STROUD GOODS SHED
If you stand on Stroud station and gaze up to the clutch of red brick buildings on the hillside to the right of the tall red brick mill, you are looking at the area where the Rev Wilbert Awdry of Thomas the Tank fame lived and wrote for the last thirty years or...
Barbados and Stroud and Stroud and Barbados
At the solstice, on the longest day of the year, I traced long lines across the Atlantic archipelago From Stroud to Africa, from Africa to Barbados, And from Barbados to Stroud railway station. I visited Risée Chaderton-Charles’ exhibition: Caribbean Atlantean...
~ The Greatest Hero Of Them All / Thomas The Tank Engine ~
~ The Greatest Hero Of Them All / Thomas The Tank Engine ~ when I was just a little boy of all the things that I enjoyed was when my grandma read to me at night or in the library the pictures and the railway tales that we would share upon those rails the journeys...
The Poetry of Chartism
The Poetry of Chartism; Aesthetics, Politics, History Mike Sanders C.U.P. 2009 ‘Between 1838 and 1852, the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, published over 1,000 poems written by more than 350 poets – as the readership of the Northern Star numbered...
Thomas the Tank Legend by Crispin Thomas
I was inspired by reading about Rev Awdry and the first two books in the Railway Series. How he eventually wrote the stories after telling them to Christopher, especially when he had measles etc; Thomas really first appears in the second book. Thomas to me,...
Overton’s Window Again
Overton’s Window Trade Unions and Chartism and Trade Unions and a People’s Assembly The concept of Overton’s Window Connotes some sort of casement on fashion: A window of acceptability And unquestioned validity: A sort of Zeitgeist vista on the Zeitgeist. And...