Category: Counter-Heritage

I’m writing this after rereading Kenneth Alsopp’s classic Hard Travellin’ after a gap of some nearly fifty years. It is, needless, to say, a book of its time but what a poetic piece of extensive research it is. It’s a piece of Americana but the book also opens up the question in the title above.

I suppose ‘riding the rails’ has happened in an almost obscure and virtually unrecorded way in this country with children and trainspotters. Steve McQueen’s film The Blitz features children and evacuees sort of stowing away and my mate has written down his memories of ‘riding the rails’ in his A Film Called Happiness    by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk

‘You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering in a thin sleeping bag on the seat in a compartment of an ancient railway carriage parked up for the night in the deserted, unlit platform at Thurso station. The end of the line, the far north of Scotland, the most northerly point of the British railway network. And don’t you know it- the sky is blacker than black, the windows of the carriage rimed with ice, inside and out.

There are four of you. You broke into this train at midnight; four fifteen-year-olds, full of chips and glowing from under-age beer drunk in a pub that couldn’t care less, in possession of a purloined carriage key. You came up here yesterday, across the vast and empty moorland on this train, and you will head back south on this train at daybreak, and now you are sleeping on this train, or trying to sleep in the bitter chill. For the past four days trains have been your home; they will be your home for the next three, too. 650 miles away, on the outskirts of London, your mother is wondering where the hell you are and what you are doing.

And what you are doing is bashing, which your mother finds difficult to understand. This is your life. You are a Basher, and you are in the (self-appointed) top tier of railway cranks. To the outside world- the normals- you are just another ‘trainspotter’, but you are not a trainspotter. Merely seeing trains and noting their numbers is not enough. You are a basher, and you are all about haulage, about riding behind a locomotive, about racking up the mileage; the beast has to work for you to earn it’s red-pen underline in the hallowed BR Motive Power Pocket Book. And it doesn’t stop at that underline, oh no: clear that loco for 100 miles, for 500, for a thousand… there is no end to this chase, no end to life on the bash.

And here in Thurso, at the head of the short rake of carriages, silhouetted against the starlight, sits your silent, slumbering quarry: 102 tons of English Electric Class 37 diesel-electric locomotive. Nicknamed ‘Tractors’ for their throaty, throbbing engine sound and their suitability for any job, from express passenger to Welsh valleys coal train. Twenty-two-year-old filthy blue-and-yellow beasts like this are your passion. You travel the length and breadth of the country in pursuit of them. It is class 37s that for now bring the thrills, the joy, the let-downs and the heartbreak that soon enough will be brought by girls and bands and politics, but not yet. You don’t know it, of course, but you have 10 months left to go before this all becomes your slightly embarrassing past.

In half an hour the Thurso traincrew will arrive; they will nod you a gruff hello. They know you’re not meant to be here, but in 1985 railway cranks are part of the everyday of railworkers’ lives; you’re eccentric but harmless- dossing on locked-up frozen trains is just the sort of thing you do, and for the most part no-one gives a toss, and you’re just left to get on with it. And soon enough daylight will grow in the east, and the engine will splutter and cough into life, and the steam-heat will drift up from under the seat to slowly warm your frozen body, and then passengers- the normals– will invade your little world and then- with a horn-blast and a roar of engine-thrash- you’re away, with you hanging out the front window, filling your hair with diesel-smoke. And four hours later you will be pulling into Inverness, and you will have racked up another 150 miles behind a class 37, and it will all have been worth it.

Your passion is relentless. Day after day, train after train. You make desperate leaps between split-second connections, endure rancid ‘festers’ in cold waiting rooms, all in pursuit of more Tractor mileage in the book. You get word-of-mouth info from other cranks. You make calls from remote phone boxes to contacts in BR Control. You are ever- hungry for the golden prize of insider knowledge- the ‘Gen’. And when you’ve got the gen, then it’s out with your ‘Bible’ (the two-inch-thick British Rail 1985 All-Line Timetable, 4-point font on rizla-thin paper). Then the frantic working out of ‘moves’, whole working timetables etched into your memory. Then scrambling at a moment’s notice from Exeter up to Edinburgh, from Bridge of Orchy down to Bristol, all because some monstrously ‘big’ freight-only 37 has wound up diagrammed on a summer cross-country relief. And when that thrashing, growling monster pulls into the platform there will be dozens and dozens of you who have made it there from all corners of the country to greet it, all alerted through some magic of pre-digital bush telegraph, all succumbing to the irresistible pull of its black-hole gravity.

In 1985, there are thousands of people like you. Tens of thousands, even. They are not all old men in anoraks, like the few cranks you still see occasionally in 2025- the last dying remnants of railway enthusiasm, gamely clinging to what-once-was against the backdrop of a ravaged and decimated privatised rail system. In 1985 you are for the most part young and you can be anyone- there are cranks who are punks, cranks who are skinhead bootboys, cranks who are soul-boys, mods, or footie casuals, cranks who are metal-heads or goths. There are black cranks and Asian cranks and female cranks, though admittedly they are few. But even amongst the vastly-predominant Young White Males, all the outside-world rivalries- all the divisions of music and class and race and sexual orientation, of north vs south, all are put aside in pursuit of trains. Gen, moves, carriage compartments and waiting rooms are all shared freely, regardless of haircut or accent or tightness of trouser.

Inside-world rivalries, of course, abound: train spotters are the pits, you’re all agreed on that, all you who have turned your back on the static passivity of the platform end in favour of the Great Hunt, the intoxicating chase of bashing. But then what to Bash? You, you’ve self-identified as an English Electric man, through and through, committing to the pursuit of locomotives built by that stalwart Newton-le-Willows manufacturer, with their distinctive engine sounds and classic stylings not just class 37s, but also class 20s, 40s, 50s, and that refinement straightaway puts you way above the bash-anything-that-moves ghettoes of the NED (‘New Engine Desperado’) and the Insect (all day back and forth the same few miles between Birmingham’s New St and International, or Edinburgh’s Waverley and Haymarket), slaves both to the red pen underline, to quantity over quality.  And- in your mind at least- it puts you way above the ‘Peak’ bashers, the ‘Rat’ bashers, and all others dedicated to what you-correctly- perceive as lesser breeds of motive power. And above all of you, at the top of the tree, the ‘main men’, the ones who’ve been at it for years, for decades even, men who started on steam; the 24/7 train-tramps, perpetually on the move, with wild hair and unidentifiable income-streams and airs of rightful superiority, the ones who’ll talk to no-one with less than a quarter-million miles on the clock, the Kings of the Rails.

And you dream of being a Main Man one day, with a beard and an eccentric overcoat and your life in a battered Gladstone bag, but for now you’re still one of the aspiring rabble, one of the thousands, with your Adidas bag graffitied with the numbers of your fave machines and stuffed with your Bible, your moves books, a jumper or two and a pair of pants. Day after day of strip-washes in swaying train bogs, snatched sleep hunched in seats under strip-lights, 3am ‘bailing’ at some freezing junction followed by a hellish ‘fester’ on a windswept platform; this is how you live. Hanging from carriage door droplight windows, drunk on the roar of engine-thrash, flailing arms, bellowing whoops in salute to the thundering machine up front.

You’ve had 37’s to Skegness. 37’s to Aberystwyth, 37’s to Blackpool and Yarmouth and the Devon coast. You’ve had 37’s to Mallaig and Thurso and Wick, to Oban and Ayr. In 1985 as a 15-year-old boy you rack up 35,000 miles on the rails. Every school holiday is a week’s All-line Rover here, a Freedom of Scotland ticket there (sixteen quid for the latter; unlimited travel for seven days); every weekend you’re off and away. Rail travel’s cheap in ‘85, but for you it’s even cheaper: the basher is a black-belt at ‘effing it’, a dab hand at the art of dubious validity, and you are no exception, deftly doctoring date-stamps with brake-fluid and milk. On a crowded summer Saturday express, with an overworked guard and every vestibule chocka with window-hanging bashers, then a quick flash of an out-of-date North Wales Rover will get you all the way to Newcastle.

Well, most times it will. But just as every cartoon hero must have their nemesis, so yours are the TTI’s, the Travelling Ticket Inspectors, all big black overcoats and hawk-eyes, the gestapo of British Rail. Like you, perpetually on the move. Like you, wedded to the rails. These are hardened men, veterans who give no quarter; grim-faced, vengeful men, primed to spot your fudged date-stamp at 100 yards … They hate you, all of you, and they want you off their trains. All have nicknames: Loose- Irons. The Purple Mask. Granville of the London Midland, who’d once spot-fined his own mother, and once went rogue in a Welsh market town, storming out into the street, demanding valid tickets from a chip-shop queue. You fear the TTI’s. You all do. You have had a TTI rip your dodgy Scottish Rover to bits in front of you, then throw you out in the rain at Falkirk High, a teenage boy, ticketless and skint and hundreds of miles from home.

But does it put you off? Not for a minute. It’s all part of the great railway adventure, and you wouldn’t swap it for anything. None of it- not the TTIs, the freezing nights, the dossing in your clothes, the filthy hair stinking of diesel fumes; not the diet of chips and Travellers-Fare sarnies, not the fitful sleeps, not the ‘leaps’ for connections at three in the morning. It’s all worth it, all of it, every glorious moment. For you don’t know it yet but you will come to think of these days as some of the best days of your life, your most favourite days, your carefree days, the days before girls, the days when joy and despair were in the hands of simple lumps of metal, and you rattled through the summers with the windows down, your head sticking out, you drinking in the distant engine-thrash, the engine-thrash that could be the soundtrack to a film you could make of all of this, a film you’d call, simply, Happiness.

Now, this is fascinating social history and well-worth recording but it is, let’s admit, very small beer compared to

‘I been ridin’ them fast rattlers I thought ya knowed

I been ridin’ them flat wheelers way down the road,

I been ridin’ these dead enders, kickin’ up cinders,

I been hittin’ some hard travellin’, Lord.’

Or

‘They were hikin’ through the tunnels,

Holdin’ on the funnels,

Ridin’ on the gunnels

On the way to Montreal.’

Or

‘I see a train coming down the railroad track,

Love to hear the bark of that old smokestack.

I hate to hear that freight train blow boo-hoo!

Cos every time I hear it, feel like riding too.’

Or

‘The long steel rails that have no end

Have caused me to roam.’

Or

‘An overland limited

Chalks a streak of gold

Across the blackboard of night …

Prosperity lounges in pullman coaches …

While American jobless

Ride the decks, the rods of coaches …’

Or

‘Caboose-like they go ruminating through

Ohio, Indiana – blind baggage –

To Cheyenne tagging …

Maybe Kalamazoo.’

Or

‘Rail-squatters ranged in nomad raillery

The ancient men – wifeless or runaway

Hobo-trekkers that forever reach

An empire wilderness of freight and rails.’

But back to the navvies building our railway lines in the 19^th century: why didn’t they hitch a ride? Why did they tramp from job to job? Why didn’t they ride the rails? Why didn’t we have hoboes over here?

Kenneth Alsopp looked at this question via Terry Coleman’s The Railway Navvies A History of the Men who made the Railways: Coleman described the 200,000 navvies in Britain as ‘nomads … to ordinary people they were practically unknown and this increased the fear and the legend’ – Alsopp comments that ‘This is strikingly similar to that which was happening to the navvy’s counterpart across the Atlantic where the hobo ganger was both romanticized and outlawed.’ He then goes on to say, ‘On the other hand the British navvy seems never to have freeloaded on the trains he made way for, as did his American opposite number. Instead of riding the rods or snagging a boxcar he either walked it or bought a third-class ticket … An American migrant worker would never, on principle, have parted with money to the railroad companies.’

Let’s now ruminate on some of the possible reasons why there was no recorded riding of the rails in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries on our side of the Atlantic Ocean. Well, the obvious answer, I hear you all say, is to do with SIZE, geography, topography and urbanisation: you might ‘rest for the night’ and be ‘only twenty-four hours from Tulsa’ but God knows where you’d be if you were twenty-four hours from Taunton and you wouldn’t say ‘only’, would you?

As regards urbanisation, Alsopp mentioned Eric Hobsbawm’s aphorism, ‘the tram replaced the tramp’: by 1851, England’s population-distribution was an outlier, with an urban population comprising half of the total for the country. No other country in the world was so densely urbanised and industrialised. This steam-based economy was also a national economy; the days of contrasting local patterns of economic boom and slump were over; it was now pointless to tramp the country via your trade and artisans’ inns (the Masons Arms, for example) in search of work. But if it’s pointless to tramp in search of work then it’s also pointless (no pun intended) to ride the rails too.

A densely packed urbanized population also meant that marshalling yards, goods yards and sidings were more easily checked compared with the wide-open spaces of the United States and also harder to trespass upon. And if you did jump a train, you’d be more easily spotted and apprehended once the train was on its way. There were no long-distance American-style freight trains trundling through a seemingly endless wild landscape; an English hobo would have been spotted quite easily. The rolling stock compounded the problem: there were no long, open-doored boxcars or grain hoppers. British wagons were smaller and shorter, affording less protection.

But even though England was densely populated and urbanised by the mid-nineteenth century, British agriculture enjoyed a boom from the abolition of the corn laws in 1846 until the 1870s. And even after that decade, there were still patterns of seasonal migration for crop-picking etc. But nothing, of course, like the hobo migrations riding the railroad in the United States. George Orwell travelled with hop-pickers from the East End into Kent in the 1930s; third-class rather than jumping a train and just a short journey too. But the mechanisation of British agriculture also reduced the need for seasonal migration of labour too. Thomas Hardy provides a vivid picture of a steam-powered threshing machine in Tess of the d’Urbevilles: it is the machine that is itinerant, not the labourers: ‘He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex.’ In addition, there was a large pool of agricultural labourers, some unemployed, waiting for work (and keeping it local, I can recall biking out as a schoolboy in the 1960s to do potato picking).

In addition, referring back to Eric Hobsbawm’s succinct summary that ‘the tram replaced the tramp’, the late nineteenth-century saw a growth in the service economy, shops, office work etc within an increasingly suburbanised England: that, too, of course, contributed to a growth in job opportunities close to doorsteps. In addition, Education Acts began to alter working-class horizons to some degree while the growth of Empire and emigration also reduced unemployment.

Now to the history of transatlantic chattel slavery. Enslavement was abolished in the British Empire in 1834 but, of course, chattel slavery was only ended in the United States with the end of the Civil War. And although there was a Black and Asian presence in the United Kingdom in the 19^th century, it bears no comparison to the United States: nearly 4 million chattel slaves in 1860 and around half a million free citizens. This leads to the question of what impact did American structural racism (Dixie! The Lost Cause!) have upon riding the rails from around 1865-1941.

There was no English Robert Johnson:

‘Goin’ to Detroit, get myself a real god job,

Tired of stayin’ round here with the starvation mob.’

Or Blind Lemon Jefferson:

‘Chicago and Detroit folks, have you heard the news?

Old Dixieland is jumping – I’ve got the Southern blues.’

Kenneth Alsopp summarised thus: ‘Yet for everyone who came back a hundred more went North.’

Now on to the IWW, the International Workers of the World, ‘the Wobblies’ and Syndicalism, and a simple British contextualisation. Syndicalism: the idea of fusing trade unions into one unified union to bring about mass strikes and break capitalism, had an arguably quick life in Britain in the 1830s and an impact of sorts on the wave of strikes in Britain between 1910 and 1914. But, in the main, the growth of individual unions for both craft and unskilled workers, allied to the growth of the Labour Party and the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ all meant that syndicalism was a marginal force in Britain. That marginality was emphasised even when this country experienced the 1926 General Strike.

But what of the USA?

Let’s start with Kenneth Alsopp’s interview with Fred Thompson.

Fred was arrested in 1923 and spent four years in jail (mostly St Quentin), having been charged with possession of IWW material and of ‘criminal syndicalism’ (along with 100 others). ‘I just moved around, soapboxing and organizing, living on next to nothing, a can of beans and a loaf of bread … At that time it would have been thought eccentric for a construction worker to pay a fare to get anywhere. For me the freights were just a practical way of getting to jobs or union assignments.

‘You remember Odysseus telling the sailors in the storm at sea that these things will be pleasanter remembered at a future time? Some things which were very unenjoyable at the time make good memories. I like to get a cup of coffee and look out of the window when there’s a severe storm – we look out of a window at the past.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t simple joys. I once went from Duluth to Chicago in a gondola loaded with spruce and pine bought for decoration. It was nice, warm summertime. The colour of that balsam as the sun hit them! The boughs had a spring action. No sultan or emperor ever travelled in greater luxury than I did on that train.

But there were some bitterly cold rides. There were times when I damaged the blood vessels in my feet from pounding them to keep the circulation going. And I’ve gone ravenously hungry. I travelled from Chicago to Spokane on 25 cents and lived on beans and some bananas I picked up in a boxcar. There were some hens there, I watched these hens until one laid an egg.’

Now to the railway workers.

‘I was a shovel and pick man. This is the kind of work you take up as a last, I mean last resort. At first it hits you so hard that you’re too bushed to eat. It takes you ten days to break in …

Pretty soon I became a gandy dancer. You use a spike-maul, that’s a ten-pond hammer with a foot-long narrow head, and you really have to roll that spike, which is an inch-and-a-half diameter, with a twirling action. Two of you work on each spike, hitting it in turn, whirling that hammer to keep it whipping. In just one second – zap!- that spike’s right in. You’re not allowed too many misses. They don’t like you hitting the rail. If you show yourself not to be much of a marksman you don’t last. Finally, I became a gauge spiker, leading a section.

You have to line up the new rail with the old rail, put an iron gauge on the old and the new, and keep them in position while you drive in the gauge spike as a guide for the gandy dancers behind you. This has to be done with speed and precision. You’re setting the pace. With a gang of sixty men you’d lay or re-lay three miles of track, one length of single line, in a day …’

Well, that’s the end of the line now, so to speak.

Unless Jon Seagrave/Jonny Fluffypunk can come up with a song to silence the American hard travellin’ hoboes …

Come on, Jon.

You know you want to …

Everyone knows the name:

Isambard Kingdom Brunel!

And everyone knows that photograph:

The top hat, the waistcoat, the cigar,

The chain-link in the background for emphasis;

The self-assured pride of the Victorian engineer,

The man of the moment and momentum,

Proud of his steamships on the oceans,

And proud of his Great Western Railway:

The dignified certainty of genius,

Knowing that his one hundred-and-twenty mile long line

Would run all the long level permanent way,

From Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads,

With a mean gradient of just 1 in 1,380.

Just as his drawing board had intended.

But where are the men who built it?

And where are the women who followed

The ever-expanding permanent way?

Where are the Fox Talbot portraits of the navvies,

With their picks and shovels and gunpowder,

Their slide rule discipline and one hundred deaths,

Taking the line through Box Tunnel,

So that the sun shone clean right through

On Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s birthday?

Where is the tribute to their anonymity?

A working-class hero is something to be.

Radical Stroud and Pop-up Museums

I suppose we ought to start this piece with our own working-definition of a Pop-up Museum: ‘a temporary exhibition carefully curated, but with changing displays created by visitors with a widening circle of participants: a sort of curated happening but with serendipitous happenstance: an inclusive community show and tell with artefacts and memories and texts and photos and artwork.

We have created such museums in pubs and art spaces and churches before – Rodborough Church, The Prince Albert, Stroud Valley Arts, the Gloucestershire Regimental Museum in Gloucester. We hope to create further pop-up museums in the future: a further Railway Pop-Up Museum (hopefully at the railway station or again at SVA or The Prince Albert) and a series of Stroud community pop-ups (again at SVA or The Prince Albert or in a church or at a closed-down shop or even in the streets).

The possible benefits are obvious: attracting people who wouldn’t normally visit museums might be one.  Encouraging people (including some who wouldn’t normally feel that they had anything important to say) to speak in public in a group, or one-to-one with a ‘curator’, could be another.  Encouraging people to visit ‘proper’ museums in Stroud, Gloucester, Cirencester, Cheltenham, Bristol and Bath etc. could be another. Revitalising closed-down shops might be another.

But let’s leave our area now; indeed, let’s leave the country, via some perceptive observations from Nora Grant in the USA: ‘Pop Up Museums: Participant-Created Ephemeral Exhibitions’:

‘The term “pop-up” has become an international buzzword used to describe ephemeral, experimental projects—from pop-up restaurants to pop-up boutiques—but a pop-up museum is still puzzling: how can you take something as substantial and precious as a museum and add a pop-up twist? What happens when you do?

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH), we host “pop up museums” (we do not hyphenate the name) that are both ephemeral and mobile; however, content comes from participants rather than museum staff or museum collections. Part exhibition, part program, part story-potluck, our pop up museums offer a hybrid experience that allow us to facilitate conversations around community issues and personal stories.

How does this work? Imagine a potluck in which, instead of a dish, everyone brings an object and/or story to share with others. We collaborate with community partners and choose the pop up museum’s theme and venue together. We then invite people to bring something on-topic to share … Our primary goal for pop up museums is to bring people together in conversation through stories, art, history, and objects …but by calling it a “museum” the project encourages people to rethink museum spaces and experiences. The Name “Museum” Sparks Confusion—But Also Meaningful Conversations.’

‘During the event, one participant commented, “People were willing to talk about what they made, how and why. And it can be loud, unlike museums. I think of museums as . . . you can’t touch anything, you can’t be noisy. It’s nice how you can touch anything. It was casual, but official-feeling at the same time.” This participant’s comment suggests a discomfort with museum spaces and with the inability to touch exhibited content. The pop up museum offers a hands-on experience in which people can touch the objects and speak directly with the exhibitor. We all have interesting things, but people rarely share them with strangers or display them in a museum context. Calling it a “pop up exhibition” or a “pop up show” would describe the physical structure, but it wouldn’t ignite as much conversation about the conceptual space of a museum. We want the project to activate museum space both physically and conceptually.’

‘The pop up museum is a fill-in-the-blanks space that prioritizes conversation over objects. Call it relational aesthetics, potluck, exhibition, museum, or non-museum—its changeability is its charm. Our primary goal for pop up museums is to bring people together in conversation through stories, art, history, and objects.’

I suppose, too, that pop-up museums could be, in a way, virtual and on-line. We have been collecting family stories here at Radical Stroud with ‘A People’s History A Miscellany of History A Textual Weaving of a Cabinet of Curiosities A Textual Sampler’ – we have been adding chapters over the last couple of years and when complete, we shall put in all online in one continuous post. This incremental story-telling has involved the local history society and the community at large. It is a model, perhaps, for future engagement in the locality on different themes. (We have also posted on how to create your own museum and how to create tongue in cheek ludic ‘counter-heritage’ events: see links at the end.)

But it’s time now for a bit of on the other handery, courtesy of Eben Diskin and the USA again (2021): ‘It’s Time to Stop Using the Word “Museum” to Describe Pop-Up Museums’:

Eben enjoys ‘mindless family excursions as much as anyone else, but pop-up museums are more than just benign diversions – they’re a symbol of the growing culture … where people think of themselves as the main character in their own movie. Now that’s metastasizing from social media to our cultural and intellectual institutions… As a highly efficient vehicle for vanity and self-aggrandizement, social media has been the primary catalyst of “me” culture … Pop-up museums are an extension of this … to offer museum-esque experiences without the learning or cultural value. They capitalize on our vanity and shrinking attention spans to tempt people away from museums with actual cultural significance. They contribute to the anti-intellectualization of culture.’

Well, I don’t disagree with some of that. And I don’t agree with some of that too. But it’s good to be mindful of such a polemic to keep us on our toes. But I finish this section with another trip to America as a judgment on the above: “It Ain’t Necessarily So”.

Now to conclude: we started off with our definition of the pop-up museum; but what definition of museum should we use? Here is the International Council of Museums 2022 definition: ‘A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.’

We look forward to contributing further to that ethos in our own idiosyncratic pop-up manner, so as to build upon our successes and achievements outlined in the second paragraph. We have the experience and expertise to take this further on the GWR, in Stroud, the county or region. We have developed a model that others can use and would be more than willing to talk about the nuts and bolts of our pop-up practice so as to spread the word.

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/you-dont-have-to-be-rich-or-famous-to/

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/making-your-own-museum-guerrilla/

STOP PRESS!

Making pop-ups in the moment to catch the mood: I have created two over the last couple of days to catch the attention of passers-by as they walk past our front garden. One was for the Mexico v England football match involving an England shirt, a football, a pair of old football boots, two pieces of Stroud scarlet cloth, and a poem about the historic links between Stroud scarlet cloth and Mexico (the cochineal beetle). There will be a performance of the poem at the local pub showing the match in the early hours, with the possibility of further group performance in the event of an England victory.

The other pop-up involves two collages created to mark the 250^th anniversary of the USA. These will be co-created with my colleague Katie McCue and displayed in the front garden of my house. It will also feature on social media, as has the football creation.

A Film Called Happiness by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk
You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering in a thin sleeping bag on the seat in a compartment of an ancient railway carriage parked up for the night in the deserted, unlit platform at Thurso station. The end of the line, the far north of Scotland, the most northerly point of the British railway network. And don’t you know it- the sky is blacker than black, the windows of the carriage rimed with ice, inside and out.
There are four of you. You broke into this train at midnight; four fifteen year olds, full of chips and glowing from under-age beer drunk in a pub that couldn’t care less, in possession of a purloined carriage key. You came up here yesterday, across the vast and empty moorland on this train, and you will head back south on this train at daybreak, and now you are sleeping on this train, or trying to sleep in the bitter chill. For the past four days trains have been your home; they will be your home for the next three, too. 650 miles away, on the outskirts of London, your mother is wondering where the hell you are and what you are doing.
And what you are doing is bashing, which your mother finds difficult to understand. This is your life. You are a Basher, and you are in the (self- appointed) top tier of railway cranks. To the outside world- the normals- you are just another ‘trainspotter’, but you are not a trainspotter. Merely seeing trains and noting their numbers is not enough. You are a basher, and you are all about haulage, about riding behind a locomotive, about racking up the mileage; the beast has to work for you to earn it’s red-pen underline in the hallowed BR Motive Power Pocket Book. And it doesn’t stop at that underline, oh no: clear that loco for 100 miles, for 500, for a thousand… there is no end to this chase, no end to life on the bash.
And here in Thurso, at the head of the short rake of carriages, silhouetted a English Electric Class 37 diesel-electric locomotive. Nicknamed ‘Tractors’ for their throaty, throbbing engine sound and their suitability for any job, from express passenger to Welsh valleys coal train. Twenty-two-year-old filthy blue-and-yellow beasts like this are your passion. You travel the length and breadth of the country in pursuit of them. It is class 37s that for now bring the thrills, the joy, the let-downs and the heartbreak that soon enough will be brought by girls and bands and politics, but not yet. You don’t know it, of course, but you have 10 months left to go before this all becomes your slightly embarrassing past.
In half an hour the Thurso train-crew will arrive; they will nod you a gruff hello. They know you’re not meant to be here, but in 1985 railway cranks are part of the everyday of rail-workers’ lives; you’re eccentric but harmless- dossing on locked-up frozen trains is just the sort of thing you do, and for the most part no-one gives a toss, and you’re just left to get on with it. And soon enough daylight will grow in the east, and the engine will splutter and cough into life, and the steam-heat will drift up from under the seat to slowly warm your frozen body, and then passengers- the normals- will invade your little world and then- with a horn-blast and a roar of engine-thrash- you’re away, with you hanging out the front window, filling your hair with diesel-smoke. And four hours later you will be pulling into Inverness, and you will have racked up another 150 miles behind a class 37, and it will all have been worth it.
Your passion is relentless. Day after day, train after train. You make desperate leaps between split-second connections, endure rancid ‘festers’ in cold waiting rooms, all in pursuit of more Tractor mileage in the book. You get word-of-mouth info from other cranks. You make calls from remote phone boxes to contacts in BR Control. You are ever- hungry for the golden prize of insider knowledge- the ‘Gen’. And when you’ve got the gen, then it’s out with your ‘Bible’ (the two-inch-thick British Rail 1985 All Line Timetable, 4-point font on rizla-thin paper). Then the frantic working out of ‘moves’, whole working timetables etched into your memory. Then scrambling at a moment’s notice from Exeter up to Edinburgh, from Bridge of Orchy down to Bristol, all because some monstrously ‘big’ freight-only 37 has wound up diagrammed on a summer cross-country relief. And when that thrashing, growling monster pulls into the platform there will be dozens and dozens of you who have made it there from all corners of the country to greet it, all alerted through some magic of pre-digital bush telegraph, all succumbing to the irresistible pull of itsblack-hole gravity.
In 1985, there are thousands of people like you. Tens of thousands, even. They are not all old men in anoraks, like the few cranks you still see occasionally in 2025- the last dying remnants of railway enthusiasm, gamely clinging to what-once-was against the backdrop of a ravaged and decimated privatised rail system. In 1985 you are for the most part young and you can be anyone- there are cranks who are punks, cranks who are skinhead bootboys, cranks who are soul-boys, mods, or footie casuals, cranks who are metal-heads or goths. There are black cranks and Asian cranks and female cranks, though admittedly they are few. But even amongst the vastly-predominant Young White Males, all the outside-world rivalries- all the divisions of music and class and race and sexual orientation, of north vs south, all are put aside in pursuit of trains. Gen, moves, carriage compartments and waiting rooms are all shared freely, regardless of haircut or accent or tightness of trouser.
Inside-world rivalries, of course, abound: train spotters are the pits, you’re all agreed on that, all you who have turned your back on the static passivity of the platform end in favour of the Great Hunt, the intoxicating chase of bashing. But then what to Bash? You, you’ve self-identified as an English Electric man, through and through, committing to the pursuit of locomotives built by that stalwart Newton-le-Willows manufacturer, with their distinctive engine sounds and classic stylings not just class 37s, but also class 20s, 40s, 50s, and that refinement straightaway puts you way above the bash-anything-that-moves ghettoes of the NED (‘New Engine Desperado’) and the Insect (all day back and forth the same few miles between Birmingham’s New St and International, or Edinburgh’s Waverley and Haymarket), slaves both to the red pen underline, to quantity over quality. And- in your mind at least- it puts you way above the ‘Peak’ bashers, the ‘Rat’ bashers, and all others dedicated to what you-correctly- perceive as lesser breeds of motive power. And above all of you, at the top of the tree, the ‘main men’, the ones who’ve been at it for years, for decades even, men who started on steam; the 24/7 train-tramps, perpetually on the move, with wild hair and unidentifiable income-streams and airs of rightful superiority, the ones who’ll talk to no-one with less than a quarter-million miles on the clock, the Kings of the Rails.
And you dream of being a Main Man one day, with a beard and an eccentric overcoat and your life in a battered Gladstone bag, but for now you’re still one of the aspiring rabble, one of the thousands, with your Adidas bag graffitied with the numbers of your fave machines and stuffed with your Bible, your moves books, a jumper or two and a pair of pants. Day after day of strip- washes in swaying train bogs, snatched sleep hunched in seats under strip- lights, 3am ‘bailing’ at some freezing junction followed by a hellish ‘fester’ on a windswept platform; this is how you live. Hanging from carriage door droplight windows, drunk on the roar of engine-thrash, flailing arms, bellowing whoops in salute to the thundering machine up front.
You’ve had 37’s to Skegness. 37’s to Aberystwyth, 37’s to Blackpool and Yarmouth and the Devon coast. You’ve had 37’s to Mallaig and Thurso and Wick, to Oban and Ayr. In 1985 as a 15 year old boy you rack up 35,000 miles on the rails. Every school holiday is a week’s All-line Rover here, a Freedom of Scotland ticket there (sixteen quid for the latter; unlimited travel for  even days); every weekend you’re off and away. Rail travel’s cheap in ‘85, but for you it’s even cheaper: the basher is a black-belt at ‘effing it’, a dab hand at the art of dubious validity, and you are no exception – deftly doctoring date-stamps with brake-fluid and milk. On a crowded summer Saturday express, with an overworked guard and every vestibule chocka with window- hanging bashers, then a quick flash of an out-of-date North Wales Rover will get you all the way to Newcastle.
Well, most times it will. But just as every cartoon hero must have their nemesis, so yours are the TTI’s, the Travelling Ticket Inspectors, all big black overcoats and hawk-eyes, the gestapo of British Rail. Like you, perpetually on the move. Like you, wedded to the rails. These are hardened men, veterans who give no quarter; grim-faced, vengeful men, primed to spot your fudged date-stamp at 100 yards.. They hate you, all of you, and they want you off their trains. All have nicknames: Loose- Irons. The Purple Mask. Granville of the London Midland, who’d once spot-fined his own mother, and once went rogue in a Welsh market town, storming out into the street, demanding valid tickets from a chip-shop queue. You fear the TTI’s. You all do. You have had a TTI rip your dodgy Scottish Rover to bits in front off you, then throw you out in the rain at Falkirk High, a teenage boy, ticketless and skint and hundreds of miles from home.
But does it put you off? Not for a minute. It’s all part of the great railway adventure, and you wouldn’t swap it for anything. None of it- not the TTIs, the freezing nights, the dossing in your clothes, the filthy hair stinking of diesel fumes; not the diet of chips and Travellers-Fare sarnies, not the fitful sleeps, not the ‘leaps’ for connections at three in the morning. It’s all worth it, all of it, every glorious moment. For you don’t know it yet but you will come to think of these days as some of the best days of your life, your most favourite days, your carefree days, the days before girls, the days when joy and despair were in the hands of simple lumps of metal, and you rattled through the summers with the windows down, your head sticking out, you drinking in the distant engine-thrash, the engine-thrash that could be the soundtrack to a film you could make of all of this, a film you’d call, simply, Happiness.