comment | Steve Woods

Keep Castle Park open

27/05/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

One of the jewels of Bristol is Castle Park – a reasonably large green space in the middle of the city.

In times gone by this was partly the heart of the medieval city and contains the ruins of Bristol Castle. It also used to be the city’s main shopping area before World War 2. It lost that status when Broadmead (virtually unscathed by bombing) was developed as the city’s central shopping area. The construction of this bland, uninspiring mid-20th century retail development required the demolition of an area of Victorian, Georgian and Tudor buildings.

The west end of Castle Park, Bristol. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For most of the past week, Castle Park has been closed to the public for a private commercial event, causing great inconvenience to those who use it regularly, such as cyclists and pedestrians making their ways to and from work or the shops, as well as more casual users wanting a bit of respite in pleasant surroundings in their lunch breaks.

To try and prevent Bristol City Council from closing Castle Park in future for its pure commercial gain and allow citizens access to their parks at all times, a petition has now been started on the 38 Degrees website.

The petition reads as follows:

To Bristol City Council

Following the complete closure of Castle Park (Bristol UK) for the 3rd year running, we propose that public parks should never be fenced off in their entirety for commercial events.

Tens of thousands of people attending a music event can negatively affect local residents and will inevitably cause damage to this small park. Damage which takes time and money to repair, and that can ruin the enjoyment of the park for the general public for weeks to come.

A park should be available for general public use at all times and even more so during School or Bank Holidays.

We request that Bristol City Council only license commercial events to be held at more suitable venues and allow people access to public parks.

Keeping parks open and accessible at all times is important because parks and green spaces have been shown to improve the well-being of local people and attract visitors from further afield.

According to Bristol City Council’s Parks and Green Spaces Strategy, central Bristol Bristol is so lacking in green space that temporary park closures would further deplete Castle Park.

Finally, parks are a public service provided by the council on behalf of the people of Bristol; they should not be exploited to the latter’s detriment as a means of generating revenue.

Sign the petition.
Slade alive

25/05/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Thursday morning’s post contained an unusual item for me: my invitation from my niece to attend the private view of her art degree show at the Slade School of Fine Art in London’s Bloomsbury.

Silk screen printed lining paper by Katherine Midgley. Image courtesy of the artist.

On Friday afternoon I hopped on the train from Bristol Temple Meads to Paddington and made my way to the Slade in Gower Street in time for the opening of the private view, entry to which was slightly delayed by a fire alarm. Coincidentally, news began to filter through at about this time of the disastrous fire at the Charles Rennie Mackintosh building at Glasgow School of Art.

One of the degree show exhibits currently greets visitors as they enter the quadrangle of where the Slade stands – Ellen Yeon Kim’s The Shelter.

Once inside the Slade, the degree exhibition is spread over 3 floors of the labyrinthine building, whose institutional white emulsion and grey gloss décor does nothing to detract from the students’ work and lets the latter not so much speak for itself, as declaim.

As an indulgent uncle, I was very impressed by my niece’s exhibits as I know full well how much hard work and effort she has put into it. However, there’s one part of her show I have yet to experience – the commentary to her video, but that’s in hand.

As one would expect from one of the UK’s finest art schools, the standard of work on show was exceptionally high. If I could pick out a couple of highlights, these would be Danielle Tay and Ben Westley Clarke, not forgetting Lori Ho.

The private view of the degree show is usually the opportunity for the students’ parents, family and friends to view their work. I do nevertheless wonder how many parents felt perplexed at their offspring’s output.

The BA/BFA degree shows are open to the public until Thursday 29 May, weekdays 10am – 8pm, weekends 10am -5pm, whilst the MA/MFA Show will be open from Thursday 12 – Wednesday 18 June, weekdays 10am – 8pm, weekends 10am -5pm.
How old is the Staffordshire oatcake?

26/04/2014 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

I’m currently reading Portrait of the Potteries by Bill Morland, published by Robert Hale Ltd. in 1978.

Being a local delicacy, oatcakes (posts passim) get an honourable mention. Indeed on page 25 Mr Morland does more than praise them, he speculates as to their origin (although he hyphenates oat-cakes. Ed.):

It is nothing like the Scottish oat-cake, but is rather like a brown and nobbly pancake made from draught-porridge. Incredibly economical to product, oat-cakes are very nourishing and sustaining. They are a symbol of the isolation and conservatism of the valley, since they appear to be an iron-age survival.

Oatcake awaiting filling

However, Mr Morland provides no evidence of the Iron Age origins of the Staffordshire oatcake, although one would have thought that, as an archaeology teacher for Keele University’s Adult Education Department at the time of publication, he would have realised the importance of empirical evidence.

If anyone can shed light on the (pre)history of the Staffordshire oatcake, please feel free to comment below.
ORG: Don’t sell our tax data, HMRC!

19/04/2014 Steve WoodsMedia, Politics

The current government’s asset stripping of the British state has now moved onto HMRC, according to an article in yesterday’s Guardian. To quote directly from the Guardian piece:

The personal financial data of millions of taxpayers could be sold to private firms under laws being drawn up by HM Revenue & Customs in a move branded “dangerous” by tax professionals and “borderline insane” by a senior Conservative MP.

The senior Conservative MP in question is David Davis, who has taken a particular interest in civil liberties in recent years. According to The Guardian, Davis has said:

“The officials who drew this up clearly have no idea of the risks to data in an electronic age. Our forefathers put these checks and balances in place when the information was kept in cardboard files, and data was therefore difficult to appropriate and misuse.

“It defies logic that we would remove those restraints at a time when data can be collected by the gigabyte, processed in milliseconds and transported around the world almost instantaneously.”

HMRC – your data isn’t safe in their hands

Outside Parliament, the Open Rights Group is campaigning against the madness that has afflicted the taxman. According to ORG, the use of personal data without consent is meant to be against data protection laws, so what are the Information Commissioner and Data Protection Registrar doing about this proposed flagrant breach of data protection legislation?

In the meantime, the ORG has set up a petition to which you can add your name. The petition reads as follows:

I call on the government to halt plans to sell personal tax data to private companies and researchers. Please don’t sell our private financial information to companies. Anonymisation is not foolproof and it is my right to object to my information being shared in this way.

Any access to my personal information held by the government should only be given after my explicit personal consent.

Sign the petition.

I have. My financial data submitted to HMRC is meant for them alone, not to be sold to the highest bidder, even in allegedly ‘anonymised’ format.
Progress

09/04/2014 Steve WoodsOddities, Tech

Technology is advancing at a pace that’s blistering.

If anything can illustrate the progress of technological change, it’s the picture below: a smaller footprint and a massive increase in storage capacity in under 10 years.

It’s not just capacity that’s changed. Prices have changed too. Back in 1998 I paid £140 for a 3.5 hard drive with 8 GB of storage. Nowadays I can buy a USB device with an equivalent capacity for £10 in most large supermarkets.

Hat tip: OpenSure
Big Retail is watching you

06/04/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Tech

Cabot Circus is hardly my favourite place in Bristol. It’s an out-of-town shopping centre with associated multi-storey car park plonked at the inner city end of the M32. It consists of 3 floors full of identikit national chain stores, plus CCTV and surly security guards to track and/or keep out those who have no intention of buying overpriced, mass-produced consumer tat they probably don’t want, definitely don’t need and most likely cannot really afford.

Today I noticed another reason for avoiding Cabot Circus – mobile phone surveillance.

Warning! Big Retail is watching you.

Note the exemplary use of newspeak: spying on your mobile is “in use at this site to improve our customer service“.

I’m not convinced by the bland assurance regarding personal data either, as will be explained below.

The Footpath technology in use in Cabot Circus has been developed by a company called Path Intelligence and is in use in a number of shopping centres around the UK, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, Princesshay in Exeter, the Buchanan Galleries in Glasgow, Bon Accord & St Nicholas in Aberdeen and The Centre, Livingston, all of which like Cabot Circus are operated by Land Securities Ltd. The surveillance system works through units placed in shops which detect the changing signals of mobile phones.

Unless people entering the shopping centre happen to see the warning signs (which are conveniently placed alongside lots of others telling the public what they’re not allowed to do, such as use skateboard, take photographs. Ed.) they’re probably unaware that their phones are being monitored.

According to Path Intelligence, the Footpath technology works as follows:

The vast majority of visitors to any given location now carry a mobile (cell) phone. To be able to make and receive calls, the telephone network must understand the phone’s geographical location. The technology behind this is complicated, but in basic terms, the phone and the network continuously ‘talk’ (ping) to each other (sending a unique signal), sending and updating information every time the location of the phone changes.

Footpath technology from Path Intelligence consists of discreet monitoring units able to read the anonymous signals that all mobile phones send. So we’re able to ‘see’ where the phone is (but not the data on it) and map its geographic movements from location to location accurately to within a few meters [sic]. In isolation the information isn’t very revealing but when aggregated, patterns and trends start to emerge. It’s those patterns and trends that are of interest in business planning.

The data collected is fed back to our data centers [sic] 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to be audited and have sophisticated statistical analysis applied. This results in continuously updated information on the flow of people in any monitored location.

As no source code is available for Footpath, no check can be made on its lack of ability to collect personal data or telephone numbers.

Concerns were expressed by Big Brother Watch about the tracking of shoppers’ mobiles 2 years ago.

At present the technology is not capable of recording phone numbers or personal information, but this will probably change as the system improves and as highlighted by Big Brother Watch:

However, as technology improves, those facilities will become more accessible, and consumers need to have faith that the law protects their privacy. Uncertainty over when and how technology is being used only undermines trust and confidence in any system using mobile phones.

To avoid being tracked, turn off your mobile when visiting Cabot Circus or any other shopping centre operated by Land Securities.
5 decades on

23/03/2014 Steve WoodsOddities

Last week I paid a brief visit for the day to Market Drayton in Shropshire, my home town. In the forty years since I left it has changed gradually but inexorably. For instance, its current population is now nearly 12,000, compared with 7,000 when I left the town for university in the early 1970s.

Going through the family photograph albums, I came across this 1965 photograph of Market Drayton’s Salisbury Road, where the family used to live. We actually spent 10 years there in total and my youngest sibling Andrew was born at home at 87 Salisbury Road.

Salisbury Road, Market Drayton, in the mid-1960s. Click on the image for a larger version.

You’ll see 2 boys standing by the lamppost outside no. 87; of these I’m the one on the right. I believe the other lad is Adrian Clarke who used to live round the corner. Note the complete absence of motor cars. A minority of working class people living in council houses (for that is what they were/are. Ed.) owned motor vehicles in those days, or seemed to. I believe at the time the picture was taken my late father had only recently acquired a moped to travel to work, having hung up his bicycle clips. The row of council houses shown was relatively new when the above photograph was taken, only having been built some 5 years earlier; I can recall the back gardens being levelled by bulldozer when we first moved in in 1960. Some of these houses are now privately owned and are currently changing hands for well over £100,000 as Drayton is a popular place for people to live while commuting to work in Shrewsbury, Telford or the Potteries.

Now here’s a picture of the same road from roughly the same spot 5 decades on.

Salisbury Road, Market Drayton, in 2014. Click on the image for a larger version.

Note the increase in the number of motor vehicles evident – 8 in all – and the increased number of lampposts – from 1 in the 1960s to 3 now.

Did you live in Salisbury Road or Market Drayton in the 1960s? Perhaps you still live there. Anyway, leave your memories in the comments below.
Parking meters arrive in Easton

11/03/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

On 1st April – April Fool’s Day – Bristol City Council’s Easton & St Philips Residents’ Parking Scheme comes into operation. (Some would consider the choice of date most apposite. Ed.)

Does Easton have one resident? Do you proof-read your signs, Bristol City Council?
This is just one of many Residents’ parking schemes being introduced by the council at the instigation of the autocratic elected Mayor, George Ferguson, the man in red trousers (posts passim).

Needless to say, the schemes haven’t exactly received universal support from the residents of a city with a high level of car ownership and an abysmal level of public transport provision. Overall, it’s been condemned by residents as a ‘parking tax’ as residents will have to acquire permits, both for their own vehicles, as well as for visitors arriving by motor vehicle.

There has been consultation, of course. However, as is usual with Bristol City Council, consultation is a portmanteau word, a crafty elision of ‘confidence trick’ and ‘insult’. With a city council consultation, the stress is always firmly on the first syllable. When something goes out to consultation, what the council wants to do is usually a fait accompli.

There have been howls of protest about the Residents’ Parking Schemes in the local press, particularly the car-loving Bristol Post, which has even enlisted the odd high-profile petrolhead to trash the Mayor’s plans.

A new parking meter on Stapleton Road
As this post is being written, the streets of Easton are being prepared for the arrival of the new parking regime. New double yellow lines and parking bays marked on the streets. In addition, there’ll be parking charges for visitors and parking meters have started to make their appearance both on main thoroughfares like Stapleton Road and the backstreets.

Bristol’s residents’ parking schemes programme is very flawed.

One of the justifications for implementing them is to dissuade the thousands of daily commuters from outside the local authority area clogging up residential roads by parking there all day. As the scheme doesn’t cover the whole city, the thousands of commuting motorists will just park a bit further out in districts not covered by residents’ parking schemes, such as the area where your ‘umble scribe happens to live.

Where I live, it’s the residents that are guilty of problem parking; the streets are Victorian, narrow and were intended for use by horse and cart, not 21st century motor vehicles. Pavement parking is rife in the backstreets, making pavements impassable to wheelchair users and parents with children in prams and pushchairs. There’s minimal enforcement to combat such anti-social parking. Indeed, the police often contribute to the problem themselves (posts passim).

If Mayor Ferguson really wanted to stop Bristol being choked by out of town commuting motorists, his counterpart in London came up with an alternative that was introduced 11 years ago. It’s called the London Congestion Charge Zone.
Let Bristol be Bristol

02/03/2014 Steve WoodsBristol, Politics

Within 2 days last week, we had the latest pair of proposals from a member Bristol’s great and good and a London property developer to try and turn the city into somewhere else.

On Monday last week Bristol 24/7 carried a story entitled “Bristol… the ‘New Orleans of the UK’?”.

According to the article, local businesses are being urged to help elevate Bristol to a world-class centre for jazz and blues music as part of Mayor George Ferguson’s ambitions to make the city the ‘New Orleans of the UK’.

By the end of the week, apparently plans had shifted from trying to turn Bristol into a city founded by French colonists in 1718 on the banks of the Mississippi to property developers and their scheme to convert some of the city into Shoreditch, now an inner city part of London in the borough of Hackney, which was originally named after Edward IV’s mistress, Jane Shore, who was reputedly buried in a ditch in the area.

This news appeared on Bristol Business News, which reported as follows:

Verve Properties, the niche developer behind Bristol’s highly-successful Paintworks creative quarter, has started work on the first speculative office refurbishment in the city for five years as the market recovery continues to gathers pace.

London-based Verve said it saw a gap in the Bristol office market for trendy office workspace of the type now common in the Shoreditch/Tech City area of East London that would appeal to the Bristol’s vibrant creative sector.

What I like about Bristol is precisely that it is Bristol. It’s quirky, diverse and has its own unique features not found anywhere else, like the centuries of architectural variety on display on Old Market Street and West Street, the City Docks and the wealth of green, open spaces which the public can enjoy, even in the city’s less prosperous parts.

A Bristol montage: image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Where attempts have been made to turn the city into somewhere else, it’s been a disaster. One only has to look at Bristol’s so-called ‘Shopping Quarter’ – Broadmead, Cabot Circus and the Mall Galleries – to see the result: bland and unedifying. The area is filled mostly with identikit local branches of national retail chains. Rearrange the shops and you could easily in another large UK town or city.

I like Bristol because it’s Bristol and it should furthermore be left to be itself and not try to be somewhere else.

One has to ask the question: do those who profess to love the city but want to turn it into somewhere else really love the city; or do they actually hate it?
Remembering WW1: fraternisation in the Dardanelles

10/01/2014 Steve WoodsPolitics

The Gallipoli Campaign, also known as the Dardanelles Campaign, took place on the Gallipoli peninsula in the Ottoman Empire between 25 April 1915 and 9 January 1916.

The campaign was one of the greatest Ottoman victories during the war and is considered a major Allied failure and the casualties and losses on both sides amounted to some 250,000 each on both the Allied and Turkish sides.

My paternal grandfather, Ted Woods, was shipped out there as a member of the Norfolk Regiment and was thus part of the PBI – the poor bloody infantry – the cannon fodder for the mechanised slaughter that characterised the erroneously styled Great War. The only photograph I’ve seen of him depicted him in his uniform just before being shipped out there.

Conditions for the Allied troops during the campaign could hardly be described as luxurious, as the picture below shows.

A trench in the Gallipoli campaign, 1915. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In some parts of the peninsula, the front line trenches between the Allied and Turkish forces were only a handful of metres apart and in spite of the ferocity of the fighting, there were times when fraternisation took place.

Gallipoli by Robert Rhodes James, originally published in 1965 by BT Batsford Ltd., and republished in 1974 as Part of Illustrated Grand Strategy series by Pan Books Ltd. gives one instance of fraternisation between Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) forces and their Turkish opponents on p. 187 of the Pan edition:

The Anzacs sometimes threw tins of bully-beef into the Turk trenches, and once received the reply: “Envoyez milk. Bully-beef, non”; on one occasion a tin of cigarettes came flying over from the Turkish trenches, on which was written, “Prenez avec plesir a notre heros ennemis*”.

*To our heroic enemies, take these with pleasure.

This year marks the centenary of the start of the First World War and already at least one government minister, Education Secretary Michael Gove, is banging the jingoistic drum (warning: link to Daily Mail article. Ed.). Unfortunately, Gove later received support for his attack on ‘left wing academics’ from those experts on the First World War – Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson (warning: link to yet another Daily Mail article. Ed.).

People as ignorant as Mr Gove et al. should heed the words of the late Harry Patch (17th June 1898 – 25th July 2009), who was dubbed “the Last Fighting Tommy” in his later years and who very wisely said the following:

[The] politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.

Harry never spoke a word in public about WW1 until he was over 100 years old. Mr. Gove on the contrary approaches every subject with an open mouth and a closed mind.

Posts navigation