Category: Counter-Heritage

When you stay at a posh gastro-pub like the Red Lion,
Just by the River Avon at East Chisenbury, near Pewsey,
With a prehistoric, Saxon, medieval and tranquil landscape all around,
It’s hard to remember that you are deep in Captain Swing land:
‘ In taking my leave of this beautiful vale I have to express my deep shame, as an Englishman, at beholding the general extreme poverty of those that cause this vale to produce such quantities of food and rainment. This is, I verily believe it, the worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility; and as to food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them!”
Sunday November 21st 1830, is when it all kicked off,
With 200 labourers demanding higher wages
And an end ‘To them damned threshing machines’;
Sir Edward Poore met the labourers at Manningham:
“I am satisfied that your wages ought to be raised and I will do my utmost to obtain for you a more adequate compensation for your labour”,
And he tossed them a sovereign and believed order had been restored.
But a sense that the old moral economy would prevail over new and base capitalism,
Encouraged the rioters, and in a long chat with Augustus Hare, the rector of Alton Barnes,
They said that a magistrate had informed them that they would be breaking no laws
If they were to smash the threshing machines with their hammers and iron bars.
So they marched from the wharf at Honey Street,
Allington, All Cannings, Patney, Maningham Abbots and Woodborough,
Until some 250 men met at the Rose and Crown at Little Woodborough,
Had their customary bread, cheese and beer,
Then smashed machinery (threshing, chaff-cutting and haymaking machines)
At farms in Woodborough, demanding money from farmers
(John Clift at Church Farm offered two half-crowns –
It needed another ten shillings before they dispersed),
They then traversed the bridge over the canal at Honey Street,
And so to Alton Barnes and Manor Farm, next to the church.
The tenant (Robert Pile) had been to Marlborough, with the yeomanry,
Putting down riots at Rockley,
But returned to use pistol and shotgun against the labourers as they tried to wreck machinery;
He was attacked, in turn: “God damn your blood, you tried to shoot me, and now I’ll do for you”.
The rioters dispersed after attacking the house and receiving a ten pound note;
They moved on to Stanton St. Bernard, then back to the Rose & Crown,
Where the yeomanry captured 28, before taking them to prison in Devizes
(En route an attempt was made to rescue the prisoners at Chirton),
Two sentences of death (Charles Davis and Laban Stone) were handed out,
Commuted to transportation;
The yeomanry remained on alert,
But the new poor law would soon do its work,
And the labourers were rendered docile for a generation,
Until ‘Hodge’ listened to Joseph Arch
And a trade union was born.

November 24th 1830 — About two o’clock we were summoned by two half drunken men who professed to be „sent on‟. They came to the door and asked for money, “any trifle‟, announcing that two hundred were coming at their heels. After failing of their errand, they went down to Pile’s House opposite, whither I followed them. He was gone to Marlborough, and there was none but the women in the house. As the only chance, I had the church bells rung, but none of the labourers came; perhaps they were too far off, and did not hear. About ten minutes after the troop arrived. The machine had been taken to pieces, but that did not satisfy them; they must break it. And breaking it they were, when Pile dashed in on horseback, and fired … they dragged him down, and have nearly killed him. Then they burst into the house and broke everything to pieces, and for sometime I expected they would serve us in the same way; so irritated were they, and so mad with drink. Indeed they talked of coming back tonight and burning down all his ricks and barns … The Yeomanry were here by six and I have just heard that they have surprised several of the rioters in the public house at Woodborough. (Letter of Augustus Hare)
November 25th 1830 — We have had no further alarm beyond the many reports, of which, if we believed one half, one could not have much rest…… Troops are at Devizes and Marlborough. We have our own special constables, patrols and fire engines and I trust are in a better state of preparation than we were. Poor Mr. Pile is not out of danger, I fear, though I hope he will do well. A large fireball was found in his field the morning after the attack. We hear of five great fires over the hills towards Calne, and at Salisbury dreadful work is going on. Our ring leaders are chiefly taken and we had the pleasure of seeing some of them go past with the cavalry yesterday morning. All the villages round about us seemed to have contributed their fair share of men, and I fear there are some very bad ones amongst them. Our village had not one, and only two were from Great Alton (Alton Priors), but of course they all rejoice secretly at what is being done to bring them greater wages. At the same time some of them are frightened to death, and the wives come crying about their husbands, they are sure they will get their heads broken. At all hours people are coming – farmers to consult about what should be done, and with fresh stories. In short, we live in a strange nervous state; and if we do not make an example, and that speedily, of some of the worst, there will be no end to these outrages …
The greater part of our rioters are men who earn from twelve to twenty shillings a week at the wharf and spend it all in the beer shops. (Letter of Maria Hare)
November 26th 1830 — The activity of the magistrates and yeomanry have struck a panic which will, I trust, spare us any further alarm. Yesterday a Bow Street Officer came to get information. He came out of Kent and says his own impression is certainly that the fires proceed from the people of the country. He hoped to have got a good clue to one of our incendiaries. The chiefs of our ring leaders are in custody and Augustus went this morning with Mr. Miller to identify some of the prisoners. He was doubtful about one, till the man put an end to his hesitation by saying, “You, Sir, can witness I was not breaking the machine, for I was talking to you.” I have written so confusedly before that I think you will have no clear idea of my share of the day, so I will tell you what I saw. On the approach of the troop, as they came over the bridge, Augustus said to me “Go home and keep in the house” and so amid the cook’s entreaties that “master would come home too”, which I knew was in vain, we betook ourselves to the house, locked and bolted the doors and windows, and had just retreated upstairs when a thundering knock came at the front door. Finding my plan of concealment would not do, I presented myself at the drawing room window and held a parley with them. “They wanted to do no harm”. “What have you got those clubs and hammers for, then?” I refused money and went away, but the continued knocking, and threats of breaking doors and windows, soon made me pull out some shillings and throw to them, with which they went away content. Meanwhile I saw in the churchyard all the women and children collected; leaning over the wall of Mr. Pile’s yard I could distinguish Augustus and one or two others; and in the farm yard and all round it were a mob, with shouts, hammering the machines to pieces. I suppose this had gone on for about twenty minutes or half an hour when we (the cook and myself, for the other servants were all gone nearer the scene of the action) heard a tremendous gallop, and in an instant saw Mr. Pile riding furiously amongst the mob, who gave way directly, and had he kept his ground there, all had been well. There was a confusion, and all I could distinguish was that the farmyard was cleared; a report of a gun came from the ricks behind the barns, there was a great scream set up, loud shouts, and to my horror I saw Augustus and those with his rush into the field amongst them. However, the alarm for him was not long; after a few minutes I distinguished him leaving the crowd, and making his way to the house, and never did my legs carry me more willingly than as I flew down the stairs to open him the door. When I again got to my station the mob were all come round and advancing upon the Pile’s house, and the noise was terrible of breaking their windows and doors. As they had vowed vengeance against Augustus for having brought the gun out of the house, he kept out of sight, whilst I sent away the few who came for money, and who were easily contented. After they had completed their destruction at Mr. Pile’s, which was not till the poor mangled victim was brought downstairs again, and had given them £10, we had the satisfaction of seeing them file away across the fields to Great Alton. In about half an hour they returned to break the Crowe’s machine which we had put in the field, and then we saw no more of them; but as they went off to Stanton, declaring of their intention of returning at night, it was an amazing relief when Mr. G. and some other men arrived, who said they had just left Devizes, and heard the troops ordered “on Alton‟. And so ended our siege, which it must be owned was as little resisted as ever enemy was; but the best labourers were all at a distance, and those near, far too frightened to give any help. (Maria Hare)
December 10th 1830 — The odd thing about the riots is, that this is not a year of scarcity. There has been no hard winter and no uncommon pressure of any sort to raise this outcry. And when one sees half of the discontented, are men who spend their money at the beer shops, and who might get ample if they chose, it hardens one against sympathy with their distress, and inclines one to think the lenity and indulgence granted in return for their proceedings, not the best judged. (Maria Hare)

http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Wilsford/Wilsford%20(Pewsey)%20-%20Charles%20Davis%20Swing%20Riot%20Captain%201798-1831.pdf
http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Woodborough/Woodborough%20-%20Swing%20Riots%201830.pdf
http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Alton/Alton%20Barnes%20-%20Swing%20Riots%201830.pdf

It was one of those never-never nights,
Becalmed between Christmas and New Year,
When you’re not quite sure of the day or the date –
We’d walked the Laurie Lee Trail,
And after falling into two different pubs,
Playing cards and spoof, drinking wine as well as beer,
Then toasting the table with Josh’s sloe gin
(Courtesy of the canal towpath at Ponder’s End),
Conversation wandered to our own pondering end.

Josh, who is a carpenter,
Was chatting about planes,
And how in former times,
Fathers passed their tools onto sons,
Names stamped into the wood –
This was too much of a coincidence
And opportunity to miss:
I ran upstairs to bring down
My great grandfather’s plane,
And Josh used pencil and grease-proofed paper,
To take rubbings and reveal: ‘C.W.Butler’
(Passed to his son, my gramp): ‘C.H.Butler’;

Josh examined the plane carefully,
Took it apart,
And was completely certain that the plane was hand made,
Presumably by my great grandfather;
The sloe gin was kicking in, and the memory kicked off:
I knew that Charles William had moved down to Swindon,
After the carriage and wagon works opened in the 1880s
(He was a carriage builder in London),
And my mum had told me donkey’s years ago,
That his wife, Caroline (nee Ridler), loathed Swindon
And eventually left him to return to London,
The marriage broken;
My grand-dad, Charles Horace, was born in 1891,
And served his apprenticeship as a carpenter in the GWR,
Before leaving Swindon for London before the First World War –
The plane ending up in my dad’s shed
And then passed on to me,
As an artefact and historical exhibit only –
For I am utterly useless with my hands,
Not what you’d call practical at all.

We then brought down a framed collage
I had made for my mum twenty odd years ago,
Now in daughter Alice’s possession:
‘My Little Museum” –
This contains pictures of my and Trish’s family,
A funeral card for a great-great uncle, a young boy killed
In a Wiltshire threshing machine accident,
Newspaper cuttings, old railway stamps,
Artefacts such as old coins,
And gramp’s brass GWR clocking-in token
(SWINDON 1001 LOCO);
But we were interested in the centre stage 1887 marriage certificate,
For Charles’ address, 19 St. John’s Place, Clerkenwell,
Is just around the corner from where Josh works today,
And where I was the other month,
Researching the local Chartist Allen Davenport and the Spa Fields Riots –
I must have walked past it, oblivious.

And what’s the moral of this tale?
That the truth is not as plain as the nose on your face –
Just as you sometimes rub your nose:
‘Ask no questions, tell no lies’,
Sometimes you have to take rubbings of what you think you know,
Examine the mundane, the half remembered and the ignored,
Enjoy the Inspector Bucket quest,
As you make your own museum,
For the truth might just be below the surface,
As plain as the name on a plane,
Or as plain as the knows inside your face.

(Stop Press! Josh also found the name Bartrop and Co. on the plane. Questions to be resolved – did this firm in fact make the plane, or did Charles William, unknown to memory, work for this firm of agricultural engineers in Highworth, near Swindon, for a while? Bartrop and Co. sounds so Dickensian, or like something out of Thomas Hardy.)

Did your history teacher ever mention the Spenceans?
They are up there with the Levellers, the Diggers, and the Chartists,
In terms of historical importance and present relevance,
But usually get just a cursory mention in the period 1815 -20,
The ‘Was Britain close to revolution?’ years of Spa Fields,
And the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy to murder the cabinet –
But their forgotten, ignored or misrepresented influence
Is seminal and needs resurrection.
Their beliefs went far beyond
The usual historians’ calumny and misinterpretation:
‘Hare brained violent insurrectionaries, a minority group
Of marginal importance, riddled with government spies’.

The name of Thomas Spence should be mentioned in the same breath
As William Blake, John Clare, Percy Shelley, the Luddites, the Chartists,
And this is where the name of Allen Davenport comes in, and the village of Ewen.

One of ten children in a handloom weaver’s cottage: ‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage in which I was born … I came into existence, while the revolutionary war of America was raging …’
He taught himself to read by learning songs; then saving up to buy printed versions: ‘I learnt, as most children do, a number of songs by heart, and … I saved all my halfpence and bought up all the printed songs that I could sing, and began with those that appeared the most easy … I proceeded to match all the words in my printed songs, with those I had previously stored in my mind … By this method, the eye became the pupil of the ear …’
He taught himself to write: ‘I got hold of a written alphabet … I tried my hand at black and white … and to my inexpressible joy I soon discovered that my writing could be read and partially understood’.

Tired of village life, a horseman and a patriot, he then joined the army, learnt his shoemaking trade (cobblers were well known as radical autodidacts, btw), then worked in Cirencester for four years, before making his way to London – marrying Mary, a shoe-binder, in 1806, and discovering the ideas of Thomas Spence: ‘During my stay’, the ‘man that brought our numbers [works of poetry] brought also a book, which he said ought to be in the hands of every Englishman … I read the book, and immediately became an out and out Spencean. I preached the doctrine to my shop-mates, and to everybody else… This was in 1805.

’The revolutionary, republican notions of Spence were broadcast in a number of ways,
And it is tempting to think that this son of Gloucestershire helped chalk
The agrarian communist slogans that appeared on London’s pavements and walls:
‘SPENCE’S PLAN AND FULL BELLIES’
‘THE LAND IS THE PEOPLE’S FARM’
Spence also cast coins, medals or tokens,
Dispensing with the circumferential fidelities of Church and State,
Instead:
‘If rents I once consent to pay
My Liberty is past away.’
And ‘Before the Revolution’ (an emaciated, chained prisoner);
Feasting and carousal on the obverse: ‘After the Revolution’;
Whilst one token laconically proclaimed:
‘War or Land’
(The war being a civil one, of course).

Allen Davenport found his voice with the inspiration of Thomas Spence,
He wrote for ‘The Republican’, Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register,
Penned republican poems …

There is more to follow on later posts, as we outline the remarkable life of Allen Davenport. But we are paying tribute to him and his history not just through words, but also through walking.
Kel Portman from Walking the Land, Jim Pinkney from Marah and yours truly walked from the source of the Thames to Ewen and then on to Cricklade on Monday November 23rd. This involved 14 muddy miles but was an absolute delight.
Kel has a unique eye for a picture and the landscape; Jim can talk for Cornwall and has a uniquely retentive memory; I know a bit about Allen Davenport. So we were three men without a boat (though Jim has journeyed from the Severn to the Thames in an inflatable canoe), walking through Gloucestershire and into Wiltshire.
The train journey was notable for meeting the Bishop of Gloucester (standard class) whilst the walk was memorable for the way we each memorialized the walk.
Kel’s peerless photographs are elsewhere. Jim’s commemorative stone for Allen Davenport is elsewhere (but will get to London sometime: see below). But Jim’s enthusiasm for the haiku is recorded below, as is Kel’s link about the walk. I don’t find writing haiku straightforward and I know I break some conventions, even whilst following the 5,7,5 syllable structure – but Jim has a real flair for this writing.
You can see from the below that Jim can capture a moment and an image in the landscape; my efforts are rather more about contextualizing the walk and placing it within a narrative.
Our next walk involves the train to Swindon; bus to Cricklade; walk from there to Lechlade; bus to Swindon; train to Stroud. I know all you Shelley fans are already thinking about Lechlade – 2nd Monday or Tuesday in January will be when about the next walk takes place.
More details to follow on the blog; and more details about Allen Davenport, too.

http://my.viewranger.com/track/details/MjE4MTE2OQ==

Jim’s haiku memories:

Young November Thames
Haiku excuses

First frost on the bridge
A muddy puddle crackles
At a toe’s hushed touch

Out of the stone womb
Spring, tree guarded, dew dripping
The infant pilgrim

Autumn fall lay still
Leaf tiling the clear young Thames’
Defracted eddies

Murmur of starlings;
Not one silly syllable.
Every one counts

A buzzard spies high:
The light fades and strides quicken
For the Cheltenham train

Untrained pencil stubs
Distract the crowded carriage
Ticket scribbling

Early hours utter
Defused Haiku excuses

Jim scribbled these on to his rail ticket on the train whilst I sent the below as an email:

When haiku hiking,
Tread syllables in rhythm,
Through footpaths’ metre.

Late November Thames:
Rhyme and rime in cold pasture
Hoar-bark frosted oak.

Meandering Thames,
Oxbow lake spindle berries,
Sluice, weir and millpond.

Where shadowed spinners,
And ghosts of hungry weavers
Point us on our way.

A Thames pilgrimage,
With a stone from Ewen Mill,
For a London grave.

Alan Davenport,
Handloom weaver’s son, alone,
Learning his letters.

Pamphleteer, poet,
A Clerkenwell radical,
Cobbling his wages.

The Davenport stone:
A name that’s etched for ever,
Not writ on water.

An eldritch twilight,
Starlings flash on water glass,
By ridge-furrowed fields.

Piers Plowman nods,
Then treads the moonlight mud-scape,
Beyond Time’s dark veil.

One stage completed,
On the path to Kensal Green,
Fourteen weary miles.

Postscript from Jim on the subject of patterns in the landscape, real and/or imagined: pareidolia … hierophany haiku … apophenia.

A walk from Kemble Station to the source of the Thames and thence to Cricklade, with interesting conversations on the way:

On Monday November 23^rd.

9.52 train to Kemble from Stroud; 6 or 7 mile walk to Cricklade; bus to Swindon; 15.38 train from Swindon to Stroud. This is the plan.

Kel Portman from Walking the Land, James Pentney from Marah, and yours truly, are going – but you are welcome to join us, if interested.

Conversations will turn to the idea of following the Thames bit by bit, to London, and beyond to the sea. This will take as long as it takes.

Allen Davenport (1775 – 1846) will also feature. He was one of 10 children of handloom weaving parents, born at Ewen, near the source of the Thames. He taught himself to read and write and subsequently became a well-known republican, revolutionary and reformer in London.

His name is recorded on the Reformers’ Memorial at Kensal Green cemetery, where he was buried in un-consecrated ground.

Our pilgrimage along the Thames (both water and footpath) might well involve the engraving of a stone taken from the dry river bed at Ewen, and its eventual placement at the Memorial in Kensal Green.

There will also be conversations about Chartism in general, and the projected film based on the events surrounding the 1839 mass Chartist meeting on Selsley Common.

But, obvs, you can talk about whatever you like.

‘I was born May 1^st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage in which I was born … I came into existence, while the revolutionary war of America was raging.’

Here are a few words from Davenport’s speech about Peterloo (1819), from a spy’s account of a meeting in Soho’s Hopkins Street: ‘The Yeomanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we even in our own Defence shot one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] put up with it no longer … we must arm ourselves … and though we may lose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are labouring under the yoke of Despotism.’

Let’s face it: it’s all a bit gendered, isn’t it?
Masculine steam engines,
Edward, Gordon and Henry;
Percy and Toby and Thomas;
Daffy feminine carriages,
Annie and Clarabel,
It’s all a bit Romeo and ‘O sweet Juliet,
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate,
And in my temper, softened valour’s steel!’

And it’s all a bit inevitably of its Ian Allan time –

And then, of course, there’s the Fat Controller
(‘I am the man, the very fat man who waters the workers’ beer’),
His iconographic and ironic representation
(The corpulence, the pin stripes, the top hat),
Mean he’ll have to go – he’s an open invitation to revolt:

So, let’s (re)nationalise the railways,
Free Thomas and his chums from demands for dividends,
Free them from the sexism of the sidings,
The branch line, the cutting and the carriage,
Free them from the tyranny of the timetable:

In short, it’s time to turn the turntables!
No more shifts, no shed, no signal box!
No more austerity!
No more points!
No more scrap yards!

‘Put your best wheel forward,
Your funnel and be bolder!
Expropriate the expropriators,
Remove the Fat Controller!’

We had a lovely walk today, revisiting the Laurie Lee poetry posts – see http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/laurie-lee-wildlife-walk-lit-crit-on.html

But this post is about unofficial memorialization; so first of all, the book that inspired me, and then some borrowed and some original ideas for making your own museum, to try out in the streets, fields and lanes in which you live, work, or travel.

Make up your own ideas too – and share, of course.

Counter-Tourism

A Pocketbook

50 Odd Things To Do In A Heritage Site

(and other places)

Triarchy Press

Gentle, surreal and subversive ideas ‘assembled by Crab Man’.

Here we have a truncated few of the 50 odd, but it’s best to buy the book isn’t it?

(More expensive, but also recommended:

Counter-Tourism The Handbook;

 Mythogeography,

Walking, Writing & Performance;

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

 by all means borrow mine if you are pushed for cash.)

Counter-Tourism

A Pocketbook

50 Odd Things To Do In A Heritage Site

‘Conduct conversations with portraits’,

‘

‘USE THE SECRET GREETING IF YOU SEE A FELLOW COUNTER-TOURIST’

(You’ll have to buy the book),

‘Collect Heritij clichés, for example:

‘with a nod to the past and an eye to the future’;

‘ Medieval jousts – as seen on TV’;

‘travel in our “time machines”’ –

‘Share them at www.countertourism.net’,

‘Domesticate iconic buildings’ – for example,

‘Do a bit of dusting in Buckingham Palace as you pass through’,

Rewrite ‘nostalgic’ heritage sites without the class oppression,

Anywhere can be a heritage site,

You can use the tactics anywhere,

You can create your own heritage sites.

What an absolutely brilliant book!

Only £5.99

Some Counter-Tourist Tactics for Stroud

A suburban home means as much a stately home

(Put posters in windows: “EVERY HOME A HERITAGE SITE”),

Invite people around and give them a guided tour –

You could even issue tickets and rope off PRIVATE AREAS.

Leave counter-heritage notes in envelopes addressed to

HERITAGE: THE TRUTH

and insert them in the gaps between official plaques

and the surfaces to which the plaques are attached,

For example:

the Black Boy clock in Nelson Street

 needs a different contextualization,

one which foregrounds slavery rather than a clock.

Leave notes in hedgerows, estimating their age

(As a rule of toe, one species of tree per hundred years

 in a 30 metre walk along the chosen hedge),

And include some lines from John Clare about enclosure,

For example:

‘Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky’.

When you visit local long barrows,

Stand by the information boards full of their enervating statistics,

And think of all the people who questioned why such constructions were necessary, but were forced to dig and delve and hew.

Make their feelings politely known.

Visit buildings associated with slave owners who received compensation for the abolition of slavery in 1834,

And leave notes.

For example, the Rev. Joseph Duncan Ostrehan, who owned slaves in Barbados and lived at Sheepscombe Parsonage,

A memorial in the church eulogizes him:

‘In faithfully preaching Christ he gave prominence to the Blessed Truth that His sheep should never perish, neither should any man pluck them out of His hand.’

.

Place a ribbon across the top of the High Street,

Where the street surface is subsiding

as the numerous subterranean springs endlessly flow,

Have a placard:

‘UNDERNEATH THE PAVEMENT THE BEACH:

WELCOME TO THE STROUD BRANCH OF THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL AND THE REASON FOR STROUD’S EXISTENCE AND ITS SUBSIDENCE: SPRINGS’.

Cut the ribbon, remove the placard,

and re-open the spectacle of normality.

Look for where ‘the past is poking through’,

For example, the fern covered drain in the Slad Road,

Just where the drive leads up past the bakers to Star Anis,

Look down the drain into the dark world of the Slad Brook,

Trace its culverted path to the new flats on the other side

of the main road junction at the bottom of Gloucester Street,

This is Badbrook, where cloth masters were ducked

in the 1825 Stroudwater Riots,

You could leave a red paper plaque to point this out,

With the heading ‘Hidden History Number 1’,

And carry on with this act of numbered

guerrilla memorialization elsewhere in the town

and Stroudwater villages.

When guerrilla memorializing,

you are making the invisible visible,

You are rescuing the anonymous poor from

‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ –

Invent people, invent names and invent stories,

You could leave these fabrications in cafes and pubs,

Just like Otto and Elise Hampel,

with their anti-Hitler postcards in wartime Berlin.

Such activity opposes the fetishization of documents.

You could produce a board game for Stroud called Coffeopoly,

And place all the cafes of the town in strategic spots,

With Counter-Heritage Chance cards to be drawn,

And Counter Tourism Community Chest cards;

Such a game will reverse the history of coffee houses –

There will be no discussion of insurance, slavery, bubbles,

Trade, Empire and war,

Instead: wage rises, unions, the abolition of slavery, equality,

The end of enclosure and private property,

And the construction of a Radical History Trail,

With alternative Heritage Boards and a We Spy Quiz.

Talk to Mr. Holloway’s statue and ask him

why he was so opposed to the co-operative movement

if he was such a friend of the working class.

You might have to use a megaphone so as to ensure

he hears you above the traffic’s din.

It gets busy by the railway bridge.

Magic reinterpretations of the past in the landscape, 

with small-scale representations,

For example, take a model train and semaphore signal

down to the old Nailsworth branch line,

Place in a suitably atmospheric wooded spot,

Take pictures and write a poem and place on social media

to encourage others to do the same sort of thing

across the five valleys, villages and towns,

And so build up a collective social media

and traditional album of the past;

Hold show and tell afternoons with tea and scones,

With short talks from exhibitors about their re-creations,

Especially with reference to how passers-by reacted;

Create a shop in your kitchen with pencils, rubbers

and fridge magnets for sale.

Take photographs of incongruities in the landscape,

Surreal or jarring juxtapositions,

Visual and/or historical oxymorons,

Such as the unconscious celebration of slavery in Bristol,

With a pub called the Golden Guinea in Guinea Street,

With signboards next door consciously celebrating

Heritage and the Future;

You could create your own versions of these solecisms –

Make the invisible visible,

Illustrating the hidden assumptions of the spectacle of the street.

When you are looking for the past poking through,

Look for floral palimpsests,

Wood anemones on Rodborough Common, for example,

Connoting woodland, long lost amongst the current swards.

Look for urban palimpsests too,

But transform industrial archaeology into social history,

By leaving invented first person recollections

or fabulous but credible statistics,

These can be your counter heritage calling cards.

Choose an unobtrusive, seemingly mediocre spot,

a place with apparently nothing to recommend it,

Reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary,

A William Blake vision of the universe within a drop of water

or a grain of sand,

Record and/or photograph and/or write down your thoughts

About this exact spot on the first day of each month

throughout the year,

And share your Miniaturist’s Almanack with friends and family

On each successive New Year’s Eve.

Take pre-decimal old money into your favoured public house,

Try to buy beer at old prices but with good humour,

And with clichéd sallies,

Treat the pub as a historical theme park –

Choose a year beforehand,

And conduct all conversation as if it is that year,

For example: ‘The Day when War broke out’.

When leaving counter-heritage calling cards,

Or leaving nocturnal red paper plaques,

Or conducting conversations with the black boy in Nelson Street,

Ensure that your peregrination involves a deconstruction

Of the iconography of pub signs,

You could sketch alternative ones and proffer to publicans.

You should also ensure that your ramble includes

a deconstruction of street names:

 you might want to point at a name such as King Street,

And maintain a street discussion

about whether it might be renamed as

Citizen Street –

draw passers-by into your colloquy,

As you make your pilgrimage around the names of streets.

You might want to take a wax crayon and plain paper

and make rubbings for a show and tell

In your own domestic museum.

Such an urban activity lends itself well to the countryside,

You could informally name footpaths and holloways,

And delicately mark this new nomenclature

upon your own OS maps;

You could also create a new space-time matrix

by cutting up photocopies of old OS maps,

And sticking them carefully onto a modern map,

So as to create a new utopian world.

Visit the Oxfam Shop and the bookies in Gloucester Street,

This used to be the Golden Hart  – a pub with a bowling green -,

Where Henry Vincent, the charismatic Chartist speaker,

Raised the roof and the masses in 1839,

So stroll into the bookies and mime some bowling of ninepins,

Then collect some betting slips and fill in the Six Points

As the names of your horses in six different races:

Universal Suffrage; Payment of MPs; Equal Electoral Districts; Secret Ballot; Annual Parliaments; Abolition of the Property Qualification for MP.

You might do this just the once.

If the television is on, and a period costume drama comes on,

Turn it off,

And visit the Farmers’ Market instead,

Count how many times you hear or see the words

‘artisan’ and ‘artisanal’

Used in an entrepreneurial false consciousness

bourgeois sort of way.

Take a walk across fields threatened with development

on a frosty morning,

Take photographs of your footprints

(For your own or a collective alternative museum),

Listen to the drone of the traffic,

Then imagine the sound of clogs, shoes, hooves and bare feet,

Re-create the conversations of past centuries,

By finding wormholes that will transport you through time,

For example, the alleyway in Stroud’s High Street

linked to Walker’s Bakery.

Visit Ordnance Survey Trig. Points and leave white poppies,

And practice commemorative guerrilla gardening,

With wild flowers seeds,

Rather than ceramic poppies,

In neglected, ‘appropriate places’,

Then stand in front of some CCTV cameras,

Clad in historical costume,

And recreate some famous events from the past,

With a series of historical tableaux.

Create your own lexis and vocabulary,

As in Robert Macfarlane,

For example: ‘Severnset’,

A word to describe the sun setting over the Severn,

When viewed from Rodborough Common,

Or ‘frost-furrow’ and ‘rime-ridge’,

To describe the re-appearance of a medieval landscape,

On a William Langland Piers Plowman winter’s day.

Conduct conversations with imaginary ghosts whilst out walking,

Or create an Edward Thomas imagined alter ego – ‘The Other’,

And unlike Thomas, who spurned the use a map when out walking,

Photograph a keepsake when you cross those

grid-reference lines on the map: Eastings and Northings,

Create a miniature museum of these keepsake pictures.

Rename constellations in the heavens

With names from radical history,

Then address the gutters too.

Photocopy banknotes and substitute radical faces for the monarch’s,

Just as Thomas Spence used to create a radical coinage

in the reign of King George the Third,

You could make wax crayon rubbings of coins,

But replace the circumferential Church and State fidelities,

With radical slogans and assertions.

                                                                               

Your house might begin to so overflow with your memorabilia,

That you might feel obliged to designate a room in your home

As ‘The Museum of Counter-Heritage, Counter-Tourism,

Guerrilla Memorialisation and Situationist Intervention’.

Your final radical act will be to call on people,

By ringing the doorbell, or knocking on the door,

Or you will communicate with them

In the street by word of mouth,

Instead of via social media,

And you will invite them round to view your completed museum,

And they will reciprocate,

And you will form a new community,

With feet in past, present and future tenses:

 A Society of Radical Remembrancers,

Whose oath of allegiance might run thus:

‘We do collectively and individually swear that we shall

Help make the nvisibilised visible,

And we shall leave mementoes to the invisibilised,

And create a series of Lieux de Memoire,

Sites of Memory,

That might be as transient and ephemeral as words writ on water,

Or as long lasting as Time might permit.