It’s been something of a long haul to complete the My London Diary entries for August 2016 and put them on line. Partly because it includes the pictures, not from London, from my holiday in Shropshire – quite a lot of pictures, though they only merit one entry on the list below, Craven Arms. Which is misleading because most of them are not pictures of Craven Arms, but we were staying in a holiday let with friends a short walk outside this rather small town.
I’ve never been a fan of A. E. Housman and his ‘A Shropshire Lad‘ , which for me has always epitomised the worst in late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and I find ‘rose-lipt maidens‘ and ‘lightfoot lads‘ hard to swallow, too much of the Milton I hated when dragged through Lycidas and L’Allegro at school. And hard to forget also the echo of him in Enoch Powell.
It was difficult to forget that this was Housman country, not least because some members of our group read out chunks of his work as we were sitting down to dinner each night. And it did at times seem that we were staying in a very different country to the one in which I normally live, one that in various ways was still locked in a mythical past.
There are two large groups of pictures, one from a remarkable survivor of that past, now part of English Heritage, the fortified manor house of Stokesay Castle. Pictures from inside the site are included simply for personal interest, and to encourage you to visit and are not available for any commercial use. Those from the outside are not the best available as the scaffolding around part of the site don’t improve its appearance.
The largest group is from a day spent walking around Ludlow, a town which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as “by any standard, one of the best loved, best preserved and most aesthetically pleasing towns in Britain”, though he described its Market Hall as ‘Ludlow’s bad luck’ with ‘nothing that could be said in favour of its fiery brick or useless Elizabethan detail’. Since it was demolished in 1986 I can’t really comment, though I couldn’t help feeling when looking at old photographs that it looked rather better than the market stalls that have replaced it.
Ludlow certainly has its interests and some charm, and aspects of it show us that medieval town planners did a better job than their modern counterparts, but at times I couldn’t stop myself thinking it was more pickled than preserved. Though there are some fine examples, I did feel that quite a few buildings would have looked better not stripped back to their timber framing. And I came away thinking that it was a better place to visit than to live in.
An old pub with new Shropshire beer
Away from Ludlow we spent most time walking on the rolling hills (and lost in the woods) as well as visiting quite a few old churches, of which Shropshire has far more than its share, some of them impressive in their age and simplicity.
But my mind has often been on other things in the past month, and as usual I’ve been kept quite busy taking pictures – though it may be some time before these emerge in My London Diary. You can see some of them more quickly – usually on the day they are taken or the morning after – on Facebook, and they are also available for commercial use on Alamy or Images Live too.
Aug 2016
Thames Path – Bermondsey
Human Rights for Refugees
End inhumane dog & cat meat trade
Falun Dafa protest Chinese Oppression
UberEats couriers strike for Living Wage
Close Australian Refugee Detention Camps
10 Years of Resistance to Phulbari
Unethical London Hotels Slammed
Craven Arms
Class War Stickers Croydon
South Hill Park
Tottenham remembers Mark Duggan
Hiroshima Day 71st Anniversary
Black Lives Matter London
Foil Vedanta at mining giant’s AGM
Vigil for murdered care home victims
Guantanamo solidarity with Chelsea Manning
Richmond Walk
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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