wouldn’t think so. Won’t the sun burn the fog off? Not really. No. 

Off we go. 

Cows, pastures, more cows, and a few sheep later. I’ve enjoyed yet another day of  rainy-day walking in the local area. My guests apologize again for the bad weather but I point out that no weather is bad weather when you’re from Boston, and it’s January. Actually I’m from north of Boston. North enough of Boston to think that fog, rain and temperatures above freezing are considered nice weather. I am talking REALLY enjoyable. There’s no ice underfoot and I can feel my face. To me that’s nice weather for January. 

My first day in Stroud began with a familiar trip, straight up hill to Stroud cemetery, with my furry friend, Hector. I’d been there before of course, but I left the directions up to Hector. Which way Hector, left or right? Hector was giving me definitive answers until I asked him how old the church was. About that he was more unclear, so we both just stood there and stared for a minute. I was rather pleased because Hector seemed to really see that church for the first time, you know. We headed back in through the arch, to find a plaque. Left, no right, left, back out again. Where is the damn plaque? I sensed annoyance from Hector. You Americans! Make up your mind for goodness sake. I need to head home and check my pee mail before the fam gets back. 

No plaque. Seriously Stroud, you need plaques. I know you have just loads of old stuff. But add a plaque for us new-worlders. Please. In America we add plaques to everything that makes it over 100 years. We’re just so excited when that happens. 

Day two. Out to dinner and then a nice walk home. In the dark. The long way around. Wow, those views are just so fantastic at night, and so little fog! A few roads are “murder-her-and-throw-the-body-in-the-woods” dark but that makes the walk more fun. I’m not going to tell anyone how cute Stroud is until I’ve bought myself a little cottage overlooking those twinkling lights of downtown. Then we can post this review and increase house values.

When I wake up my quads are a tiny bit stiff. Last time I felt that was walking the streets of San Francisco. Maybe it was all the walking in heels? I have a suitcase full of shoes but none of them appropriate for Stroud. 

Day three, headed to Cirencester to buy sensible shoes. And a shoebrush for the mud. 

Waiting For A Steed

There aren’t many Americans who can claim they have been to four, yes four events at Chavenage House. I am talking EVENTS – ball gowns, cocktail hour, formal photographs, champagne-swigging events. The whole 9-yards. I have the distinction of being the only American to have that honour. (Write-Ins entries will be accepted.) I keep waiting in the courtyard for the handsome titled Englishman to ride in, but when I wander outside I usually just get asked to have a smoke with the 20-something crowd.

Whenever I go to Chavenage I have the same experience I do when visiting a beautiful old church that has been converted into a restaurant. I wonder if somehow that old structure groans to find itself in this embarrassing position. Like an 80-year-old former high school beauty queen finding herself in the food pantry line, or foodbanks, as you call them in the UK. She had such an auspicious start in life and never pictured ending up in this sorry spot. She just figured her life would stay grand based on her looks alone. But time marches on and sadly enough, keeping up your good looks takes time and money. A facelift only takes you so far. More foundational work must be done.  The modern look changes you somehow and it’s never quite the same. Your value becomes only a link to the past. Stay cheerful, updated, and make money or no one will want you anymore.

Gentle readers may ask why I have been to four events at Chavenage, but just ask around town and someone will point out the traditional 16th century cottage where Hector lives. He has an ordinary family life, other than the blow-out party every five years. Someone’s always getting married or having a birthday worthy of dusting off the formal wear and dance shoes. Our cabby says he takes someone to Chavenage every week, and yet in his confusion we get dropped off at the stables and mistaken for the help. 

Time To Go Home 

I’m sorry. HOW much is a rail ticket to Paddington from Stroud? I blink, staring at the register. It says 101, but surely it must cost more than a pound and a pence. But it wasn’t; it was one hundred and one. I blink again. I’m sorry, don’t you have socialized, subsidized railways? What the hell? I can get into Boston for 15 bucks on the train. It’s how much? Seriously? (Looks like someone’s let the Tories back in.)

I’m sure gentle readers will remember that Monday. You know, the Monday of the tube strike, mud slide, heavy fog at Heathrow, motorcycle accident on the highway? That is how the day of Trains Planes and Automobiles started and before it ended I had a four hour journey to the airport that involved to die version buses, two full pat downs, two, take everything out, luggage searches, and one confiscated cosmetic bag.  Headed for 3 days of New York business meetings without anti-perspirant or make-up. That always impresses the NY business crowd. 20 hours later I land in New York, in eye-tearing cold with only a raincoat. At least I have sensible shoes now.

Has it been 5-years yet? 

Note from the editor:

Many thanks to Mel for penning this – btw, I think Chalford is about 100 miles from Paddington by rail. Mel’s one way ticket would cost her about a £ a mile …