Author: Stuart Butler

Buddleia in broad gauge bloom down on Stroud station,
Crazy golf flags out at the Brunel Goods Shed,
The 9.08 to Paddington
(1966 and all that in the newspapers),
Then the Bakerloo to Oxford Circus,
And early doors into the Argyll Arms
(‘Example of fin de siècle social stratification’),
The cubicles, mahogany, mirrors and cut glass screens
Evoking an art nouveau gendered snobbery:
‘In keeping with the new vogue style for privacy …
snug areas to separate the different social classes’-
Or upper class men pursuing music hall conquest:
An Inspector Calls.

Then on to The Flying Horse
(‘The last remaining pub on Oxford Street’),
Named The Tottenham when it was built in 1892,
‘Regulars … were theatregoers from … Tottenham Street Theatre,
once London’s finest music hall.
The three curvaceous ladies on the pub walls were painted
by Felix de Jong, the leading decorative artist in music hall’:
An Inspector Calls again…

But I wanted to jump into the 18th century:
The condemned journey to the gallows
From Newgate to Tyburn Tree
Touched on Oxford Street,
And my next port of call took me past St. George’s in Bloomsbury,
Its spire discernible in the Hogarthian chaos of Gin Lane,
But it’s hard to keep away from Victoriana in London,
Especially when close to an old haunt:

The Lamb in Lamb Conduit Street,
Plush leather sofas,
Endless pen pictures of Victorian beauties,
Adamantine porcelain and tiled lavatories;
I ordered a lemon and lime,
And explained that this was a local of mine some forty years ago –
The solitary drinker there told me she was
‘In a pub in Camden Town yesterday, they played my music,
The Rolling Stones, The Beatles; I was so happy.’
She was over from Sweden, her daughter lectured at UCL,
I mentioned that I was once an undergraduate there,
She trilled:
‘A student of UCL is a student of UCL for life.’
I talked of my pub pilgrimage, took a few pictures,
Walked out the door,
‘See you in twenty years,’ she called,
As I left for Roger Street, a change of period,

And the art deco Duke of York,
Suitably close to where Dorothy Sayers lived,
This is a passport to the ‘30s:
‘Every day when Big Ben chimes, it’s Radio Times’,
‘There won’t be another war will there, sir?”
The mirrors, the fireplace, the exterior, the font …
A session in there and you’d end up being Sandy Powell,
‘Can you hear me, mother?’

But Charles Dickens is more likely to hear you here,
In the environs of Bloomsbury:
I’m not talking so much Dombey Street, Brownlow Street,
The Charles Dickens Museum, and so on,
But more the way London presents itself
As one huge Dickens theme park,
All his characters larger than life,
All beer and skittles and victuals and wittles,
All Sam Weller and Mr. Jingle,
With not a workhouse in sight,
Only the offices of the trade union UNITE,
To remind us that a Victorian reality lies behind the façade –

Then it’s all box files and Jarndyce and Jarndyce,
And Bleak House around Gray’s Inn,
Until you walk on to High Holborn,
Where I at last give some money to a beggar,
Holding the placard about the 1824 Vagrancy Act,
And so to the 1920s Mockabethan Cittie ofYorke
And the tiled Victoriana of the Princess Louise;

Next up: Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
Where I must have been the only person on a park-bench,
With homemade sandwiches, nor on a mobile ’phone,
Then Chancery Lane and Fleet Street,
For Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,
Rebuilt after the Great Fire,
Crepuscular, Gothicke atmosphere,
Here in Wine Office Court,
With the ghosts of Samuel Johnson, Congreve, Pope, Goldsmith,
And Reynolds, Gibbon, Garrick, Burney, Boswell smoking clay pipes;
Over there, Carlyle, Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Hood,
Thackeray, Cruickshank, Leech, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle
Mulling over glasses of port and the intricacies of plot.

Then on to the Viaduct Tavern in Newgate Street,
Opposite the Holborn Viaduct,
(Which straddles the subterranean River Fleet,
And the consequent steep dip in the road,
Between Holborn and Newgate Street);
Queen Victoria opened the viaduct in 1869,
The same year the pub opened,
All curving frontage,
And inside, three huge paintings of pre-Raphaelite maids,
Like something out of Christina Rossetti,
And Cousin Kate,
Symbols for agriculture, banking, and the arts,
Towering over the lunchtime topers.

I decided to aim for the 15.36 back,
With time and space to relax and write up my notes,
So aimed for just one more pub:
The secretive and difficult to find Ye Olde Mitre;
It’s down an alleyway between 8 and 9 Hatton Garden,
The alleyway indicated by a strange old street lamp,
But easily missed,
In Ely Court, Ely Place, by Holborn Circus,
‘Ye Olde Mitre 1546’,

The date reminding me that I had to hotfoot it to Paddington,
So walked to Chancery Lane, for the central line to Notting Hill,
The line eerily echoing the route taken by Jack Sheppard and his ilk,
From Newgate to Marble Arch and Tyburn Tree:

‘Jack’s two hour procession, with rope and coffin,
through crowds proffering handshakes and flowers,
halted at a tavern for Jack to quaff his last drink,
Until the cart reached its woeful and final destination at Tyburn …’

‘They groan’d aloud on London Stone
They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook
Albion gave his deadly groan,
And all the Atlantic mountains Shook.’
(William Blake)

Part Two

The Victorian London pub experience continued
With a newspaper article on the train again,
This time about the fact that not since 1893
Had so few days been lost to strikes –
But the Bakerloo was back on at Paddington,
Two weeks ahead of schedule,
And so I caught the underground to Piccadilly Circus,
To walk past top hatted Fortnum and Masons,
And onto the Red Lion in St James’s,
Off Jermyn Street, at 2 Duke of York Street:
It was closed, so I missed all the mahogany,
The sparkling glass and mirrors of this 1870s pub,
But it looked grand enough from the outside,
With its ornate ironwork, and hanging baskets.

Next up, a walk through London’s theatre land,
Hobson’s Choice and beggar land,
To the Dog and Duck’s Victoriana in Soho,
In Bateman Street: a glazed tile oasis of calm,
Where Dante Gabriel Rossetti supped,’
And George Orwell mused,
Possibly about his ideal pub:
‘The Moon Under Water … two minutes from a bus stop … on a side-street … it’s whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian … it is always quiet enough to talk.’

I passed a clothes shop called A Child of the Jago,
Where you pay through the nose for your clothes –
A Child of the Jago was a Victorian novel about slum life,
But postmodernist Victoriana is everywhere in London,
It deceives the eye and the mind,
As people on phones talk money, money, money;
And as I hear a scouse voice say:
‘The Strand. That’s on the monopoly board innit?’
Monopoly … A game that was originally devised to reveal
The essentials of capitalism, rather than encourage
Mercenary competitiveness and selfishness…

And so to the gilt edged splendour of The Salisbury
(Faux ‘Pie Shop’ and a board for ‘Fish and Chips’),
Lord Salisbury, high aristocrat and Tory grandee,
Top hatted prime minister of ‘Splendid Isolation’,
Gazing down on the art nouveau ambience,
The cut glass, the mirrors, and the fruit machine.

And so on past Somerset House, and the Thames,
To Blackfriars Bridge and the delight of the cornered
Blackfriars Pub, 174 Queen Victoria Street,
An art nouveau four storey angular gem,
With a carved black friar and a clock above the door,
Inside: ecclesiastical depictions in wood and stained glass,
The pub saved from 1960s demolition, and vandalism
By, inter alia, John Betjeman.

Then on past the Old Bailey, once the site of Newgate,
Did I see the ghost of Jack Sheppard climbing down the wall?
Past Smithfield, and the medieval splendour of St Bartholomew’s,
To reach the Hand and Shears, Cloth Fair, Middle Street:
The site has a medieval history,
The pub, an early 19th century provenance,
Matchboard walls, an oak floor, delightful prints,
And friendly company – I wanted to walk to the British Library
To meet the daughters, and received great directions:
Turn into Aldersgate, and then continue left along Goswell Street
(Where our famous Gloucestershire Chartist,
Allen Davenport lived and died),
Then past Clerkenwell Green where Lollardy thrived,
And the Artful Dodger and Fagin had their fictions,
Where Chartism was nurtured and Marxism fostered;
On to Islington and the Pentonville Road,
Twenty men on their own bicycles,
Awaiting instructions at Deliveroo,
Using their own phones to navigate …
For all the world, just like a modern day depiction
Of the docks before the strike of 1889,
When dockers queued in the hope of work,
Until unionised in the strike waves of the unskilled:
‘The New Unions’.

Walking on, I remember what I had read earlier on the train,
Feel the ground rise and fall beneath my feet,
By Pentonville Rise,
And hear the Situationist cry:
‘Under the pavements, the beach!’

And so to Kings Cross, the British Library, the canal,
And a picnic with my daughters on artificial grass,
Somewhere near where the marshaling yards used to be,
And then back to Paddington and this train,
Where I sit typing this final line about this London Pub Pilgrimage,
To ‘The Moon Under Water … two minutes from a bus stop … on a side-street … it’s whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian … it is always quiet enough to talk.’

Addendum:
Aiming for a group Radical Stroud comes to Town pub pilgrimage on the third weekend of November.

Walking and/or Cycling: Roads and Lanes not Fields

Sometimes, I like to walk paths, lanes and roads, rather than the fields: a route that can also be cycled on another occasion; or held in reserve for a wet winter spell, when the fields are waterlogged. The following is one of my favourites: from Stroud to Selsley and back to Stroud.

1. Start at the bottom of Rodborough Hill and walk along the cycle path –

See the rusting mighty iron capstans,
One, now toppled, but one still firm and strong,
Once used for winching trucks down the gas works siding,
To a coal tippler (concrete remains there still),
Where a hydraulic ram tipped the trucks’ coal
Down a chute to a narrow gauge hopper,
And thence over two bridges and the Frome,
To its destination at Stroud Gasworks –

2. When you get to the bridge, climb up to the road to descend towards Sainsbury’s. Have a look at the waters at Dudbridge Flour Mill and the clothier’s marks and doorway set into the Sainsbury’s supermarket wall. You might want to turn right here, to have a look at the waters of the Frome channeled at Dudbridge Mills, and then try to follow its subterranean path to
3. The confluence of the stream from Nailsworth and the River Frome, by the pelican crossing at the bridge. Time for a ponder. Then walk up the hill to find the street sign, Meadow End – there is a tragic history here:

A Great War: Dudbridge To Woolwich Pilgrimage

4. Cross the road to pick up the railway track again. Dudbridge railway station was near the roundabout – lots of industrial blue brick to be seen near the tunnel. Time to climb the hill and pass on your right, the Old Lodge; then the cricket ground; then the Arts and Craftsy looking Old Vicarage on your left before turning right at the junction.

5. There’s an interesting triangle at the junction, but also glance over to your right into the fields below to spot the monument. Take a moment to reflect on how important – and beguiling – this junction could have been for conversation before the motor car.

How many people would have been thronged here, making their way to the 1839 Selsley Hill Chartist meeting …

Carry on past the house – Selsley Green – then on past the farm and Stanley Park to reach the church (All Saints); walk inside and read of its Pre-Raphaelite/William Morris stained glass windows (the Virgin Mary – was the model Lizzy Siddall or Christina Rossetti?); reflect on social class and the Church of England – ‘The Tory Party at prayer’, as it was called by some in the nineteenth century; return outside and take in the view, and The Cheltenham Examiner, 14th of August, 1839:
“A report is current that an anonymous letter has been received by Messrs Marling, of the Ham Mills, desiring them to close their mills on Monday the 12th inst. to give their people an opportunity of keeping the sacred month … unless the request is complied with they are marked men.”

(I remember as a very small boy, sitting at a pub’s outside skittle alley, Vimto (anagram of ?) and crisps, gazing down at the twinkling lights of Stroud, and falling in love with it all. I’m sure the pub was along this road somewhere.)

6. Look at the slightly Thomas Hardy farm on your right; enjoy looking at, and closing, the church gate; take a look at the war memorial and its commanding view – how often war memorials are placed at cross roads … return to the road for another Hardyesque limned farm …
7. And so past Poachers Pocket on your right …
Horsley gaol register GA Ref: Q/Gh/10/2 entry number 780 –
Name: John Flight, aged 30, labourer
Offence: Unlawfully entering certain inclosed land at King Stanley at night with a Gun for the purpose of destroying game.
Class: 1
Order of commitment: Three Calendar months hard labour and to find 2 sureties in the sum of £5 each or one in £10 and by recognisance himself of £10, or further imprisonment 6 cal months hard labour
Magistrate committing: Thos Kingscote Esq; A Shakespeare Esq
Commencement of term: 28 Sept 1835
When discharged: 4 Jan 1836
Remarks: 4 times before vide 641. Taken before Thos KINGSCOTE Esq and found sufficient sureties and was discharged 4 Jan 1836

Memoranda of convictions, general
GA Ref: Q/PC/2/49/A/74 –
Name: James Coleman of Kings Stanley, labourer, for the crime of keeping and using a bludgeon to kill game in Woodchester, dated 18 December 1829 [printed form]
H Burgh, JP, at Stroud.
James Kenyon, gamekeeper of Nympsfield, informer.
Thomas Prout, labourer of Kings Stanley, witness.
Offenders pleaded not guilty.
Fined £5 each
Crime committed 21 November 1829

8. But it was hollyhocks in season as I passed by, and so to Old Church Lane, and on past Old Church Farmhouse (Why Old Church?). Then past Weavers Cottage:

‘I’ll never forget last Tuesday, even if I live to seventy.
We all woke up so excited, never eaten porridge so fast.
We put on our best blouses, aprons and hats
(We mightn’t have looked as fine as Miss Austen’s ladies,
But it’s not as though they’ve got the vote either),
The men shaved their chins, put on their caps,
Moleskin trousers and fustian waistcoats,
And out we strode into the lane.
Such a sight you never did see!
Hundreds of working men, women and children,
All marching in an orderly line past our cottage,
And serpentine lines climbing up every valley side,
There must have been thousands!
All laughing and cheering, but sore determined,
Determined to get our rights and right our wrongs.’

9. Past another grand house on your right and the spring on your left:

Some Five Valley Spring Names

What toponymic messages are sent
When we tramp the lane
Rather than drive the road,
When we disconnect the sat-nav and navigate
By the tracks that connect our ancient springs?
Cherington Springs, Seven Springs, Toadsmoor Brook,
Blanche’s Bank, Baker’s Pool, Frogmarsh Lane,
Snakeshole, Puckshole, Derryhay,
Tankard’s Spring, Dimmel’s Dale, Hell Corner,
Be-Thankful Fountain, The Combs, Severn Waters,
Well Hill Spring, Bubblewell, Troublewell,
The Bubbler, the Blackgutter, Spriggs Well,
Springfield, Springhill, Bulls Bank Common,
Sweetwater Spring, Stanfields Spring, Millbottom,
St. Tabatha’s Well, Cud Well, Gainey’s Well,
Then Verney Spring and Ram Pitch Spring,
Farmhill Well, Double Spout and Turner’s Spring.
Every name a history, every spring a name:
Reclaim the names and etch them on your maps,
Keep the traces of the past as lapidary reminders,
Of otherwise forgotten traces of sense.
Underneath the Pavements, the Beach!

(Does the spring at Selsley West have a name?
Why not give it one, if it doesn’t?)

10. The descent into Middleyard and Kings Stanley seems to take us into a different historical and social ecology: a 17th century chapel; a lane referencing the name PENN (did they meet with the Quakers of Painswick and the Diggers at Slimbridge?); another chapel, red brick; a house down a side street with ‘The People’s Hall’ still legible beneath a coat of paint …

Henry Burgh, May 5th, 1839, in a letter to Lord John Russell: “ I had heard that they were making hand grenades at Wotton-under-Edge where the greatest number of Chartists reside. I employed a person that I could rely on…and find that report not true, but they are making Pikes there and also at Stroud, Cainscross and King’s Stanley.”

Peter Leversage, JP, later in the year: ‘It is right to inform your Lordship that a meeting of Chartists was held in the village of King’s Stanley…on Wednesday last at one o’clock in the day … Vincent of notoriety addressed the meeting for about two hours…the only available civil power at our command was two police and a few village Constables, the latter not being a very efficient body, we thought it advisable to request the officer commanding the 12th Lancers now in Stroud to have an Officer and 20 men in readiness should a riot or disturbance take place. We also sent a person whom we could depend upon, to attend and report what took place there. He states that Vincent spoke for two hours “but gave utterance to no sentiment that could be characterised as dangerous, or calculated to lead to a breach of the peace”, also “that the meeting consisted from 300 to 500 persons, the greater part being women and children and they all quietly dispersed at the conclusion of Vincent’s address after singing what was called a Hymn”… Although the addresses do not lead to actual breaches of the peace, I am bound to state my opinion that they leave the minds of the class of persons who attend in a very unsettled and excited state.’

11. I then picked up a road, then track, that led on up to the woods beneath Nympsfield, and then took the right hand path that leads to Leonard Stanley. It leads into what I used to know as Marsh Lane, if it is still called that, and so to the cottages where my gran and gramp (2 Woodland View, Marsh Lane) lived, and Mr. and Mrs. Lusty used to live, half a century ago and more.

11. I plucked up courage to ask the people in the garden about Mr. Lusty and was told he lived to be well over a hundred; both cottages now had solar panels on the roof, and I walked through the gate and along the grassy path to gran and gramp’s old cottage. Onions were laid out in the sun; the apple trees were burgeoning, and I was made very welcome after I introduced myself.
The apple tree that gramp planted when he removed the outside lavatory is still there, and it was probably gramp who filled in the well, over a half a century ago – my sister can’t remember it – but it has been reopened and now used again.
It was a delight to meet Mr. and Mrs. Gibberd, exchange email addresses and learn of Vernon (Gibberd) at The Micro Farm.
I talked of train-spotting, bingo and seeing the mosaic at Woodchester Roman villa in the 1960s; Vernon was then in Africa …
It is, and isn’t, a small world …

12. What next? A walk around medieval and Saxon Leonard Stanley is a must – there is an informative notice board at the church; have a look at the Lusty name on the war memorial; you might have a stop in the White Hart and think of our treat of being allowed INSIDE a pub when we were children, to play table skittles there; or of Stanley Spencer staying there. Or wander down to Gypsy Lane and re-imagine John Clare here:

The Gipsy Camp

“The snow falls deep; the Forest lies alone:
The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,
Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;
The Gipsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
Beneath the oak, which breaks away the wind,
And bushes close, with snow like hovel warm …”

13. And so back to Stroud – which route? Frocester and the tithe barn and Frocester Court? (1834: John Altham Graham Clarke Frocester Estate: 482 slaves in Jamaica and £8, 934 8s 8d compensation.) Then the canal towpath back for some industrial history?
Or back to Selsley, to follow the Roman and prehistoric track of Water Lane back to Woodchester, and the site of the old church and the Roman Villa? Water Lane connected Bath with the Roman river crossing point of the Severn at Arlingham – in an earlier carnation, it is easy to imagine it as an important track linking tumuli, barrows and sacred spots at Sesley, Minchinhampton, Avening and so on.
Then back to Stroud along the railway line for industrial and textile history.

We’re spoilt for choice – time to get the bike or your boots ready.

It was eleven o’clock, on a sunshine Sunday in July,
When we gathered together to way-fare through time,
In Bristol, at Temple Meads station forecourt:
The carriage doors of remembrance troop trains
Slamming shut, as whistles blew
To take troops over the top,
To a new experience of gas and smoke,
Far away from clocking in and clocking out
At gasworks, ironworks, glassworks, rope-works,
Railway yards, engineering works, docks and cuts
Around St Phillips and the Dings.

We wandered through Edgelands terrain:
An urban-industrial cobbled street interface:
Buddleia in bloom, blackberry in blossom,
Bindweed clustered on rusting railway railings,
Damp, dripping tunnels of red brick and bedrock,
Street names recalling a long lost rural past:
‘Barleyfields’, and the pub: the ‘Barley Mow’.

Victorian terraced streets, now long gone,
From where Arthur and Alfred Jefferies once strode out,
To volunteer for the British Army,
And where their mother, Georgina,
Was at her washing line,
One day in September 1916,
When the telegram boy called:
The curtains were pulled tight across the windows,
The laundering was forgotten,
A cry of pain and anguish echoed up the stairs:
Arthur had been killed in action at the Somme –
Curtains were pulled tight too at the home
Of Arthur’s wife and children.

Then one member of our troupe – Roger Fogg –
Pulled out his grand-dad’s Soldier’s Small Book
(With photographs, addresses, next of kin and a will),
Right where his grand father – and the Jefferies –
Used to live before the Great War:
This was a theatre of memory –
We could see the boys right there before our eyes,
Clutching an old ragged football,
Laughing together on their way to the board school:
‘He would have known Arthur and Alfred.
They would have been mates.
He would have played with them in the streets just round here.’
(Cars now edging between the boys, and ourselves,
To reach a recycling centre
At the end of what was once a street with houses.)

A pigeon flew into the branches of an edgelands ash tree,
But with no message travelling through time
To us, and nor to mother, from Alfred at the front;
Wounded at Ypres, shell-shocked at the Somme,
At the end of his tether,
Shot at dawn on November 1st 1916,
Part of that accelerated wave of executions
That coincided with the faltering Somme offensive.

Georgina tramped over the cobble stones,
Handkerchief in hand,
Through the fog and reek of gas and smoke and steam,
Past a queer, sardonic rat,
A sentinel of the docks;
She cut herself a bit of bread and marg,
Pulled the curtains tight shut yet again,
And sat in the parlour gloom,
The clock ticking its empty time;

General Haig glanced at his watch,
And scratched yet another quick note:
‘How can we ever win if a plea like this is allowed?’