Black and British (and Stroud)
Black and British A Forgotten History David Olusoga Bunce Island in Sierra Leone was once an early British slaving headquarters: ‘In exchange for slaves and other valuable commodities the British offered glass beads, bundles of cloth, gunpowder, European metal goods,...
Trade Cloth
Trade Cloth: strouds, scissors and shrouds We travelled track 32 from Grand Central, The Hudson Line up to Beacon, Where fires were once lit on the Fishkill Mountains, To warn of British army redcoat movement; The hills and woodland were all red fall tint, On both...
Stroud Brewery
Stroud Brewery – Organic craft beer www.stroudbrewery.co.uk Stroud is a hotbed of innovation and art. At Stroud Brewery we have crafted a range of organic and vegan beers made with barley grown on the surrounding Cotswolds hills. We love to make delicious beer and...
Capel’s Mill
It’s a great walk down to Capel’s Mill from my house, Past old ridge and furrow and tenterhook hedgerows, Teazles here and there to raise your nap, Imagining the patchwork quilt of fields of two centuries ago: Rack Hill, Thresher, Bacon Slad, Spout Leaze, Lower...
Broadway Elegy
When you’re a slightly star struck English tourist, Visiting NYC for the very first time (‘It’s that Broadway Melody!’), It’s easy to forget the Paris Situationists: ‘Underneath the paving stones, the beach!’ You might stare...
Guiding Principles of Waterscape
WATERSCAPE: Inform, Educate and Entertain
Waterscape is the result of jottings, notes, recreations and re-imaginings after reading a number of texts, as well as navigating and walking canals and rivers, and cycling towpaths.
There is no fetishisation of documentary evidence and primary sources: in fact, a guiding principle of WATERSCAPE is to go beyond any available historical evidence, so as to recreate the lives of the anonymous, unrecorded lower orders. Waterscape is rather more about boatpeople and navvies, slaves, convicts and itinerants, rather than technology, weights, measures, the statistical and the numbered. We are, in the words of E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, rescuing the ignored ‘from the enormous condescension of posterity’.
I have concentrated on local canals and, in the spirit of oral culture and balladry, I have changed the words of a few old songs to fit with the rivers and inland navigations of Gloucestershire.