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Here's the PWP we used in class

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Just one of many articles I could have chosen to show what a sad, out-of-touch unfunny old git John Cleese has become.

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A collection of saucy postcards full of double entendres on Pinterest

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Old funny double entendre Postcards | Seaside Postcard British Seaside Postcards | Funniest | Funny postcards, Golf humor, Funny cartoon pictures

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Old funny double entendre Postcards | Seaside Postcard British Seaside Postcards

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A piece I wrote about a Londoin archetype

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Every big city contains certain kinds of characters who come to represent some deep and fundamental truth about the place. They capture some timeless essence of their being. One of the most enduring social types familar to anyone who's spent much time in London is the wide boy.

Wide boys are working-class, exclusively male, and survive on the margins of society by basically using their wits - their ability to think quickly and make good decisions. Wide boys are the characters you may see in Oxford Street selling knock-off (fake) botles of brand-name perfumes out of a suitcase that can easily be packed up should the seller need to run when the police turn up. And they're the guys in the warm sheepskin-coats who'll do a great job of selling you a dodgy second-hand motor (a car that's had at least one previous owner and may well not be working properly and may even be stolen!) . . . but not remember this ever happened when you take it back the next week after it dies a slow and painful death! Basically, everything about wide boys is a little bit dodgy: they are not to be trusted!

You might think that such characters would be hated and made into social outcasts, but actually there's a strong tradition of people having grudging respect for them. Partly, this is a recognition of the fact that they're frequntly charming. Most wide boys have the gift of the gab - they're able to talk a lot without feeling shy, especially when it gets them out of potentially awkward situations! They're often quick-witted and able to think on their feet - and, above all, they're survivors, and one of the myths Londoners tell themselves about the city is that it's a survivor. It's survived t he Great Fire of London, the Plague, the Blitz (when the Germans dropped countless bombs on the city during the Second World War), terrorist attacks, and so on. We endure!

Wide boys survive by wheeling and dealing and ducking and diving - using clever (and often slightly dishonest) methods to gain advantages in business situations. They buy from here, and sell there, always looking to make a profit in the process. It's this base-level raw capitalist instinct that has won them admiration and there have been countless depictions of wide boys as loveable rogues - people who behave badly, but are still liked by others - on TV. There was Arthur Daley, the dodgy second-hand car dealer in Minder (a show so named becuase he had to employ a minder - a bodyguard - to look after him!), the south-east London market trader Derek Trotter - better known as Del Boy - in Only Fools and Horses, and there was this comic character in The Fast Show, to name just a few.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the idea of being a wide boy comes from the fact they're seen as always being wide awake, sharp-eyed, always alert for the moments still to come.
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Do characters like wide boys exist where you live? How are they generally seen by the public?

What other kind of social types do you think represent the timeless essence of where you live?

Would you know where to get knock-off brand name products if you wanted them? Have you ever bought any?

Can you think of any dodgy areas / bars / clubs where you live?

Do you know anyone who's got the gift of the gab?

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Every big city contains certain kinds of characters who come to represent some deep and fundamental truth about the place. They capture some timeless essence of their being. One of the most enduring social types familar to anyone who's spent much time in London is the wide boy.

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Alex Baldwin's observations on our ability to see double entendres everywhere is a very entertaining read.

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A conversation with Alec Baldwin feels rather like being in a holding pattern above New York. Not that it's boring: on the contrary, talking with this old-fashioned film star and modern-day sitcom god, this part-time Trump antagonist and full-time schmoozy showbiz personality, is an entirely pleasant experience. You are in business class, perhaps even first, and you are happy and sated and stimulated. Spread out invitingly below you are the twinkling lights of Manhattan, where the 61-year-old actor and his 35-year-old wife, Hilaria, own a penthouse apartment. (They also have an 18th-century farmhouse in the Hamptons.) And yet a question presents itself, not unreasonably, as the plane circles the city and each new circumnavigation seems to bring it no closer to terra firma: are we ever going to land?

It is something to do with the circuitous nature of Baldwin's sentences, the way he riffs and waffles and meanders at will. Nothing can interrupt him, apart from his pets. ("Hold on a second," he says down the line from New York, and then I hear the words "Girls! Come!" before he returns to the phone to tell me he was "just summoning my dogs".) It is his appearance in the new docudrama Framing John DeLorean that has occasioned our conversation today. In bite-sized dramatic reconstructions peppered among interviews with the subject's family and colleagues, Baldwin plays the late automobile executive and inventor, whose gull-winged car was turned into a time machine in Back to the Future but whose life was destroyed by ambition, stupidity and greed. It's a compelling story that starts with DeLorean relinquishing his position as group executive at General Motors to start his own company and ends with his naive involvement in a cocaine-smuggling operation exposed in an FBI sting.

Baldwin has said he feels differently about DeLorean every day, so I ask where his head is at right now. "With John - I don't think I've ever said this before - and I'm not just saying this to, um, delight you and freshen up this material for this interview - but lately when I think about him - and I've been talking about him a lot - I have friends and acquaintances who've seen the film, and we go out to dinner and discuss it - I find that beyond anyone who's - oh, I don't know - committed murder or they're a sex trafficker - I kind of look at John as a victim."

I am trying to fathom the "sex trafficker" comment but he has already moved on. "Now, granted, this sounds like I'm being overly colourful. But he's a victim of his own ambition. He's an American businessman and that comes with a whole menu of options. American businesses have changed the world - they've fostered innovation on a level that's unseen - and they're also responsible for a lot of the horrific pollution and climate change and plastics pollution - I mean, I don't want to go on and on with that list - and DeLorean is someone who made a lot of poor choices. His family, reputation, his own health, all fell victim to that soaring ambition."

Baldwin himself had one interaction with the real DeLorean: a late-night phone call in 2004 in which the fallen automobile giant suggested that the actor might like to play him in a movie. "No one was approaching me from a network or a studio. It was all hypothetical. John's hand was in this because he was an uber control freak. I never heard from him again, and then he died the following year."

For the film's reconstructions, Baldwin wears facial prosthetics, a silver wig and a pair of thick black slabs for eyebrows. I bring up the subject of makeup but all this does is prompt one of those ruminations, which ends, with Baldwinian inevitability, in him comparing his treatment unfavourably with that of a more successful actor. "I wish we could have gone further," he sighs. "The hair and makeup people said they could do a detailed version that would take three hours to apply. The director said: 'Give us the best you can in two hours.' I was looking at some stills of Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice - I admire Bale so much - and when you have as much skill as Bale, and they get it just-so ..." He trails off, then picks up the thought again with a note of faintly smouldering resentment. "Well, I'm sure they didn't rush him out of the makeup chair."

DeLorean once said that no man without a strong sex drive ever accomplished anything, so I ask Baldwin whether he agrees. "What an English question," he says, with a booming laugh. "What a naughty, naughty English question that is. You could fold the sex into anything, couldn't you? You could fold the sex into dentistry. Listen, I'm not an authority on that subject, but there are men and women who want what they want, and that is a shotgun for them: they want art, they want palaces, they want people, they collect people, they collect children and wives. They have a reality that burns out and then they dust themselves off and start all over again. And then there are people who are laser-like. There's one thing they want and that's all they want, whether it's money or sex or power. And that was John."

There is no mystery about which category Baldwin falls into. After the wreckage of his divorce from the actor Kim Basinger in the early 2000s, and the catastrophic fallout when an enraged voicemail he had left for their then-11-year-old daughter found its way online (in the recording, he branded her a "rude, thoughtless little pig"), he went through a period of what he has called "staring off a cliff". And then he did indeed start all over again with Hilaria, with whom he now has four children under the age of 10.

His career has always seemed so diffuse. Who knows what he ever wanted? He has been a theatre actor, a film and TV star, hosted a quiz show and presided over his own chatshows, as well as Alec Baldwin's Love Ride, in which he dispenses relationship advice to couples from the back of a limousine ("It's the silliest thing you've ever seen"). There is also a podcast, Here's the Thing, with a slate of guests including everyone from Itzhak Perlman to Sarah Jessica Parker, Bernie Sanders to Ben and Jerry. If he never gives another great performance again it won't matter: he is having a blast playing Alec Baldwin, a role that, as a younger man, he appeared often to despise.

Following a stint in soap opera in the early 1980s, he briefly became an actor to be reckoned with, performing David Mamet, Joe Orton and Caryl Churchill on stage, and working with Tim Burton, Jonathan Demme and Mike Nichols in the early years of his film career. But the Basinger era, and his own consuming anger, came to define him in the public consciousness far more than any of his performances, with the exception perhaps of the shark-like sales executive who dominates the opening scene of the 1992 film of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Then again, that movie wasn't playing on a loop on the front pages of every tabloid at America's supermarket checkouts, the way his divorce later did.

Likewise, Baldwin's onscreen achievements - his Oscar nomination for playing an unscrupulous casino boss in The Cooler or his collaborations with Martin Scorsese ( The Aviator, The Departed) and Woody Allen (three films including Blue Jasmine) - have usually been eclipsed by his intemperate comments and displays of aggression. Most actors of his stature and experience make the headlines for winning awards; losing his temper is more Baldwin's thing. Only this year he pleaded guilty to harassment and agreed to take an anger management course after an argument over a Manhattan parking space. He has also been arrested for disorderly conduct, had a chatshow cancelled after he used a homophobic slur against a paparazzo, and been kicked off a flight for refusing to stop using his phone prior to takeoff.

If he is known for poor control of his impulses, he still has principles. He distinguished himself by refusing to join other former Woody Allen cast members (among them Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig) in denouncing the legally exonerated film-maker. "There's a very small number of people who know what really happened in that situation," Baldwin tells me. "Only the people who were in that room can know for sure, but you have testimony for and against Woody from the same pool of people. One daughter is saying he's a sex offender; his other son has defended him. I have nothing but the most profound sympathy for anyone who was the victim of sex abuse, but I also have a bit of a conscience, if you will, about people who are falsely accused. That's tragic, too."

Watch Baldwin and James Toback discuss the documentary Seduced and Abandoned

When I ask how he feels about his friend, the film-maker James Toback, who has been accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment by 395 women, we are firmly back in the holding pattern again. "The only thing I have to say about that - like any of the other cases - is that there are people who have admirably brought that subject to the fore - whether it's Asia Argento or Rose McGowan, to name two of the most notable - and that moment seems to be slipping away. I hope we can rekindle it all, because it seems to be waning. If [Harvey] Weinstein is presumed to be low-hanging fruit, then why isn't he in a courtroom? The only person who's behind bars is [Bill] Cosby." Abruptly, he decides that he has had enough of that topic. "We're almost done," he announces, though in fact there are still 10 minutes remaining of our allotted time. "What else have you got?"

What I want to hear about are the two roles that have done the most to bring Baldwin back from the brink, to dissuade the public from associating him with temper tantrums and divorce and bad parenting. The most recent is his Emmy-winning performance as Donald Trump, whom he plays on Saturday Night Live with one eyebrow permanently raised and both lips protruding as though trying to suck a lemon through a letterbox. What purpose does he feel his portrayal serves? "Among the American people, there is a level of disgust and even nausea about Trump. Just as his presidency is a chronic condition and it's not going away any time soon, so the humour - not just me, but all humour about Trump - is the medicine people are taking to quiet the nausea. It's a see-saw. I do SNL and then by Monday or Tuesday night, they wanna throw up all over again."

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Disgust and nausea ... Baldwin as Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. Photograph: Will Heath/AP

Baldwin recalls once meeting E Jean Carroll, the columnist who alleges that she was raped by Trump in the mid-90s. "I was introduced to her a few years ago when a friend of mine brought her to dinner at a small restaurant in New York, and nothing about that woman led me to believe she was a liar or a sociopath. She's making a charge of rape - especially at this time - when she knows how the other accusers have been dealt with - she knows what she's getting herself into. I mean, just look at all the other accusers who've been dismissed and have watched the accused having rose petals spread by his supporters for him on a path toward his goal. Carroll knows this going in - she knows that's where it's headed."

The other defining performance in Baldwin's career came with Tina Fey's wickedly inventive sitcom 30 Rock. As the calculating and charismatic network boss Jack Donaghy, vice-president of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming, he lent the show his gravitas and style, and it, in turn, reinvented him as a lovable wag with a killer line in comic disdain. What did it teach him about himself? "30 Rock taught me how unfunny I am. My mind was blown by how quick the people on that show were, how sharp Tina was. The first thing off the top of her head was funnier than something it would take me two hours to come up with." The show

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Alec Baldwin: 'You naughty English could fold sex into dentistry'

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A conversation with Alec Baldwin feels rather like being in a holding pattern above New York. Not that it's boring: on the contrary, talking with this old-fashioned film star and modern-day sitcom god, this part-time Trump antagonist and full-time schmoozy showbiz personality, is an entirely pleasant experience.

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A good piece on recent trends in the city.

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Earlier this month the Financial Times ran an article, as every newspaper has done many times before, headlined "Has London's property price bubble burst?" The report was well researched and judicious, as you would expect. The conclusion, roughly, was "Probably not, but you never know", which is all one can ever say safely. The only problem was the word "bubble".

The South Sea Bubble, the all-time benchmark for market irrationality, lasted one year - 1720 - when shares in the South Sea Company rose tenfold and then collapsed. The London property market has been rising, with brief interruptions, since the end of the second world war, when top-end houses cost around £5,000.

In the past 20 years, an era of low general inflation, the Halifax house price index shows that values in London have multiplied by almost six. The Office for National Statistics figures, which started later but dig deeper, suggest that in some of the richest areas of inner London, the 20-year increase is tenfold. Over 70 years, that £5,000 house might have gone up to £5m or £10m - one or two thousand-fold. This long ago ceased to be a bubble. A hot-air balloon? A barrage balloon? The metaphor doesn't work.

It has become an entirely different phenomenon: a ceaselessly rising tide, occasionally drawing back after one wave breaks, but only to regather force for the next, even stronger, surge. This tide has not lifted all boats, but it has lifted a great many: metropolitan middle-class members of the baby-boom generation in particular, but others too. (Some have of course been drowned, but there you go.)

It has sent ripples across the country, and down the class hierarchy. The Thatcherite council house sell-off created many more winners, particularly in London, and a new cockney diaspora cashed up and moved out, creating space - albeit nowhere near enough - for vast numbers of new Londoners: the hopeful young pouring in from across the UK and the world.

The outlines of this phenomenon have become so familiar that only rarely does anyone stand back and consider quite how astonishing it all is, and the extent to which the consequences have permeated every aspect of British life.

Three years ago, the London-based American journalist Michael Goldfarb did stand back, for an op-ed column in the New York Times, which went viral, pointing out something that had not then been widely understood: how the most expensive London homes had ceased to be places to live and had become a store of global money. "Almost nothing has changed," says Goldfarb now, "except that all the stresses in the system have got deeper. It will take an epochal catastrophe - like the great depression followed by a war - to allow ordinary people to get into the housing market. But no one will say this. It will be a London without Londoners.

"The one thing that has changed is that people will now rent rather than buy. But has there been anything done to protect tenants? Nothing. None of that conversation is being had, and it's shocking."

In fact, the Halifax house price index, which began 33 years ago, shows just how much deeper those stresses have become. From a base of 100 in 1983, the UK-wide index passed the 700 mark earlier this year. The separate Greater London index was still below 200 in 1996, towards the end of the negative-equity crisis, and under 700 in early 2013, but reached 1,128 in the second quarter this year. The average property sold in London fetched £40,000 in 1983; the figure is now £449,000. (The next set of figures may show a slight post-Brexit dip, but only a slight one.)

The structural facts have not changed. Supply and demand for homes in London are out of kilter because Britain is so over-centralised, and the road to success in almost every field of endeavour leads through the capital; because the UK is run by people who have made massive tax-free gains from the boom and have a mindset that the merest blip is a catastrophe; and because successive governments have had no coherent policy on anything relevant - certainly not on housing, regional policy or immigration.

There are also strange sub-phenomena now taking place, designed to keep the mad times rolling. Parents are sinking their profits back into the market to help their children into the game. Well-off baby-boomer provincials are downsizing and moving to London to be near their children. Old houses that were subdivided into flats decades ago are now being undivided again, further reducing the stock of homes.

At street level, it is possible to see other subtle developments taking place - none of them intended, some of them astonishing. Each district, each sub-district, or even each street, has its own nuances and variations. It cannot just be said that the top 1% are gaining at the expense of the 99%, which was never the whole truth. Now the 1% are themselves finding themselves overmatched by the 0.1% or the 0.01% or the 0.001%.

Take Chelsea, an area that has been in fashion, with artistic tendencies, since at least Victorian times. In this portion of London, the wealth has now entirely submerged the raffishness and even the trendiness. "You won't find any Sloane Rangers anywhere near Sloane Square," reflected Michael Stephen, the former MP who is now chairman of the Chelsea Society 's planning committee. "They can't afford to live there."

Fewer and fewer people are doing anything as quaint as actually living in Chelsea. The signs are obvious from the streets: constant darkness at dusk and closed blinds at noon are the outward indicators of an empty flat, ownership likely foreign and opaque. And there is anecdotal evidence that this is starting to make local businesses unviable.

Close to Chelsea Green is the Sutton Estate, a not unhandsome collection of 15 Edwardian red-brick blocks - originally 500 flats in all - now in urgent need of an upgrade. Affinity, the housing association that owns the estate, plans to knock down all but two of the blocks and rebuild: the result will be 316 flats at "social" rent (much cheaper than the misleadingly titled "affordable" rent), to be funded by building 106 for private sale.

The Chelsea Society has been closely involved, and is sympathetic to Affinity's problems. "They can choose to spend their money anywhere in the country. And they can build four social housing units somewhere else for the price of one in Chelsea," says Stephen. Nonetheless, the quantity of social housing in central London will decrease even if the quality improves.

Round the corner is the Chelsea Green Shoe Repairs, run by Matthew Childs, a bubbly bloke who still serves the kind of Chelsea resident who buys shoes classy enough to be worth repairing. Now 51, he grew up in the Sutton, amid the small patches of asphalt and the "No ball games" signs. "There were 50 or 100 of us kids there then, and we always used to play there anyway," he says. "You don't need those signs now. I don't think there are any kids in there at all." Childs himself now lives in Surrey, and commutes.

The going market rate in the area seems to be around £1m per bedroom, judging by the window of John D Wood estate agents, although - good news - they do have a handsome five-bedroom stone house on offer at £214,000. Bad news: it's in Normandy.

The redevelopment of the Sutton - a project that will take years to complete - will have one thing in common with the developments favoured by the mega-rich: it will be ghastly for the neighbours. This is something equally apparent at the other end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, on the north side of Holland Park Avenue, in the Norland conservation area.

Holland Park was once far from posh, but in the 1950s these Victorian homes were colonised by the kind of artistic types who went to Chelsea a century earlier. They were then replaced by barristers, doctors and managers at levels that would never be able to fund a house there now.

There are fewer empty homes here, but some residents wish there were. Many newcomers' first act is to apply to start digging towards the earth's core to create new basements. The council clamped down on the most egregious "iceberg" basements in 2014, but the issue has not gone away. "You can't actually prove that these basements cause flooding or subsidence," says Libby Kinmonth, chairman of the Norland Conservation Society. "But you can prove social disruption. No one can argue against the fact that the neighbours get two years of hell while the work's going on."

Kinmonth took me to her local, the Academy, but not inside. The Wellington Pub Co, ultimately owned by the property-developing Reuben brothers, closed it a few weeks ago. The Academy (formerly the Crown) had gone gastro and wine bar-ish long ago, but, she insisted, it was still very much a local. "This is where the pensioners had their lunch, where the bridge club met, and we had our Christmas party and our local meetings ... "

Holland Park gentrification stats

Not least, meetings to protest against pub closures. The Norland Arms is now an estate agents; the Portland Arms is a beauty salon; the Prince of Wales, the Unicorn, the Star and the Earl of Zetland are all private houses. The only pub left inside the conservation area is the Stewart Arms, which, counter-intuitively, is the traditional council-estate pub, with big-screen TV and music on Saturdays.

Opposite the Academy is a row of what were once, quite obviously, neighbourhood shops. Only one is still functioning: a dry cleaners, a business that has not yet transferred to the internet. But it is not technology that has killed these shops; it is house prices. How can you run a newsagents if closing it makes the building worth £2m?

"We were one of the first areas to have a neighbourhood plan," says Kinmonth, "and the whole idea was to keep the feel of the place. If you look at a meadow, it has amazing biodiversity. We had that here and we're losing it."

Variations on the theme are happening across London. Even a decade ago, transport zones 1 and 2 were full of areas whose very name would make one's mother faint. ("You're going to live in Hoxton?!") Now the respectability-map is being infilled. One of the last remaining pieces of the jigsaw is Peckham, best known to the outside world as the home of Del Boy.

In 1966, the architectural critic Ian Nairn delighted in the "unquenchable vitality" of Rye Lane, the shopping street outside Peckham Rye station, "one of the last cockney streets in London". The cockney flavour has gone, to be replaced by Khan's emporium and a choice of jerk chicken bars, but the vitality is indeed unquenched. "It's rough, but I've never felt unsafe in Peckham in my life," says photographer John Whitfield, who has lived here for decades.

But nearby, the first whiffs of coffee can be sensed round the station. The next phase is on its way. Whitfield took me into a narrow alley leading to the huge Bussey Building, a former sporting goods factory. When dereliction came, the shell became a hangout for prostitutes and drug addicts, then home to a dozen or more African churches. Now it is an informal arts centre, with a rooftop cinema and bar, 60-odd studios for the kind of artists who would once have gravitated to Chelsea or Holland Park, and loads of "professional co-working spaces" where wannabe creatives and techies can ply their trade sociably.

"It all seems wonderful," I remark to a manager, who is disinclined to give his name, but happy to extol the glittering future that awaits Peckham. "But if Peckham comes up as you say, this won't be an arts centre for long. It'll be worth too much for housing, won't it?" He raises his eyebrows a little and smiles an enigmatic smile. But less cryptic answers are available. Not far away, a sign announces the impending arrival of the famously aggressive chain of estate agents, Foxtons.

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The bubble that turned into a tide: how London got hooked on gentrification

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Gentrification is a familiar story in the capital - but now even the 1% are being squeezed out. What do the stories of Peckham, Holland Park and Chelsea tell us about the new reality?

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A piece on one of the great writers about lost London.

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The rhythm of Iain Sinclair's life has always gone something like this: walk, write; walk, write; walk, write. There have been interruptions, of course. In the old days, before he was a published author, he had to make a living just like everyone else - he painted the white lines of the football pitches on Hackney Marshes, he mowed the grass outside Hawksmoor's London churches - and there were his children (Farne, William and Madeleine) to be fed, watered and generally brought up. Mostly, though, there has just been the walking and the writing, the writing and the walking. His books, sprawling and arcane, would not, could not exist without the walking, which means that to visit him and then fail to propose a walk would be wilfully perverse, like meeting Lucian Freud and turning down the chance to see his studio. So, this is what I do."I thought we'd walk first, and then talk," I tell him when I arrive at his Hackney house in my sensible shoes. "Good idea," he says, as if no one had ever suggested such a thing before. But then I look up at his face, and I can't help but notice that his expression is one of sincere eagerness: I am a tourist, Hackney is Rome, and Sinclair is a guide so ardent he will give me the tour - the full 60 minutes - absolutely free. If only I had brought my camera.

The rhythm of Iain Sinclair's life has always gone something like this: walk, write; walk, write; walk, write. There have been interruptions, of course. In the old days, before he was a published author, he had to make a living just like everyone else - he painted the white lines of the football pitches on Hackney Marshes, he mowed the grass outside Hawksmoor's London churches - and there were his children (Farne, William and Madeleine) to be fed, watered and generally brought up. Mostly, though, there has just been the walking and the writing, the writing and the walking. His books, sprawling and arcane, would not, could not exist without the walking, which means that to visit him and then fail to propose a walk would be wilfully perverse, like meeting Lucian Freud and turning down the chance to see his studio. So, this is what I do."I thought we'd walk first, and then talk," I tell him when I arrive at his Hackney house in my sensible shoes. "Good idea," he says, as if no one had ever suggested such a thing before. But then I look up at his face, and I can't help but notice that his expression is one of sincere eagerness: I am a tourist, Hackney is Rome, and Sinclair is a guide so ardent he will give me the tour - the full 60 minutes - absolutely free. If only I had brought my camera.

The funny thing is, he has brought his. He whips it out when we arrive at the apartments that are being built above the new Dalston station. They are part of the flurry of construction work that began during the boom, and in the wake of the Olympic bid, but which now seem not only ugly but deranged, too. Who will buy these flats? Even before the economy went belly up, the idea that City wealth would spread graciously north to this still deprived part of east London was a misguided fantasy. Now, it seems doubly delusional.

Sinclair regards the "loft-style" flats with a cool eye. "Look at them. Too close together, too dark, totally unsympathetic to everything around them. And where has the pavement gone?" In a proprietorial huff (I used to live here, too, and even now the borough is only at the end of my street), we press on: north to Ridley Road market, all monster fish and trailing cabbage leaves; south to Fassett Square, the model for EastEnders' Albert Square, with its Victorian cottages and its art deco block of flats; south again, down Queensbridge Road, passing on our way Mapledene Road, where a young man called Tony Blair once lived, before he went upmarket to Islington, and the Holly Street Estate, where the same Mr Blair went walkabout on his election in 1997, promising all manner of good things.

Finally we swoop back into Sinclair's own enclave. He lives in a terraced house, bought for £2,000 in 1969 when its lavatory was still outside. Now worth, according to my estimates, at least £600,000, it is in a street off Hackney's loveliest residential spot: Albion Square. For those who can ignore what lies beyond Albion Square's leafy hush - the tower blocks and the drug dealers, the endless thrown-up construction work and the dubious local council - this is the ne plus ultra of urban living: early Victorian houses with gardens that are close to a good farmers' market and to town (well, close-ish) and yet which are still vaguely affordable (though this is highly relative: When I ask Sinclair if his children live in Hackney, he laughs, "No! They can't afford to.")

Sinclair, of course, is not in the business of ignoring the grot. While incomers close their eyes, cross their fingers and pray that gentrification will continue, he does pretty much the opposite. He owns a flat in that crumbling art deco monolith, Marine Court in St Leonard's-on-Sea, for the very reason that the town reminds him of how Hackney used to be in the 1960s. "It's like time travel," he says. "When we bought it eight years ago there was still an old lady who used to walk round, pushing a pram with a doll in it. Different dolls at different times of day. She walked all through the night, spookily, like a child."

Now St Leonard's is on the turn too. "Same process as in Hackney. A repeat story. But the place saved Hackney for me, for another seven or so years." And now that time is up, he finds he cannot leave - in spite of what he gloomily told people when his novel Dining on Stones was published in 2004 (he said he'd had it with Hackney). He and his wife, Anna, put their house on the market and received several offers, only to find that they could not go through with it. "I realise this is it now," he says. For one thing, they cannot bear to leave the "repository of memory" where their children were born. But the process of writing his latest epic, a compendium of myth and madness entitled Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report, has also played its part: "It would be like leaving a living entity."

The book had been nagging away at him for a long time. "I took a contract, as you do, for a totally different kind of book: the impulse was to do with money. I could see that things were collapsing big time, a major crisis was coming, and I thought it might be funny to write about how you would get money: the Mecca bingo, betting shops ... a much sexier idea, but too simple for me. Then, one morning, I was going through Broadway Market [site of the posh farmers' market] and I met about 20 people I knew, but from all over London, all buying a loaf of bread and a bag of tomatoes for 20 quid, and I thought: this is it. I've got to start now, or it's gone."

He talks about the poet John Clare, who as a child walked beyond his knowledge, beyond what he knew, only to find that he no longer knew who he was because the birds and the trees didn't know him. "This is what I feel about this landscape. I've walked out into it so often that it accepts me. Bits of stone and river accept me, and I know myself by that. If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.

"I've never written much about Hackney before because it was my own doorstep. I felt more comfortable with Wapping, Whitechapel and the Thames Gateway. But I really felt that was one reason for doing the book: could I retrieve memories? Only then I found out that I didn't know anything anyway; everything I thought I knew was wrong." Result? "I can see the end of Hackney as I know it. I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney. A different Hackney, younger, brasher, will emerge and wipe the old one away, and wipe me away, only now I'm quite happy about that process." All of which is patently true - except for the last bit. I think he is still in deep mourning for the old Hackney. His book isn't just the size of a tombstone. There are moments when, for all that it thrums with life, it reads like one too.

Like all Sinclair's books, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire has such a keen sense of place you can practically smell it. But it is also as detailed and as complex as a historical map, taking the reader hither and thither with no care as to which might be the most direct route. It drives you nuts but it repays effort. Sinclair traces the borough's rise and fall and putative rise, its many guises and its reinventions, through its people and its myths. Among those who have passed through its teetering lanes are Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles, Julie Christie and Tony Blair, even one Astrid Proll, the Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla who hid out in Hackney when half of Europe was looking for her. Hackney is, it quickly becomes clear, a place of disappearances. People come by, lurk awhile, and then leave (Sinclair's own 40-year residence starts to seem ever more remarkable). Now it is the place itself that is disappearing. Hovering at the edge of the book, just out of view, is the vast folly (or triumph, depending on your point of view) that is the Olympic site, a portion of which has already obliterated some of the borough. Hackney Wick, once home to more artists per square mile than any other part of Europe, is already gone in spirit, if not in actuality. "And Fish Island," he says. "It's just not there any more."

His publisher is marketing Hackney as "the book they tried to ban", a claim based on the fact that the local council does not want its author speaking in any of its libraries because he is "anti-Olympics". At this, Sinclair laughs gleefully. "So wonderful for me. So absurd and crazy, a metaphor for insanity, in fact, but the best piece of publicity. I was asked to go along to Stoke Newington library to speak to 20 people: old hippies and local history buffs, probably. But I'd written an anti-Olympics piece in the London Review of Books, and so the Hackney thought police decided: no, we can't have this person in our library. They lied about this all the way down the line, insisting it was nothing to do with the Olympics but that they can't have 'controversial' topics discussed in libraries. Eventually someone from the Hackney Citizen used the Freedom of Information Act to get the transcript [of what was said in a meeting] and, sure enough, it came directly from the Mayor, Jules Pipe, saying that this person is anti-Olympics, and he doesn't go into our libraries. So Hackney Council is my co-sponsor, really - and, of course, this manipulation [on the part of the council] is also a big theme of the book."

Sinclair goes further than most when it comes to condemning what he regards as the folly of the Olympics. "It's catastrophic. Apocalyptically catastrophic. It's brutalising: the time scale of it, the fact that it was imposed from above, the consultation a farce, and the promise of this legacy - which is what? It's Westfield shopping mall, basically [a similar mall to west London's Westfield, will be built out east]. Have you been there? Horrendous. Drains the life blood out of you in seconds. Then they have the nerve to call it the People's Park. What do they think was there before? It was the people's park: anglers, birdwatchers, footballers. Now they're all gone, so it's the opposite. I'm deeply disturbed and angry." Will he spend the summer of 2012 in St Leonard's? "I might be perversely drawn in to watch the horror. I think there'll be gridlock for a start. But right now it's like an invaded city. Like Basra. A sea of mud. Convoys rolling in day and night, day and night."

Sinclair was born in 1943, in Cardiff, a little blue. Someone whacked his newborn self with a book to get him going, an act that is up there with Leonard Bast being killed by a bookcase in EM Forster's Howards End when it comes to clunky symbolism. He grew up in Maesteg, where his father was a GP, and only lost his Welsh accent at Cheltenham College. After a period in Dublin, where he was notionally attached to Trinity College, and where he met Anna (they married at 23), he moved to London and eventually to Hackney.

"Such an accident," he says. "I came for a few weeks to live with friends, and realised: this is a deeply engrossing landscape. It was easy picking up jobs, and very soon you've been here four, five, six years, and then half your life has slipped by." He and Anna bought their condemned house after he made a film about Allen Ginsberg for German TV (Sinclair had attended the London School of Film Technique). While she worked as a teacher, he began a series of unskilled, some might say dead-end, jobs: situations that required his hands but which left his mind free. "They were in wonderful landscapes. Hackney Marshes! I loved being out there. Sandwiches, book, notebook. I couldn't believe someone would pay me to be there."

Later he became a secondhand book dealer, a move that bought him the time to write his first book, and ran his own small press. But there was never a time when he wasn't writing. "I'm not anxious about my writing now because, having lived for a long time on zilch, I don't care if all this goes belly up. I can survive. What I write, I write. I'll always do it in some form." Reviews? He doesn't give a fig. "I'm not being arrogant. I just know that what I do is OK."

He was 40 before he was published properly. It was after Peter Ackroyd published his novel Hawksmoor that things started to happen. (Ackroyd, another London obsessive, had read Sinclair's long poem, Lud Heat, a mystical account of Hawksmoor's churches and the significance of their alignments.) "I got in on the tail end of that. If I was doing it now, no chance. My early books could not be published now, not remotely: publishers are so hopelessly nervous."

For a while he was best known for a novel, Downriver, which won prizes, and depicted Britain as one-party state run by The Widow (this was Mrs Thatcher, whom Sinclair sincerely believes to have been a witch). But it was his later non-fiction, ostensibly so unfashionable, that made him fashionable. Lights Out For The Territory, a collection of essays about London and its symbols from the Krays to Chingford Mount Cemetery, and London Orbital, in which he walks around the M25. He is usually described as a "psychogeographer" by his (mostly male) fans, though he has always thought of what he does as "psychotic geography - stalking the city" and, in any case, is now wary and weary of the term. To me, he is a writerly pathologist, always in search of decay, the better to note the time of death. That's why, occult obsessions aside, his writing can be so chilling: as clammy as a corpse.

So, now he has laid Hackney to rest between hard covers, what will he do by way of a follow-up? His next book, he tells me, begins with the forbidding blue fence that surrounds the Olympic site. "The book will be about [state-funded] follies, these grand projects. I've already been to the Earth Centre in Doncaster [this visitor attraction opened in 2001, and closed, a failure, in 2004]. One security guard, deeply depressed, walks around it all day. The attitude to the north was so grotesquely patronising. This whole thing of 'cities of culture'. It's insane."

He talks about the architect Will Alsop's plan for the urban corridor between Liverpool and Hull. Alsop's vision is somehow to connect these cities, and all those in between, using high-rise "Stacks". Thus, they will become one "super-city". "What? Does he think all these places are the same? My wife and I took our Hackney Freedom Passes, and travelled from Liverpool to Hull by bus. We hadn't gone five miles before there was a change in voice, in attitude, in landscape. What world is he living in?"

Meanwhile, Sinclair thinks his Hackney book will probably do rather well. "Thanks to the proliferation of media types here, everyone will know what I'm talking about for once," he says. "It's going to be Book of the Week [on Radio 4], and never in a million years would they have done a book of mine had it not been set in Hackney; the producer lives here." He laughs. "Though when I told him that I had wanted to write a book with something positive in spirit in it, as well as all the grotesque stuff, he said: 'Oh, I haven't found any of those bits yet.' So perhaps it's all been a disaster." My hunch is that it will make the gentrifiers - already in a funk about house prices - feel quite tense. The Farrow & Ball merchants like a bit of authenticity. But they don't want everything painted in a colour we might call Dark Underbelly.

Iain Sinclair: A life
Early life
1943 Born 11 June in Cardiff to a Scottish GP father and a Welsh mother.
Personal life
Lives with his wife, Anna, whom he met as a student, in Hackney, east London. They have three grown-up children.
Career
1970 Publishes his first book Back Garden: Poems and Stories. Much of his early work is printed by his own small press, Albion Village Press.

1987 Publishes his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, which is set in contemporary and 19th-century east London.

1991 Wins the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his second novel, Downriver, an account of London river life in Thatcherite Britain.

2002 Receives widespread acclaim for London Orbital, which describes a series of trips tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot.
Bria Francis
* Iain Sinclair's new book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, is published by Hamish Hamilton at £20. To order a copy for £19 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6847
Topics

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The rhythm of Iain Sinclair's life has always gone something like this: walk, write; walk, write; walk, write. There have been interruptions, of course.

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Great piece eon the Woodberry Downs area, which we passed on our walk on Tuesday!

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Google Tony Pidgley, chairman of one of Britain's biggest housebuilders, and you'll find a video in which he shows off his latest toy. The plaything in question is a giant council estate that his firm, Berkeley Homes, is smashing up and building over.

A squat, punchy figure, he shows a reporter around the new towers - and the gashed old blocks that, we're informed, were used in Schindler's List as a stand-in for the Warsaw Ghetto.

"You can understand why they used it in the film," begins Pidgley in a reasonable tone. "It looks like a concentration camp."

Forget for a moment that the Warsaw Ghetto was not a concentration camp, or that practically every large inner-London estate has featured in some film in the role of Ominous Backdrop. Ignore the crassness of a man who, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, is worth £160m casually rubbishing the homes of thousands of families poorer than him. Concentrate instead on the rare sight presented in that clip: a businessman at the height of his powers.

Pidgley is one of the most lavishly paid executives in his industry. The firm he helms is enjoying bumper profits, thanks to a taxpayer-funded housing boom in Berkeley's key market of London and the south-east. And the building site where he's playing the tour guide - Woodberry Down in Manor House, north-east London - is one of the largest housing-estate redevelopments in Britain.

By 2031, around 2,000 council or former council homes will have been demolished and replaced with more than 5,500 units on the estate: some social housing; some for "key workers", the euphemism now used for low-paid public servants, and the majority to be sold on the open market. The flagship private block in Woodberry Down, looking on to a lovely reservoir, has been sold largely to foreign investors, with one flat going for a million pounds (tell a Londoner that flats in Manor House are going for a million quid and see how low their jaw drops).

Pidgley began touting Woodberry Down as a "blueprint for regeneration and all the new development Britain needs to beat the housing crisis" in February. Although it has only just got going on a job that will last 25 years, Berkeley Homes published a scientific-looking survey that neatly showed residents to be delighted with the results so far. At a corporate meeting this February to publicise the poll, coalition planning minister Nick Boles gave a warm keynote speech and the Times led the media applause: "Schindler's estate is now a blueprint for urban happiness".

Within the grasp of Pidgley's team is a tantalisingly large prize. If Berkeley can establish itself as the pre-eminent name in regeneration, it will put itself front of the queue for what is a roaring business. It will also have even greater sway with local authorities, London city hall and Westminster.

Executives at the FTSE-250 company estimate that, of every four houses they build, one is on a former council estate somewhere in the capital. But the potential business is much larger: 1.69 million people in England were waiting for local authority accommodation last year; over 344,000 in London alone. Unprecedented cuts have left town halls up and down the country less cash to maintain their existing housing stock - giving them little choice but to turn to Pidgely and co.

These public-private partnerships are relatively recent and haven't come under much serious scrutiny, either in the press or in parliament. Yet they are widespread. The Guardian asked London's local authorities about their schemes to redevelop public housing with a private builder, in which at least some of the dwellings would be sold on the open market. Our map shows the results: of the capital's 32 councils, 18 are in such partnerships with the private sector, many across multiple estates.

As the financial crisis recedes into the middle distance, London has been colonised by builders' hoardings and cement mixers. Hospitals are being transformed into luxury flats; school fields littered with concrete boxes, and public housing turned into not-so-public housing. With politicians of all stripes looking for ways to drum up millions of new homes, Berkeley and its rivals will become ever more important to Britain's future.

By the time Pidgley began his Woodberry Down PR push, we had spent many hours talking to its residents. Our interest was aroused by the claims being made for it: Hackney council officials described it privately as its "greatest success"; the commitment to making 40% of the new development affordable homes.

To critics, regeneration is simply code for gentrification, which is often a fancy term to describe how poor people are cleared from valuable land to make way for the rich. But here was a scheme promising regeneration with a conscience, creating a genuinely mixed community. Council and the builders sang the same song: Woodberry Down represented private-led redevelopment at its best - a model to be followed.

Except the residents on the estate consistently demonstrated that the claims about its transformation were untrue. Berkeley's survey - the subject of laudatory column inches - turned out to be about as methodologically robust as the science part of a L'Oreal advert: it was massively skewed towards those settling into the new towers, when the vast majority still live in the old blocks, and will do for years. And it omitted entirely the number of residents who were moved off the estate.
Among the more than 50 interviewees we spoke to over six months, there was naturally a range of views about what benefits had been brought by regeneration. But the majority talked of pensioners offered inadequate sums for their leaseholdings, and being forced to move far from their families; of business owners promised a place in the new development only to be turfed out later, losing small fortunes in the process.

Their neighbourhood was an endangered species: a patch of inner London belonging to the elderly, the working poor, the unemployed. Now it was being broken up to suit an international company selling homes to the well-off. The fact their council was leading this dismemberment made some especially angry.

Even tenants in the new social housing reported how they or neighbours had been plunged into debt because of the higher bills incurred through having a private housing association as a landlord. Despite Berkeley's promise to "bring together all people in Woodberry Down", social tenants reported that those living in the expensive private blocks "cross the road to avoid us". They had been made to feel like second-class citizens in their own home.

What follows are stories of the people best placed to tell you about what regeneration does to a community: the ones who come from it. Some have lived on Woodberry Down for more than six decades; others are in their 20s. Their photos don't feature in the civic-centre case studies or corporate press releases. They haven't got local elections to win, or a profit target to chase. They've just got to live with the results.

Jane

In all her 65 years on Woodberry Down, Jane Frost has never had to deal with anything like this. Around six or seven on most evenings, a mystery man comes to her flat and pees against the balcony outside. Jane's the only resident left on the entire floor; and there's no neighbor, no security guard to pop out and see who the pest is. The 71-year-old cleans up the puddles herself.

All five storeys of Jane's council block have been emptied. Almost everyone else has been rehoused, either in the new blocks opposite or in a different area. But Jane is disabled and, even after years, the council has yet to find her suitable accommodation. Which leaves her stuck here, with so few neighbours that she finds it "creepy". Too creepy for her friends, who don't visit after dark for fear of muggers - or worse.

"When I come up the stairs late at night my heart's going boom-boom-boom-boom," she says. "If I'm taken bad I no longer have anyone's door I can knock on."

The afternoon light streams into Jane's lounge, playing on a lifetime's worth of ornaments and porcelain. But outside her front door, "it's absolutely horrible. I'm a nervous wreck." Since the regeneration began she's been diagnosed with depression.

One night she went out for a loaf, got chatting to a woman selling the Big Issue and let slip where she lived. The homeless woman was so worried for Jane's safety that she walked her home - and wouldn't even take anything for the trouble.

Out on the pensioner's deserted balcony you see the thing she blames most for leaving her "abandoned". It's the towers springing up opposite, and the changes they've ushered in.

All that activity on the other side of the road - the cranes, the 400-plus builders charging around in white hard hats - could be described as rejuvenation: bringing new life to decades-old dereliction. "A Place in the Making," Berkeley Homes calls it. They've slapped the phrase on hoardings everywhere, and rechristened the area Woodberry Park.
Visitors to the 64-acre estate now have two maps to navigate. On one is the old council layout of Woodberry Down, each block assigned a starchily municipal name: Bayhurst, Delamere, Whittlebury. On the other is a Technicolor guide to Woodberry Park and its landmarks: Residence, Watersreach and, less dreamily, Berkeley Homes Marketing Suite.

Yet marketing won't totally obliterate history as long as people such as Jane and her childhood friend Sheila Coxon are knocking around. They met on this estate in 1949, the year after it opened. "You'd have parties in the courtyards," remembers Jane. Sheila chimes in: "You had a community."

You also had heroic public investment. Woodberry Down was the brainchild of Peter Mandelson's grandfather, Labour MP Herbert Morrison, who wanted to rehouse working-class Londoners living in inner-city squalor - even if it meant compulsorily buying up the homes of the well-to-do residents of Manor House. "Morrison drives out mansion owners," thundered the North London Recorder in November 1938 under the headline: "£1,000,000 slum dwellers' paradise". It ran a photo of a resident standing pensively by the reservoir and warned, "Hundreds of shouting children will take the place of this solitary silent man."

But soon "everybody wanted to be here," says Jane. She tells a family legend about how her mum lobbied the then-MP for Westminster Abbey: "He said: 'What do you want? A flat in Westminster?' And she said: 'No ... on the Woodberry Down estate.' He told her she was asking the world, the absolute world. That's how good this estate was."

Council housing is now synonymous with cheap boxes, built grudgingly, and piled up to the sky. But, however rundown, the low-rise redbrick blocks of Woodberry Down still look solid - reminders of their prideful days as an "estate of the future", toured by policy-makers in order to glean lessons. With a health centre opening in 1952 and Britain's first purpose-built comprehensive soon afterwards, it was also a showcase for the cradle-to-grave welfare state.

"The estate was the estate and everybody had it the same," says Sheila. Then she nods towards the building works: "It's segregation, isn't it?" She's referring to the way the different classes of resident live in different blocks: social tenants on subsidised rent in one, part-owners of "affordable" homes in another, and the private residents in their own flagship tower. "The private properties are being built around the reservoir, with just a few token flats for council residents. The private buyers have got the best part of the estate."

Gentrification

The term "gentrification" was coined just down the road from Woodberry Down, about 15 years after Jane and Sheila moved into their new homes. Living in Islington, north London, sociologist Ruth Glass noticed a rapid change among her neighbours.

"One by one, many of the working-class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes - upper and lower," she wrote in an article published in 1964. "Shabby, modest mews and cottages ... have been taken over, when their leases have expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences ... Once this process of 'gentrification' starts ... it goes on rapidly until ... the original working-class occupiers are displaced, and the social character of the district is changed."

This is gentrification as we still discuss it: the invisible hand of the market moving inexorably but gently (it waits until the leases expire) to gentrify an area. The squatters beget artists, who beget the public-sector middle-class, who beget banker families, who just stay put in their stucco-fronted Georgian houses, endlessly decorating and redecorating. A doleful bugle sounds for the demise of the family-run cobbler, soon drowned out by buzz over the gelato parlour that's replaced it.

This long, slow process of gentrification does not describe what's happening in Woodberry Down, or on mammoth estates from Greenwich's Ferrier (which, in Berkeley's hands, is being remoulded into Kidbrooke Village) to the Heygate in Elephant and Castle. Many of the made-up "villages" and "parks" mushrooming across the capital owe nothing to age-old market forces and everything to councils eager to upgrade their housing stock without eating into already-stretched budgets. They pass control of their inventory to a private housing association ( Genesis, in the case of Woodberry Down) and lease the land for a few centuries to big developers. The builders put up new "affordable" homes to be sold or rented at below market rates, and cross-subsidise them by constructing expensive private homes. This planned poshification has been given a name by Paul Watt at London's Birkbeck: state-led gentrification.

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The truth about gentrification: regeneration or con trick?

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Google Tony Pidgley, chairman of one of Britain's biggest housebuilders, and you'll find a video in which he shows off his latest toy. The plaything in question is a giant council estate that his firm, Berkeley Homes, is smashing up and building over.

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A great recent piece about the areas around the worlkd that are being lost to gentrification.

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he wave of urban renewal that swept the world in the 20th century gave us inner-city highways, modernist downtown malls and high-rise housing projects. It destroyed countless fine-grained, human-scaled neighbourhoods.

We lost more than just physical buildings. Each of these communities contained something less tangible - neighbourhoods like these are ecosystems. They incubate communities and cultures that do not and could not exist elsewhere.

Sometimes, as in these 10 that follow, a neighbourhood lives in the memory of the displaced and their descendants, as powerful in death as in life.

In 1914, the author Gustav Meyrink wrote a vivid depiction of 16th-century life in Prague's Jewish quarter, Josefov. His novel Der Golem describes an oppressive labyrinth of ancient, looming houses in which "something malicious seemed to permeate the very bricks".

That was pretty close to the perspective of Prague's city government at the end of the 19th century. By then, Josefov's medieval streets had become a dense, diverse hub of poor Czechs, immigrants and artisans whose trades had been devastated by factory manufacturing. City authorities, inspired by Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussmann's recent "renovation" of Paris, saw it as a blight. In December 1896, the Finis Ghetto urban-renewal scheme kicked off with a literal bang, as 45 houses were destroyed by dynamite. With the exception of few religious sites, the entire neighbourhood was destroyed.

The razing faced little opposition from Prague's Jewish residents, many of whom returned after redevelopment - fuelling resentment among the displaced, and contributing to the antisemitic atmosphere that prevailed in the years before the first world war.

A neighbourhood within a building, Mecca Flats was built for Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and by 1910 was home to artists, musicians, white-collar workers and labourers, mostly black, many arrivals in the great migration. The building was one of America's first luxury apartment houses, oriented around a central atrium that brought the street life of the neighbourhood indoors.

By the great depression, it housed more than 1,000 people. The poet Gwendolyn Brooks worked in the building as a peddler in the 1930s, and immortalised it in her 1968 epic poem, In the Mecca, conceiving of it as a cross-section of black American life: "To touch every note in the life of this block-long block-wide building, would be to capsulize the gist of black humanity in general."

The Mecca was acquired by the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1941; tenants, activists and preservationists rallied to save it, but it was replaced with the school's Crown Hall - a bright slice of modernism, designed in direct opposition to the perceived darkness and decrepitude of the Mecca.

St John's Ward was an aberration in uptight, homogenous 20th-century Toronto. A diverse polyglot with a population density approaching that of contemporary central Hong Kong, it was a prototypical arrival city, with Irish, Italian, Jewish, African, Chinese and others establishing their first Canadian beachheads. A 1922 dispatch in the city's Globe newspaper reported: "Chinese restaurants are filled with negro customers, many of them women, while here and there an occasional white girl can be seen partaking of a meal with either a brown or yellow skinned partner." Sanitation and overcrowding were the ostensible targets of the reformers who sought to eradicate the Ward, but that nascent multiculturalism was probably as much a target.

Redevelopment began in 1946 and continued for decades; today, the district is an imposing institutional corridor separating the city's downtown from the fine-grained neighbourhoods to the west - a few of which, especially Kensington Market and Chinatown, still bear traces of the old Ward.

Born in Alabama, Coleman Young's family moved to Detroit's Black Bottom in 1923. The future mayor found himself at five years old amid a community of Jewish, Greek, Italian and Irish residents - and a burgeoning black population arriving, as his family did, from the south. (Boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, both southerners by birth, lived a few doors from one another here in the 1930s.)

Young was politicised as a teenager, listening to union workers talk leftist politics in a local barbershop. He found entertainment along the neighbourhood's commercial spine, Hastings Street, where John Lee Hooker, Della Reese and others found their musical footing in small clubs.

As with other renewal projects nationally, the funds to raze the community were in part provided by the federal Housing Act of 1949, which extended broad powers of expropriation to cities. By 1956 much of Hastings Street had been destroyed and replaced by the Chrysler Freeway. Bisected, what remained of the community quickly fell into decline.

Late in life, Young would remember the neighbourhood as "a thrilling convergence of people, a wonderfully versatile and self-contained society".

Philip Payton Jr is sometimes referred to as the "father of Harlem" for his work buying properties in Upper Manhattan and renting them to black tenants. In 1905, he began to do the same on West 99th and 98th streets, purchasing several blocks of buildings between Central Park West and Amsterdam Avenue.

A Harlem-in-miniature took root here, and half a decade later, it was a tight-knit community that included the composer Will Marion Cook, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, activist James Weldon Johnson, historian Arturo Schomburg and singer Billie Holiday. In 1951, empowered as Detroit was by 1949's Housing Act, the city declared the district a slum and evicted residents. More than 500 buildings were demolished, replaced by a luxury housing project called Park West Village.

The community became one of the lesser known victims of US slum clearance, though no less mourned by its former residents. "There's a space in my life that's missing right now because of that move," former resident Jim Torain told a documentary film crew in 2008.

In 1844, Los Angeles councilman and rancher Julian Chavez petitioned for 83 acres (33.5 hectares) of land in what was than a semi-rural district near today's Echo Park. He got it, and over the following decades three neighbourhood, Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop, developed in the verdant hills north of the city. The mostly Mexican-American residents practised subsistence agriculture and raised livestock, ran their own schools, and lived a semi-agrarian lifestyle - in the shadow of one of the nation's ascendant boomtowns.

By the 1940s, urban renewal made the community a target for redevelopment. Residents' homes were expropriated, and while they were promised relocation to new public housing, those plans fell apart after Norris Poulson, who believed public housing to be a communist plot, won 1953's Los Angeles mayoral race.

A handful of stragglers waged the years-long Battle of Chavez Ravine against city authorities, but by 1959 the community was destroyed. In 1962, Dodger Stadium was erected on the site.

Sophiatown was the Victorian-era brainchild of a real estate investor who in 1897 bought 237 acres of land near Johannesburg, laid out a few tidy streets, and named them after his children and wife. After the city located a sewage disposal plant nearby, his white homebuyers fled, and black residents found an opportunity denied them elsewhere: property ownership.

By the 1950s, Sophiatown was the "Chicago of South Africa", filled with shebeens (speakeasies), incubating musicians and artists. It was a focal point of activity for the African National Congress and a young Nelson Mandela, and a hub of anti-apartheid activism. In Sophiatown Speaks, the poet and former resident Don Mattera declared: "Sophiatown was the antithesis of what they wanted for this country. Sophiatown had the black people - meaning Coloured, Indians, Blacks of all tribes - and the whites living together."

In 1955, its residents were mostly relocated to the township of Soweto, out of the city. The community was bulldozed, reconstructed as a district of tidy bungalows, and renamed, in Afrikaans, Triomf, eventually reverting in 2006 to its original name.

The de facto capital of Canada's eastern provinces, Halifax is proof that urban renewal often exacted as great a toll on small cities as on large ones. In 1969, local planners were aiming to replicate the slum clearance policies of bigger metropolises, and devised a scheme to raze the city's historic waterfront for an expressway to the suburbs.

Protests halted the expressway, but not a massive downtown interchange that wiped out almost 15 blocks and 400 buildings in the city centre. It displaced thousands of mostly poor residents, and severed the city's working-class North End from its downtown, exacerbating its decline. Many of the displaced were African-Nova Scotian, descendants of some of Canada's oldest black communities. (The displacement came just a few years after the destruction of Africville, a historic black community at the city's northern tip.)

The interchange was considered a blight almost as soon as it was erected, and will soon be torn down itself, to be replaced by a mixed-use neighbourhood.

In the 1950s, a group of itinerant puppeteers settled on the outskirts of Delhi, establishing this vital community of performers. Memorably described in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, its thousands of small homes, called jhuggis, were crammed daily with magic shows, music, storytelling, puppetry and performance.

But like similar communities, Kathputli lacked sanitation and other amenities; by the 2000s, it was targeted by the Delhi Development Authority, which planned an "in-situ rehabilitation" programme. This involved moving residents to a "transit camp", razing the neighbourhood, and developing a new high-rise district. Nearly 3,000 350-square-foot apartments were to house former residents, with the rest of the land given to market-rate development.

Few residents willingly moved, arguing that the community's survival depended - like Seoul's Euljiro district - on the irreplaceable particulars of its built environment. The tension came to a head in October 2017 when demolition began, leaving residents fleeing their homes with little notice. Some residents remained, living in the ruins.

A visitor to Shanghai in the late 19th century would have found the city dominated by narrow, winding lanes of shikumen, the local equivalent of Britain's Victorian terraced workers' housing, or Philadelphia's miles of rowhouse neighbourhoods. Laoximen is among the most famous of these neighbourhoods, the product of an earlier population boom that saw the city swell with rural residents coming to the fast-growing city, a hub of regional trade.

Today, as the city struggles to house its 26.3 million residents, many old neighbourhoods are being targeted. Part of Laoximen has been destroyed, and demolition is imminent for what remains. Shanghai has a better reputation for preservation than many Chinese cities, however, and a few buildings in Laoximen may be retained.

"It still breaks your heart every time you see something like Laoximen," Tina Kanagaratnam of advocacy group Historic Shanghai told the South China Morning Post last year. "You know this whole way of life is not going to continue. But every time we go somewhere else in China and come back, we think, 'Oh thank God we live in Shanghai', because there is so much more of this than there is anywhere else."
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Vanished neighbourhoods: the areas lost to urban renewal

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he wave of urban renewal that swept the world in the 20th century gave us inner-city highways, modernist downtown malls and high-rise housing projects. It destroyed countless fine-grained, human-scaled neighbourhoods. We lost more than just physical buildings.

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One of my favourite Muslim stand-up comedians tackling Islamaphobia.

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Bilal Zafar: Watch this Muslim comedian take on the Islamophobic trolls

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Great piece on the funny responses to the lunacy of our times:

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As the United Kingdom reels after the result of the referendum, the reaction in England appears to be falling into two camps. A picture is emerging of an older, more rural, demographic, many of whom chose to leave, and a younger urban electorate who mostly voted to remain.

The fallout from what is perhaps the most seismic political event in the country since 1945 is apparent across social media, which is resounding with fury and hurt.

"65+ and voted to leave? Any thoughts of what kind of country your grandchildren will grow up in? Or a purely selfish, single-minded, insular decision? For once I truly understand what 'I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed' means."

"Don't kid yourself - if you voted for 'independence' you voted for fear and isolation and racism."

"We don't have a problem with immigrants, we have a problem with imbeciles."

Of course, it's not as simple as "all people under 40 voted to remain and are disappointed with the result", as these comments - often posted with an image of a union jack or Winston Churchill - demonstrate:

"Wow! Exciting times! C'mon Britain!", "We have taken our country back - BRITAIN FOR THE BRITISH!!" which are certainly enthusiastic, if not nuanced. And naturally, there will be many a rural baby boomer who is distraught at what's happened.

That said, a by-now-viral blog-post lays the blame for Brexit firmly at the door of those born in the mid-1940s to early 1960s.

"They took the secure corporate and government jobs with the guaranteed pay rises and final salary pension schemes and benefitted from property they bought cheap and sold dear.

"They burnt the bridges behind them by colluding with the dismantling of the very things that had brought them prosperity. Their last act will be to burn the economy before they die."

So, as the pound crashes and shares plummet, is there anything that can raise a smile for Generation Ex-(European Union)?

Of course there is. As one Facebook user puts it: "If I didn't laugh, I'd cry". Here are some ways the pro-EUers have reacted.

So, is it the end of the world as we know it? Will we live to rue the day we were allowed to choose? Some think so.

Zoe Davies posted on Facebook: "To those who acted upon the advice to 'follow your heart rather than your head'. The head is designed for thinking, and the heart is merely a pump. Common sense suggests that we should have chosen to remain.

"The consequences could be terrible. We have pressed the self-destruct button."

Many agree with her - a crowd of people gathered around Boris Johnson's home in north London to boo him and shout "Shame on you" - and much, much worse.

But, on a brighter note, that British get-up-and-go (which we've obviously just deployed) should hold us in good stead.

Mike Irons put in his online penny's worth: "What matters now is how we walk through the fire. The 'leave' vote was not the end of the fight, but the beginning. Racism and fascism are not certainties.

"But honestly. What the hell have we done?"

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As the United Kingdom reels after the result of the referendum, the reaction in England appears to be falling into two camps. A picture is emerging of an older, more rural, demographic, many of whom chose to leave, and a younger urban electorate who mostly voted to remain.

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Has Brexit affected our sense of humour?

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Has Brexit affected our sense of humour?

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An interesting piece from the Financial Times of all places!

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Long before Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, travellers arriving in Britain would often find themselves perplexed by this rain-soaked corner of north-west Europe. Emotionally reticent, class-obsessed, a little repressed, the locals could make a bad first impression. Until, that is, they unleashed their all-redeeming superpower: a wry, sometimes surreal, often self-deprecating sense of humour.

Say what you like about the British, but they know how to have a laugh. Even as the cries of "traitor" ring out around Westminster and social media vibrates with acrimony, this still seems largely to apply.

Take the placards at the London anti-Brexit march a few weeks ago, with their polite declarations of "Fromage not Farage" and "This Does Not Spark Joy". Or Theresa May's entrance at last year's Conservative party conference, dancing towards the podium in playful homage to her own much-derided turn for the TV cameras while on tour in Africa that summer.

Perhaps more surprising is that many of the Europeans with whom she has been negotiating for the past two years continue to subscribe to the same view of Britishness, as is evident every time a Monty Python-loving official professes sadness that the country should leave, or draws an affectionate parallel with the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" ingrates of the People's Front of Judea.

In truth, there has always been a certain amount of mental gymnastics involved in sustaining this idea. What was it exactly about irony that Americans were supposed not to "get", for example? The answer could not be gleaned from exposure to actual Americans and their culture - although it seemed to have something to do with Brits being weirdly evasive in response to straightforward questions.

Turning to perceptions of the continent, you can come across the most contradictory arguments. French humour, according to one common theory, suffers by comparison with the British variety for its over-reliance on clever punning, while, in another, the Germans fall short for precisely the opposite reason: long compound words that make it harder for ambiguity to survive enough of the exposition to deliver a satisfying punchline.

This is not logic but national myth, of course, and the latter can have it both ways; all that matters in the end is that enough people continue to believe.

But with any kind of faith, the ultimate test is how it measures up to reality. For me, the crisis came when I read an article about the British citizenship test by my colleague Federica Cocco, which revealed that applicants were expected to bone up on our ability to laugh at ourselves.

This seemed invalidating somehow: were we really now boasting about our modesty? And how ironic, to say the least, that we should fail to see the irony of this. What I had long regarded as a harmless piece of exceptionalism, like Portuguese saudade or French joie de vivre, was starting to feel close to the source of our current travails.

It is impossible, however, to deny that humour is important to the British - a fact that is well illustrated by the Victoria and Albert Museum's decision to extend its British Galleries into the 20th century exclusively through this medium. And just a few minutes perusing the exhibits of Laughing Matters: The State of a Nation is enough to bring home just how saturated in comedy British culture is, as snippets from forgotten 1980s television shows or old covers of Private Eye reveal themselves to be already embedded somewhere in your psyche.

Curator Simon Sladen is clearly keen to avoid the congratulatory tone that can pervade discussions of this subject, and the "Cruel Britannia" section of the display, including an anti-Chinese marionette and the burnt cork greasepaint used by minstrel performers, shows British humour in pretty much its worst light.

I say British, but often the Scots, Irish and Welsh did not fare much better than other groups. In particular, the caricatures on the cover of "John Bull and His Three Little Brothers", a volume of sheet music from 1887, remind us of the essential Englishness of Mr Bull, a symbol of fierce independence and bad table manners, so often used as a proxy for the Union as a whole.

On one level, Brexit has represented a bonanza for comedy - a seemingly inexhaustible source of folly and hypocrisy

Imperial insult would, of course, be returned in kind. This is stylishly done in "Terribly Sympathetic", a lithograph by the Indian artist Gaganendranath Tagore, nephew of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath, which depicts the British politician Bampfylde Fuller stamping on figures representing opponents of the 1905 partition of Bengal.

We get a glimpse into the interesting life of ABC Merriman-Labor, a Sierra Leonean writer whose indignantly received satirical portrait of Edwardian London provided an early illustration of the limits of Britain's appetite for comic mortification. That, at least, had grown markedly by the time Stephen Adnitt designed Dame Edna Everage's breakfast dress, a sartorial hymn to the dubious pleasures of the fry-up worn by the alter-ego of the Australian Dadaist Barry Humphries on a televised tour of a Heinz factory in 1997.

One thing that comes across strongly is the significance of the second world war, which launched the careers of a generation of performers and inspired some of the most popular comedy shows of the decades that followed, from Dad's Army to It Ain't Half Hot Mum! and 'Allo 'Allo!.

Steve Nallon, the voice of Spitting Image's Margaret Thatcher, comments in one of a number of perceptive audio interviews on the extraordinary number of explosions in the radio programme The Goon Show: "You don't need Freud to tell you that they were coping with that trauma."

Then there is the big one: class. British comedy is famous for returning to this topic relentlessly, often through vehicles such as Keeping Up Appearances ' Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced "Bouquet"), whose clumsy attempts at social climbing somehow seem to buttress the system they purport to mock.

That charge cannot be levelled at The Frost Report 's 1966 "class sketch", however, the script of which is the central exhibit of this part of the display. If you were only to read it, you might think that the famous skit on British attitudes to class as embodied by John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett was just another example of punching down. But on screen, Corbett, ostensibly the butt, steals the show through sheer comic timing, and by the time you get to the closing punchline the joke is firmly on the system itself.

Britain's departure from the EU inevitably looms over a display that opened significantly (or, as it turned out, not so significantly) on the original Brexit day of March 29, and Cleese makes another appearance as we arrive at the subject via the post-referendum New Yorker cover, in which a bowler-hatted figure modelled on his civil servant from Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks marches off a cliff.

The Pythons themselves have long insisted that the 1970 sketch was nothing but silliness, though some contemporaries would surely have read it as a critique of the industrial policies of the day - particularly towards the end, as we learn more about how silly-walk grants are dispensed and then move on, with perhaps a hint of Euroscepticism, to the Concorde-like project of "La Marche Futile", described by a cod Frenchman wearing a beret, a Breton shirt and a string of onions.

On one level, Brexit has represented a bonanza for comedy - a seemingly inexhaustible source of folly and hypocrisy to fuel the sketch-writers and columnists. And if our consumption of memes and clips via social media inevitably focuses attention on viewpoints with which we already agree, it also gives us greater access than ever before to outside perspectives.

I was particularly struck by the glorious incongruity of Sammy J's Brexit Yoga, an online video in which an Australian comic urges us serenely to "get back control of our bodies" before demonstrating a sequence of positions such as the Rising Nationalism, the Poisoned Chalice and the Scottish Independence.

But in many ways, modern British politics doesn't fit easily into the tradition of humour represented in the exhibition by Yes Minister, in which civil servants suavely outmanoeuvre shallow, opportunistic politicians ("I don't want the truth, I want something I can sell Parliament!"), or Spitting Image, whose grotesque renderings of Margaret Thatcher and others won audiences of 15 million in the late 1980s.

This stems in part from Brexit's divisiveness, and often the joke focuses squarely on that: take the dress worn by the dame in the Hackney Empire's 2016 pantomime production of Sleeping Beauty, which uses flags to show how the referendum split the UK.

The artist Grayson Perry 's Brexit vases, which have gone on display in a different part of the V&A, offer a sophisticated variant of the same approach, drawing on crowd-sourced suggestions from Remainers and Brexiters to make the point that, in many respects, the two camps are much alike. Each of the metre-high ceramics is blue, the favourite colour of both sides, and each features graphic nods to Marmite, David Bowie, Big Ben, Heinz and a host of other shared cultural reference points.

Going beyond this and picking sides can be a perilous business, as the comedian Marcus Brigstocke observed recently when he described how the anti-Brexit material in his stand-up show had been prompting walk-outs in parts of the UK. The bigger problem for comics is that Brexit itself is in on the joke.

In many ways, modern British politics doesn't fit easily into the tradition of humour represented by 'Yes Minister' or 'Spitting Image'

How, for example, do you satirise Jacob Rees-Mogg as a cartoon Etonian when he is happy to stand up in parliament to berate a fellow MP for Wykehamist tendencies? Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, too, rather obviously revel in self-parodic images that they have cultivated over many years and burnished with appearances alongside Ian Hislop and Paul Merton on the panel show Have I Got News for You.

"Every joke is a tiny revolution," wrote George Orwell in his 1945 essay " Funny, but not Vulgar ", and you want to agree - but what to do when the politicians are laughing along? One response is to go in harder. You can see something of this in the savage metaphor-building of Marina Hyde and Frankie Boyle; it is there, too, in the strange oeuvre of Coldwar Steve, whose photomontages of politicians and celebrities collectively paint a picture of modern Britain that is both dystopian and bathetic.

Orwell might well have agreed with the strategy: indeed, his purpose in "Funny, but not Vulgar" was to celebrate the robust, raucous but morally serious satire of the early 19th century, before nonsense, whimsy and irony set the template that, he felt, had robbed his contemporaries of their bite.

It is at this point that I'm reminded of George Mikes, the Hungarian journalist and prolific writer on British humour, who in 1980 observed - ironically, of course - that British humour as it existed in the late 20th century was already an anachronism, the privilege of an imperial power rather than a scrappy medium-sized one fighting for its place in the world. As circumstances changed, he prophesied, its jokes would inevitably become more like those of the nations among which it jostled.

But British humour is always changing, as an exhibition like Laughing Matters makes abundantly clear. What makes us laugh after Brexit will be very different from what worked in the age of the silly walk, just as this had moved on from the days when the French traveller Jean Froissart could observe that the 14th-century English "amused themselves sadly, according to the custom of their country". Though perhaps the jokes, as sometimes happens, were simply lost in translation.
Lorien Kite is the FT's deputy Life & Arts editor Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

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Can Brexit Britain still laugh at itself?

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Long before Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island, travellers arriving in Britain would often find themselves perplexed by this rain-soaked corner of north-west Europe. Emotionally reticent, class-obsessed, a little repressed, the locals could make a bad first impression. Until, that is, they unleashed their all-redeeming superpower: a wry, sometimes surreal, often self-deprecating sense of humour.

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A very perceptive, entertaining video

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Stephen Fry on American vs British Comedy

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More on the plot against Prince Harry after his marriage to Meghan Markle.

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A teenager who described Prince Harry as a "race traitor" in an online post has been sentenced to four years and three months in a young offender institution.

Michal Szewczuk, a university student, created an image of Harry with a pistol to his head against a blood-covered background.

The picture, which also featured a swastika, was shared on a far-right social media platform in August last year, a few months after the prince married Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race. The post included the phrase "See ya later race traitor".

Szewczuk, 19, was ordered to be detained after pleading guilty to two counts of encouraging terrorism and five counts of possession of terrorist material, including the White Resistance Manual and an al-Qaida training manual.

He also wrote a blog, described as "extremely violent and aggressively misogynistic", which attempted to justify the rape of women and children in the pursuit of an Aryan race.

Szewczuk, from Bramley, Leeds, was sentenced at the Old Bailey alongside Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, 18, from Chiswick, west London, who had admitted two counts of encouraging terrorism.

The judge, Rebecca Poulet QC, said the pair promoted the violent ideology of rightwing groups influenced by neo-Nazism.

Referring to the image of Harry, the judge said: "The posts I have seen and read are abhorrent as well as criminal by reason of their clear intention to encourage terrorist acts."

She told Szewczuk: "Individuals were urged to go out and commit appalling acts of violence on others for no reason that can ever be understood by any right-thinking individuals."

Sentencing Dunn-Koczorowski to an 18-month detention and training order, Poulet said: "You still hold deeply entrenched views in support of this extreme rightwing ideology."

The defendants were both said to be of Polish descent, but had only known each other through online chatrooms.

They were arrested in December after posting images or links last summer influenced by extreme rightwing groups on Gab, a social media platform that attracts mainly far-right users.

One of the organisations, the Atomwaffen Division, was described as "a youth-driven, national socialist group at the extreme end of the revolutionary rightwing spectrum" and had been linked to five murders in the US since 2017, the court heard.

Dunn-Koczorowski, whose posts included support for the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik and the threat of the ethnic cleansing of Albanians, demonstrated a "highly radicalised and violent mindset", the court was told.

His lawyer, David Kitson, admitted Dunn-Koczorowski's mindset had not changed since the offences were committed, quoting from a medical report that said the teenager had a "lack of remorse" for his views and a "deeply entrenched ideology".

The prosecutor, Naomi Parsons, said the posts, made across three accounts by the two individuals, "convey a message of the threat of and/or use of serious violence against others, in order to advance a political, ideological and racial cause (neo-Nazism) and in this way encourage terrorism".

She told the court the targets included Jewish people, non-white people and anyone "perceived to be complicit in the perpetuation of multiculturalism".

Dunn-Koczorowski was 17 at the time of the offences and living at home.

Szewczuk, who was arrested at his halls of residence during his first year studying computer science at Portsmouth University, had a "difficult and disordered upbringing" and had experienced depression "for a considerable period", his lawyer, Adam Morgan, said.

The court heard he moved to the UK from Poland at the age of 10, living first in Northern Ireland and then England.

The defendants appeared in court via video link from Belmarsh prison and gave no reaction as they were sentenced.
Topics

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Teenager who called Prince Harry a 'race traitor' sentenced

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A teenager who described Prince Harry as a "race traitor" in an online post has been sentenced to four years and three months in a young offender institution. Michal Szewczuk, a university student, created an image of Harry with a pistol to his head against a blood-covered background.

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A shocking story that has rocked Russia and that sheds liught on the way domestic viiolenbce cases are often (not) handled:

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The case of three Russian sisters charged with the murder of their abusive father has drawn public outrage and shone a light on the way the Russian justice system handles domestic violence and sexual abuse cases.

Thousands have protested outside Russian embassies around the world with more than 200,000 signing an online petition urging prosecutors to drop murder charges against the Khachaturyan sisters.

If found guilty, the three girls, Krestina, Angelina and Maria, face a maximum prison sentence of 20 years in prison.

Advocates for victims of domestic violence say police routinely turn a blind eye to cases of domestic abuse, while preventive measures, such as restraining orders, are either lacking or not in wide use.

The three sisters, now aged 18, 19 and 20-years-old, were repeatedly beaten by their father Mikhail and sexually abused.

Court papers show their father kept a stockpile of knives, guns and rifles at home, despite having been diagnosed with a neurological disorder. He also repeatedly threatened neighbours and family with violence.

His actions, the sisters' lawyers said, pushed them to the brink one evening last summer.

Their father had decided that his living room wasn't tidy enough, so he summoned his three teenage daughters one by one and doused each with pepper spray.

They waited until their father fell asleep in his rocking chair and attacked him with a kitchen knife and a hammer.

He put up a fight, but died within minutes.

Prosecutors acknowledge the extraordinary violent circumstances that pushed the teenagers to attack and eventually kill their own father, but they insist that Maria, Angelina and Krestina should be tried for murder.

The sisters' lawyers meanwhile argue that they were acting in justified self-defence in circumstances of lasting abuse and life-threatening violence.

Krestina's lawyer Alexei Liptser said on the first day they met "she said she's better off here, in jail, than living at home the way she had been."

The sisters have been released on bail and barred from seeing each other, witnesses in the case or the media.

They are, however, reportedly in good spirits. "At least, no one is beating them up," Mr Liptser says.

"The Khachaturyan case is quite indicative of the general situation with domestic violence and how the Russian state responds to this problem," said Yulia Gorbunova, who authored an extensive report on domestic violence for Human Rights Watch last year.

According to the court records, the three Khachturyan sisters were afraid that going to the police would make life worse.

They had shared some of their ordeals at home with school friends, but pleaded with them not to go to the authorities.

Russia does not have dedicated laws for domestic violence and two years ago decriminalised domestic battery for first-time offenders.

The number of women reporting domestic violence has since seen a sharp decrease.

In the year before they killed their father, the girls had attended less than two months of classes in total, yet the school administration also did not interfere.

Research on Russian criminal court cases compiled by media outlet Media Zona showed that out of 2,500 women convicted of manslaughter or murder in 2016 to 2018, nearly 2,000 killed a family member in a domestic violence setting.

Human Rights Watch has also documented cases where "a very clear case of self-defence" was not recognised as such by prosecutors and led to the victim's imprisonment.

"The choice is not whether you go to the police and get help," Ms Gorbunova said.

"The choice for these women was either to die or they had to protect themselves to the best of their ability."
Additional reporting by Associated Press

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Teenage girls charged with murder of abusive father sparks outrage in Russia

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The case of three Russian sisters charged with the murder of their abusive father has drawn public outrage and shone a light on the way the Russian justice system handles domestic violence and sexual abuse cases.

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The viral Russian anti-manspreading video

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The viral Russian anti-manspreading video

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A remarkable piece on the lengths people go to to create narratives around 'extremist feminism' and why they do so.

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A few weeks after it became a viral sensation around the world, a Russian video supposedly showing a woman dousing men in bleach for taking up too much space on the subway was revealed to be a fake - one with conspicuous ties to Russia's propaganda machine.

The video, first published by "In the Now," an arm of the Russian propaganda outlet RT, quickly went viral and was highlighted by outlets ranging from Fox News to Vice to Vocativ. And understandably so. The clip appeared to show a Russian activist named Anna Dovgalyuk dumping bleach on the laps of unsuspecting men to punish them for "manspreading," or spreading their legs too wide while sitting on the subway.

This Russian student threw bleach on men's crotches to stop their 'manspreading' on trains pic.twitter.com/fp0pdbABJM

- Vocativ (@vocativ) September 26, 2018

The first hints that the video may have been staged - and that the men were actually just doused with water - came a few days after it started to spread around the internet, with the Russian Rosbalt news agency suggesting the video may have been faked. Dovgalyuk denied the initial charges, claiming her "action is absolutely real."

Then over the weekend, "EU vs. Disinfo," an outlet dedicated to combating Russian propaganda efforts, highlighted a write-up from the Russian "Bumaga" outlet. As Bumaga found, one of the men supposedly drenched in bleach was paid for his efforts. The actor wrote on his VKontakte page that he came to the shoot "with two spare pants and [left] with a salary."

Rather than a viral moment of outrage captured on video, the clip now appears to be little more than the latest output of an ongoing disinformation campaign spearheaded by the Russian government. This time, the target was feminists - but the ultimate goal was to stoke the same type of social division fake Russian Facebook and Twitter feeds pursued around the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

New fakes, old strategies

There are several key red flags regarding the authenticity of the manspreading video. Not only has Dovgalyuk admitted she supports Russian President Vladimir Putin, but she has participated in separate pranks in the past. And as independent Russian outlet Meduza found, the production company allegedly behind the video, called My Duck's Vision, has its own conspicuous links to the Kremlin.

Foremost among the video's conspicuous connections is the fact that "In the Now," the outlet that initially popularized the post, is directly funded by the Russian government (something it goes out of its way to avoid mentioning).

"In the Now" posts little information regarding its financial ties to the Russian government. It doesn't have any RT branding on any of its social media accounts, nor on its videos.

As a video project of RT's Anissa Naouai, "In the Now" specializes in precisely the type of content viral markets eat up: clever, short, memorable clips designed for mass appeal. It's also grown remarkably popular, at least on Facebook, with nearly 3.3 million followers - significantly more than RT America's 1 million.

But as the Atlantic Council's DFR has found, "In the Now" has followed in RT's steps when it comes to conspiracy theories writ large

From spooky stories of George Soros - a new favorite of the American far-right - to claims that Hillary Clinton stole State Department furniture, to widely debunked assertions that Google was censoring anti-Clinton content, the output at "In the Now" is no different from regular RT fare. The only difference is the slick, bite-sized packaging and the lack of any obvious RT branding on "In the Now" content. (The revelations about the video came alongside a separate fracas involving RT's Washington correspondent Sameera Khan, who spent the weekend praising Stalin before deleting her Twitter account.)

And then there's the fact that the video, at its core, was designed to stoke social tensions, just as the fake Russian Facebook and Twitter feeds of 2016 (and beyond) attempted to do. The target this time: discourse around feminism. And in that sense, the video was a resounding success.

While the original video has since been removed from YouTube, look at the top comments on the "In the Now" post - which remains live and uncorrected:

"This is not a protest, it's assault. Maybe someone should pour bleach water on her for sticking her breasts out. Same thing."

"Not cool. And with bleach added. Aggression is not protesting. Most men sit this way for a reason, it's not directed at you (unless you're conceited? and think they all want you?) I will not 'share' this-no need to promote her message."

"But it's ok for her to wear short skirt and push up bra showing her femininity? Do they have any logic or capacity to think for themselves?"

"If I saw her do that to my husband she wouldn't be standing for long."

Anger, vitriol, frustration, misogyny - all there, prominent in the comments section. All because a handful of actors, a production studio, and a Russian propaganda machine decided it would be worth the effort.

Some of the outlets that originally and uncritically shared the video have since issued corrections, like Vocativ.

CORRECTION: Since publishing, this story has been shown to be false. The so-called bleach was in fact water, according to St Petersburg-based publication Bumaga, who reported that one of the men involved in the video, Stanislav Kudrin, was a paid actor. "They poured water on us,"

- Vocativ (@vocativ) October 9, 2018

But many of the other outlets, including Fox News and "In the Now," have ignored the revelations and left the material up uncorrected. All of which means future audiences can access the video without any information regarding its origins, and can react exactly the way its creators, and the propagandists behind it, hoped.

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Fake viral 'manspreading' video points to new tactic in Russian disinformation

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A few weeks after it became a viral sensation around the world, a Russian video supposedly showing a woman dousing men in bleach for taking up too much space on the subway was revealed to be a fake - one with conspicuous ties to Russia's propaganda machine.

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A pretty grim piece on the growing INCEL movement:

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First came Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who shot and stabbed six of his fellow students to death in a premeditated attack at the University of California in 2014. In a chilling final YouTube video, he explained his motive: furious that he was still a virgin, he wanted to punish women (an entire gender, no one in particular) for not being attracted to him and prove that he was "the true alpha male".

Rodger was a self-described ' incel' - short for 'involuntary celibate' - and his deadly attack brought attention to a hitherto under-explored global community of sexually frustrated men, irate at women who they believe deny them sex and relationships (although the term was originally coined more than two decades ago by a woman, who has since denounced its adoption by men). At least three mass killings in North America, which have mainly targeted women, have since been inspired by Rodger, including Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old with no criminal history, who murdered eight women and two men in April 2018 in north Toronto, citing Rodger as his inspiration. "The Incel Rebellion has already begun!... All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!" he posted on Facebook before his violent van rampage.

Despite existing largely online and often posting on public forums (some of which have up to 40,000 members), incels are a closed community who prefer to hide their true identities. Take a recent article on The Cut about the trend for extreme plastic surgery among incels vying to become conventionally attractive 'Chads', in which those interviewed insisted on anonymity and said things like: "I need a new social circle, a new identity, a new life. I've been thinking of leaving my country."

If these females aren't treating these guys with respect, they're gonna kill them... That's just life.

'Catfishman', an anonymous incel

Somehow, the team behind a new BBC Three documentary, Inside The Secret World Of Incels, managed to convince three self-described incels to share their stories on camera - and the results are disturbing.

"Maybe if Elliott Rodger wasn't bullied by females, none of that would have happened," says the first incel we meet, who goes by 'Catfishman' and admires Rodger because of his similar struggles on the dating scene. Catfishman, whose face remains covered throughout by a mask, describes himself as "a legend in the community" for the way he deceives women by posing as male models online and posting videos of the hostile IRL encounters. "If these females aren't treating these guys with respect, they're gonna kill them... That's just life."

Humiliating women in this way, often after receiving sexually explicit photos and videos from them, Catfishman says, is 'retribution' for the more than 100 rejections he's received from women: "It makes me feel good." He experiences other forms of gratification too - admitting to masturbating to the women's sexual pictures and videos, and describing the praise he receives from fellow incels for his confrontation videos as "way better than sex".

We also meet Matt from New York City, who was drawn to the incel community after unsuccessful attempts at dating. Matt describes his community online, on forums like Incelistan (a self-proclaimed "non-violent, gender inclusive incel forum"), as a "source of comfort". "It's beneficial to me in the sense that knowing that having dating problems" is "completely normal", he admits.

But Matt also talks us through the darker corners of the incel internet, where sanctioned rape and state-sponsored girlfriends are often discussed and memes and photoshopped images featuring Rodger are shared widely. From there, he believes, it's a "very slippery slope towards acts of violence".

Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, an expert in digital culture from the University of Kent, who has been researching misogyny online for the past five years and Rodger's actions for a year, says incels are a manifestation of the zeitgeist. "We live right now in the age of the hate crime", she explains, adding that Rodger's crime "flipped the switch" to turn the actions of a community that had previously operated mostly online to "a community that has the potential to carry out real acts of violence".

The police should be looking at this in the same way they look at religious extremism online.

Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, University of Kent

Unlike much existing coverage of the incel movement, Inside The Secret World Of Incels explains why so many men feel bitter and hateful enough towards women that they're willing to kill innocent people and even themselves (as in the case of Rodger) for their 'cause'. Many men feel alienated and isolated by mainstream society, Dr Regehr explains, while others are living difficulties like mental health issues ('mentalcels' are a subset of incels), autism or traumatic upbringings, all of which enhance their "risk of being sucked into the darker side, the more violent side" of the community.

"It's really easy to look at the incel community and say those guys are totally obsessed with sex, those guys feel entitled to sex, but it's not as simple as that. It's not just that they feel isolated by women, they feel isolated by society in general," Dr Regehr says. "For some, the online forums are a haven to joke, vent and find support in a world where they are struggling to find an identity and where gender relations are changing dramatically," she says.

Take the section of the incel internet that's fixated on 'looksmaxing' - like the forum Looksmax.me, which is dedicated "to the art of improving your appearance to achieve your greatest aesthetic potential". We meet James, a "kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin" (or KHHV in incel parlance) from County Down, Northern Ireland, who says he's an incel because his insecurities, anxiety, mental health problems and troubled upbringing stood in the way of his ability to form relationships with women.

It becomes more difficult to feel sympathy towards James, though, when he recites the song he wrote about Rodger during his "darkest point" a few years ago: "Elliot Rodger Meme Incel Trap Version 2", which is still available on Soundcloud. Smiling, he reads the lyrics: "Riding through the city like Elliot Rodger/ Can't stop me now/ Bitch, you ain't no bullet dodger..." He laughs: "Suck on my nuts as I blow out your guts."

Dr Regehr is worried that it's "very likely" we will see another attack in the name of involuntary celibacy soon. She cites a dearth of discussion around the mental health impact of digital culture as a key contributing factor. "The police should be looking at this in the same way they look at religious extremism online."

BBC Three's Inside The Secret World Of Incels is available on BBC iPlayer from Sunday 14th July.

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'Inside The Secret World Of Incels' - The Men Who Want To Punish Women

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First came Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old who shot and stabbed six of his fellow students to death in a premeditated attack at the University of California in 2014. In a chilling final YouTube video, he explained his motive: furious that he was still a virgin, he wanted to punish women (an entire gender, no one in particular) for not being attracted to him and prove that he was "the true alpha male".

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A good - if rather technical - piece on emerging issues in feminist architecture:

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Only resist: a feminist approach to critical spatial practice

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Since the 1990s, a radical and interdisciplinary approach to spatial practice offers a rich and productive seam for feminism and architecture

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A good piece on some of the key works / ideas in feminist linguistics:

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The first article I ever read that used THEY to refer to a person who indetified as gender neutral:

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Laura Rose might go to prison for an anti-fascist act of rebellion which has exacerbated a deep debate in a small Oregon town, but they say it wasn't premeditated.

"I didn't make a plan. I missed the bus," Rose says, raising their eyebrows under a battered cowboy hat.
Bishop Michael Curry: 'moderate religious voices' are not being heard
They - Rose is genderqueer - live an itinerant lifestyle, traveling around the US Pacific north-west. They had been staying in the small town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, (population 10,000) when they had heard about a violent neo-Nazi by the name of Jake Laskey who had been using a store, Wolfclan Armory, as a base of operations for reviving the American Front, one of the oldest white supremacist gangs in the country.

Laskey had a track record that included being sent to prison for attacking synagogues and threatening witnesses, and had published videos in which he made veiled threats against anti-fascists and journalists.

In Cottage Grove, public meetings had been organized by anxious residents. Leaflets and posters had distributed, and street protests outside the store had been organized.

Nothing had seemed to work, and Wolfclan Armory was open and trading on Main Street. Rose knew that although anti-fascists had successfully shut down openly fascist street marches in liberal cities on the east coast, things were different in rural America.

One day in June, as Rose walked back into town from the bus stop, they "realized I couldn't just walk past it again. I looked across the street and there were these American flags - 7ft long metal poles set out in sidewalk sconces in the lead-up to the 4th of July. They weren't locked down or anything."

Rose has been an environmental activist, but has not participated in mass anti-fascist actions like the ones that have taken place in Portland over the last year. But that day, they grasped the opportunity for a "symbolic act".

"I was like, I am gonna smash in these windows with an American flagpole, in broad daylight, and then I am going to go and sit down over there and I am going to deal with the consequences."

Before they acted, in a nearby pub, Rose drank a glass of mead, ate some hot soup and "waited for my hands to stop shaking".

"I walked down the street, and pulled the flag pole out of the ground. Then I walked back across the street and bashed the windows in. Some of them were reinforced plexiglass, like bulletproof stuff. So I couldn't break them, but I broke all the glass ones. Then I threw the big American flag through the window into the shop," Rose says.

"Then I walked back across the street. There was a public bench right there. I sat down and I waited for the cops," Rose says.

Within minutes, Cottage Grove police took them into custody. Rose is now facing a felony charge of criminal mischief, which carries a possible prison term.

Rose says they "don't advocate violence at all. I think of what I did as a forceful intervention, in which no living being was threatened. I wanted people to pay attention, to investigate these people, to find out what is unseen: 'Look here: this is evil at work in the world.'"

Progressive organizers and more radical groups have disagreed about the best way to respond when faced with white supremacists, and Rose's actions has dramatized that argument and raised a question: how far should a community go in fighting the far right?

In the towns nestled in Oregon's south Willamette Valley, neo-Nazis and assorted other far-right actors have been operating in the open throughout the Trump era - hate crimes in the area have doubled in the year following the 2016 election.

The Guardian spoke to many people in Cottage Grove who were fearful of the Laskeys' presence, and the possibility of attracting white supremacists to the town. So fearful, in fact, that few were willing to go on record.

When Wolfclan Armory registered the business with Oregon's secretary of state in 2016, they announced their intention to sell "KNIVES, SWORDS, TACTICLE [sic] AND SURVIVOR GEAR ETC".

Many of the knives are handcrafted by one of the Laskey boys, Gabriel. But it is their older son, Jake, who occasionally used them to commit violence. In January 2018, he illegally carried one and went on to assault his former comrade in Oregon's white supremacist movement, Devin Wolfe, stabbing him in the hand.

When he was arrested, photos taken there show him with a buzzcut, inked from his fingertips to his chin with white power tattoos, and wearing a T-shirt advertising the neo-Nazi group he had hoped to revive. When a deputy asked where he got the knife. Laskey replied: "What do you mean? I sell them."

We are trying to navigate the impulse to do whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe

Jake had also taken charge of Wolfclan's social media accounts to spread his poisonous ideology and threaten those who challenged him. On YouTube and Bitchute, Laskey issued a rambling and at times menacing series of videos, in which he described himself as an "anti-antifa supremacist".

Mostly they are filmed at Wolfclan's premises, and some of them feature Jake's brothers. Often, Jake would pose against the wall of knives. In one, challenging anti-fascists to confront him face to face, Jake Laskey says: "You guys wonder why I handle knives? Come and find out. You guys say I have a very violent history and I must be stopped. Well, stop me then. Stop me then, Antifa."

All indications were that until he went back to prison in September for stabbing Wolfe, Jake intended to continue this track record of violence.

Since its formation in 1983, members of the American Front have been responsible for racist beatings, bombings, and attempted murders.

In 2012, 10 members of the group were arrested in Florida, where they had been doing paramilitary training ahead of a projected "race war". (The anti-fascist group Rural Organizing Project, based in Cottage Grove, published a report on the group, warning of its reach.)

In 2010, in Norfolk Virginia, Christopher Brooks placed antisemitic stickers on the exterior of a synagogue and got five years for "injury to a church". Closer to Cottage Grove, Christopher Lord received a 54-month sentence on various charges related to his 1994 drive-by shooting on the Temple Beth Israel synagogue in Eugene.

In 2002, Jake Laskey would attack the same synagogue in the company of his brother, Gabriel. At that time, they were members of another white power gang, Volksfront. (Photographs obtained by the Guardian show him with other members of that group throwing fascist salutes and posing with weapons.)

On 25 October of that year, Jake, his brother Gabriel and two other men threw swastika-engraved rocks at Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, in the middle of a Friday service. While awaiting trial for the 2002 attack, Jake doubled down on the violence. County jail surveillance caught him threatening to kill witnesses, including the woman who he would later marry when he got out of jail, Amanda Laskey.

In court documents from his trial, prosecutors said that a police search of Laskey's car found more knives, these ones "designed in the manner of Aryan or German weaponry". They also said Laskey was involved in "efforts to indoctrinate youth" at a local high school.

For the synagogue attack and the threats, Jake was sentenced to 11 years in a federal prison. Between 2007 and 2015, he served eight.

Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein, who leads Temple Beth Israel in Eugene, which Jake Laskey attacked in 2015, says that recent far right activity in the area in the last two years has brought about "a level of anxiety. I think we are trying to navigate the impulse to do whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe, and the moral courage it takes to stand in solidarity with other targeted groups."

When Jake got out of prison, he started promoting the American Front aggressively. A Facebook photo republished by an anti-fascist group shows Jake at Wolfclan with Steve Shallenberger, a far-right skinhead who beat a black man in Portland while yelling "KKK" in 1992.

Jake was also using the American Front's social media account to promote national far right gatherings, like the Hammerskin music festival in Boise, Idaho in September 2017. During his period outside prison, he was pictured with Hammerskins members, all wearing the American Front T-shirts.

Meanwhile, throughout 2017 and 2018, in surrounding towns and cities, neo-Nazis were becoming bolder and more confident.

The longtime white supremacist campaigner Jimmy Marr co-wrote a Holocaust-denying book with Jake. He also seemed to take credit for anti semitic banners hung on freeways around Eugene in 2018.

In February, Andrew Oswalt, who was a teaching assistant at Oregon State University in Corvallis, faced hate crimes charges over a neo-Nazi stickering campaign targeting civil rights activists.

In April, a neo-Nazi folk singer who billed himself as Byron De La Vandal was identified by anti-fascists and the Eugene Weekly as Evan McCarty, a luminary of the local musical theater scene.

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Counter protesters at the Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington DC in August. Photograph: Zach Gibson/AFP/Getty Images

In this atmosphere, Wolfclan's move to Cottage Grove from the nearby town of Creswell earlier this year had caused a wave of public consternation, even before the store opened.

Residents expressed their anger and concern at public meetings, and some took matters into their own hands. In March, one woman, Venice Mason, staged a picket outside the store. She claimed that the Laskeys shared their son Jake's beliefs, and supported his activities.

In response, Jake's mother Jeanette Laskey issued the first of many denials that they were white supremacists. She told the Cottage Grove Sentinel: "We're Christians." She told KEZI, a local TV station, that "it seems like our son can't live down his past, even though he's tried to".

She denied there was any fascist symbolism in the store's name or logo, saying that it was named after another son, Elias, who committed suicide in 2000. "My son was a lone wolf ... that's why we're the Wolfclan," she told KEZI. (Attempts by the Guardian for comment from Jeanette and Allen Laskey through their son, Gabriel, were unsuccessful).

Following this, community groups worked - sometimes at cross purposes - to put pressure on the landlords, city authorities, anyone who could stop the store moving to town.

The national context hung over local activism. While Donald Trump had famously argued that there " some very fine people " among the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville in 2017, he, conservative media, and groups like the NRA had relentlessly demonized any radical responses to such groups.

I think there is a lot of passivity in modern America. People don't think for themselves

Inevitably, this rubbed off on the opinions of conservative residents of towns like Cottage Grove. Some worried about a backlash to actions that pressed too hard on the Laskeys.

While they had deep disagreements over tactics, all of those opposing the Laskeys' presence in Cottage Grove agreed that, at the very least, the elder Laskeys had effectively condoned Jake's organizing by allowing him to do it with the business's accounts. Some suspected he had their blessing, pointing to the decades in which Jake's (and earlier, Gabriel's) far-right organizing had happened under their noses.

Cottage Grove's local progressive activists tried to enlist support from local businesses and community leaders, while more radical anti-fascist groups urged a more confrontational approach.

A progressive coalition, Cottage Grove Community United, printed posters, held community meetings, enlisted faith groups, and generally tried to mobilize the community to oppose the store. They also tried to lobby city authorities to prevent the store opening. A statement from the group to the Guardian says that "a lot of people were concerned to see a business with strong links to white supremacy move onto Main Street. The goal of our group however, is to fight against racism and other hate however it shows its face in Cottage Grove."

They explain that their approach has been resolutely peaceful: "Our focus to date has been on reaching out to businesses and community members, as well as educating ourselves and others about white supremacy."

But legal and peaceful means have thus far been met with the reluctance of city authorities to get involved. Though Cottage Grove has a strong, progressive element, many residents and city leaders are conservative-leaning, or inclined to leave the Laskeys be.

Cottage Grove's mayor, Jeff Gowing, said in a telephone interview that "we uphold the constitution. The Oregon constitution doesn't allow us to dictate what businesses come into town."

His comments were in line with warnings emailed to city councillors by city manager, Richard Meyers, in March. Meyers wrote "the city has no authority to approve or disapprove the use of property by Wolfclan Armory" and told councillors to take care with their public statements lest they "put the city into a liability situation".

Into this impasse, Rose threw a flagpole.

Cottage Grove Community United distanced themselves from Rose immediately after their action at Wolfclan.

The next day, they posted on their Facebook page that the group "does not condone violence of any sort and we are dismayed by the events of 6/11/2018 at Wolfclan Armory. Our goal is to promote peaceful actions of positive community involvement that build understanding, trust and open communication."

Eugene Antifa, who do anti-fascist organising in nearby Eugene, were more supportive. In an email, a spokesperson repeated the allegation that they have consistently made: "The Laskey family has a long history of being active in and funding white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. The tolerant left of Cottage Grove has been unsuccessful in removing this hive from their community.

"While other organizations have denounced Laura Rose's actions, we support a variety of tactics including property damage and certainly support Laura Rose's actions."

These different responses reflect persistent philosophical and political disagreements over appropriate responses to fascism in liberal and leftis

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'This is evil at work': how should a small town react to neo-Nazis?

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Laura Rose might go to prison for an anti-fascist act of rebellion which has exacerbated a deep debate in a small Oregon town, but they say it wasn't premeditated. "I didn't make a plan. I missed the bus," Rose says, raising their eyebrows under a battered cowboy hat.

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A good piece on the new wave of angry young female punk bands here:

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"Women and non-binary people, come to the front," Janey Starling, lead singer of the feminist punk group Dream Nails, shouts to a thumping beat.

The crowd at the Solace Women's Aid fundraiser at a pub in north London oblige, with women moving closer to the stage and a few sheepish-looking men shuffling out of the way. "What we're trying to say is, men at the back," Starling continues. "Make some space for once in your life."

Dream Nails, who describe themselves as "punk witches", formed in 2015, shortly after the Conservative government won a majority in parliament. They are one of many bands to explode on to the DIY punk scene in the UK, led and dominated by women demanding to be seen and heard.

The scene is not just about picking up an instrument and performing, it's also tied to feminist action groups such as Sisters Uncut. Bands are creating their own merchandise, including t-shirts and badges, and producing zines that tackle issues from violence against women to masturbation. According to Dream Nails guitarist Anya Pearson, groups like hers come from a long line of brilliant feminist punk bands that have been contributing to the culture for the last four decades.

Anya Pearson (guitar and backing vocals); Janey Starling (lead vocals); Lucy Katz (drums); front pink suit: Mimi Jasson (bass & backing vocals). Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

The Sex Pistols and the Ramones brought a lot of attention to punk, then largely an underground movement, in the 1970s, inspiring a wide range of other people who had something to say to pick up any instrument and form a band. But female-fronted bands, such as the Slits, X-Ray Spex and Siouxsie and the Banshees, were also making their mark. A decade later, the Riot Grrrl movement burst on to the scene, featuring songs about rape, domestic violence and political activism.

With nearly a decade of austerity and the rise of the #MeToo movement, Dream Nails say it is no surprise that there's a resurgence of women in punk as the anger on the streets has spilled on to the stage.

"It's come from a place where women are saying 'fuck it' because the stakes are so high. I've got all this rage that I need to let out or I'm going to explode. Once you create spaces where that can happen, it's contagious and others want to do it, too," Starling said.

James Sherry, who set up Division PR, which promotes many punk bands and the Rebellion Festival, says: "There's definitely a resurgence of really angry female punk bands. We're starting to see, with austerity and Brexit, a lot more younger bands coming in and talking about politics.

"While bands like Dream Nails are currently bubbling underground, there's a lot of potential for them to hit the mainstream."

Several musicians credit the DIY space for London and First Timers, a two-day festival that supports people from marginalised communities to form bands, in bringing new life and diversity to the DIY punk scene. Rhianydd Yorkwilliams, a guitarist for the band Charmpit who also helps organise First Timers, said that since 2013, nearly 90 bands will have debuted through the festival.

As well as help forming a band, Nadia Vogel, a bassist and singer at Jellie Rolls, said First Timers helped foster a strong community, where people share instruments, contacts for promoters and the press, and help each other negotiate pay. Most established bands also invite newer ones to be supporting acts in their gigs.

Nadia Javed, the frontwoman of the band The Tuts, which formed in 2012, said the feminist punk scene was non-existent when they started, but there were now plenty of gigs catering to the scene every month. She added the DIY spirit is a form of necessity for bands like hers. "Nobody gave a fuck about us at first," Javed said, "even till this day, we still do everything in-house because, if you want a job done properly, you've got to do it yourself."

Nadia Javed and Harriet Doveton of The Tuts play the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire in 2017. Photograph: Lorne Thomson/Redferns

For Steph Phillips, the singer and guitarist of the black feminist punk band Big Joanie, the DIY punk scene is about taking back power. "People don't listen to you in society. I'd be playing to a room of white people, but because I have a mic, they have to look at you, they have to listen to you. It's interesting to have that dynamic turn around because of music, because of punk," she said.

Big Joanie, who formed in 2013, usually start their gigs with Token, a tongue-in-cheek song about white people who only have one black friend and never interrogate why that is. Phillips says while punk music has always been political, it's long ignored its lack of racial diversity.

"There wasn't really a conversation about race. People kind of alluded to being political and being leftist, but ignored this big elephant in the room," she said. Her bandmate, bass player Estella Adeyeri, said: "Britain has never been that comfortable discussing race. I like we start with that [Token] and you can't get away from it."

The scene is not without its issues, and each band member has their own story of sexist male sound engineers or belittling fans. It's the anger and frustration that draws many women to the scene, Starling adds, but it's the joy on fans' faces that keeps her coming back.

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'I've got all this rage': the feminist punk groups demanding to be heard

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"Women and non-binary people, come to the front," Janey Starling, lead singer of the feminist punk group Dream Nails, shouts to a thumping beat. The crowd at the Solace Women's Aid fundraiser at a pub in north London oblige, with women moving closer to the stage and a few sheepish-looking men shuffling out of the way.

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Brining toxic masculinity into the public arena through advertising:

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The wonderful Grayson perry, who wrote abook called THE DESCENT OF MAN, which had a huge impact on me personaly, discussing masculinity.

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A great article about the appalling way the police still handle reports of stalking.

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Illustration by Calum Heath
Every year, women in the UK are killed by stalkers and domestic abusers-despite previously reporting them to the police. Unfollow Me is a campaign from Broadly to highlight the under-reported issue of stalking and domestic abuse in support of anti-stalking charity Paladin's calls to introduce a Stalkers Register in the UK. Follow all of our coverage here.
Exclusive data obtained by Broadly under British Freedom of Information laws reveal the shocking failures of police forces across the UK to protect victims of stalking and domestic abuse. Our data reveals that 55 women were killed in the three years between 2015 and 2017 despite reporting their killers to police for threatening behavior prior to their deaths.

Broadly asked every police force in the UK how many women had reported an abusive partner, ex-partner, or stalker to police for threatening behavior and went on to be killed by that individual in the last three years.

Our figures reveal a widespread police failure to protect victims of domestic abuse and stalking. Many of the women who reached out to police for assistance prior to their deaths could be alive today, had their concerns been taken seriously.

Some police forces performed worse than others when it came to protecting women from domestic abusers and stalkers. Nine women under the jurisdiction of West Yorkshire Police-the fourth largest police force in England and Wales-were killed by their partner, ex-partner or stalker over the last three years despite reporting them to the police. Two deaths occurred in 2015, four in 2016, and three in 2017.
Watch: Unfollow Me: The Story of Alice Ruggles
This was followed by Avon and Somerset Constabulary, which is responsible for policing in cities including Bath and Bristol. The force reported a total of seven such deaths occurring over the last three years. Police Scotland, the national police service of Scotland, told Broadly that six women were killed by a partner or ex-partner over the last three years.

North Wales Police told Broadly that there were a total of five deaths in their jurisdiction over the same time frame. Merseyside Police, which oversees policing in Liverpool and is the eighth largest police force in England and Wales, reported a total of four deaths over the three year period.

Laura Richards, the founder of the anti-stalking charity Paladin, says of the 55 deaths: "These figures are unacceptable. Many of the men identified through these figures will be serial abusers who target multiple victims, over time escalating to murder. These are the most dangerous of cases-they are murders in slow motion-yet women are still not being believed or taken seriously when they report to police."

Thirty-one out of 45 territorial police forces in the UK responded to Broadly's requests for information, with the rest failing to respond within the statutory 20 working day time limit mandated by the Freedom of Information Act.

Twenty-nine forces were able to provide us with the specific information we requested. South Yorkshire Police told Broadly that our request exceeded the cost limit, and Hertfordshire Constabulary said that they did not hold the information on file.

You can find all of our data, and see how your local police force performed if you are based in the UK, on unfollowme.vice.com.

Some of the women identified by our data were killed by partners or ex-partners with long histories of escalating abuse against multiple women, like mother-of-two Kerri McAuley, 32, who was murdered by her boyfriend Joe Storey, 27, in January 2017.

Storey had eight previous convictions for offences against four women, including one case in which he punched a pregnant ex-girlfriend in the stomach. When sentencing Storey to life in prison, the presiding judge described the case as one of the worst examples of domestic violence the court had ever seen.

Violent and dangerous men like him are allowed to bounce from partner to partner, their attacks increasing in frequency and severity-and ending with sometimes fatal consequences.

Like McAuley, business development director Zoe Dronfield began a relationship with a man with a prior history of abuse. Unlike McAuley, Dronfield, 41, from Coventry, narrowly escaped with her life after her ex-partner Jason Smith brutally assaulted her in February 2014.

In an eight-hour ordeal, Smith stabbed Dronfield in the neck, stamped on her head, and slashed her wrists. Dronfield sustained a brain haemorrhage, a stab wound to her neck, a broken nose, and a cracked eye socket. Her right arm was also snapped.

Dronfield believes that she could have avoided her injuries if the police had taken her more seriously. After Smith was convicted of grievous bodily harm with intent and criminal damage, she learned that Smith was a serial perpetrator who was known to the police for his violent and controlling behavior towards previous partners. Dronfield had previously reported Smith to police for stalking, but says she felt ignored.

"In my case, police officers would make jokes while Smith was stalking me and making my life a misery," she tells Broadly. "They'd say things like, 'Why don't you find yourself a nice boyfriend?'"

Dronfield says that Smith would call her hundreds of times a day and leave voicemails threatening to take his own life unless she met with him. "The police knew all of this but over and over again it was minimized," she says, "until one day I decided to meet up with Smith and try to talk some sense into him. That nearly cost me my life."

West Midlands Police, the force responsible for investigating Dronfield's case, acknowledge that the shortcomings in their handling of her case. "We are very familiar with Zoe's case and recognize, as a force, we could have done more to support her at the time," Detective Inspector Jenny Bean told Broadly. "We have listened to Zoe and she has since worked with West Midlands Police, having presented at a conference on stalking so that police and partner agencies can learn from her experience."

Anti-violence campaigners argue that authorities desperately need to change how they treat domestic abuse and stalking victims. One of the women identified by our Freedom of Information data is Melinda Korosi, a 33-year-old woman who told Cumbria Police that her ex-partner Miklos Verebes had raped her. He was arrested and released without charge in September 2016, and subsequently broke into Korosi's house and battered her to death with a sharpened rock.

An investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), now known as the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), judged that two Cumbria Police officers had cases to answer for misconduct. The pair were sanctioned by police management but retained their jobs.

"This data shows that even when women try to get help and report violent partners, they are failed," says Rachel Krys of the End Violence Against Women Coalition.

She argues that all professionals-not just police, but healthcare workers, teachers, and social workers-need to be trained in how to spot signs of abuse and provide help to women at risk of harm.

"Our culture of minimizing and disbelieving victims of violence must end," Krys says. "Women often have a very good understanding of the risks they face and they should be believed and supported when they raise the alarm and call for help.

Broadly asked the Home Office-the government department responsible for policing-to comment on the figures. "Domestic abuse and stalking are abhorrent crimes, which is why this Government is working to protect victims and stop perpetrators at the earliest opportunity," a spokesperson told us. "The police response to domestic abuse has improved in recent years."

"However we recognize that there is more to do, which is why we have committed to bringing forward a draft of a Domestic Abuse Bill to transform the national response to this horrendous crime. The Stalking Protection Bill will bring into law new civil Stalking Protection Orders (SPOs) to protect victims and halt perpetrators at the earliest opportunity." Under these measures, stalking victims can ask the courts to impose restrictions on their stalker, and breaching such an SPO would result in jail time. Paladin have welcomed the new policy, but does not feel they go far enough to protect victims.

While our data indicates a widespread failure to protect women, important lessons that might prevent future homicides are left unlearned because of the way police failings are investigated.

Police forces in the UK are often able to investigate their own officers for potential misconduct. While the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) was set up to assess allegations of police failures, it can also refer cases back to the Professional Standards Department (PSD) of the relevant force for self-investigation. In essence, police forces are allowed to investigate themselves for misconduct, rather than being externally audited by independent investigators.

Broadly asked each police force to provide details of whether the killings they reported had been referred to the IOPC for investigation, and what the outcome of each investigation had been. Just 17 cases out of a total of 55 deaths were referred to the IOPC for investigation. In these 17 cases, Broadly was able to identify just four cases in which officer failings were found, and sanctions or training were proscribed. In at least six cases, potential failings referred to the IOPC were referred back to the police forces for self-investigation.

Richards believes that referring cases back to the police force for investigation creates an ameliorated picture of police misconduct in cases of stalking and domestic abuse. "The IOPC needs to have the confidence of the public to do an independent review, and there needs to be accountability," she says. "If you're not real about where things have gone wrong, how do things get better? How do you learn if you're sugar-coating the truth?"

"If I'd known about Smith's past history with police, I'd never have continued a relationship with him."

A spokesperson for the IOPC told Broadly: "Our specialist unit carries out a thorough assessment of each referral and determines whether an independent investigation or a local investigation by the force is appropriate.

"In the last two years or so, with additional resources, we have been carrying out significantly more independent investigations into serious cases. Forces are obliged to re-refer any conduct matters to us that emerge during the course of their investigation. They also send us any final investigation reports relating to deaths or serious injuries for review."

Campaigners like Dronfield argue that a Stalkers Register would have helped to protect many of the 55 women identified by our data. Under the proposals, those with multiple convictions for stalking and domestic abuse would be tracked and monitored by police in a private database, and future partners warned of their history of violent offending.

Dronfield believes that such a register would have warned her off Smith and kept her safe. "If I'd known about Smith's past history with police, I'd never have continued a relationship with him," she says, adding that being on a database would have curtailed his violent outbursts. "His behavior escalated over time with different relationships because there was no accountability for his actions. In his eyes, he was above the law. The register would send a clear message that this kind of offending is unacceptable."

According to one recent study, 94 percent of female homicide victims are stalked prior to being killed. Abusive behavior commonly escalates over time, meaning that key warning signs would be evident to police and authorities if serial perpetrators were being tracked and monitored. The report's authors identify common markers of homicidal intentions, including threats of suicide, threats to kill, isolation of the victim, and strangulation assaults. ("You were trying to kill me, you were suffocating me until I nearly passed out," McAuley texted Storey before she was murdered.)

Anti-stalking campaigners also believe that police need to dramatically change the way they manage serial stalkers and domestic abusers. "There is an ingrained attitude in frontline police that needs to change," Dronfield argues. "Some police forces are a 'boy's club' that doesn't take the victim's experience seriously."

Paladin has been leading the calls for a Stalkers Register. A petition for its introduction currently stands at over 150,000 signatures, and has been backed by parliamentarians from across the political divide, including Labour peers Baroness Jan Royall and Baroness Anita Gale, the Conservative peer Baroness Diana Barran MBE, and the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Brian Paddick.

Richards believes that a Stalkers Register would track dangerous individuals and prevent their behavior from escalating to murder or serious injury. "The same mistakes and patterns repeat," she says. "We are told that 'lessons will be learned' [by police], but they rarely are."

She says that a register that manages and tracks violent and dangerous offenders is the answer. "Urgent systemic change is needed where information about a serial perpetrators must routinely be put on the intelligence database, ViSOR (the Violent and Sexual Offenders Register), and serial perpetrators proactively managed via multi-agency Public Protection Arrangements, in a similar way to how sex offenders are currently managed in the UK."

"This will save lives and money."
If you are being stalked and you are based in the UK, you can call Paladin on 020 3866 4107. If you are based in the US, you can call the Stalking Resource Center at the National Center for Victims of Crime on 855-484-2846.
Update: This article originally stated that 49 women in the UK were killed. Police Scotland sent Broadly their Freedom of Information data after publication. The original figure has now been updated to 55 reflect that information, and additional information about the Police Scotland number has been added to the piece. Information about the Metropolitan Police's response has also been added.
This article originally appeared on Broadly.

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55 British Women Were Killed By Men They Previously Reported to Police

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Illustration by Calum Heath Every year, women in the UK are killed by stalkers and domestic abusers-despite previously reporting them to the police. Unfollow Me is a campaign from Broadly to highlight the under-reported issue of stalking and domestic abuse in support of anti-stalking charity Paladin's calls to introduce a Stalkers Register in the UK.

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A pretty grim article against violence against women here:

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he latest census on femicide - women killed by men - has shown that during 2017, a staggering 139 women in the UK died as a result of male violence. But nobody joined the dots between these cases except for feminists campaigning against male violence towards women. Despite there being an obvious link between the misogynistic culture under which brutal - and often fatal - male violence occurs, the UK government has never made the connection that these women die because men's violence towards women and girls is a global pandemic.

The resistance to legally making misogyny a hate crime (currently under review) is partly down to the fact that it is such a huge everyday reality that it seems impossible to enforce. If the police did their job and treated every domestic violence incident as a potential fatality, we might prevent some deaths of vulnerable women and children. But to end the deaths of women relating to domestic violence, there needs to be a robust criminal justice response that intervenes at the earliest stages.

Karen Ingala Smith, one of the authors of the report and founder of the brilliant campaign Counting Dead Women, has become friends with some of the family members of the victims and sees how their pain never goes away: "I watch the anniversaries of the murder of their daughter/sister/aunt come around and the never-ending awfulness. It breaks my heart to see it".

Between 2015 and 2017, some 55 women were killed despite having previously reported their murderers to the police for threatening behaviour, according to freedom of information reports. There is a clear connection between different forms of men's violence against women. Domestic violence, sexual assault and prostitution come from the same place of male entitlement, ownership and access. If we really want to end male violence towards women, we need to think radically.

Even with the best police and criminal justice responses possible, if men continue to see women and children as their property, and believe that women exist to satisfy them sexually, then the rape and murder of women will never end.

Three-quarters of the victims last year were killed by a man they knew. Almost half of the killers were partners or former partners of their victim. These men cannot bear the thought that a woman has rejected them - because after all, in the violent, controlling mind of the perpetrator, she belonged to him. This is misogyny in its clearest form.

Take the case of Janbaz Tarin, who fatally stabbed his ex-partner Raneem Oudeh and her mother Khaola Saleem outside their home in August. Raneem had recently left Tarin after discovering he had a secret wife in Afghanistan with whom he had three children and a fourth on the way. To a man such as Tarin, if he can't get what he wants and his "property" dares to defy him, she must be destroyed.

Ten of the 139 murdered women were killed by their sons. A further seven were killed by another male family member (grandson, uncle or brother), and 24 were killed by a man they knew (neighbour, acquaintance, colleague). Twenty women were over the age of 66 when they were killed, whether by a partner, son, grandson or by neighbours or burglars. In some cases, the victims were raped and their homes burgled prior to being killed.

Twenty-one of the 30 women killed by strangers were murdered in terrorist attacks, which some feminists have linked to male violence towards women on account of the number of men convicted of terror attacks who also have a history of domestic violence.

The brutality used by the perpetrators is highlighted in the report and named as "overkill", because almost half (42%) of the cases used multiple methods of murder such as beating, stabbing, strangling and setting on fire - in other words, the use of gratuitous violence far greater than that necessary to end life. One woman was stabbed 175 times and another hit 40 times with an axe, bludgeoned repeatedly and battered virtually beyond all recognition. Additionally, a number of cases involved desecration, mutilation and the hiding of the body after death.

This shows hate and rage towards the victim, which is at odds with the accommodating and exculpatory narrative that often accompanies men's killings, for example that he "just flipped", was "upset", "lost the love of his life", was "depressed" or "momentarily lost control".

This is also completely at odds with all the cases we deal with at Justice for Women, where women who kill their abuser inflict one single stab wound in a desperate culmination of self-defence after years of receiving domestic abuse.

Pornography and the culture of woman-hating it promotes also plays its part. In a number of cases in the report, the male killer was discovered to be a prolific porn user, with some of these using the defence that the victim supposedly liked "rough sex".

Women in danger from violent men need to be protected, and the abuser prevented from accessing her and other women he may target. Specialist feminist projects with an expertise in violence towards women should be the ones running refuges and other support services, and not generic housing projects with no skills in the area.

Like all other forms of men's violence against women, femicide is often accepted as inevitable and normal. Yet each one of those women matters. They matter individually and collectively. We must mourn each and every one of the dead, and name their killers as terrorists in the war against women.

Julie Bindel is a freelance journalist and political activist, and a founder of Justice for Women

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A war on women is raging in the UK - the femicide statistics prove it | Julie Bindel

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he latest census on femicide - women killed by men - has shown that during 2017, a staggering 139 women in the UK died as a result of male violence. But nobody joined the dots between these cases except for feminists campaigning against male violence towards women.

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Here's the handout I used in class.

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Here's the Powerpoint I used in class

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Thatcherism

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What is the the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died today?

The 1980s is increasingly being seen as deep history - 50% of the Datablog team were born in the late 1980s and were just toddling into school when she resigned in November 1990.

If the past is a foreign country (they do things differently there), there is nowhere more foreign than May 1979, when the Conservatives entered Downing Street. In fact, it's getting increasingly difficult to tell - many of the datasets we rely on now weren't compiled until the early 1990s. So what kind of Britain did the country's first woman prime minister come to rule in 1979 - and how has it changed?

These are some of the datasets which actually go back that far - mostly from the Office for National Statistics, and some from the excellent British Political Facts.

She may or may not have caused it, but Britain under Thatcher saw huge economic, demographic and cultural change. These are just some of the facts.

The UK was a smaller country then - 56.2m people lived here, compared to 62.3m people in 2010. That had been pretty stagnant since 1970, actually going down for four years before 1979 as the economy faltered. During the first years of Thatcher's reign, fewer people came to live in the UK - acceptances for settlement went down from 69,670 in 1979 to 53,200 by the time she resigned in 1990. Since then, the economy has boomed and eastern European countries have joined the EU. In fact, for much of the decade there were more people leaving the UK than coming here. Now it is the reverse. Net migration now is at a record high.

The population has changed too. There are no accurate figures for the UK's ethnic breakdown before the 1991 census, so we can't say what Britain's ethnic mix was. By the 2001 census, four years after the end of the Conservatives in power, the UK's population was 92.1% white. According to the latest ONS estimates, that figure has gone down now as Britain becomes more diverse; 83.35% of England and Wales is now defined as "white British".

We're living longer - life expectancy overall went up from 70.3 for men and 76.4 for women in 1979 by three years for both sexes by 1990. In a developed country, life expectancy should go up as medicine improves and the economy grows. But in 1985 it went down briefly, as it did again in 1993, both after huge recessions.

There are more of the super-old around now. Some 15% of babies born in 1979 would live to reach 100 - that figure is 26% now.

Ironically for a prime minister who focussed so much on family life, the 1980s saw the end of the traditional family unit for many. Divorce rates reached 13.4 per 1,000 married population in 1985, although that wasn't as high as the peak of 1994 after the recession. They have gone down now. The most recent figures show that 119,589 people got divorced in 2010, roughly half of the number of people who got married the same year.

Of course, fewer people are getting married now - only 231,490 in the latest year, down from 368,853 in 1979, which was the highest figure since the war brides of 1940.

Which also means less babies being born to a traditional family unit too - in 1979, only 12.5% of babies were born outside marriage. By 1991 that had gone up to 29.8%.

As Britain learnt to come to terms with the idea of "no such thing as society", unemployment shot up under the Conservatives to levels not seen since the Great Depression. The figures show how it lags behind the economy - even after the recession was over, many were unemployed.

Britain got hit by two major recessions under Thatcher, which sandwiched the boom of the 1980s but even that boom never saw GDP grow by more than a couple of percent. Obviously in 2013, George Osborne would kill for growth of 2.2%.

If the deficit is the obsession of this government, in 1979 it was inflation, which had rocketed into the twenties in the 1970s.

The figures show how it went down under the Conservatives - after a struggle as it rose to 21% in the 1980s - decreases which largely continued under Labour and have only just started to reverse.

Perceived wisdom is also that manufacturing disappeared under Thatcher. If so, it was something that had already started. In 1970, manufacturing accounted for 20.57% of UK GDP. By 1979 that was down to 17.62% of GDP. By the time she left office, that decline had continued - albeit at a slightly slower pace, down to 15.18%. Now it is much lower, according to the ONS - down to 9.68% in 2010.

Thatcher never tried the scale of austerity cuts facing the UK coalition government now. In fact if you look at spending as a percentage of GDP it actually rose in her first years of power, going down during the 1980s before rising in the early 1990s under John Major and chancellor Kenneth Clarke. Her reign actually ended with more of the workforce employed in the public sector than now - 23.1% as opposed to around 20% now.

She may have been our first prime minister but men still ended her decade paid a lot more than women - especially if you look at the bald figures below.

However, if you change it and look at women's full-time pay as a percentage of male full time pay it shows women working full time in 1990 paid 76% male full-time pay - up from 73%. It has improved since then - in 2011 it was 84.8%.

One of the defining features of the 1980s was the rise of the house price economy, especially with the sales of council houses.

At the same time, interest rates rose to record levels of 17% and repossessions rose to match.

In 1991, 75,500 properties were repossesed, the peak, and 186,649 cases reached the courts.

The unions were a major force in 1970s Britain, with around one in four of the UK population a member - 13.2m people. Those numbers went down significantly by 1990 to 9.8m - and in 2008/9 to 7.4m or one in eight of the population.

At the same time days lost to industrial disputes shot down too - from around 900,000 a month when Thatcher became prime minister to 183,000 in November 1990 - albeit with millions of days lost in the miner's strike.

Poverty went up under Thatcher, according to these figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In 1979, 13.4% of the population lived below 60% of median incomes before housing costs. By 1990, it had gone up to 22.2%, or 12.2m people, with huge rises in the mid-1980s.

With it came a huge rise in inequality. This shows the gini coefficient, which is the most common method of measuring inequality. Under gini, a score of one would be a completely unequal society; zero would be completely equal. Britain's gini score went up from 0.253 to 0.339 by the time Thatcher resigned.

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How Britain changed under Margaret Thatcher. In 15 charts

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What is the the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, who died today? The 1980s is increasingly being seen as deep history - 50% of the Datablog team were born in the late 1980s and were just toddling into school when she resigned in November 1990.

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During her years as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher revolutionised the economic fortunes of every person in the UK.

Giving people the right to buy their council houses and shares in previously nationalised firms such as British Telecom and British Gas were among the initiatives that won her much support.

But some believe that other changes, such as those that made mortgages and credit much easier to get, sowed the seeds of future crises that still affect many to this day.

Here, BBC reporters look at some of the changes that, for better or worse, have changed our finances forever.

Right to buy
By Brian Milligan, personal finance reporter, BBC News.
The Right to Buy Scheme for council houses was one of Margaret Thatcher's most popular policies.

It was enshrined in the Housing Act of 1980, making it one of her first major pieces of legislation after she came to office in 1979.

The number of people who bought their council house from their local authorities rose to 200,000 by 1982, and again peaked at 180,000 in 1989, her last full year as prime minister.

Since the Housing Act came into force, it is estimated that some two million homes have been sold to former council tenants.

The sale price was based on market valuation, but included substantial discounts, depending on how long a tenant had been living there.

When Labour came to power in 1997, it reduced the value of such discounts in areas where councils were running short of housing stock.

Critics said the policy resulted in speculators buying up valuable housing stock too cheaply.

The Right to Buy Scheme was extended in the March 2013 Budget, as the government vowed to increase sales once again.

Credit and savings: Seeds of future crises
By Simon Gompertz, personal finance correspondent, BBC News
Before Mrs Thatcher arrived at No 10, British passports contained a special page to record the amount of cash travellers took out of the country.

The page was one of the first things to be scrapped by the new government, as the Tories moved to abolish exchange controls.

The Chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, raised travel allowances to £1,000 per trip and permitted overseas property purchases of up to £100,000.

On the tax front, the basic rate was cut by 3p to 30p in the pound, while the highest rate came down from 83p to 60p.

But Thatcher's chancellors not only cut income tax, but also changed the way we pay tax.

To fund lower taxes on incomes, up went tax on most things shoppers bought. VAT, or value added tax, jumped from 8% to 15%.

Within a few years, the basic rate of tax had fallen to 25%, while the higher rate had been slashed to 40%.

Credit unleashed

In the wake of the financial crisis, some say the market is now too free - that we give too much power to the consumer, and pile too much risk on to the individual.

With money from tax cuts in their pockets, shoppers began to rediscover the "feelgood factor". They were encouraged further as credit was unleashed.

Restrictions on hire purchase offers were relaxed, stores offered credit, credit cards boomed. Consumer borrowing tripled during the 1980s.

And, of course, mortgages were easier to get. The old rule of thumb that you only borrow two-and-a-half times salary was thrown out of the window.

Building societies were allowed to lend more and foreign banks set up in the UK to compete.

The Bank of England did not control the expansion of credit and there are those who see the roots of the current financial crisis in the credit boom of the Thatcher years.

Private pensions

Mrs Thatcher wanted self-reliance, not reliance on the state. That was the thinking behind the launch of personal pensions in 1988.

The new plans provided a route to save for those who did not have a company scheme. But, sadly, they backfired.

The promotions and publicity got out of hand. Advisers went to town, encouraging savers to switch out of solid traditional schemes into riskier personal pensions.

Compensating the victims cost the pensions industry £11bn.

More successful were personal equity plans or Peps, designed to encourage savers to salt away up to £6,000 a year in shares, in exchange for a tax break.

To complement Peps, John Major, the last chancellor of the Thatcher era, introduced a tax-free vehicle for cash savings, the Tessa.

The idea caught on. Peps and Tessas later morphed into individual savings accounts, or Isas, in which Britons have £390bn salted away.

Union rights
By John Moylan, employment correspondent, BBC News
Few senior trade union figures have commented on the death of Baroness Thatcher. That silence speaks volumes for the lasting legacy that her reforms had on the power of the movement.

She was ushered to power in the wake of the Winter of Discontent when a wave of strikes paralysed many parts of the economy. Rubbish was piled high in the streets as collections stopped. And famously, gravediggers went on strike.

The Conservative government set about a series of changes to employment and trade union laws, which ended mass picketing, secondary action and the closed shop, where staff had to join a union to get a job.

Secret ballots were introduced, as were restrictions on holding legitimate disputes that still rankle with the unions to this day.

In 1979 there were more than 29 million working days lost to strike action. These days, that number is typically well below one million.

The miners' strike of 1984-85 came to symbolise the government's battle with the unions. The year-long dispute over pit closures led to repeated scenes of violence as striking miners clashed with police.

In the end the miners went back to work. The balance of power in industrial relations had shifted forever.

Unions insist that the collapse in traditional manufacturing industries during the 1980s did as much to diminish their power. Membership fell from over 12 million in 1980 - today there are fewer than 6 million members of Trades Union Congress-affiliated unions.

One of the first actions of the Labour government in 1997 was to repeal the ban on unions at GCHQ - the Government Communications Headquarters - imposed under the Tories. But under New Labour, the main planks of the reforms of the Thatcher years remained unchanged.

A share-owning revolution
By Kevin Peachey, personal finance reporter, BBC News
A policy of privatising the UK's large utilities revolutionised share ownership in the UK, and as such it was widely popular with many, though the initiatives also had their critics.

The recession of the early 1980s created the environment that allowed the Conservatives to drive forward the idea of moving nationalised industries into private ownership.

By the end of its first term, it had already privatised British Aerospace and Cable & Wireless. British Telecom, British Airways, British Steel, as well as water and electricity firms were among those privatised later.

This led to a new wave of first-time shareholders in the UK.

One of the first privatisations and arguably the most memorable - through a celebrated advertising campaign - was the sell-off of shares in British Gas in 1986.

The promotional campaign featured TV adverts in which characters urged each other to "tell Sid" about the chance to buy shares at "affordable" prices.

Anyone who has held on to these shares will now have a portfolio that includes a stake in Centrica, BG Group and National Grid.

Privatisation was key to the Thatcher government's economic policy. As a result, it hoped that the large subsidies granted to industry over the decades would be eventually phased out, allowing for further tax cuts and controlling borrowing.

It also encouraged the idea of members of the public owning shares in big former monopolies.

Yet, figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the percentage of the UK stock market owned by UK individuals was higher in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of value, than the 1980s.

In 1981, 28% was owned by UK individuals. This had fallen to 20% by the end of the Thatcher term in 1990. Yet it fell to just over 11% by the end of 2010.

The Big Bang
By Rebecca Marston, business reporter, BBC News
The impact of one of Margaret Thatcher's deregulation drives was the drastic reorganisation of the way shares were traded in the UK.

The so-called "Big Bang", introduced on 27 October 1986, made it far simpler to trade shares on the London Stock Exchange.

The most visible reform was that traders no longer stalked the floor of the Exchange, animatedly dealing with each other face-to-face.

Big Bang moved them at a stroke from that to screen-based and telephone trading.

It also broke up what many saw as a gentlemen's club, ruled by restrictive practices. (It is worth noting that there were almost no women and the gentlemen described came from a far wider class base than the phrase suggests.)

Before Big Bang, share dealing was done through a stockbroker, who advised clients on dealings. Transactions were carried out by jobbers, who made markets in shares - physically seeking out others with whom to trade on the Stock Exchange floor.

Price competition was not allowed, fixed commissions were the norm.

At best it was a self-regulating club, where bounders could easily be spotted, but at its worst this club fostered insider dealing and share price ramping.

Big Bang saw many of the City's historic names disappear in a frenzy of takeovers as banks jostled to buy jobbers and stockbrokers in order to become one-stop shops.

This, in turn, unleashed a succession of takeovers by even bigger organisations, the giant American finance houses.

Big Bang helped facilitate privatisation, demystifying the share-buying process that many ordinary people had found a stumbling block, thus allowing people to simply walk into their banks and order a parcel of shares.

But while it made dealing and investing easier, it also paved the way for the creation of giant financial institutions, whose size has meant their health is critical to the wellbeing of the general economy.

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During her years as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher revolutionised the economic fortunes of every person in the UK. Giving people the right to buy their council houses and shares in previously nationalised firms such as British Telecom and British Gas were among the initiatives that won her much support.

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The 35th anniversary of South Yorkshire police's brutal operation against striking miners at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham will be marked on Saturday with a rally by campaigners still seeking the whole truth about the police actions, and public accountability. Led by the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), the march will begin on Orgreave Lane and proceed to the site of the traumatic confrontation at the old coking plant, which closed in 1990. Chris Kitchen, the current general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, will speak, alongside other union officials and Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham.

Champion told the Guardian: "For my constituents in Rotherham the 'battle of Orgreave' is not something in the past, it is a living wound. Until we have an inquiry and the full details of that fateful day are exposed, the town will be unable to move forward. I will make sure that justice is served, however long that takes."

Thousands of miners from around the country picketed the plant on 18 June 1984 during the bitter, year-long strike that was ultimately defeated by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government and the state-owned National Coal Board.

They were met by 6,000 police officers commanded by a South Yorkshire police assistant chief constable, and were subjected to a charge by mounted officers, with many hit by police on horses and on foot wielding their batons.

Ninety-five miners were arrested, and 55 prosecuted for the offence of riot, which carried a potential life sentence in prison. The police withdrew the prosecution 48 days into the trial, after a succession of police officers were accused of lying and presenting false evidence, including the forgery of a signature on a statement.

Michael Mansfield, one of the miners' defence barristers, denounced the police evidence as "the biggest frame-up ever" and called for an inquiry.

No inquiry was held, no police officer was ever disciplined for any offence, and no officer resigned. Instead, the South Yorkshire police maintained the narrative they presented on the day of the operation and in court, that they had been subjected to violence first by miners.

In 1991, South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners who had sued for assault, false arrest and malicious prosecution, but the force still publicly denied any wrongdoing by any officer.

The OTJC began its campaign for a full inquiry in 2012 after the Guardian and BBC highlighted the enduring lack of accountability for the Orgreave events.

In 2015 the Independent Office for Police Conduct produced an initial report that questioned the "ethical standards" within South Yorkshire police at the time, finding that senior officers had known that miners had been assaulted, and believed that police witnesses may have perjured themselves in the trial, and settled the civil case to ensure that was not made public. However, the IOPC declined to fully investigate due to the passage of time.

In October 2016, after initial briefings that Theresa May's government would hold an inquiry, Amber Rudd, the then home secretary, refused, principally arguing that policing had since changed and the need was not pressing because "nobody died".

In March the Right Rev Dr Peter Wilcox, the bishop of Sheffield, revealed that the Home Office had also declined to support his proposal for an independent panel to consider the Orgreave events.

In advance of the 35 year anniversary rally, he said: "Questions remain unanswered which are not going away. In the fullness of time, these questions must be addressed thoroughly and openly, so that wrongs can be put right and so that individuals and communities can move on from a deeply unhappy piece of history. I gladly repeat today my call for a formal, public and independent process of inquiry."
Topics

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Thirty-five years on, Orgreave campaigners still seek justice

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The 35th anniversary of South Yorkshire police's brutal operation against striking miners at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham will be marked on Saturday with a rally by campaigners still seeking the whole truth about the police actions, and public accountability.

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Idioms for a non-UK worker in an UK workplace.

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Idioms for a non-UK worker in an UK workplace.

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In case you were wondering where the world ends. The answer is- in London. Found the exact spot😂😂😂

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Please complete the form below. Your feedback is really important for our future courses and maintaining high standards

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PFI, Postcode Lotteries and ring fencing

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Background tio the 23 dead Chinese workers kiled at sea picking cheap seafood for English supermarkets.

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The deaths 10 years ago of 23 Chinese cockle pickers who were searching for a "better life" has had a lasting effect on all those associated with the disaster in Morecambe Bay.

The events of that night left indelible memories for everyone involved - from the sole Chinese survivor and witness - to the lifeboat crew who found themselves confronted by a "sea of bodies".

On 5 February, Chinese cockle pickers were at work in the dark but facing the incoming tide.

A rescue operation began after one cockler, Guo Bing Long, called 999 and told police: "Sinking water, many many, sinking water... Sinking water, sinking water."

The RNLI searched the waters to find the cocklers.

The sole survivor

One of them, Li Hua, was within seconds of becoming a victim.

He said: "The water covered the wheel and the vehicle couldn't move. Everyone was panicking, they got out of the vehicle and tried to swim.

"But the water was flooding so quickly some were dragged right away under the water."

Mr Hua said: "It was pitch black and I was desperate. I thought I might just as well wait to die.

"I was just numb.....then, I don't know how, a wave maybe turned me round.

"I was on my own... And then a helicopter came," he said.

He said he "kept waving" at the helicopter.

Mr Hua said: "I could not believe I was being rescued and I was alive again."

Almost a decade after the disaster, Mr Hua said he still has panic attacks.

He said: "I think a lot about those who didn't survive, particularly at Chinese New Year, because it happened around that time.

"From time to time I wake up in the night with a panic attack and remember them.

"We all came for the same reason. We left our families to make a better life. And they were gone just like that. I was just lucky."

Mr Hua was speaking to the BBC under the protection of the government's UK Protected Persons Service.

His evidence helped convict Lin Liang Ren of 21 counts of manslaughter, facilitating illegal immigration and perverting the course of justice.

In March 2006, Ren was jailed for 14 years at Preston Crown Court.

Mr Hua agreed to be interviewed and talk about the disaster almost 10 years on.

"My family are all healthy and we are happy. We do not have a lot of money but we are happy to go through each day peacefully and I am very thankful... And glad to be alive," Mr Hua added.

The widow

Widow Lin Meiqin, who lives in China's Fujian province, has never remarried after her husband Lin YouXing died in the bay at the age of 38.

She said: "I still think about him... When he died it was such a loss.

"Sometimes I think if he hadn't died I would live a better life."

The RNLI

Morecambe's RNLI crew worked for 22 hours during the search and rescue operation.

Michael Guy, lifeboat operations manager was on duty that night.

"Our thoughts really are of sadness for the families. The only contribution we made to the families is that because we did recover the people we gave them some closure - rather than people being lost at sea."

He said the team on the hovercraft covering Arnside in Cumbria began their "normal search patterns" when they made the grim discovery of the bodies.

Mr Guy said: "At that stage they effectively came into a sea of bodies.

"It was very harrowing. Apart from the senior hovercraft commander, many of the crew on that particular night on the hovercraft hadn't seen bodies in the water before."

"So it had a lasting effect on them," he added.

The police

The detective who led the investigation into the tragedy said the deaths had "lived with him" ever since.

Mick Gradwell, who has retired from Lancashire Police, said: "You're thrown into investigating international organised crime gangs, snakeheads, triads, international human trafficking.

"We dealt with the people who were responsible for the deaths on the night.

"But we did not make any dent into these wider criminal gangs who traffic people around the world," he said.

Mr Gradwell claimed other similar disasters could still occur because people are willing to exploit the poorest in society for their own ends.

"There is a constant threat and risk of people being abused like this and dying because they're being forced to work in dangerous conditions," he added.

Inside Out is broadcast on Monday 3 February at 19:30 GMT on BBC One North West and nationwide for seven days thereafter on the iPlayer.

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The scars of Morecambe's cockling disaster

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The deaths 10 years ago of 23 Chinese cockle pickers who were searching for a "better life" has had a lasting effect on all those associated with the disaster in Morecambe Bay. The events of that night left indelible memories for everyone involved - from the sole Chinese survivor and witness - to the lifeboat crew who found themselves confronted by a "sea of bodies".

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Some background on the horsemeat scandal from the BBC

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The discovery of horsemeat in processed beef products sold by a number of UK supermarket chains last month has resulted in a series of product recalls and thrown the spotlight on the food industry's supply chain. It has also inspired a stricter food testing regime across Europe. So how did the scandal unfold and what is being done?
How did the scandal emerge?
Irish food inspectors announced in mid-January that they had found horsemeat in frozen beefburgers made by firms in the Irish Republic and the UK, and sold by a number of UK supermarket chains, including Tesco, Iceland, Aldi and Lidl.

Since then, a growing number of stores and companies across Europe, including Findus and Nestle, have recalled beef ready meals, after tests found they contained horse DNA.

Catering giant Compass Group, which provides schools and hospitals, and Whitbread, one of Britain's largest hotel chains, have also found horse DNA in products supplied to them as beef.

Health experts have said the issue is one of food fraud rather than food safety.
How widespread is the problem?
Mislabelled processed meat products have so far been discovered in the UK, the Republic of Ireland, France, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Germany. Suspicious products have also been withdrawn in the Netherlands as tests are carried out.

The European Union has told member states to conduct random tests for horsemeat.

In the UK, food retailers were told by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to examine processed beef products soon after the crisis emerged. Some 2,501 tests were conducted but the results announced on 15 February showed that no products other than those already identified contained more than 1% horsemeat.

The 29 positive results were in seven products that had previously been identified and withdrawn. These included some Findus lasagne as well as some Aldi lasagne and spaghetti bolognese - all made by the Comigel food processing company in France. Some of the products were found to contain up to 100% horsemeat.
What is the cause of the scandal?
Experts say the scandal has highlighted the complexity of the food industry's supply chains across Europe.

In France, where seven supermarket chains have withdrawn all frozen beef meals made by Findus and Comigel, an initial investigation has found that horsemeat sold as beef originated from Romanian slaughterhouses before being sold to a Dutch food trader, then on to a Cypriot trader and on again to a French firm.

In Nestle's case, the Swiss-based firm has halted deliveries of products containing meat from a German supplier.

Meanwhile, Silvercrest Foods in Ireland and Dalepak in the UK - suppliers of beefburgers to UK supermarkets and caterers - both said they had never bought or traded in horse product and have launched an investigation into their continental European third-party suppliers.
Why would meat suppliers use horsemeat instead of beef?
Many believe financial gain is the motive for the fraud - horsemeat is cheaper than other meats in some countries. Some industry insiders say profit margins have been squeezed by supermarkets and it is understandable that people might "cut corners".

On the Continent the price of horsemeat is much higher, as "viande de cheval" is a recognised dish in France. Horsemeat is also eaten in Italy and is consumed in vast quantities in China.
Have there been any arrests or legal action?
In the UK, raids have taken place at Peter Boddy Licensed Slaughterhouse, in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and Farmbox Meats Ltd, near Aberystwyth, by FSA officials supported by police.

Police also arrested three men on suspicion of offences under the Fraud Act. They have been bailed and all deny any wrongdoing.

Three more firms in London and Hull were later raided.

Meanwhile, evidence seized by UK investigators has been handed to the European law enforcement agency Europol.

In France, Findus France says it has been the victim of fraud and will take action in the courts, accusing French supplier Spanghero of knowingly selling horsemeat labelled as beef. Spanghero denies the allegation and says it is a victim of its Romanian supplier - but when French officials temporarily suspended Spanghero's licence, they said the Romanian firm had acted in good faith.

Dutch officials have raided a meat processing plant suspected of mislabelling beef.

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, police have been asked to consider whether the beefburgers were adulterated accidentally or whether there was fraudulent activity and deliberate mislabelling.
Who is responsible for checking and enforcing standards in the UK?
The Food Standards Agency is an independent food safety watchdog responsible for food safety and food hygiene in the UK, and its work is conducted by local authority inspectors. It tested almost 80,000 samples of food last year and focuses "on those risks that can make people ill or worse", including looking for arsenic and listeria.

But the agency has not been responsible for DNA testing to show whether meat is authentic.

In response to the horsemeat scandal, the FSA have launched a UK-wide survey of food authenticity, to be completed by local authorities in three phases, testing 514 products.

Foodstuffs labelled as containing beef as a major ingredient were the first to be tested. Burgers, mince and sausages were among the phase one testing, which is continuing, while beef-based ready meals such as lasagne and cottage pie form phase two.

Phase three is due to begin as part of a Europe-wide control programme to check food items such as seasoned kebabs, gelatine, beef dripping, stock cubes and steak.

UK food retailers have also now agreed to update ministers on their own DNA testing on processed beef every three months.
Should I throw away the meat I have bought if I suspect it might be horsemeat?
Horsemeat itself should be as safe to eat as beef and is eaten in many countries around the world.

The government has advised people to carry on with their normal shopping habits unless told otherwise. But if people have any of the recalled products, they are advised to return them to the store they were purchased from.

The FSA ordered tests to check whether a drug given to horses, bute (phenylbutazone) - which can be dangerous to humans - had illegally entered the human food chain. It found eight horses, killed in the UK, had tested positive for bute and six may have entered the food chain in France. However, the levels detected are said to pose "very little risk to human health".

Rules introduced this month mean all horsemeat in the UK should now be tested for bute before it is allowed to be sold for food.

Supermarket Asda is recalling all corned beef from its budget range after the tests found "very low levels" of bute.

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The discovery of horsemeat in processed beef products sold by a number of UK supermarket chains has resulted in tests by regulators across Europe and prompted a number of product recalls. How did the scandal unfold and what is being done?

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A blog post about the idea of being provincial and its relationship to food

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This morning, I took my kids down to one of the many amazing restaurants near where we live, for a Turkish breakfast. As you may have seen from the featured photo, the portions there are so huge that the kids just shared one between the two of them. As I watched them devour the olives and grilled halloumi cheese and sucuk (Turkish sausage, made from beef, rather than pork), I started thinking about how different my own experience of the world was when I was their age. I grew up in the 1970s, with far less exposure to foreign food, far less opportunity to travel abroad and far less awareness of the sheer diversity of the world. I told my kids how lucky they were to be growing up in a time and place where they could eat Turkish breakfasts, pop into the local Polish shop, and then say hello to school friends with parents from Somalia and New Zealand, Ghana and Iran. They asked if I used to eat this kind of thing when I was a kid, at which point I started to try and explain how provincial England was back then!

Historically, the provinces were the parts of the country outside the capital. Those who lived and worked in the capital would often be fairly snobbish about them and would look down their noses at them, as the provinces were seen as lacking in culture and sophistication. It follows on from this that describing a place - or a person - as provincial means you see ideas and opinions that are old-fashioned and narrow-minded there. It also probably means that you see yourself as more cosmopolitan, as a citizen of the world at home in many different contexts.

I was recently asked by a Russian student what being a Londoner meant to me and one of the definitions I came up with was that it means being familiar with the menus of lots of different kinds of restaurants, knowing your injera (a kind of flat Ethiopian bread) from your tahdig (a kind of Iranian rice dish) and being open to new cuisines and experiences. For many of our English-language students who choose to come to London, it's precisely this kind of thing that draws them to the city. Of course, those from outside the capital who feel looked down on and ignored, words like provincial can act like a red rag to a bull, but that's a story for another day!
Want to learn more with Lexical Lab? Take one of our summer school courses.

Is there a divide in your country between the capital and the provinces? Which side of the divide are you on?

How has the kind of food people eat and the opportunity to travel changed since you were a kid?

Do you ever look at certain bits of your country and think they're very provincial? Why?

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This morning, I took my kids down to one of the many amazing restaurants near where we live, for a Turkish breakfast. As you may have seen from the featured photo, the portions there are so huge that the kids just shared one between the two of them.

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A nice little piece on the concept of love-hate relationships

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Marmite is the brand name of a well known sticky, dark brown spread, made mainly from yeast that has been used to brew beer. It has a distinctive, powerful flavour, and is very salty. You often have it spread on toast, or use it to add flavour to other foods, such as cheese. It is, to put it politely, an acquired taste*, (It took me 50 years to like it!); it is something you either love or hate. There is no middle opinion; you never hear anyone say, "I quite like Marmite." You either do or you don't!

Because of this very black and white concept, the expression, ' It's a Marmite thing ', is now used more and more as metaphor to describe something, which arouses strongly differing opinions.

Anything at all can be described as 'A Marmite Thing': a film, a piece of music, a work of art, even a person. It is perhaps most often used when people are discussing new buildings, about which they have strong, differing opinions. In London, for example, The Shard, an immensely tall new building near Tower Bridge has become very much a Marmite thing. Some love it; many hate it.

'It's a Marmite thing' is a wonderfully precise, descriptive expression, and I hope you'll get a chance to use it some time. I also hope you'll one day have the opportunity to taste Marmite. Who knows? Like me, you might get hooked on it, but it could take a long time!
With Best Wishes David
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'An acquired taste' is something you have or see many times before you really begin to like it.
"Strong, black coffee is an acquired taste for most people."

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Marmite is the brand name of a well known sticky, dark brown spread, made mainly from yeast that has been used to brew beer. It has a distinctive, powerful flavour, and is very salty. You often have it spread on toast, or use it to add flavour to other foods, such as cheese.

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A nice article about the concept of love-hate relationships

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Marmite is the brand name of a well known sticky, dark brown spread, made mainly from yeast that has been used to brew beer. It has a distinctive, powerful flavour, and is very salty. You often have it spread on toast, or use it to add flavour to other foods, such as cheese. It is, to put it politely, an acquired taste*, (It took me 50 years to like it!); it is something you either love or hate. There is no middle opinion; you never hear anyone say, "I quite like Marmite." You either do or you don't!

Because of this very black and white concept, the expression, ' It's a Marmite thing ', is now used more and more as metaphor to describe something, which arouses strongly differing opinions.

Anything at all can be described as 'A Marmite Thing': a film, a piece of music, a work of art, even a person. It is perhaps most often used when people are discussing new buildings, about which they have strong, differing opinions. In London, for example, The Shard, an immensely tall new building near Tower Bridge has become very much a Marmite thing. Some love it; many hate it.

'It's a Marmite thing' is a wonderfully precise, descriptive expression, and I hope you'll get a chance to use it some time. I also hope you'll one day have the opportunity to taste Marmite. Who knows? Like me, you might get hooked on it, but it could take a long time!
With Best Wishes David
--------------------------

'An acquired taste' is something you have or see many times before you really begin to like it.
"Strong, black coffee is an acquired taste for most people."

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Marmite is the brand name of a well known sticky, dark brown spread, made mainly from yeast that has been used to brew beer. It has a distinctive, powerful flavour, and is very salty. You often have it spread on toast, or use it to add flavour to other foods, such as cheese.

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A little blog post on a key concept for hardcore drinkers!

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For almost as long as I can remember, I've wanted to see the world. It's been one of my burnings ambitions since I was maybe 15 and 16. I guess that the first time the travel bug bit me was when I read On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and found myself hypnotised by his descriptions of bumming around the States in the post-war years. As a teenager, I hitchhiked all over the place and then the band I was in got to tour Europe a bit as well, which was great. However, it's been teaching and teacher training that have really allowed me to see places I didn't even know existed when I was a kid. As far as humanly possible, when I travel I try to follow the old adage that when in Rome, do as the Romans do! If this means trying deep-fried grasshoppers as a bar snack because that's what the Thai guys you're with fancy eating, I'll do it. If it means not eating your evening meal till eleven or twelve at night, I'm willing to give that a go. And when I'm in Russia, as I was over the weekend, it means accepting the inevitability of vodka!

Vodka occupies a really important place in Russian culture. It helps group bonding, it oils the wheels of business and offering a shot or two is a gesture of hospitality and part and parcel of the warm welcome often extended to visitors. Indeed, it can sometimes be nigh-on impossible to turn down the offer of a drink! However, as I've learned the hard way, one shot can lead to another. And then another. And then maybe a beer, a cigarette, five more shots and then who knows what else! You crawl back to your hotel at some ridiculous hour and wake up feeling somewhat the worse for wear! Your head is throbbing, your throat is dry, you've lost your voice and you're swearing that you're never going to drink again.

Often, the hangover gets worse as the morning wears on. Nothing you try seems to work: coffee, Red Bull, soup, cigarettes. By the early afternoon, you're feeling like death warmed up - and you still have four more hours of work to get through. It's around this time that the idea of hair of the dog starts to seem like a good one - and it's quite possible that someone will suggest that a shot of vodka may help to take the edge off things!

Hair of the dog is short for the hair of the dog that bit me - and we usually use it to refer to an alcoholic drink that we have to make ourselves feel better when we had a few too many the night before! In other words, it's a hangover cure. The phrase originally referred to the practice of treating a bite from a rabid dog by placing hair from that same dog inside the wound! I've no idea if this was an effective cure and somehow prevented rabies, but a shot of vodka taken within a few hours after waking up does certainly straighten you out a bit. So they tell me.

Of course, it's a very slippery slope - and one that ends in alcoholism if you're not careful! It's a fine line between enjoying a drink and needing one, and if you're looking for a definition of when liking a drink stops and being an alcoholic starts, the exact moment could well be when you start craving hair of the dog in the morning!

One thing's for sure, though. I'm never going to have another shot of vodka again for as long as I live. Honestly!
Want to learn more with Lexical Lab? Take one of our face-to-face summer courses.

Are any drinks particularly important in your country?

Do people have any speical ideas about how to prevent a hangover - or how to cure one once you have one?

Have you ever had to resort to hair of the dog? When?

What things would you say occupy a really important place in your culture?

What would your definiton of alcoholism be?

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For almost as long as I can remember, I've wanted to see the world. It's been one of my burnings ambitions since I was maybe 15 and 16. I guess that the first time the travel bug bit me was when I read On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and found myself hypnotised by his descriptions of bumming around the States in the post-war years.

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Here are the handouts we used in class.

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Great piece on our long-standing obsession with curry.

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The UK now celebrates National Curry Week every October. Although curry is an Indian dish modified for British tastes, it's so popular that it contributes more than £5bn to the British economy. Hence it was hardly surprising when in 2001, Britain's foreign secretary Robin Cook referred to Chicken Tikka Masala as a "true British national dish ".

If Britain taught India how to play cricket, India perhaps returned the favour by teaching the British how to enjoy a hot Indian curry. By the 18th century, East India Company men (popularly called 'nabobs', an English corruption of the Indian word 'nawab' meaning governors or viceroys) returning home wanted to recreate a slice of their time spent in India. Those who couldn't afford to bring back their Indian cooks satisfied their appetite at coffee houses. As early as 1733, curry was served in the Norris Street Coffee House in Haymarket. By 1784, curry and rice had become specialties in some popular restaurants in the area around London's Piccadilly.

An East India company official enjoying hookah (in India)

The first British cookery book containing an Indian recipe was 'The Art of Cookery Made Plain & Easy' by Hannah Glasse. The first edition, published in 1747, had three recipes of Indian pilau. Later editions included recipes for fowl or rabbit curry and Indian pickle.

Excerpt from 'The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Simple' by Hannah GlasseThe first purely Indian restaurant was the Hindoostanee Coffee House which opened in 1810 at 34 George Street near Portman Square, Mayfair. The owner of the restaurant, Sake Dean Mahomed was a fascinating character. Born in 1759 in present-day Patna, then part of the Bengal Presidency, Mahomed served in the army of the East India Company as a trainee surgeon. He later travelled to Britain with 'his best friend' Captain Godfrey Evan Baker and even married an Irishwoman. With his coffee house, Mohamed tried to provide both authentic ambience and Indian cuisine "at the highest perfection". Guests could sit in custom-made bamboo-cane chairs surrounded by paintings of Indian scenes and enjoy dishes "allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England". There was also a separate smoking room for hookahs.

'Portrait of a Gentleman, Possibly William Hickey, and an Indian Servant' by Arthur William Devis, 1785

One of the chief patrons of the restaurant was Charles Stuart, famously known as 'Hindoo Stuart' for his fascination with India and the Hindu culture. However, unfortunately, the venture was unsuccessful and within two years Dean Mohamed filed for bankruptcy. It was difficult to compete with other curry houses that were better established and were closer to London. Also, it is likely that nabobs in the Portman Square locality could afford to employ Indian cooks, hence not much need to go out to try Indian dishes.

Lizzie Collingham in her book 'Curry: A Tale of Cooks & Conquerors' argues that Britain's love for curry was fuelled by the bland nature of British cookery. The hot Indian curry was a welcome change. In William Thackeray's satirical novel 'Vanity Fair', the protagonist Rebecca's (also known as Becky Sharp) response to cayenne pepper and chili shows how unfamiliar Britons were to spicy food:

"Give Miss Sharp some curry, my dear," said Mr. Sedley, laughing. Rebecca had never tasted the dish before........"Oh, excellent!" said Rebecca, who was suffering tortures with the cayenne pepper. "Try a chili with it, Miss Sharp," said Joseph, really interested. "A chili," said Rebecca, gasping. "Oh yes!" She thought a chili was something cool, as its name imported....... "How fresh and green they look," she said, and put one into her mouth. It was hotter than the curry........... "Water, for Heaven's sake, water!" she cried.

By the 1840s sellers of Indian products were trying to persuade the British public with the dietary benefits of curry. According to them, curry aided digestion while stimulating the stomach thereby invigorating blood circulation resulting in a more vigorous mind. Curry also gained popularity as an excellent way of using up cold meat. In fact currying cold meat is the origin of jalfrezi, now a popular dish in Britain. Between 1820 and 1840, the import of turmeric, the primary ingredient in making curry, in Britain increased three fold.

Chicken Jalfrezi

However, the bloody revolt of 1857 changed the British attitude towards India. Englishmen were banned from wearing Indian clothes; recently educated public officials disparaged old company men who had gone native. Curry too 'lost caste' and became less popular in fashionable tables but was still served in army mess halls, clubs and in the homes of common civilians, mainly during lunch.

Curry needed a jolt and who better to promote it than the Queen herself. Queen Victoria was particularly fascinated by India. Her interest in India could be seen at the Osborne House, which she and her husband Prince Albert built between 1845 and 1851. Here she collected Indian furnishings, paintings, and objects in a specially designed wing. The Durbar Room (initially commissioned to be built as a sumptuous Indian dining room in 1890 by the Queen) was decorated with white and gold plasterwork in the shapes of flowers and peacocks.

Victoria employed Indian servants. One among them, a 24-year-old named Abdul Karim, known as the Munshi, became her 'closest friend'. According to Victoria's biographer A.N. Wilson, Karim impressed the monarch with chicken curry with dal and pilau. Later her grandson George V was said to have little interest in any food except curry and Bombay duck.

Queen Victoria and the Munshi in 1893

By the early 20th century, Britain had become home to around 70,000 South Asians, mainly servants, students and ex-seamen. A handful of Indian restaurants sprang up in London, the most famous being Salut-e-Hind in Holborn and the Shafi in Gerrard Street. In 1926, Veeraswamy opened at 99 Regent Street, the first high-end Indian restaurant in the capital. Its founder Edward Palmer belonged to the same Palmer family frequently mentioned in William Dalrymple's famous book, 'The White Mughals'. Edward's great-grandfather William Palmer was a General in the East India Company and was married to Begum Fyze Baksh, a Mughal princess. Palmer's restaurant was successful in capturing the ambience of the Raj; notable clients included the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin, amongst others.

Curry was yet to establish itself firmly in British cuisine. In the 1940s and 1950s, most major Indian restaurants in London employed ex-seamen from Bangladesh, particularly from Syhlet. Many of these seamen aspired to open a restaurant of their own. After the Second World War, they bought bombed-out chippies and cafes selling curry and rice alongside fish, pies, and chips. They stayed open after 11 pm to catch the after-pub trade. Eating hot curry after a night out in the pub became a tradition. As customers became increasingly fond of curry, these restaurants discarded British dishes and turned into inexpensive Indian takeaways and eateries.

Chicken Tikka Masala, Britain's favorite curry

After 1971, there was an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants into Britain. Many entered the catering business. According to Peter Groves, co-founder of National Curry Week, "65%-75% of Indian restaurants" in the UK are owned by Bangladeshi immigrants.

Today there are more Indian restaurants in Greater London than in Delhi and Mumbai combined. As Robin Cook aptly puts it, this national popularity of curry is a "perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences".
By Debabrata Mukherjee. I am an MBA graduate from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management (IIM), currently working as a consultant for Cognizant Business Consulting. Bored with mundane corporate life, I have resorted to my first love, History. Through my writing, I want to make history fun and enjoyable to others as well.
Published: November 2, 2017.

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History of the British Curry - Historic UK

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The UK now celebrates National Curry Week every October. Although curry is an Indian dish modified for British tastes, it's so popular that it contributes more than £5bn to the British economy. Hence it was hardly surprising when in 2001, Britain's foreign secretary Robin Cook referred to Chicken Tikka Masala as a "true British national dish ".

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A really good article about how we fell in love with curry - and how the love affair is slowly ending.

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No one in Oli Khan's family had ever lived in Scotland, or anywhere near it. But when, aged 23, Khan first set eyes on Linlithgow, a modest West Lothian town near Falkirk, he saw a prize greater than home. He saw opportunity. This chilly Scottish town - whose name means "lake in the damp hollow" - was the perfect place, Khan decided, to set up a curry house: it had a decent sized population, around 9,000 people, but no Indian restaurant. With help from his brother-in-law, who was in the restaurant trade in Birmingham, he opened his curry house in 1995 and named it Kismet - destiny.

Khan's father, who arrived in Britain from Bangladesh as a waiter in 1962, had taught him that there was good money to be made in selling curry to the British, if you could adapt it to their taste for predictable sauces on a sliding scale of heat (mild korma, medium Madras, fiery vindaloo). For thousands of Bangladeshi immigrants in the 60s and 70s, working in Britain as OCs ("onion cutters") and DCs ("dish cleaners") was a way out of an even more precarious existence back home.

From the experience of his father, who worked his way up from waiting tables to owning a curry house in Kent, Khan knew that opening a new curry business anywhere in the UK was a low-risk proposition, because many locals, especially those who drank, would soon become hooked on "going for an Indian". On the first night Kismet opened its doors, there were so many customers that by 7.30 all the food had run out.

Even as a child, growing up in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh - the ancestral home of around 80% of British curry chefs - Khan had understood that curry houses were an unshakeable part of the British way of life. By the late 1990s, curry had come to represent a newly cosmopolitan Britain, culminating in the former foreign secretary Robin Cook's famous 2001 speech citing chicken tikka masala as the national dish of Britain, an example of the way that the country "absorbs and adapts external influences".

Though hardly acknowledged by restaurant critics, except for mocking asides about their red flock wallpaper, curry houses were one of the great successes of the postwar restaurant industry in Britain. In her 2005 book Curry: A Biography, the historian Lizzie Collingham argued that the Sylheti curry cooks converted "unadventurous British palates" to a new flavour spectrum. Goodbye, mince and potatoes; hello, chicken bhuna. "More than any other ethnic food," Collingham wrote, "the British have made curry their own." Across the country, in any town big enough, you could guarantee that there would be at least one Kismet or equivalent, set up by enterprising Bangladeshi or Pakistani families. In high streets dominated by chains, from Harvester to Pizza Express, these were rare independent traders, and they played a role in the regeneration of many local economies in the 1980s and 90s. (In the past decade, according to a trade group, Britain's curry houses employed 100,000 people and generated annual sales of £4.2 billion.)

Now, however, the curry house's once unassailable place in British life looks precarious. Thousands of Indian restaurants are critically short of both staff to cook the food and customers to eat it. Across the industry, two or three curry houses are closing down a week.

This is a crisis with many causes, the effects of which extend far beyond curry. Since the Brexit vote and the subsequent collapse of the pound, independent food outlets of all kinds have been hurt by rises in rents, rates and food prices. Meanwhile, in families that run curry houses younger generations have moved away from catering to more lucrative jobs in medicine or tech. So long as there was a ready supply of new onion choppers from Asia, the exodus of upwardly mobile offspring did not affect curry houses too much. The real blow came when a harsh new politics of immigration came in, which made it harder for skilled south Asian chefs to work in the country, just as the wider British public were changing the ways in which they consumed curry.

Ever since the Conservative-Liberal Coalition assumed power in 2010, with David Cameron elected on an impossible pledge to reduce net migration into Britain to the "tens of thousands", the Bangladeshi Caterers' Association (BCA), of which Oli Khan is senior vice-president, has warned of a curry crisis. The BCA says that if nothing is done to support the industry, as many as a third of Britain's curry houses - around 4,000 in total - will close over the next couple of years. Speaking in December, Lizzie Collingham told me she no longer saw "a bright future for these cheap and cheerful places", even though curry as a dish (or series of dishes) is as beloved in Britain as ever.

A quarter of a century after he put his faith in Linlithgow, much of what Oli Khan knew about Indian food in the UK is crumbling. He sold Kismet and moved south several years ago when his father got cancer. Now, Khan owns two curry houses in the Hertfordshire commuter town of Stevenage and finds himself operating in a much tougher climate. At Surma, a takeaway he now runs, Oli Khan says that he is losing money on the £10.95 set dinner for one, yet he hesitates to put prices up because "everyone's demanding more". But Khan's main complaint - in common with thousands of other curry house owners - is that he is permanently short-staffed.

In fact, Khanwas one of many curry house owners who backed Brexit in 2016, in the hope that exiting the EU would bring more favourable terms for south Asian immigrants. The president of the BCA, Pasha Khandaker, explicitly urged the association's 4,000 members to vote leave, while the then employment minister, Priti Patel, told British Asian voters that by voting leave, they could "save our curry houses and join the rest of the world". (In the end, about one in three British Asian people voted to leave the EU.)

Curry is still the soul food of the UK, the bowl of warmth people turn to when sniffy, sloshed or merely peckish

It is now dawning that under Theresa May's government, the prospect of more Bangladeshi chefs being granted work visas is more distant than ever. A law that came into effect in April 2016 states that a skilled chef from south Asia must earn £35,000 or more a year, after deductions for accommodation and meals, to come work in a British restaurant that also offers a takeaway service. (The figure is only slightly lower for restaurants without takeaways.) Lord Bilimoria, the entrepreneur behind Cobra beer, is part of an all-party parliamentary group lobbying to reverse the law, which he calls "ridiculous" and "discriminatory". No ordinary curry chef earns £35,000 (the industry average is £22-25,000 but the cooks who marinate lamb chops and mix raita get less).

Curry is still the soul food of the UK, the bowl of warmth that people turn to when sniffy, sloshed or merely peckish. But curry house owners have watched as dishes once unique to their restaurants were sold in cheapened forms, from supermarket ready meals - an "Indian banquet for 2" for only £9! - to the £6 Thursday curry nights offered by Wetherspoon pubs, which by 2016 was the biggest seller of curry in the UK. Another source of competition were the curries people had started to make for themselves at home, evidenced by rising sales of fresh ginger, chillis and exotic vegetables, the market for which leapt 22% to reach £215m in 2005. "You probably cook Indian food," Oli Khan said to me, rather sadly, as we sat in his half-empty restaurant Spice Róuge on Stevenage high street, eating the Sunday night buffet.

For a few decades from the 1970s to the 2000s, the curry house - like its high street companion, the pub - looked like a permanent feature of British life; maybe even an emblem of Britishness itself. Yet it is now clear that our passionate relationship with these restaurants was a product of particular circumstances. For the high street curry house to flourish in its classical form, British tastes needed to stay fixed and south Asian cooks needed to be free to work here. Neither of these conditions now holds.

The curry house taught a white population that was eager to shed its colonial past to relinquish an earlier generation's suspicion of garlic and chilli. For a while, curry lovers could tell themselves that openness about spice was a form of cultural broad mindedness. But the curry house's current predicament shows that a national attachment to Indian food did not necessarily extend to the people who made it.

efore anyone told me different, I thought curry house food was the most exotic and delicious in the world. As a child growing up in early 1980s Oxford, a trip to Uddin's Manzil Tandoori restaurant on Walton Street, established 1971, was one of our great family treats.

Everything about Uddin's was comforting and yet excitingly unlike how we ate at home: the stacked rounds of poppadoms, the pressed table linen, the stainless steel serving platters and candle-lit warmers to keep the food hot. Our parents would marvel at the charm of the dinner-jacketed waiters and the artistry of the rice: how did they get the grains in the pilau to turn so elegantly red? My sister and I were frugally encouraged to share a vegetable biryani - the yellow rice decorated with its slices of hard boiled egg and tomato - accompanied by a slightly oily mixed vegetable curry. We snuck spoonfuls of our mother's sweet-creamy korma, and our father's lamb Madras or vindaloo, squealing with pain as the chilli hit our tongues. It felt like visiting another country, but one that was strangely familiar. The whole dining room had a particular spicy smell that I couldn't quite place.

When I was little, I had no inkling that these flavours and smells existed anywhere except Uddin's on Walton Street. I was astounded when I discovered that this same food was served at other restaurants - not just in Oxford, but in other cities as well. There was the same biryani with the same hard-boiled egg garnish and the same sticky mango chutney in the same stainless steel bowls. I discovered that some versions of aloo gobi were greasier than others and there might be more or less delicacy to the seasoning, but the dishes were always essentially identical. In 1983, the trade publication Curry Magazine marvelled: "You are as certain to get the standard menu in the standard restaurant as you are to get a postage stamp from a post office whether you are in the coves of Cornwall or the Highlands of Scotland."

As a nation, we started to take this cuisine and its comforts for granted. For anyone who lived through the curry house boom, it seemed such a part of the furniture of British life that it wasn't obvious that it had only sprung into existence because of very specific economic and social forces. The curry house belonged to a Britain that was becoming affluent enough to eat out regularly for the first time, but not one where anyone had ever cooked an Ottolenghi recipe. Back then, if you wanted spicy food - to make a change from the bland Bisto of everyday life - you got an Indian.

In 1960, there were just 300 curry restaurants in Britain. The grandest of these was the venerable Veeraswamy's off Regent Street, opened in 1926 by Edward Palmer, a retired army officer and Indian spice importer who had been the official caterer for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Palmer aimed his menu at visiting Indian princes and upper-middle-class Londoners who appreciated the turbaned waiters and chandeliers.

Most "Indian" restaurants, however, started as fish and chip shops that sold a bit of curry and rice on the side, run by Bangladeshi boatmen from the predominantly Muslim district of Sylhet, which at that time was still part of British India.

This was not a region ever famed for its cuisine, which is one of the reasons that some British Asian people used to dismiss curry house food as the clumsy cooking of untrained sailors. However, food journalist Vikram Doctor, who writes for the Economic Times in Mumbai, told me that there were good cooks in Sylhet, namely the Mug or Mogh cooks who catered for the British Raj in Calcutta, whose great talent was to make inauthentic concoctions such as roast dinners jazzed up with masala spices. "I've always wondered," Doctor told me last year in Mumbai, "whether the Mug cooks were among the first Sylhetis who cooked in British curry houses. It would make sense, if so, because they knew how to adapt a curry to please the British."

Was any food ever so thoughtfully designed to please its audience as the early curry house menus? Each day, the chefs cooked up a gigantic vat of "base sauce" which could be adjusted to varying degrees of hotness and creaminess to suit the diners' tastes. This sauce consisted of onions and carrots simmered with ginger, garlic, turmeric and other spices into an all-purpose orangey gravy. A dollop of this base sauce was sizzled in a pan of ghee, cooked meat and vegetables. If red peppers and green chillis were added, it became a jalfrezi. With yoghurt, garam masala and almonds, the same sauce transformed into a pasanda.

When the first significant wave of south Asian people settled in British towns in the 1960s, sometimes their neighbours complained that their cooking "stank". Some white residents in Birmingham even went so far as to demand rate reductions from the city council to compensate them for the smell of spice. But slowly almost everyone was won over by the flavours. For those who really couldn't stomach spice, there was usually an "English" section of the menu, offering an omelette and chips.

In the 1970s and 80s, more chefs arrived from Bangladesh. This was the golden era of the curry house, when its only real rival was long life Vesta curry, that peculiar amalgam of dehydrated mince in brown sauce. By 1980 there were roughly 3,000 curry houses. During the following decade, Manchester began to promote the largely Pakistani restaurants of its famous Curry Mile as part of a trade renaissance. One of the reasons to visit Birmingham was now the balti curry, invented by immigrants from Pakistan - a one-pot dish made with cumin, cloves and cassia bark, served with extra-large naan breads. Britain's appetite for curry now looked as enduring as our love of tea and toast. By 1990, five years before Oli Khan set foot in Linlithgow, there were 6,600 curry houses (by 2011, there were 12,000).

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An Indian restaurant in London in 1955. Photograph: Thurston Hopkins/Getty Images

This expansion was enabled by a wave of Bangladeshi immigration, especially after the country's war of independence of 1971. In 1972, a new immigration act came into force decreeing that family members could only join husbands and fathers once the men were already settled in the UK. This meant that men came to Britain alone, and only later sent for their wives and children, which partly explains why curry house food never bore much resemblance to authentic cookery from the subcontinent. Home cooking in India and Bangladesh was generally done by women.

When he first joined his father in Britain aged 17, Oli Khan noticed that mouth-scorching British curries were nothing like the light, herb-rich food his mother made in Sylhet, with spices ground fresh on a stone for each meal. Traditional Bangladeshi cooking is a world away from creations such as the locally notorious "Widower" curry served at Bindi restaurant in Grantham, Lincolnshire, made from 20 Naga Infinity chillis, which is so hot that a customer who ate a portion in 2013 was left crying and hallucinating from the pain.

This blastingly hot food was an invented cuisine that no Indian person would fully recognise as their own. Given the choice, even the curry house owners themselves often preferred to go home and eat fresher, more subtle food than the dishes they served in their own restaurants. What they didn't anticipate was that one day, some of their customers might start to feel the same way.

ou can judge the age of a British curry restaurant from its name. If you see one that is called Taj Mahal, Passage to India or Koh-i-Noor (after the famous Indian diamond), it probably dates back to the first wave of curry houses in the 1960s.These eateries appealed to retired Old India Hands, who wanted to eat hot chutney and be treated like "sahibs" again. The names of 1970s curry houses began to shrug off the colonial past and evoke, instead, a vague sense of eastern exoticism: Lily Tandoori, Aladdin, Sheba - glamorous names to counteract longstanding British prejudices that south Asian food was malodorous and unclean. By the 1980s, however, such orientalism had also begun to seem hackneyed, and new restaurants opening in that decade often named themselves after ingredients, a more subtle form of rebranding: Tamarind, Cumin, or Lasan (Hindi for garlic).

Complaints that the British curry houses were inauthentic first began to be heard in the 1970s. In 1976, the cookery writer Madhur Jaffrey complained in her book An Invitation to Indian Cooking that these were "second-class establishments" serving a "generalised Indian food from no area whatsoever". Jaffrey's own books introduced millions of Britons to a more regional Indian cookery of flatbreads and complex dals and fresh, green coriander chutneys: a cuisine quite unlike the dear old tikkas in neon-red sauces. Increasing numbers of travellers came back from India with stories of meals of intensely varied flavours and textures that did not begin with a poppadom starter and a pint of Kingfisher. Curry houses went on the defensive, insisting that their menus were regional and "authentic".

The objection that curry house food was inauthentic was true, but also unfair. It's worth asking what "authenticity" really means in this context, given that people in India - like humans everywhere - do not themselves eat a perfectly "authentic" diet. When I asked dozens of people, while on a recent visit to India, about their favourite comfort food, most of them - whether from Delhi, Bangalore or Mumbai - told me that what they really loved to eat, especially when drinking beer, was something called Indian-Chinese food. It is nothing a Chinese person would recognise, consisting of gloopy dishes of meat and noodles, thick with cornflour and soy sauce, but spiced with green chillis and vinegar to please the national palate. Indian-Chinese food - just like British curry house food - offers a salty night away from the usual home cooking. The difference is that Indian people accept Indian-Chinese food for the ersatz joy that it is, whereas many British curry house customers seem to have believed that recipe for their Bombay potatoes really did come from Bombay, and felt affronted to discover that it did not.

The story of curry in modern Britain raises a question about food and identity. Does a cuisine belong to the people who eat it or the ones who cook it? The accusation of inauthenticity went hand in hand with a broader issue of ownership: once people realised that what they were eating was not proper Indian food, it was a short step to feeling that perhaps they, and not the south Asian chefs who cooked and served it, were the ones who owned it. Curry houses were always places where some customers behaved with a shocking sense of entitlement, occasionally expressed as outright racism. (One industry insider also told me that a surprising number of diners feel that no tip is required at a curry house.)

While the rest of Britain was assuming ownership of curry house food, many British Asian people were busy disowning it. As a student in Leeds in the 1990s, Nikita Gulhane, whose family arrived in the UK from India in the 1930s, occasionally ate at curry houses but found them to be "horrific places" full of drunken customers eating "shockingly overspiced food". Gulhane is now a cookery teacher in London, whose courses include Keralan cuisine. He loves teaching people how to make simple dishes, such as roasting an aubergine over a flame and mashing it into a silky pulp with slivers of garlic and ginger - something quite alien to the curry house menu.

To many British Asian people, whether they had grown up in the UK or arrived as adults, British-Indian food seemed odd, both in form and flavour. The young cookery writer Meera Sodha, author of the 2016 cookbook Fresh India, always felt that curry house food was "misrepresentative" of the Gujarati cuisine she grew up eating at her mother's table in Lincolnshire. The entire flavour profile of curry house curries, Gulhane told me, is founded on the tang of dried fenugreek leaf, a herb his mother never used, which acts as a flavour enhancer, comparable to MSG. (While talking to Gulhane, I suddenly realised that the spicy aroma at Uddin's that I had found so distinctive and alluring as a child must have been fenugreek leaf.)

The chef Vivek Singh arrived in Britain in 2000 from Jaipur, where he had been cooking at the five-star Oberoi Rajvilas hotel. When Singh, who grew up in West Bengal, ate in a curry house in Canary Wharf, he found that he didn't recognise any of the sauces. Singh was puzzled by the grid formula of the menu - pick any protein in any sauce - and the curious fantasy that a small kitchen serving just 60 or 70 covers could pretend to offer a hundred or more dishes. In a hugely successful departure from the traditional low-price British curry, Singh has been at the forefront of a new, high-end version of Indian food in Britain. At Singh's Cinnamon Club in Westminster, which is a favourite of senior politicians, a main course of chargrilled halibut with bay leaves might cost £25.

When Singh first moved to Britain, he said, there were only five Indian restaurants here that he considered to be any good. Now, Singh claims, there are as many as 200 excellent examples, in which number he includes not just pricey establishments such as his own, but the more affordable London chain of Dishoom, modelled on the Irani cafes of Mumbai.

In Vivek Singh's view, the original curry houses were based on a faulty understanding both of cuisine and of business. "You employ very few people. You don't pay them very well. You are not willing to share your knowledge or techniques." Isn't it sad, I ask, that these old family-run businesses are now struggling? "Not for me!" replied Singh. "The British curry house is an institution that has to be revered. But it failed to adapt."

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Who killed the curry house? | Bee Wilson

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No one in Oli Khan's family had ever lived in Scotland, or anywhere near it. But when, aged 23, Khan first set eyes on Linlithgow, a modest West Lothian town near Falkirk, he saw a prize greater than home. He saw opportunity.

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The problems we have agreeing on what to call different meals of the day!

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When I was 19, I went out with quite a posh girl. Not only did I lose my virginity with her while watching Life On Earth on the telly, but I also received a crash course in dining and class mobility. On evenings when I was to visit her, I would eat my tea with my family first. Tea, in this case, not being Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches, but the working-class evening meal, served perhaps between six and seven o'clock. After tea, I would ride my motorbike over to her parents' Elizabethan manor house and there I would partake of supper. This was good news to a growing country lad who could easily eat five large meals a day.

When I was 19, I went out with quite a posh girl. Not only did I lose my virginity with her while watching Life On Earth on the telly, but I also received a crash course in dining and class mobility. On evenings when I was to visit her, I would eat my tea with my family first. Tea, in this case, not being Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches, but the working-class evening meal, served perhaps between six and seven o'clock. After tea, I would ride my motorbike over to her parents' Elizabethan manor house and there I would partake of supper. This was good news to a growing country lad who could easily eat five large meals a day.

Supper, as in "kitchen" or "country", is upper class. It implies that this is just a casual family meal, maybe with close friends. It may involve a simple starter, wine, and cheese and fruit to follow, but would probably not involve a white tablecloth and starched napkins. Supper is elegant sufficiency. It has overtones of Billy Bunter's midnight feasts, Hogarth prints or officers on campaign. The real significance of supper, I think, is that it implies the user is familiar with an altogether grander style of meal held in stately halls, the formal dinner with copperplate invitations, waiters, silverware, port and speeches. The word supper, I think, implies a subtle rebuke to the aspirational classes who are gauche enough to hold dinner parties at home.

Noel Gallagher

Me and my kids call it tea. My wife calls it dinner. She went to uni, I didn't. She's middle class, I'm not. As for supper? What is that, exactly? As a kid, I ate Irish stew. As unemployed teenagers, it was something with beans. After that, until I left home, it was, "Make it yourself!" That's when it started to get tricky. I still eat shit, to be honest. You can move the boy to London, but he'll always be a northerner.

Helen Fielding

Growing up in Yorkshire, breakfast was a fry-up at the start of the day, dinner was at lunchtime (often a cold collation of what, in hindsight, was probably slices of giant sausage made from BSE) and tea was at the end of the day - a lard-based feast of something like suet and mince roly-poly with gravy and carrots, followed by treacle sponge topped with cream, ice-cream and custard. Supper was Ovaltine and a biscuit at bedtime.

When I descended to the south and Oxford, in the first week my tutor invited me and my tutorial partner, who was also from the north, to dinner. We duly turned up in the middle of the day to be greeted by kindly astonishment and a gracious attempt to explain how things worked in the sophisticated world we were about to enter.

Emboldened by this new knowledge, the next time I was invited to dinner, this time by fellow students, I arrived at the appropriate time - the evening - but wearing a long gown, admittedly one from C&A, but somewhat in the style of pictures I'd seen of Oxford drinking clubs and summer balls. Unfortunately, my worldly-wise hosts were wearing jeans and serving spag bog on a kitchen table decorated with candles in old wine bottles.

Things got better for a while, but when I moved to Los Angeles, the whole nightmare started again. People wanted to have power breakfasts in the middle of the night - 6.30am! - meet for lunch before noon and the earliest I was ever invited to dinner was 5.30pm. Even then, it didn't seem to be quite acceptable actually to eat anything. The concept of "supper" doesn't really exist in LA, as far as I can make out. People don't seem to cook very much, so either it's dinner in a restaurant or a posh, carb-free dinner in someone's house done by a cook, but again, quite often ridiculously early and all over by 9pm. The closest thing to a Cameron supper is going round for "take-out" or "carry-out", which means you just hang out informally and eat something that arrived in a van.

Back in London, I find myself using the word "supper" quite a lot, usually to suggest the sort of informal, just-a-bunch-of-incredibly-cool-friends-round-the-kitchen-table soirée I aspire to, with something I've knocked up from the Ottolenghi cookbook. In reality, I'm more likely to spend the evening eating spoonfuls of odd things out of the fridge while watching telly in pyjamas. But at least you don't have to call that anything.

Rachel Johnson

I remember my parents giving dinner parties in Brussels, in the 1970s, during the tragic Ice Storm period of my childhood. My mother would cook. My father would carve, occasionally with an electric knife, like a baby buzzsaw. They divorced when I was 14. I learned from my mother that the best parties have nothing to do with "fine dining" - I have to this day a horror of hushed tones and chinking cutlery - but lots of wine, rowdy guests, and rough peasant food with plenty of things to pick at even after pudding. It's a model I try to follow myself, although for some reason even "kitchen supper" can take three days, not counting all the time one spends convening exactly the right cast, and clearing up. I still do "kitchen suppers", but have long banned "dinner parties" as both exhausting to give and to attend: they're like taking a four-hour exam in someone you don't know and may never see again. I've noticed a new trend, though: often, the host will ting a glass and want guests to sing for their supper, and get a "general conversation going". Being highly competitive and noisy, I enjoy that (the last dinner I went to, we had Stephen Hester talking about banking). If it's in Notting Hill, "kitchen supper, just locals" can be a £200-a-head catered dinner for which the whole mansion is transformed into a souk and there will be at least two household names present as trophy guests. A "country supper" is eight people, something killingly calorific and crumbly out of the Aga, followed by drunken driving through country lanes. No one gets invited to dinner parties any more: that's déclassé thanks to Come Dine With Me. It's always supper, sometimes even "sups", but only if you're really grand. It's at "sups", of course, that you're most likely to get the Lynch-Bages or the PM.

Joe Dunthorne

There was a constant war between my sisters and me for the best seat in front of the TV. This meant that dinner became, in essence, nothing more than a race to finish first, so that we could run from the dinner table and claim prime position. With the good seat came the remote control and with the remote control came dominion over one's destiny.

We always ate quite late, at eight or so, which was proof that we were authentically middle class. Sometimes, the names of the dishes my parents cooked sounded unsettlingly exotic - ratatouille, moussaka - and I would long for parents like those of my mate John, who lived on the hill. When I went to his, we ate tea early, at 6, sometimes even at 5.30, and had proper food: fish fingers, pizzas, crinkle-cut chips.

After school, knowing that I would have a long wait for our evening meal, I always put two chocolate muffins and half a tub of custard in the microwave. Then I'd eat them with a spoon in front of Neighbours. I didn't know it then but I was having high tea.

David Lammy

Breakfast was always rushed - a slice of toast and out of the door. Lunch was terrible - baked beans and two chicken nuggets from the school canteen. Dinner, however, was something to look forward to. This was always real Caribbean food: chicken rubbed with allspice and scotch bonnet peppers, rice and peas, yam dumplings and plantain. Sometimes, we'd set out the table, but more often than not we'd sit in front of the TV with our dinner trays (mine was a tacky metallic one commemorating Charles and Diana's wedding).

The first few weeks at university brought some culture clashes. Newly made northern friends talked about "tea", but to me "tea" was just a warm brown drink that my teachers enjoyed. My family never had it. The closest we got at home was Ovaltine, and that certainly wasn't a meal.

I was first introduced to "supper" at the inevitable visit-your-new-friends-at-their-homes that follows your first term at university. It was more ritualistic than our dinners ever were. Supper was something you anticipated, that you perhaps got changed for. Inevitably, it was a faux pas minefield: multiple courses, a plethora of cutlery and alcohol (which, until then, was something I had only ever had in a park or a pub, never in front of a consenting adult).

This was all new and novel, but it was mundane and stuffy, too. As I've grown older, friends who have "supper" make their children have "tea" with different food, at a different time and on a different table. I don't see the point. I find it hard enough to see my kids as it is, and even harder to make them aware of their Caribbean roots. That's why we have dinner. The four of us sit down at the table and we eat food their grandmother would approve of.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

There is no such thing as a "country supper" in culinary or sociological terms. Or at least there wasn't, until now. What there is, is "supper", the meal that posh(ish) people eat at home most days in the evening - when they are not going out to or hosting "dinner" - a meal of some formality designed to entertain and impress your social peer group. You can invite someone to "supper" and know they will not expect tablecloths or candles or more than perhaps half a dozen guests. They might expect to chat to you in your kitchen, though, while you prepare the meal in question.

Then there is "the country" - not to be confused with "the nation", but a posh shorthand for what might more generally be described as "the countryside". It means anywhere with more fields and hedges than streets and lamp-posts. It's a word used in such sentences as "I live in the country, but I have a flat in London", or "I live in London, but I have a cottage/farm/stately home in the country."

To me, therefore, the term "country supper" is specific. It can be meaningfully used only by and between people who regularly eat "supper" in each others' houses, and have (at least) two residences, one in a rural location. (Though, being a Devon man, I'd call Chipping Norton suburban. Or at best "home counties".) On that basis, although "country supper" is a hot buzz-phrase right now, I doubt it will permanently enter the lexicon of either gastronomy or class analysis.

I know all this, of course, because I am reasonably posh myself - and if there really was such a thing as a "country supper", I would expect to have been invited to one.

In 18th-century London, supper was posh: an insubstantial final snack eaten by the upper classes long after dinner - cold beef and punch, perhaps, nibbled to sate the appetite before bed. But growing up in the 1980s, supper wasn't grand. It was just what we called the seven o'clock meal, whether it was toad in the hole, cottage pie or that exciting new discovery, the M&S ready meal.

I'm not sure why we called it supper rather than dinner or tea. Our Oxford household was thoroughly middle class, but also eccentric, very bookish and Anglican; the Last Supper was much discussed. My mother was a Shakespeare scholar, so she may have been talking in Elizabethan English when she called us in for supper: "Men sit down to that Nourishment which is called Supper", as it says in Love's Labour's Lost. Or it could have been an affectation from my grandmother, who tried hard to shrug off her roots in a Devon post office, referring to "the drawing room" and going so far as to ennoble Marmite with a French pronunciation: to her it was always "Mar-meet". She would never have dreamed of calling the evening meal "tea", which meant small cakes and china cups at four.

Personally, I don't find "supper" snooty. It is only when you add an adjective that it becomes pretentious: country supper and kitchen supper are both phrases used by people like David Cameron, who normally eat dinner, but are slumming it. My husband's family, much posher than mine, always eats dinner, implying candles and several delicious courses at 8pm. The joy of supper, by contrast, is that it carries no particular expectations besides nourishment. It could be anything from fillet steak to poached eggs and Mar-meet toast. Supper is simply the comforting end point to which the whole day has been leading.

Tom Parker Bowles

Dinner party: two words to strike fear into even the most open-minded of hosts. It comes barded with sneers and marinated in petty snobbery, an event that seemed less about eating and more about a smug sense of belonging - Debrett's with fish knives and a par-frozen bun. They have tea, you have supper, I have dinner. Visions spring to mind of jellied tomato rings and overcooked soufflés, an excess of velvet and the degradation of a perfectly good meal.

But, really, it's a simple matter of semantics. There are few things more civilised than having friends over for supper or dinner. It matters not which word you use, so long as you don't go and call it a dinner party. I can think of nothing worse than asking people to clad themselves in black tie or, worse still, "smart casual" before coming over to eat. Or to subject them to the half-witted, smeared and foamed approximation of a three-star Michelin chef. Good food, well cooked, and plenty of grog, shared with people you love. That's not a dinner party, rather having dinner, at home, with mates.

As children, we had tea - sausages, fish fingers, whatever - at about 5pm. Then my parents had dinner at about 8.30. I was always rather jealous of those mums and dads who had "supper". It seemed far cooler and laid back, resolutely more modern. But whatever it was called, there was always comfort in falling asleep to the clatter of knives and forks, and the easy hubbub of well-watered good times.

So yes, the dinner party, with its forced dress code and fussy food, stilted conversation and whiff of self-satisfaction, is something to be feared. But then, so is any meal possessing these horrible qualities, regardless of whether it's branded "supper", "dinner" or "feast". All that matters is the shared pleasures of the table, time to eat, drink and be merry. The dinner party might be dead, but the fundaments of domestic edible pleasure will endure for ever and ever.

I'm not a foodie, but I know foodies, and I find their dinner parties most alarming. I want meat and two veg spread in an orderly way on the plate. And a pudding that contains something nice like meringue.

Dinner parties have changed a lot since I wrote the Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr in 1982. There still exist in corners of the country meals of almost stunning simplicity, usually involving something I hate - game birds - produced with a certain amount of fanfare. Horribly red stringy things. But at least you know exactly where to start, which is the main course, and what's the end. And there is all sorts of silverware.

At a foodie supper, the sequence is disrupted, and it's done with the utmost of casualness. I remember eating at a foodie neighbour's house 25 years ago and thinking, which bit is which? What goes first? Is that a pudding or does it just look like one? For a person of conservative habits, it was very disconcerting.

Now you can see it in full bloom. There used to be five kinds of cheese from about three nations that one could take to a dinner party. Now there will be Colombian drug smuggler's cheese and something sourced from a farmers' market in Aberdeen.

Of course, I don't give dinner parties. Mostly I eat out, but when I'm at home I have kitchen suppers in the most literal sense: "This delicious thing I found in Tesco, let's just put it in the microwave." I'm not northern, so I don't call it tea. And I don't call it dinner, because it's not dinnery. So it's supper, I'm afraid.

Jeanette Winterson

Dinner parties make me feel like a desperate housewife on Come Dine With Me. I grew up in Lancashire in the 1960s. Dinner was eaten at 12 noon and it was pie and gravy. Except on Sundays, when we had a joint of beef or lamb, the remains of which would be put through the Spong mincer on Mondays for a week's worth of aforementioned pies. My first dinner party happened to me when I went to Oxford. I never wanted it to happen again. The real issue is that I like food and I like to eat my food, not try to shove it in my mouth while talking to someone I hope never to meet again. My girlfriend is Jewish, a great cook and seriously social. When we got together, I said, "I will do cocktail parties and I will do supper with friends. Never make me go to dinner." She tried, twice; the first time I refused to eat and the second time I refused to speak. We haven't tried since.

I love suppers with friends. Is there a class thing? Yes, for sure, but if you are a writer or an artist of any kind, you can avoid class. You can mix wherever you want to and say what you like. That helps. I have to say, though, that the best dinner party I ever went to was thrown by an eccentric member of the Guinness family in a crumbling house in Dublin. The dining room hadn't been decorated since 1840 and, as the room was colder than the fridge, we left the champagne out to chill. Food was cooked on a burner of the kind road-menders use to melt tarmac. I was sitting next to Neil Jordan and we both ate in silence until we had eaten enough to be able to speak.

I'm rarely invited to dinner parties these days - being a judge on Great British Menu, as well as a restaurateur, people just assume I'm the guest from hell.

Maybe that's also why, when I have people over for dinner, they're often surprised by my food. They turn up expecting some sort of whizz-bang gastronomic experience, only for me to serve up a fish that's been covered in herbs and salt, and shoved in the oven. Dinner parties, to me, are about family, friendship and fun, not networking or spending all night in the kitchen.

That attitude's probably a throwback to my childhood in Mayo - mealtimes were extraordinarily important, and we wouldn't dream of not sitting down to dinner together. And it's "dinner" or "tea", by the way - I'd never even heard the term "supper" until I came to England.

When I was young, dinner parties didn't focus nearly so much on the food. They were more about staying up all night, and if there was any actual cooking involved, it usually got burned anyway. Perhaps it's just an age thing that the dinner parties I go to now aren't like that at all, but I kind of miss those days.

* Interviews: Charlotte Northedge, Bob Granleese, Becky Barnicoat.

The guidelines: Tea

When? 6.30pm, or whenever Dad gets home from work.
What are we eating? Fish fingers, chips, beans. And then a yoghurt.
Who's coming? You, your siblings, your parents, possibly a friend, so long as they've checked with their mum first.
Topics of conversation Shhh... Hollyoaks is on.
Tableware Not the good cutlery. That's for Christmas Day and Christmas Day alone.
Dress code Your school uniform, unless it's in the wash because you got it muddy at lunchtime.

The guidelines: Dinner

When? 7pm, or thereabouts.
What are we eating? One of those Marks & Spencer meal deals, bought on the way home from work.
Who's coming? Whoever's at home.
Topics of conversation Work, your journey home from work, that thing Joanna who sits opposite you at work does with her teeth that's really annoying.
Tableware A plate on your lap. Who has space for a table any more?
Dress code Whatever you worked in (although freelance writers may wear trousers as a point of etiquette).

The guidelines: Supper

When? 9pm, or later.
What are we eating? Something light and self-consciously rustic, usually cooked in a bloody Aga or something.
Who's coming? You, Rebekah Brooks, David Cameron and, indirectly, Robert Jay QC.
Topics of conversation Chipping Norton, NewsCorp's BSkyB takeover bid, whether or not Dave can lend you a horse.
Tableware Silver cutlery, ironed tablecloths, goblets full of children's blood.
Dress code Top hats left at the door. We're all in this together, remember.
By Stuart Heritage This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set. More information. Topics

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Tea with Grayson Perry. Or is it dinner, or supper?

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When I was 19, I went out with quite a posh girl. Not only did I lose my virginity with her while watching Life On Earth on the telly, but I also received a crash course in dining and class mobility. On evenings when I was to visit her, I would eat my tea with my family first.

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A great comedy sketch about drinking in the UK and US.

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A great article about the history of our world-famous traditional breakfast.

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The traditional English breakfast is a national institution. Eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms and fried bread, served with hot buttered...

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I love the Atlas Obscura site and their sections on food are particularly great. Here's their history of fish and chips.

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The powerful pairing of fish and chips has long been considered a British staple. Dubbed "the undisputed national dish of Great Britain" by the National Federation of Fish Friers, it's been enjoyed on the island for over a century, with an estimated 35,000 chip shops in business by 1935. During World War II, Winston Churchill exempted the beloved dish from rationing. Today, "Fish & Chip Friday" is a weekly ritual for Brits ringing in the weekend.

Fish and chips's origin story, however, is a bit more complex than this nationalist sentiment might imply.

As told by Simon Majumdar in his podcast, Eat My Globe, it all began outside of the U.K., hundreds of years ago. From the 8th to the 12th century, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in relative peace in Portugal, known as Al-Andalus under Moorish rule. Sephardic Jews, who likely comprised around 20 percent of the population, were relatively well-respected and held positions in the high court. For this reason, the area became somewhat of a haven for those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. However, in 1496, after the end of Moorish rule, King Manuel I married Isabel of Spain, who was not so aligned with the idea of religious freedom. Her ultimatum: Their betrothal would mean the expulsion of Jews from Portugal. Manuel I mandated that all Jews be baptized, or otherwise expelled.

While many fled, some Jews stayed, and either converted to Christianity or pretended to do so while continuing to practice Judaism in secret. But when Portugal fell under Spanish rule, the Inquisition targeted individuals with Jewish lineage, threatening anyone claiming to be a Converso. As religious violence worsened, many fled Portugal and resettled in England, bringing with them culinary treasures founded in Sephardic cuisine-including fish.

Peshkado frito (in Andalusian dialect, pescaíto frito) was one of them. The dish of white fish, typically cod or haddock, fried in a thin coat of flour, was a favorite particularly among Sephardic Jews, who fried it on Friday nights to prepare for the Sabbath, as the Mosaic laws prohibited cooking. Allegedly, the batter preserved the fish so it could be eaten cold, and without sacrificing too much flavor, the following day.

It was a hit. Fish prepared "in the Jewish manner" was sold on the streets of London on any given day. And at the end of the week, eating fish on Friday was a part of religious observance for Jews and Catholics alike-as "fish fasting" to avoid consuming warm-blooded animals has been a part of the Catholic tradition for centuries.* Though both groups were religious minorities at the time, fried fish became a popular secular dish, too.

But the Friday-night tradition was likely chipless until the late-19th century. The general popularity of the potato bloomed late in Europe, and it wasn't until the late 1800s that the tuber was accepted, due especially to the promotional efforts of a French scientist. Though there are several theories of how the potato came to England-and how it became the "chip" we know and love today- one historical account credits a tripe vendor by the name of Mrs. "Granny" Duce with selling the first fried cut potatoes to the public.

There are also competing theories about who created the pairing of, as Churchill called them, "good companions." Most trace it back to the early 1860s, when Joseph Malins, a Jewish immigrant, opened up a fish and chips shop in London. Others point to John Lee, a man living outside of Manchester, who ran a "chipped potato" restaurant that sold the beloved pairing.

Whether the winning combo was first slapped together by John or Joseph or someone else entirely, it soon became everybody's dish. British natives and immigrants alike began slathering their cod in batter and frying up husky chips. Industrialization in the 19th and early 20th centuries launched the fish dish to even greater heights, as it became a favorite for factory and mill workers in London and beyond. And while its religious connotations are hidden today, many admirers remain devoted to the beloved international, national dish.
*Update 10/23:**Update 10/23: This post has been updated to remove the term "Marranos," which is often considered offensive. Gastro Obscura covers the world's most wondrous food and drink.
Sign up for our email, delivered twice a week. This post has been updated to note that Catholics were a minority in England during the time period in question.

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How Fish and Chips Migrated to Great Britain

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The powerful pairing of fish and chips has long been considered a British staple. Dubbed "the undisputed national dish of Great Britain" by the National Federation of Fish Friers, it's been enjoyed on the island for over a century, with an estimated 35,000 chip shops in business by 1935.

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Quite an interesting historical overview of what's shaped our cuisine.

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British food from the Romans to Sunday roast dinners, fish and chips and the great British curry!

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Different types of schools and universities in the UK

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Different types of schools and universities in the UK

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Here's a recent BBC documentary about the Hillsborough scandal. Well worth a watch, if you can find the time:

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Hillsborough Disaster - BBC Documentary HD (2016)

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Here'sa collection of articles from The Guardian around the theme of the north-south divide. Dip in and find things that interest you.

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North-south divide | Society | The Guardian

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The latest news and comment on perceived differences between southern England and the rest of Great Britain

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I came across this article the morning after we went to Brixton and it reiterates much of what I was saying on that trip. Great piece.

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Migration and empire 'should be taught in English schools'

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Race equality thinktank calls for lessons to be made compulsory in secondary schools

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Middle class aspiration

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Example of posh boy portrayed in comedy

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Tim Nice-But-Dim's school re-union - Harry Enfield - BBC

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Here's more on the utterly shameful treatment of many Windrush generation Brits.

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The Windrush scandal was a British political scandal that began in 2018 concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries, as members of the " Windrush generation" (so named after the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought one of the first groups of West Indian migrants to the UK in 1948).

As well as those who were deported, an unknown number were detained, lost their jobs or homes, had their passports confiscated, or were denied benefits or medical care to which they were entitled. A number of long-term UK residents were refused re-entry to the UK; a larger number were threatened with immediate deportation by the Home Office. Linked by commentators to the "hostile environment policy" instituted by Theresa May during her time as Home Secretary, the scandal led to the resignation of Amber Rudd as Home Secretary in April 2018 and the appointment of Sajid Javid as her successor. The scandal also prompted a wider debate about British immigration policy and Home Office practice.

The March 2020 independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review, conducted by the inspector of constabulary Wendy Williams, concluded that the Home Office had shown "ignorance and thoughtlessness" and that what had happened had been "foreseeable and avoidable". It further found that immigration regulations were tightened "with complete disregard for the Windrush generation" and that officials had made "irrational" demands for multiple documents to establish residency rights.

Despite a compensation scheme being announced in December 2018, by November 2021, only an estimated 5 per cent of victims had received any compensation and 23 of those eligible had died before receiving payments. Three separate Parliamentary committees had issued reports during 2021 criticising Home Office slowness and ineffectiveness in providing redress to victims and calling for the scheme to be taken out of the hands of the Home Office.

HMT Empire Windrush after which the Windrush generation is named.

The British Nationality Act 1948 gave citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies status and the consequent right of settlement in the UK to everyone who was at that time a British subject by virtue of having been born in a British colony. The act and encouragement from British government campaigns in Caribbean countries led to a wave of immigration. Between 1948 and 1970, nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain, which in 1948 faced severe labour shortages in the wake of the Second World War. Those who came to the UK around this time were later referred to as "the Windrush generation". Working age adults and many children travelled from the Caribbean to join parents or grandparents in the UK or travelled with their parents without their own passports.

Having a legal right to come to the UK, they neither needed nor were given any documents upon entry to the UK, nor following changes in immigration laws in the early 1970s. Many worked or attended schools in the UK without any official documentary record of their having done so, other than the same records as any UK-born citizen.

Many of the countries from which the migrants had come became independent of the UK after 1948, thereby making those migrants citizens of the countries they formerly resided in. Legislative measures in the 1960s and early 1970s limited the rights of citizens of these former colonies, now members of the Commonwealth, to come to or work in the UK. Anyone who had arrived in the UK from a Commonwealth country before 1973 was granted an automatic right permanently to remain, unless they left the UK for more than two years. Since the right was automatic, many people in this category were never given, or asked to provide, documentary evidence of their right to remain at the time or over the next forty years, during which many continued to live and work in the UK, believing themselves to be British.

The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 specifically protected long-standing residents of the UK from Commonwealth countries from enforced removal. This provision was not transferred to 2014 immigration legislation because Commonwealth citizens living in the UK before 1 January 1973 were "adequately protected from removal", according to a Home Office spokesperson.

In 2012 (photo 2013), Home Secretary Theresa May introduced the hostile environment policy

The hostile environment policy, which came into effect in October 2012, comprises administrative and legislative measures to make staying in the United Kingdom as difficult as possible for people without leave to remain in the hope that they may " voluntarily leave". In 2012, Home Secretary Theresa May said the aim was to create "a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants". The policy was widely seen as part of a strategy of reducing UK immigration to the levels promised in the 2010 Conservative Party Election Manifesto. It introduced measures including a legal requirement for landlords, employers, the NHS, charities, community interest companies and banks to carry out ID checks and to refuse services to individuals unable to prove legal residence in the UK. Landlords, employers and others are liable to fines of up to £10,000 if they fail to comply with these measures.

The policy led to a more complicated application process for "leave to remain" and encouraged voluntary deportation. The policy coincided with sharp increases in Home Office fees for processing leave to remain, naturalisation and registration of citizenship applications. The BBC reported that the Home Office had made a profit of more than £800 million from nationality services between 2011 and 2017.

The term "hostile environment" had first been used under the Brown Government. On 25 April 2018, in answer to questions in Parliament during the Windrush scandal, then Prime Minister Theresa May said the hostile-environment policy would remain government policy.

In June 2020, Britain's human rights watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), launched a legal action to review the "hostile environment" immigration policy and to assess whether the Home Office had complied with its equality duties (as outlined in the Equality Act 2010). The EHRC planned to develop recommendations by September 2020. In November 2020, the EHRC said that the Home Office had broken the law by failing to obey public-sector equality duties by not considering how its policies affected black members of the Windrush generation.

The Home Office received warnings from 2013 onwards that many Windrush generation residents were being treated as illegal immigrants and that older Caribbean-born people were being targeted. The Refugee and Migrant Centre in Wolverhampton said their caseworkers were seeing hundreds of people receiving letters from Capita, the Home Office's contractor, telling them that they had no right to be in the UK, some of whom were told to arrange to leave the UK at once. Roughly half the letters went to people who already had leave to remain or were in the process of formalising their immigration status. Caseworkers had warned the Home Office directly and also through local MPs of these cases since 2013. People considered illegal were sometimes losing their jobs or homes as a consequence of having benefits cut off and some had been refused medical care under the National Health Service, some placed in detention centres as preparation for their deportation, some deported or refused the right to return to the UK from abroad.

In 2013 Caribbean leaders had put the deportations on the agenda at the Commonwealth meeting in Sri Lanka and in April 2016 Caribbean governments told Philip Hammond, the UK Foreign Secretary, that people who had spent most of their lives in the UK were facing deportation and their concerns were passed on at the time to the Home Office. Shortly before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in April 2018, twelve Caribbean countries made a formal request for a meeting with the British Prime Minister to discuss the issue, which was rejected by Downing Street.

A month before the report was published, more than 60 MPs, academics and campaign groups wrote an open letter to Amber Rudd urging the Government to halt the "inhumane" policy, citing the Home Office's "poor track record" of dealing with complaints and appeals in a timely manner.

From November 2017, newspapers reported that the British government had threatened to deport people from Commonwealth territories who had arrived in the UK before 1973 if they could not prove their right to remain in the UK. Although they were primarily identified as the "Windrush generation" and mainly from the Caribbean, it was estimated in April 2018 on figures provided by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford that up to 57,000 Commonwealth migrants could be affected, of whom 15,000 were from Jamaica. In addition to those from the Caribbean, cases of people affected who had been born in Kenya, Cyprus, Canada and Sierra Leone were identified in the press.

The press coverage accused Home Office agencies of operating a "guilty until proven innocent" and "deport first, appeal later" regime; of targeting the weakest groups, particularly those from the Caribbean; of inhumanely applying regulations by cutting off access to jobs, services and bank accounts while cases were still being investigated; of losing large numbers of original documents that proved right to remain; of making unreasonable demands for documentary proof - in some instances, elderly people had been asked for four documents for each year they had lived in the UK; and of leaving people stranded outside the UK because of British administrative errors or intransigence and denial of medical treatment. Other cases covered in the press involved adults born in the UK, whose parents were "Windrush" immigrants and who had been threatened with deportation and had their rights removed, because they were unable to prove that their parents were legally in the UK at the time of their birth.[citation needed ]

The Home Office and British government were further accused of having known about the negative impacts that the "hostile environment policy" was having on Windrush immigrants since as early as 2013 and of having done nothing to remedy them.

Those highlighting the issue included journalists Amelia Gentleman and Gary Younge, Caribbean diplomats Kevin Isaac, Seth George Ramocan and Guy Hewitt, and British politicians Herman Ouseley and David Lammy MP. Amelia Gentleman of The Guardian was later awarded the 2018 Paul Foot Award for her coverage of what the judges described as "the catastrophic consequences for a group of elderly Commonwealth-born citizens who were told they were illegal immigrants, despite having lived in the UK for around 50 years".

In early March 2018, questions began to be asked in Parliament about individual cases that had been highlighted in the press. On 14 March, when Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn asked May about an individual who had been refused medical treatment under the NHS during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons, May initially said she was "unaware of the case", but later agreed to "look into it". Parliament thereafter continued to be involved in what was increasingly being referred to as "the Windrush scandal".

On 16 April 2018, David Lammy MP challenged Amber Rudd in the House of Commons to give numbers as to how many had lost their jobs or homes, been denied medical care, or been detained or deported wrongly. Lammy called on Rudd to apologise for the threats of deportation and called it a "day of national shame", blaming the problems on the government's "hostile environment policy". Rudd replied that she did not know of any, but would attempt to verify that. In late April, Rudd faced increasing calls for her to resign and for the Government to abandon the "hostile environment policy". There were also calls for the Home Office to reduce fees for immigration services.

On 2 May 2018, the opposition Labour Party introduced a motion in the House of Commons seeking to force the government to release documents to the Home Affairs Select Committee concerning its handling of cases involving people who came to the UK from Commonwealth countries between 1948 and the 1970s. The motion was defeated by 316 votes to 221.

On 25 April, in answer to a question put to her by the Home Affairs Select Committee about deportation targets (i.e. specific numbers to meet), Rudd said she was unaware of such targets, saying "that's not how we operate", although another witness had discussed deportation targets. The following day, Rudd admitted in Parliament that targets had existed, but characterised them as "local targets for internal performance management" only, not "specific removal targets". She also claimed that she had been unaware of them and promised that they would be scrapped.

Two days later, The Guardian published a leaked memo that had been copied to Rudd's office. The memo said that the department had set "a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18" and "we have exceeded our target of assisted returns". The memo added that progress had been made towards "the 10% increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the Home Secretary earlier this year". Rudd responded by saying she had never seen the leaked memo, "although it was copied to my office, as many documents are".

The New Statesman said that the leaked memo gave "in specific detail the targets set by the Home Office for the number of people to be removed from the United Kingdom. It suggests that Rudd misled MPs on at least one occasion". Diane Abbott MP called for Rudd's resignation: "Amber Rudd either failed to read this memo and has no clear understanding of the policies in her own department, or she has misled Parliament and the British people." Abbott also said, "The danger is that [the] very broad target put pressure on Home Office officials to bundle Jamaican grandmothers into detention centres".

On 29 April 2018, The Guardian published a private letter from Rudd to Theresa May, dated January 2017, in which Rudd wrote of an "ambitious but deliverable" target for an increase in the enforced deportation of immigrants.

Amber Rudd

Later the same day (29 April 2018), Rudd resigned as Home Secretary, saying in her resignation letter that she had "inadvertently misled the Home Affairs Select Committee ... on the issue of illegal immigration". Later that day, Sajid Javid was named as her successor.

Shortly before, Javid, while still Communities Secretary, had said in a Sunday Telegraph interview, "I was really concerned when I first started hearing and reading about some of the issues ... My parents came to this country ... just like the Windrush generation ... When I heard about the Windrush issue I thought, 'That could be my mum, it could be my dad, it could be my uncle... it could be me.'"

On 15 May 2018, Javid told the Home Affairs Select Committee that 63 people had thus far been identified as having been possibly wrongly deported, though stating the figure was provisional and could rise. He also said that he had been unable to establish at that point how many Windrush cases had been wrongfully detained.

Human Rights committee report

On 29 June 2018, the parliamentary Human Rights Select committee published a "damning" report on the exercise of powers by immigration officials. MPs and peers concluded in the report that there had been "systemic failures" and rejected the Home Office description of "a series of mistakes" as not "credible or sufficient". The report concluded that the Home Office demonstrated a "wholly incorrect approach to case-handling and to depriving people of their liberty", and urged the Home Secretary to take action against the "human rights violations" occurring in his department. The committee had examined the cases of two people who had both twice been detained by the Home Office, whose detentions the report described as "simply unlawful" and whose treatment was described as "shocking". The committee sought to examine 60 other cases.

Harriet Harman MP, the chair of the committee, accused immigration officials of being "out of control", and the Home Office of being a "law unto itself". Harman commented that "protections and safeguards have been whittled away until what we can see now ... [is] that the Home Office is all powerful and human rights have been totally extinguished." Adding that "even when they're getting it wrong and even when all the evidence is there on their own files showing that they have no right to lock these people up, they go ahead and do it."

Home Affairs Select Committee report

The report recommended that the Home Office should re-assess all hostile environment policies to evaluate their "efficacy, fairness, impact (both intended and unintended consequences) and value for money", as the policy placed "a huge administrative burden and cost on many parts of society, without any clear evidence of its effectiveness, but with numerous examples of mistakes made and significant distress caused".

The report made a series of recommendations designed to give the "Home Office a more human face". It also called for "passport fees to be abolished for Windrush citizens; for a return to face-to-face immigration interviews; for immigration appeal rights and legal aid to be reinstated; and for the net migration target to be dropped".

The report commented that they had hoped to uncover the extent of the impact on the Windrush generation, but that the government had "not been able to answer many of our questions ... and we have not had access to internal Home Office papers". It said that it was "unacceptable that the Home Office still cannot tell us the number of people who have been unlawfully detained, were told to report to Home Office centres, who lost their jobs, or were denied medical treatment or other services."

The report also recommended extending the government compensation scheme to recognise "emotional distress as well as financial harm" and that the scheme should be open to Windrush children and grandchildren who had been adversely affected. The report reiterated its call for an immediate hardship fund for those in acute financial difficulty. Committee chair Yvette Cooper said the decision to delay hardship payments was "very troubling" and victims "should not have to struggle with debts while they are waiting for the compensation scheme".

The report also said that Home Office officials should have been aware of, and addressed, the problem much earlier. Cross-party MPs on the committee noted that the Home Office had taken no action during the months in which the issue had been highlighted in the press.

The Labour Party responded to the report by saying that "many questions remained unanswered by the Home Office". Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said it was a "disgrace" that the government had not yet published "a clear plan for compensation" for Windrush cases and that it had refused to institute a hardship fund, "even for people who have been made homeless or unemployed by their policies".

Home Office replies

In response to questions from Parliamentary select committees, and questions asked in Parliament, the Home Office issued a number of replies during the scandal.

On 28 June 2018, a letter to the HASC from the Home Office reported that it had "mistakenly detained" 850 people in the five years between 2012 and 2017. In the same five-year period, the Home Office had paid compensation of more than £21m for wrongful detention. Compensation payments varied between £1 and £120,000; an unknown number of these detentions were Windrush cases. The letter also acknowledged that 23 per cent of staff working within immigration enforcement had received performance bonuses, and that some staff had been set "personal objectives" "linked to targets to achieve enforced removals" on which bonus payments were made.

In November 2018, in a monthly update to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Javid said there were 83 cases in which it had already been confirmed that people had been wrongfully deported, and officials feared there might be a further 81. At least 11 deportees had subsequently died.

Public outcry against the deportations caused them to be paused in 2018. However, in February 2019 it emerged that the Home Office intended to resume deportations. The news led to renewed outcries against the Home Office.

On 5 February 2019, Javid claimed that all of the people due to be deported were guilty of "very serious crimes ... like rape and murder, firearms offences and drug-trafficking", but the claim was rebutted by the Home Office and was criticised by commentators as inaccurate and potentially detrimental to the futures of the deportees.

On 21 February 2019, the Jamaican High Commissioner to the UK called for a halt to deportations to Jamaica until the Home Office had published its investigation into the Windrush scandal.

Amber Rudd, while still Home Secretary, apologised for the "appalling" treatment of the Windrush generation. On 23 April 2018, Rudd announced that compensation would be given to those affected and fees and language tests for citizenship applicants would be waived for this group in the future. Theresa May also apologised for the "anxiety caused" at a meeting with 12 Caribbean leaders, though she was unable to tell them "definitively" whether anyone had been wrongly deported. May also promised that those affected would no longer need to rely on providing formal documents to prove their history of residency in the UK, nor would they incur costs in getting necessary papers.

Sajid Javid

In subsequent weeks, Javid also promised to provide figures on how many people had been wrongly detained and indicated that he did not believe in quantified targets for removals.

On 21 May 2018, it was reported that many Windrush victims were still destitute, sleeping rough or on the sofas of friends and relatives while waiting for Home Office action. Many could not afford to travel to Home Office appointments if they got them. David Lammy MP described it as "yet another failure in a litany of abject failures that Windrush citizens are being left homeless and hungry on the streets." In late May and early June, there were calls from MPs for a hardship fund to be set up to meet urgent needs. By late June, it was reported that the government's two-week deadline for resolving cases had been repeatedly breached, and that many of the most serious cases still had not been addressed. Jamaican High Commissioner Seth George Ramocan said: "There has been an effort to correct the situation now that it has become so very open and public."

In August 2018 a compensation plan had still not been implemented. Examples cited included, a man who was still homeless while waiting for a decision; a former NHS nurse, Sharon, who told a caseworker, "I am not allowed to work, I have no benefits. I have a 12-year-old child." The caseworker replied, "Well I'm afraid these are the immigration rules, ... but obviously the Home Office point of view [is] if you don't have a legal status in the UK you're not entitled to work or study." Satbir Singh of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants stated: "It's appalling that the Home Office effectively told Sharon to go and beg for food, when there are laws requiring the state to act in the best interests of children, and provide financial support to children facing destitution." Also in August 2018, a caseworker for David Lammy, said: "We have referred 25 constituents to the Windrush taskforce in total. Only three have been granted their citizenship so far, and the others are left in a strange limbo ... We still have some people who have not even got biometric residence permits and we alerted the Home Office to these people months ago."

In February 2019, the Home Office admitted that, although it had set up a hardship scheme in December 2018 for victims of the scandal, only one of the applicants to the scheme had thus far received any assistance. Also, the compensation scheme promised by the Home Office in April 2018 was still not in place in February 2019.

In February 2020, government ministers were told that the number of people wrongly classified as illegal immigrants could be much greater than previously thought and that as many as 15,000 people could be eligible for compensation. Despite this, only 36 people's compensation claims had thus far been settled and only £62,198 has been paid out from a Home Office compensation pot that was expected to distribute between £200m and £570m.

By April 2020, the Windrush taskforce, which was set up to deal with applications from people who were wrongly categorised as illegal immigrants, still had 3,720 outstanding cases. Of these, 1,111 cases had yet to be considered, over 150 cases had waited for more than six months, and 35 had waited for longer than a year for a response. The Home Office revealed that it had thus far identified 164 people from Caribbean countries whom it had wrongly detained or deported. Twenty-four people who had been wrongly deported had died before the UK government had been able to contact them, 14 people who had been wrongly deported to the Caribbean, had thus far not been traced. Officials refused to attempt to trace people who had been wrongly deported to non-Caribbean Commonwealth countries. Up to that date, 35 people had been granted "urgent and exceptional support" payments, totalling £46,795.

By October 2020, nine victims had died without receiving their compensation; many others had yet to receive compensation.

In November 2021, a report from the cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee found that the number of victims who had died without receiving compensation was at least 23 and only an estimated 5 per cent of Windrush victims had received compensation. Despite initial Home Office estimates of about 15,000 people being eligible, as of the end of September 2021, only 864 people had received any compensation. The Home Affairs Committee report identified a "litany of flaws in the design and operation" of the compensation scheme, including an excessive burden on claimants to provide documentary evidence of the losses they suffered, long delays in processing applications and making payments, inadequate staffing of the scheme and a failure to provide urgent and exceptional payments to those in desperate need. It was "staggering" that the Home Office had failed to prepare for, resource and staff the Windrush compensation scheme before its launch, the report noted.

Other reports in 2021 from the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee and the legal charity JUSTICE had all criticised the slowness and ineffectiveness of the compensation scheme and recommended that the scheme be taken out of the hands of the Home Office.

In June 2022, Home office figures showed that 7 per cent of its original anticipated 15,000 claimants, and 25 per cent of actual claimants had received any compensation up to that date. A further 25 per cent of claims had been processed and rejected.

The only official records of the arrival of many "Windrush" immigrants in the 1950s through to the early 1970s were landing cards collected as they disembarked from ships in UK ports. In subsequent decades, these cards were routinely used by British immigration officials to verify dates of arrival for borderline immigration cases. In 2009, those landing cards were earmarked for destruction as part of a broader clean up of paper records. The decision to destroy was taken under the then-Labour government, but implemented in 2010 under the incoming coalition government. Whistleblowers and retired immigration officers claimed that they had warned managers in 2010 of the problems this would cause for some immigrants who had no other record of their arrival. During the scandal, there was discussion as to whether the destruction of the landing cards had negatively impacted Windrush immigrants.

The scandal drew attention to other issues relating to UK migration policy and practice, including treatment of other migrants, and of asylum seekers and what the status of EU nationals living in Britain would be after Brexit.

Stephen Hale of Refugee Action said, "All of the things those [Windrush] people have been through are also experiences that people are going through as result of asylum system". Some skilled workers had been threatened with deportation after living and working in the UK for over a decade because of minor irregularities in their tax returns; some were allowed to stay and fight deportation but prevented from working and denied access to the NHS while doing so. Sometimes the irregularities were due to the tax authorities, not the migrant.

Antigua and Barbuda: Prime Minister Gaston Browne told Sky News' All Out Politics that an apology from the British government over the Windrush issue "would be welcome". He said it had been a major concern, but that he was pleased the government had stepped in. "We have had at least one Antiguan who incidentally has a British passport, who was apparently identified for deportation on the basis that he had no original documents. He came here about 59-years ago as an infant with his parents, and would have been on his parents' passport. Many of these individuals do not have any connection with the country of their birth, would have lived in the UK their entire lives and worked very hard towards the advancement of the UK."

Barbados: High Commissioner the Rev. Guy Hewitt said on 16 April the "Windrush Kids" who went to schools in Britain and paid their taxes were being "treated as illegal immigrants" and "shut out of the system", with some deported or sent to detention centres. Hewitt also advised people not to contact the Home Office unless they first notified their representative or lawyer, as too many people doing so had been detained. During interviews in March 2021, Hewitt referred to the scandal and said it was time to move away from an "oppressive and racist colonial past". In Hewitt's view, many believe that the "monarchy symbolizes part of that historic oppression" and the country was due for "a native born citizen as head of state".

Grenada: Prime Minister Keith Mitchell said that those affected were owed "serious compensation".

Jamaica: Prime Minister Andrew Holness said on 18 April: "my interest is to ensure that the Windrush generation and the children of the Windrush generation get justice. We have to call it out for what it is, but we also have to ensure that those who have been deported get access to a process that gets them back. They should get access to all the benefits that their citizenship will entitle them to. If there was an acceptance that a wrong was done, then there should be a process of restoration. I'm certain that the robust civil society and democracy that you have will come up with a process of compensation."

Saint Kitts and Nevis: High Commissioner Kevin Isaac helped coordinate Caribbean high commissioners to speak in a single voice on the Windrush issue from 2014.

Windrush Lessons Learned Review

On 19 March 2020, the Home Office released the Windrush Lessons Learned Review. This study, described by the Home Secretary as "long-awaited", was an independent inquiry managed and conducted by Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary. The report concluded that the Home Office showed an inexcusable "ignorance and thoughtlessnes", and that what had happened had been "foreseeable and avoidable". It further found that immigration regulations were tightened "with complete disregard for the Windrush generation", and that officials had made "irrational" demands for multiple documents to establish residency rights. The study recommended a full review of the "hostile environment" immigration policy.

In March 2022, a progress report on the Learned Review concluded that the Home Office has broken pledges to transform its culture after the Windrush inquiry, warning that the scandal could be repeated. The report was also critical of the failure to review the effectiveness of the hostile environment policies - now known as "compliant environment" policies and of the slowness of the compensation scheme. A small poll of applicants for compensation found that 97% did not trust the Home Office to deliver on its commitments.

In June 2020, BBC Television screened an 85-minute, one-off drama, Sitting in Limbo, starring Patrick Robinson as Anthony Bryan, who was caught up in the effects of the hostile environment policy.

Dexter Bristol, a Grenadian citizen who died while destitute as a result of losing his job because of the Home Office hostile environment policy

Paulette Wilson, who was one of the first cases covered in British media, who went on to become an activist working for other victims of the scandal

1. ^ McCann, Kate (15 May 2018). "Home Secretary admits 63 Windrush migrants may have been deported and brands hostile environment 'un-British'". The Telegraph.

2. ^ National Archives. Citizenship 1906-2003. Retrieved 6 November 2006

3. Nokes, Caroline (15 April 2018). "Immigration Minister: Immigration status of the Windrush generation". originally published in The Voice. Home Office. Having not previously needed documentation they have now found themselves without any way of proving their status today."

4. ^ "Inspection report of hostile environment measures, October 2016 - GOV.UK".

5. ^ Gentleman, Amelia (10 March 2018). "Londoner denied NHS cancer care: 'It's like I'm being left to die'". The Guardian. Official suspicion about his immigration status led to him being evicted last summer, and he was homeless for three weeks. His disputed status has also led to free healthcare being denied.

6. ^ "Home Office 'was told about Windrush problems in 2016'". BBC News. 25 April 2018.

7. ^ Davis, Nick (21 April 2018). "Stuck in Jamaica: 'My pension, my house and my kids are in the UK'". The Guardian. Aloun Ndombet-Assamba, who served as High Commissioner for Jamaica in London between 2012 and 2016. 'We put this on the agenda ... in Sri Lanka in 2013.'

8. ^ Gentleman, Amelia (15 April 2018). "No 10 refuses Caribbean request to discuss children of Windrush". The Guardian. Downing Street has rejected a formal diplomatic request to discuss the immigration problems being experienced by some Windrush-generation British residents at this week's meeting of the Commonwealth heads of government, rebuffing a request from representatives of 12 Caribbean countries made through Guy Hewitt, High Commissioner for Barbados, for a meeting with the prime minister.

9. ^ "Commonwealth migrants arriving before 1971, year ending June 2017". The Migration Observatory.

10. ^ Gentleman, Amelia (24 April 2018). "'I felt like dirt': disabled Canadian woman told to leave UK after 44 years". The Guardian. The letter informed her 'of our intention to remove you from the UK to your country of nationality if you do not depart voluntarily. No further notice will be given' ... If she decided to stay, the letter warned, 'life in the UK will become increasingly difficult'; O'Brien was liable to be arrested, prosecuted and face a possible six-month prison sentence.

11. ^ Gentleman, Amelia (30 March 2018). "Man who moved from Antigua 59 years ago told he is in UK illegally". The Guardian. Kate Osamor said she wanted the Home Office to explain why a large group of black Caribbean men and women who have been here since the 1960s were being targeted by immigration officials.

12. ^ Grierson, Jamie; Marsh, Sarah (31 May 2018). "Vital immigration papers lost by UK Home Office". The Guardian. Important original documents submitted to the Home Office by applicants are lost, then applications are denied or applicants remain in limbo, sometimes for years because it is claimed documents are not available. Yvette Cooper said, 'The Home Affairs committee and the independent inspectorate have warned the Home Office repeatedly to improve the competency and accuracy of the immigration system. It's crucial they get the basics right. We've even recommended digitising and changing the system so people don't have to submit so many original documents in the first place, given the risk of loss and delay.'

13. ^ Halliday, Josh (25 May 2018). "Windrush scandal: 'You don't need that passport, they said'". The Guardian. His problems began on 7 May 2012. He was going through Gatwick airport using his new Jamaican passport, as well as his older passport bearing the crucial 'indefinite leave to remain' stamp. Instead of letting him keep his old passport, the immigration officer kept it and told him: 'You don't need that, sir.'

14. ^ "Dossier of Failure - Windrush and the Hostile Environment". Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants and Liberty. 23 April 2018. Archived from the original on 2 September 2018.

15. "David Lammy lambasts government over Windrush deportations". BBC. 16 April 2018. Lammy, calls this a 'day of national shame', telling the Commons: 'Let us call it as it is. If you lay down with dogs, you get fleas, and that is what has happened with this far right rhetoric in this country.'

16. ^ Grierson, Jamie (26 April 2018). "How Amber Rudd came up to speed on migrant removal targets". The Guardian. 'I don't know what you're referring to,' said Amber Rudd, the home secretary, as she was questioned about the existence of targets for removing migrants from the UK.

17. ^ Bush, Stephen (27 April 2018). "These latest revelations ought to finish Amber Rudd's career". New Statesman. She told the Home Affairs Select Committee that the Home Office had no targets for removals, then that she was unaware of these targets and that they would be scrapped. Now it emerges that she saw the relevant targets herself.

18. ^ Kentish, Benjamin (28 April 2018). "Amber Rudd summoned back to Parliament for questioning as calls grow for resignation". The Independent.

19. Bundock, Laura (29 June 2018). "Home Office 'a law unto itself' over Windrush, damning report says". Sky News. Harriet Harman: these two people ... would have been better off if they'd broken the law and done something wrong. Then the police ... would have taken them to court and the state would have had to explain why they were locking them up.

20. ^ "Home Office approach to Windrush detention cases has been 'shocking'". Parliament of the United Kingdom. 29 June 2018. none of the safeguards to prevent against wrongful detention worked. These people were consequently detained unlawfully

21. ^ "Windrush generation detention Summary - Human Rights Select Committee report". UK Parliament. 29 June 2018. This report should alert (the Home Secretary) to the scale of human right violations within the powerful department he now leads.

22. ^ "New Jamaica deportation flights attacked as 'insult to Windrush victims'". The Gleaner. Kingston, Jamaica. 4 February 2019.

23. ^ Bulman, May (7 February 2019). "Home secretary urged to apologise for falsely claiming Jamaica deportees were all guilty of 'very serious crimes'". The Independent.

24. ^ Ford, Richard; Coates, Sam (17 April 2018). "Windrush crisis: Home Office 'destroyed thousands of migrant landing cards'". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460. (subscription required)

25. ^ Acres, Tom (18 April 2018). "Windrush scandal: Theresa May 'genuinely sorry' over deportation row". Sky News.

26. ^ Grierson, Jamie (13 June 2018). "Windrush scandal: MPs call for urgent hardship fund for victims". The Guardian'.

27. ^ Lyons, Kate (17 May 2018). "Windrush cases just 'tip of iceberg' of immigration failings, report warns". The Guardian.

28. ^ "Wendy Williams CBE | HM Inspector of Constabulary and HM Inspector of Fire & Rescue Services". Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services. Archived from the original on 10 May 2019.

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The Windrush scandal was a British political scandal that began in 2018 concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office.

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If you ever get the chance to see this film, set in Brixton and made in 1980, do so. It's how I remember the area when I was a kid.

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Akala discusses race and class in the ruins of empire. 

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Akala discusses race and class in the ruins of empire. 

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Ash Sarkar Meets Akala | Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

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Everyday racism: what should we do? Akala | Comment is Free

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Info for the quiz

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN ENGLAND

By Tim Lambert

Christianity in Roman Britain,

The first evidence of Christianity in what is now England is from the late 2nd century AD. (There may have been Christians in Britain before then, we cannot be sure). Roman Britain was a cosmopolitan place. Merchants from all over the empire settled there and soldiers from many countries served there so we will never know who first introduced Christianity to Britain.

At that time the native people were Celts. They were polytheists (they worshiped many gods). The Romans too were polytheists and they were willing to allow the Celts to worship their old gods.

However the Romans were not tolerant of Christianity. At times waves of persecution crossed the empire. St Alban the first British Christian martyr was executed in a town called Verulamium in 304 AD. Much later an abbey was built there dedicated to St Alban and it gave its name to the town of St Albans.

In 313 the Emperor Constantine granted Christians freedom of worship. So persecution ended and during the 4th century Christianity became widespread in England.

In 314 three British bishops attended a church council in Arles in France, Eborius bishop of York, Restitutus bishop of London and Adelius bishop of Caerleon (Gwent). So by that time there was a flourishing and organised church in England.

In Hinton St Mary, Dorset a 4th century mosaic was found with the face of Jesus and the Greek letters chi rho, which stand for christos (Greek for Christ) showing Christianity was a popular religion in England.
Life in Roman Britain
Christianity in Anglo Saxon England

In 407 the last Roman soldiers left Britain. Over the following decades, Roman civilization broke down. In the 5th and 6th centuries Pagan peoples the Saxons, Angles and Jutes from Germany and Denmark invaded southern and eastern England and gradually conquered most of England.

However Christianity continued to thrive in Wales and by the early 5th century it spread to Ireland. In the 5th and 6th centuries Scotland was converted. Cut off from the Church in Rome Celtic Christians formed a distinctive Celtic Church.

According to tradition Pope Gregory saw boys on sale in the slave market in Rome. He is supposed to have asked about them and when told that they were Angles he replied 'not Angles but angels' When he became Pope he was keen to convert the Anglo-Saxons. In 596 he sent a party of about 40 men led by Augustine to Kent. They arrived in 597.

Aethelbert permitted the monks to preach in Kent and in time he was converted. (The king of Kent was married to a Christian princess named Berta. It may have been partly due to her influence that Kent was converted to Christianity). Furthermore, his nephew, Saeberht, the king of Essex was also converted.

Meanwhile in 627 King Edwin of Northumbria (in the North of England) and all his nobles were baptized. (He may have been influenced by his wife, Ethelburga, who was a Christian). Most of his subjects followed.

However things did not go smoothly in Northumbria. King Edwin was killed at the battle of Hatfield in 632 and afterwards, most of Northumbria reverted to Paganism. They had to be converted all over again by Celtic monks from Scotland.

Further south in 630 a Christian called Sigebert became King of East Anglia. He asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to send men to help convert his people. Meanwhile Pope Honorius sent a man named Birinus to convert the West Saxons (who lived in Hampshire).

Missionaries also preached in the kingdom of Mercia (The Midlands). In 653 King Penda of Mercia was converted and baptized and gradually the realm was converted. The last part of England to be converted to Christianity was Sussex. It was converted after 680 by St. Wilfrid.

Finally by the end of the 7th century all of England was at least nominally Christian. However, some people continued to secretly worship the old pagan gods as late as the 8th century.

However in the late 9th century the Danes conquered most of England. However in 878 Alfred the Great, king of Wessex (Southern England) crushed the Danes at the battle of Edington. Afterwards the Danes made a treaty with Alfred. They split England between them. The Danes took all the territory east of the old Roman road, Watling Street. The Danes also agreed to become Christians.

Once they were converted to Christianity the Danes of Eastern England had much in common with the Saxons. Gradually Alfred's descendants conquered the Danish-held areas of England and in time they created a single kingdom of England.

Then in the late 10th century there was a religious revival. A man named Dunstan (c.1020-1088) was Archbishop of Canterbury. He reformed the monasteries. Many new churches and monasteries were built during his time. Women played a significant part in the 10th century revival.
Life in Anglo-Saxon England
A Saxon church in Chichester

Christianity in England in the Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages religion was a vital part of everyday life. All children were baptized (unless they were Jewish) and everyone attended mass on Sunday. Mass was in Latin, a language that ordinary people did not understand.

Bishops ruled over groups of parishes called dioceses. They usually came from rich families. Bishops lived in palaces and often took part in government. Things were very different for parish priests. They were poor and often had little education. Parish priests had their own land called the glebe where they grew their own food. They lived and worked alongside their parishioners.

In the Middle Ages monks and nuns gave food to the poor. They also ran the only hospitals where they tried to help the sick as best they could. They also provided hospitality for pilgrims and other travelers (although as time went by there were an increasing number of inns where you could pay to stay the night). In a medieval monastery, there was an almonry where food or money was given to the poor, the refectory where the monks ate, the dormitory, infirmary and the cloisters where the monks could take exercise. An almoner looked after the poor, an infirmarian looked after the sick and a hospitaller looked after visitors.

As well as the monks from the 13th century there were also friars. They took vows like but instead of withdrawing from the world they went out to preach. Franciscan friars were called grey friars because of their grey costumes. Dominican friars were called Blackfriars.
More about monasteries
In the Middle Ages merchants and groups of craftsmen were organised into guilds, which protected their interests. Guilds also put on plays called mystery play. (The word mystery is a corruption of the French word metier, meaning job or trade). The plays were based on Bible stories and were meant to instruct the people. However, there was nothing solemn about these plays. They contained lots of jokes.

In the 14th and 15th centuries the Virgin Mary and the saints were given much more prominence in religion. Far more devotion was shown to them. Furthermore, the Bronze Age people continued to build barrows, although cremation was practiced. The dead were buried with useful artifacts. Presumably, the living believed the dead would need these in the afterlife. Unfortunately, since they had no written records nothing is known about the Bronze Age religion.

A famous Christian of the 14th century was John Wycliffe. He denied the doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ during mass). His followers translated the Bible into English. Wycliffe died of natural causes but his followers were persecuted. They were known as Lollards (a word that meant mutterers) because they said long prayers. In 1401 a law was passed which allowed heretics to be burned to death. Nevertheless, the Lollards continued to meet during the 15th century.

Christianity in 16th Century England

One of the great Christians of the early 16th century was William Tyndale. In 1525 Tyndale translated the New Testament into English. Tyndale also translated part of the Old Testament. However, Tyndale was burned in 1536. His last words were 'Lord open the king of England's eyes'. Meanwhile, Protestant ideas were spreading in England despite persecution by the state.

In 1501 Arthur the oldest son of King Henry VII married Catherine of Aragon. However, Arthur died in 1502. His brother Henry now became heir to the throne. He married his brother's widow in 1509. (Normally such a marriage would not have been allowed but the Pope gave a special dispensation).

At the beginning of 1511 Henry VIII had a son but the boy died after only 7 weeks. Catherine had four miscarriages and only one of her children lived - a girl named Mary. Henry was desperate to have a son and heir and Catherine could not give him one.

Henry decided that God was punishing him for marrying his brother's widow. Henry now argued that the marriage to Catherine was not valid and he asked the Pope to annul the marriage. However, the Pope would not cooperate.

The Henrician Reformation

Finally Henry lost patience with the Pope and rejected his authority in 1534. The Act of Supremacy made Henry the head of the Church of England. However, although Henry broke with Rome he kept the Catholic religion essentially intact in England. Henry had no intention of changing the English religion to Lutheranism and he continued to persecute Protestants. In 1539 Henry VIII passed the Act of Six Articles, which laid down the beliefs of the Church of England. The Six Articles preserved the old religion mainly intact. From 1545 English replaced Latin, a language ordinary people could not understand as the language of church services.

Meanwhile Henry dissolved the monasteries in England. Parliament agreed to dissolve the small ones in 1536. The large ones followed in 1539-1540.

Shortly before Henry VIII died a woman named Anne Askew was martyred. Anne was a preacher and teacher. However, in 1546 she was arrested, tortured in the Tower of London and burned.

Edward VI

Henry finally died in 1547 and he was succeeded by his 9-year-old son Edward. Since he was too young to rule his uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was made protector and ruled in his stead.

Somerset was a devout Protestant as was Archbishop Cranmer. They began to turn England into a truly Protestant country. The Act of Six Articles was repealed and in 1549 the first Book of Common Prayer, the first Anglican prayer book was issued. Meanwhile, priests were allowed to marry and pictures or statues of Mary or the saints were removed from churches. In 1552 a second prayer book was issued. Also in Edward's reign the chantries (where a priest prayed for the souls of the dead) were closed.

Mary

In 1553 Edward died and he was followed by his sister Mary. She was a Catholic and she detested the changes of Henry VIII and Edward VI. Mary was determined to undo the reforms of the two previous reigns. Catholic mass was restored in December 1553. In 1554 married clergy were ordered to leave their wives or lose their posts. Then, in November 1554 the Act of Supremacy was repealed.
I
n 1555 Mary began burning Protestants. Over the next 3 years nearly 300 Protestants were executed. Many more Protestants fled abroad. However Mary's cruelty simply gained sympathy for the Protestants and alienated ordinary people. She simply drove people away from Roman Catholicism.

Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I was crowned in January 1559. She restored Protestantism to England. The Act of Supremacy was restored in April 1559 and further Acts replaced Catholic practices. However it was a moderate Protestantism. Elizabeth disliked extremists. She disapproved of the Puritans. (They were people who wanted to 'purify' the Church of England of its remaining Catholic elements).

However most of the population (not all) accepted the religious settlement. People could be fined for not attending church. Nevertheless some Catholics continued to practice their religion in secret.

Meanwhile clergymen became better educated during the 16th century. By the end of the century many of them did a degree.
Life in Tudor England
Christianity in 17th Century England

In the early 17th century king and parliament clashed over the issue of religion. In 1633 William Laud was made Archbishop of Canterbury. He was strongly opposed to the Puritans and King Charles I supported him wholeheartedly. Laud emphasized the ceremony and decoration in churches. These measures were strongly opposed by the Puritans. They feared it was the 'thin edge of the wedge' and Catholicism would eventually be restored in England.

Meanwhile in the 16th century everybody was supposed to belong to the Church of England. However, in the 17th century, independent churches were formed. The first Baptist Church in England began meeting in 1612.

Later in the 17th century George Fox (1624-1691) and Margaret Fell (1614-1702) founded the Quakers. Fox believed that everybody had an inner light and during the 1660s and the 1670s he traveled across England. Margaret Fell wrote a book called Women's Speaking Justified, Proved and Knowed of the Scriptures. However, the Quakers were persecuted and Fox himself was often imprisoned.

From the end of the 16th century there were also Congregationalists or Independents. They believed that every congregation had a right to run its own affairs without any outside interference.

In 1642 came Civil War between king and parliament. It ended in 1646 and Charles I was executed in 1649. Following the Civil War and the execution of the king many independent churches sprang up in England.

Charles II became king in 1660. The king was not particularly religious but parliament was determined to crack down on the many independent churches that had sprung up and make Anglicanism the state religion again. They passed a series of acts called the Clarendon code, a series of laws to persecute non-conformists (Protestants who did not belong to the Church of England). The Corporation Act of 1661 said that all officials in towns must be members of the Church of England.

The Act of Uniformity 1662 said that all clergy must use the Book of Common Prayer. About 2,000 clergymen who disagreed resigned. Furthermore, the Conventicle Act of 1664 forbade unauthorized religious meetings of more than 5 people unless they were all of the same household.

Finally the Five Mile Act of 1665 forbade non-Anglican ministers to come within 5 miles of incorporated towns. (Towns with a mayor and corporation). However, these measures did not stop the non-conformists meeting or preaching.

When Charles II died in 1685 he was followed by James II, who was openly Catholic. James II promptly alienated the people by appointing Catholics to powerful and important positions. In 1687 he went further and issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending all laws against Catholics and Protestant non-Anglicans.

James II was deposed in 1688. Afterwards the Bill of Rights (1689) said that no Catholic could become king or queen and no king could marry a Catholic. Parliament also passed the Toleration Act in 1689. Non-conformists were allowed their own places of worship and their own teachers and preachers. However they could not hold government positions or attend university.
Life in 17th Century England
Christianity in 18th Century England

In the early 18th century England was noted for its lack of religious enthusiasm. It was an age of reason rather then dogmatism and the churches lacked vigor. However in the mid-18th century things began to change. In 1739 the great evangelist George Whitefield (1714-1770) began preaching. Also in 1739 John Wesley (1703-1791) began preaching. He eventually created a new religious movement called the Methodists.

John Wesley traveled all over the country, often preaching in open spaces. People jeered at his meetings and threw stones but Wesley persevered. John Wesley never intended to form a movement separate from the Church of England. However the Methodists did eventually break away.

At the end of the 18th century a group of Evangelical Christians called the Clapham Sect were formed. They campaigned for an end to slavery and cruel sports. They were later called the Clapham Sect because so many of them lived in Clapham. Meanwhile in the late 18th century religious enthusiasm began to revive in England.

Christianity in 19th Century England

During the 19th century Britain was transformed by the industrial revolution. In 1801, at the time of the first census, only about 20% of the population lived in towns. By 1851 the figure had risen to over 50%. By 1881 about two-thirds of the population lived in towns.

During the early 19th century religious revival continued. The Church of England regained its energy and many new churches were built.

Meanwhile in 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed. Since the Reformation Catholics had been unable to become MPs or to hold public office. The Act restored those rights to them.

Organised religion was much more important in 19th century England than it is today. Nevertheless, in 1851 a survey showed that only about 40% of the population were at church or chapel on a given Sunday. Even allowing for those who were ill or could not make it for some other reason it meant that half the population did not go to church. Certainly many of the poor had little or no contact with the church. In 1881 a similar survey showed only about 1/3 of the population at church on a given Sunday. In the late 19th century organized religion was in decline in England.

During the 19th century many poor workers had little or no contact with the church. In 1865 William and Catherine Booth founded a new movement to reach the poor and fight a 'war' against poverty. In 1878 it was named the Salvation Army.

Christianity in 20th Century England

During the 20th century church going declined rapidly in England and by the end of the 20th century only a small minority of the population attended church regularly. Nevertheless, most people continued to believe in God and in the late 20th century there was a hunger for the spiritual. There was an explosion of interest in the occult and the New Age Movement.

Meanwhile in the early 20th century Pentecostal churches were formed. They practiced the gifts of the Holy Spirit such as praying in tongues. In the 1960s use of the gifts of the Holy Spirit spread to mainstream churches. In the 1970s and 1980s charismatic or, 'house churches' became common. At the end of the 20th century, the Alpha Course became an effective method of introducing people to Christianity.
Famous Christian Women A Timeline of the Bible A brief biography of George Fox A brief biography of John Wesley A brief biography of Julian of Norwich A brief biography of Margery Kempe Home
Last revised 2019

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN ENGLAND By Tim Lambert Christianity in Roman Britain, The first evidence of Christianity in what is now England is from the late 2nd century AD. (There may have been Christians in Britain before then, we cannot be sure). Roman Britain was a cosmopolitan place.

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For the film round of the quiz

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Check out my IMDb Watchlist to see everything I want to watch

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Info for the quiz

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Take a guided tour around 8 of London's principal religious buildings in full 360° detail.

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To discuss in class

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Student A

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Student B

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An example of a them and us view of language. I am not sure I agree with all of them to be honest. Jolly I just don't think is used much and the 'non-posh' example of terribly here also means 'very'. I think they want to say 'the NHS is doing terribly'. This is the problem when these articles are written by journalists who went to public schools themselves!

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Sir Alan Duncan, MP for Rutland and Melton, came to David Cameron's defence in the outcry about the profits he made from his father's offshore unit trust revealed in the Panama Papers.
He told critics of the prime minister, who in his mind "hate anyone who has even got a hint of wealth in their life":

We risk seeing a House of Commons which is stuffed full of low achievers, who hate enterprise, hate people who look after their own family and who know absolutely nothing about the outside world.

Mr Cameron also argued that MPs should not be forced to publish their tax returns as it could discourage candidates from seeking election.

Apropos of nothing, here's a list of a few words that may mean different things to the upper class than to the everyday member of the electorate:
Posh:
Earning loads of money!
Everyday:
Having accomplished a task of magnitude or difficulty without necessarily being paid shedloads of money, such as becoming a leading nurse, teacher, or paramedic - or, dare we say, politician.
Posh:
Greatly - i.e. this Beaujolais is terribly satisfying.
Everyday:
Extremely bad, serious or sinister - ie. the NHS is terribly underfunded.
Posh:
A child at boarding school who was, for a period of time, subservient to you, from which you gained no regard of the underclasses.
Everyday:
A cigarette.

Posh:

A minor inconvenience that doesn't really apply to you because you can afford an expensive accountant.
Everyday:
A contribution to the state from your wage that pays your way in society by funding universal services.
Posh:
To be killed and their remains desecrated for the purpose of initiation ceremonies to Oxford and Cambridge societies.
Everyday:
Animals used for agricultural purposes, predominately the production of meat for consumption.

Posh:

Uncle owns four companies there, we must visit again this summer.
Everyday:
A central American republic bordered by Costa Rica and Colombia, which you will probably never visit - it's quite expensive to get there from the UK.
Posh:
Very. As employed by Boris Johnson describing his experience of Cannabis:

It was jolly nice.

Everyday:
Upbeat, happy or joyous.
Posh:
A daytime formal dress code including a morning coat, waistcoat and striped trousers.
Everyday:
Whatever you happen to put on in the morning.
Posh:
A blank cheque, provided no-one catches you with your hands in the till.
Everyday:
Costs, monthly bills, or money you claim from the company you work for, such as a stay in a Travelodge during a work trip.
Posh:
Ah, better days. What a raucous bunch of fine individuals!
Everyday:
A group of spoilt posh boys with too much money, smashing up restaurants while masquerading as a dining club, because they need some way to distract themselves of their overbearing wealth and privilege.
Posh:
The devil incarnate.
Everyday:
MP for Islington North since 1983 and leader of the Labour Party.
Posh:

Oh you know J.B.?! I know him from my city days! How is the rotter?

Everyday:
A pair of initials. What am I looking at here?

More: What David Cameron did and didn't pay in tax, in one graph

More: James O'Brien has nailed the reason why people are so angry over the tax scandal

More: People are mocking the suggestion David Cameron is 'trapped in wealth'

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11 words that mean completely different things when you're posh

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Sir Alan Duncan, MP for Rutland and Melton, came to David Cameron's defence in the outcry about the profits he made from his father's offshore unit trust revealed in the Panama Papers.

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A wonderful collection of British TV shows and comedies, all of which have class at their heart.

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A collection of clips from the BBC Comedy archive focussing on the British class divide.

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And this is something closer to the reality

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Blitz

Blitz, the German word for 'lightning', was applied by the British press to the tempest of heavy and frequent bombing raids carried out over Britain in 1940 and 1941. This concentrated direct bombing of industrial targets and civilian centres began on 7 September 1940, with heavy raids on London.

The scale of the attack rapidly escalated. In that month alone, the German Air Force dropped 5,300 tons of high explosives on the capital in just 24 nights. In their efforts to 'soften up' the British population and to destroy morale before the planned invasion, German planes extended their targets to include the major coastal ports and centres of production and supply.

The infamous raid of November 14 1940 on Coventry brought a still worse twist to the campaign. 500 German bombers dropped 500 tons of explosives and nearly 900 incendiary bombs on the city in ten hours of unrelenting bombardment, a tactic later emulated on an even greater scale by the RAF in their attacks on German cities.

The British population had been warned in September 1939 that air attacks on cities were likely and civil defence preparations had been started some time before, both on a national and a local level. Simple corrugated steel Anderson shelters, covered over by earth, were dug into gardens up and down the country. Larger civic shelters built of brick and concrete were erected in British towns and a blackout was rigorously enforced after darkness.

The night raids became so frequent that they were practically continuous. Many people who were tired of repeatedly interrupting their sleep to go back and forth to the street shelters, virtually took up residence in a shelter. This gave rise to a new spirit of solidarity and community.

Londoners took what seemed to them an obvious and sensible solution to the problem and moved down in their thousands into the tube stations. At first, this was actively discouraged by the government. However, this popular action held sway and it was a common sight for a traveller on the Underground in wartime London to pass through a station crowded with the sleeping bodies of men, women and children and their belongings.

The main air offensive against British cities diminished after May 1941, with the change of direction of the German war machine towards Russia. However, sporadic and lethal raids, using increasingly larger bombs, continued for several more years.

Daily Mirror's account
September 9, 1940 - Second Night in the Battle of London
The battle for London was on again last night, when Hitler once more launched his bombers at the city. Bombs crashed in the London area.

All day long London had been coolly 'patching up' the damaged spots left after the heavy and prolonged attacks made on Saturday - the first day of the battle.

Immediately after last night's warning - it was London's second of the day - a fierce anti-aircraft bombardment opened up. It started in one outer district, shaking doors and windows, but in a few seconds the Central London guns were in action.

There was the sound of a screaming bomb and an explosion.

Raiders approached London from the north-west. Several planes droned over a suburb.

A second wave came toward the East London area three-quarters of an hour after the warning.

The German machines approaching from the south-east could be seen at a great height. A.A. shells burst round them and they changed their course.

Some bombs were dropped on a suburb, including incendiaries, which started a blaze.
Fires Their Guide
Some of the German machines appeared to turn over another district owing to the fierce A.A. gunfire and flew back toward the coast without, apparently, reaching their main objective.

It was evident that the German airmen had used the smouldering fires of Saturday's raids to guide them, for the attacks were directed at the same area - London's dockland.

The first hour of the attack was considerably less formidable than Saturday's raid - fewer enemy planes were penetrating the intense defensive barrage from the coast to London. At the end of an hour there was a hushed lull.

Ten minutes passed - then, 'like all hell let loose', the whole of London's defence barrage roared and crashed into action, heralding the return of the raiders.

Dull menacing crunches, whining and quivering reverberations were heard. Livid flashes leapt across the darkened sky as the planes dropped their bombs.
A.A. - 3 in Minute
The London area's first warning sounded as formations of raiders attempted a daylight attack.

As one big formation emerged from clouds over a south-east area, three Dorniers were blown to pieces within a minute by A.A. fire. The brilliant marksman was a gunner aged 22.

When the planes were hit their bombs were released and fell over a wide area. Shops and cottages were badly damaged, but all the occupants escaped injury.

The bombs set light to a schoolroom at a boys' home and the matron's house. A master gave the alarm and the elder boys fought the flames.

Members of the Home Guard, disbanding after a church parade, captured one of the airmen who had baled out. He told them that four others were close.

The Myth of the Blitz

The account of the Blitz - as Britain's major cities experienced a sustained and unrelenting bombardment by Nazi Germany - has been etched into our country's conscience ever since the war years. The question has to be asked, however, as to whether the subsequent victory in the war, and the following 60 years, have coloured the way in which it is now generally seen?

Our heritage industry has encouraged a 'Myth of the Blitz', that differs from the reality of wartime experience. The myth is that we all pulled together, that spirits were up as young and old, upper and lower classes muddled through together with high morale under the onslaught of the Nazis.

But the 'Myth of the Blitz' is just that - a myth. As members of the establishment were able to take refuge in country houses, in comfort and out of the way of the bombs, or in expensive basement clubs in the city, the lower-middle and working classes were forced to stay in the cities and face up to the deadly raids with inadequate provision for shelter.

It was a time of terror, confusion and anger. Government incompetence - almost criminal in its extent - displayed what was almost a contempt for ordinary people. It was time for the people to help themselves to the shelter they needed. It was a time of class war.

Since the end of World War One, air attack had been seen as the warfare of the future. Predictions about the unstoppable destructive power of bombing had been terrifying. Nothing seemed safe, as industrial and domestic buildings were equally threatened. There was a real fear that society would quickly collapse, under a concerted bombing campaign. Provision of shelter from the anticipated bombing was a major issue of concern.

At first no one in authority seemed concerned about the people of Britain's towns who, unlike the upper classes, could not leave their homes and find shelter in the country. Hitler had provided large, sanitary and comfortable indestructible shelters for his people, but in this country it was a different story.

The government had understood that the safest means of shelter seemed to be deep underground shelters, so a shelter for the use of government officials was built in the disused Down Street tube station. It was fitted out with bathrooms, offices and living quarters, and it remains in place to this day - forgotten and dusty.

Finsbury, in London, was a communist borough and its councillors also recognised the need to shelter its people safely. However, a pre-war scheme designed by pioneering engineer Ove Arup to build deep shelters in its garden squares was halted.

The government expressed concern that a deep shelter system might create a 'deep shelter mentality': the fear that hordes of people might descend into the bowels of the earth and never come out, rendering them useless to the war effort and hampering war production. Unfortunately, the shelter that the government actually provided for the people was a lot more meagre.

Shelter for the people

In the first years of the Blitz, Anderson shelter were provided by the government, and 150,000 of these were distributed to houses with gardens. They were constructed of corrugated iron, many quite poorly, and were usually cold and damp, but they did provide a little private shelter for those who had them.

Many people did not want to leave their homes, and even owners of Anderson shelters would forsake their shelters for the comfort of the understairs cupboard. The Morrison shelter was an iron cage that doubled as a table, but was designed to protect the family as their house collapsed around them. The theory was that they would crawl out from the rubble unhurt. However, if they were trapped and the house was on fire, they would die, powerless to save themselves.

But what of those without a Morrison or Anderson shelter, those without a garden and who lived in high density housing? For these people, communal shelters were constructed in the basements of certain houses, to be used by those who happened to be out and about when the raid happened. The government also decided to build surface shelters, in streets. These were built of brick, with concrete roofs, and were for families in surrounding estates.

Due to the incompetence of the Government's construction specification, however, an ambiguous instruction was misinterpreted, and resulted in a sand and lime mix being used in the construction, without the benefit of cement. These dark shelters quickly became squalid, unsanitary and dangerous. When the bombs began to fall, these inadequate shelters simply crumbled, and many people sheltering in them died.

On 7 September 1940, as the bombs began to fall on London, it quickly became clear to those seeking shelter that there was not enough space for everyone. And that even those in the poorly constructed surface shelters weren't safe. Without anywhere to sleep at night, public anger rose ,and people felt that it was time to take the responsibility for shelter into their own hands.

The demand for deep shelter returned, but this time more strongly. The obvious and most popular move in London was to take over the underground tube system. The government had previously ruled out - indeed forbidden - the use of the tube. But for many it was the last place of refuge. So by simply buying a ticket and staying underground for the duration of the raid, people slowly began to occupy the underground system.

The shelterers made it clear that they intended on making these new sanctuaries their homes. The government had to bow to pressure, and began to supply bunk beds and toilets for the tube dwellers. Nightly, a community of 60,000 would convene underground in London. A community was born, and the first victory for the people was won.

Deep shelters

Following the victory over the tube stations, people began to occupy the safe basements of other public buildings. In church crypts throughout the country, terrified people possibly missed the irony of sheltering among a room full of corpses.

The people of Liverpool used the crypt of St Luke's church for shelter, and here they sat, literally surrounded by death, as the bombs fell around them. When the city was hit on 3 May 1941, British morale had never been so low. Liverpool and its leadership collapsed. Its citizens were caught up in a war that they did not want to be involved in, and that many of them probably did not even understand. They were ready to surrender, but what could they do? Their story was suppressed by government censorship.

In its attempts to cover up low morale, the government made what has come to be seen as a huge mistake. They tried to show that life in London was carrying on as normal, and there was much coverage in the press of people going to parties, dining out and clubbing in the West End. This propaganda certainly backfired in London. The majority of the population, particularly in the East End, were not dining and partying in reinforced basement clubs. For them, shelter was either completely non-existent, or extremely poor.

In response, on the evening of 15 September 1940, about 100 people burst into the Savoy Hotel, on the Thames Embankment, demanding shelter. During the confusion the air raid alert sounded, and the manager realised that he could not send the invaders out into danger. The police were called for advice, but before the manager had to decide where to put his unwelcome East Enders, the 'all clear' sounded, and the interlopers retreated. They had made their point for specially designed, comfortable and safe shelter. They were sure that officialdom would now take notice of their concerns.

In late 1940, the tubes began to show their weakness, especially when bombs fell directly on Balham and Bounds Green underground stations. In early 1941, 50 people were killed when a bomb blasted through a ticket hall at Bank station. Perhaps after all it was not the tubes that were going to be the most successful solution, but another scheme championed by the people of the East End - the astonishing shelter known as Mickey's Shelter.

Mickey's was a notorious example of people finding shelter for themselves. It was in the massive vaults beneath the Fruit and Wool exchange in Brushfield St, and it was taken over early in the war as a shelter for 5,000 people. However, on the first night it was opened, twice that number of people crammed in to a space that quickly became the black hole of London. By 7.30pm every bit of floor space was taken up. The floor was awash with urine. People slept on piles of rubbish, and the passages were loaded with filth. The lights were dim or non-existent. There was no room to move.

Out of this chaos, there came a system of rules to make it more bearable. When the shelter was finally recognised by the authorities, toilets were installed. All of this was thanks to Mickey, a 3ft-tall hunchback optician, who had established a shelter committee that went on to elect its own leaders. Mickey's shelter was the people's success - regulated, but not as regulated as the tube system. Here some 10,000 people slept under the same roof, resulting in nightly scenes of fighting, sex, music and laughter.

The people had helped themselves, and it was thanks to their action that the government began to build specially designed deep shelters, linked to the underground system. The class war was won, but the gesture was too little, too late, with the government using the lame excuse that the Germans were using heavier bombs to justify the change in policy.

Eight deep shelters were eventually completed, 80ft to 150ft under the ground. Each of them could hold some 8,000 people. However, none of them was ready until the end of 1942, which was long after the Blitz had started, and thousands of British citizens died due to government incompetence and prevarication in the months immediately before the war.

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The Blitz: Sorting the Myth from the Reality

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Blitz, the German word for 'lightning', was applied by the British press to the tempest of heavy and frequent bombing raids carried out over Britain in 1940 and 1941. This concentrated direct bombing of industrial targets and civilian centres began on 7 September 1940, with heavy raids on London.

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The number of pupils taking GCSE Religious Studies (RS) has suffered a 13% drop compared to 2017, provisional figures published by Ofqual have revealed. Whereas 297,800 students chose to study GCSE RS in 2017, just 260,300 were entered for GCSE RS in 2018, a fall of 37,500. This is the largest drop in both percentage and real terms of any major subject, and runs counter to the rise in GCSE entries for other humanities subjects such as history and geography.

Humanists UK, which has always spoken out about the value of good-quality education about religions and beliefs in schools, believes the latest slump in RS entries demonstrates again the urgent need for reform.

The decline in the number of students taking GCSE RS is not a novel trend. The number of entrants has been falling for several years. , 328,000 GCSE students studied RS, 67,700 more than in 2018 - a drop of more than 20%. The decline is largely attributed to the Government's decision to exclude RS from the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), as well as to no longer take account of the short course RS GCSE in school performance tables. Indeed, entries for short course RS specifically fell by a staggering 27% this year according to Ofqual's provisional figures.

Whilst Humanists UK has joined groups such as the Religious Education Council (REC), and the National Association of Teachers of RE (NATRE) in calling for a reversal of these policies, it also advocates for a more significant overhaul of the subject.

Its formal to the Commission on RE, an independent panel established to review the legal, educational, and policy framework for RE, focussed on updating the subject to be more inclusive and relevant in modern Britain. Recommendations included more balanced content about a fuller range of religions and beliefs, greater weight given to humanist perspectives, changing the subject's name to reflect its inclusion of non-religious beliefs as well as religions, and replacing the outdated system of locally agreed RE syllabuses with a national entitlement statement. The Commission, which picked up many of these recommendations in its interim report last year, is due to publish its final report in the Autumn.

Humanists UK Education Campaigns Manager Jay Harman commented, 'If Ofqual's provisional figures are accurate, the drastic fall in pupils taking GCSE RS shows that reform is badly needed. RE is one of the most important subjects that schools teach and vital to fulfilling its duty to promote British values and the spiritual, moral, social, and cultural (SMSC) development of their pupils.

'The latest figures from the British Social Attitudes Survey show that 71% of young people in Britain are non-religious, and that the country is more diverse in terms of religion and belief than ever before. If the decline in GCSE RS is to be halted, more attention has to be paid to reflecting this diversity and including the perspectives of the non-religious majority. We hope these figures prompt the Government to look urgently at how they can save a subject that is simply too valuable to squander in this way.'
Notes
For further comment or information please contact Humanists UK Education Campaigns Manager Jay Harman on jay@humanism.org.uk or 0207 324 3078.

Read Humanists UK's previous article on the interim report of the Commission on RE: https://humanism.org.uk/2017/09/21/commission-on-re-calls-for-major-shake-up-of-subject-in-english-schools/

Read Humanists UK's full response to the Commission on RE consultation: https://humanism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017-11-27-FINAL-CoRE-interim-report-response.pdf

Read more about Humanists UK's work on religious education: https://humanism.org.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/school-curriculum/religious-education/

At Humanists UK, we advance free thinking and promote humanism to create a tolerant society where rational thinking and kindness prevail. Our work brings non-religious people together to develop their own views, helping people be happier and more fulfilled in the one life we have. Through our ceremonies, education services, and community and campaigning work, we strive to create a fair and equal society for all.

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Latest slump in RS GCSE entries boosts case for reform

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The number of pupils taking GCSE Religious Studies (RS) has suffered a 13% drop compared to 2017, provisional figures published by Ofqual have revealed. Whereas 297,800 students chose to study GCSE RS in 2017, just 260,300 were entered for GCSE RS in 2018, a fall of 37,500.

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A great short documentary about the gulf between the upper- and under-classes in Britain.

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Upper Middle Class and Lower Middle Class

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Posh, Poor, and Middleclass Brits: A close-up look at the modern class divide in Britain For downloads and more information visit http://www.journeyman.tv/?lid=65840 Britain has certainly become more multi-cultural and diverse, but does its traditional class system still stand? It seems the divide between the rich and the poor is growing ever-more prominent.

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A poll carried out by Ipsos MORI for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) in the week after the 2011 Census focused on the beliefs, attitudes and practices of UK adults who say they were recorded as Christian in the 2011 Census (or would have recorded themselves as Christian had they answered the question).
Attitudes
UK Christians are overwhelmingly secular in their attitudes on a range of issues from gay rights to religion in public life, according to new research.
Religion and government

Three quarters (74%) strongly agree or tend to agree that religion should not have special influence on public policy, with only one in eight (12%) thinking that it should.

More oppose than support the idea of the UK having an official state religion, with nearly half (46%) against and only a third (32%) in favour. The same pattern is repeated with the question of seats being reserved for Church of England bishops in the House of Lords: 32% of respondents oppose, with only 25% in favour.

There is overwhelming support for religion being a private, not public, matter. Asked how strongly they support the statement that governments should not interfere in religion, 79% strongly agree or tend to agree, with only 8% strongly disagreeing or tending to disagree.

While Christians are more likely to support than oppose state-funded faith schools, this support is reduced when non-Christian faiths schools are included. Less than half (45%) support state-funded faith schools for any religion, whether Christian or non-Christian, while just over half (53%) are in favour of state-funded schools for any Christian denomination.

Less than a quarter (23%) think religious education in state-funded schools should teach pupils to believe in a religion: 15% think it should teach pupils to believe in Christianity and 8% to believe whatever faith the school subscribes to. Most (57%) think state-funded schools should teach knowledge about the world's main faiths even-handedly, without any bias towards any particular religion, and without trying to inculcate belief.

More Christians oppose (38%) than support (31%) the teaching of 6-day creationism in state-funded school science lessons.

The current law in England and Wales requiring state schools to hold a daily act of broadly Christian worship is not strongly supported either, with almost as many Christians opposing to it (36%) as in favour (39%).

Other attitudes

Six in ten respondents (61%) agree that homosexuals should have the same legal rights in all aspects of their lives as heterosexuals, and those who disapprove of sexual relations between two adults of the same sex (29%) are greatly outnumbered by those who do not (46%).

Less than a quarter (23%) believe that sex between a man and a woman is only acceptable within marriage.

There is strong support for an adult woman's right to have an abortion within the legal time limit, with more than three in five (62%) in favour and only one in five (20%) against.

Three in five (59%) Christians support the legalisation of assisted suicide in the case of terminally ill adult patients where certain safeguards are in place, with only one in five (21%) opposing it.

Despite the fact that 60% of respondents claim that Christianity is very or fairly important in their lives, this does not appear to be strongly reflected in practice. Seven in ten (69%) say that Christianity has had, or would have, no or not very much influence in their choice of marriage partner, and even more (81%) say it has no or not very much influence on whom they socialise with.

Practice
When asked why they think of themselves as Christian, the research found that fewer than three in ten (28%) say one of the reasons is that they believe in the teachings of Christianity. People are much more likely to consider themselves to be Christian because they were christened or baptised into the religion (72%) or because their parents were members of the religion (38%) than because of personal belief.

The research sought to measure a number of Christian practices, including regular reading of the Bible and prayer outside church services, to see how prevalent these were amongst respondents self-identifying as Christian. Among the results, we find that:

The majority (60%) have not read any part of the Bible, independently and from choice, for at least a year.

Over a third (37%) have never or almost never prayed outside a church service, with a further 6% saying they pray independently and from choice less than once a year.

Only a quarter (26%) say they completely believe in the power of prayer, with one in five (21%) saying they either do not really believe in it or do not believe in it at all.

The low level of religious belief and practice is reflected in church attendance. Apart from special occasions such as weddings, funerals and baptisms, half (49%) had not attended a church service in the previous 12 months. One in six (16%) have not attended for more than ten years, and a further one in eight (12%) have never attended at all. One in six (17%) attends once a week or more.

When asked where they seek most guidance in questions of right and wrong, only one in ten (10%) said it was from religious teachings or beliefs, with over half (54%) preferring to draw on their own inner moral sense.

Half (54%) of the self-identifying Christians describe their view of God in Christian terms, with the others using the term in the sense of the laws of nature (13%), some form of supernatural intelligence (10%), or whatever caused the universe (9%). Six per cent do not believe in God at all.

Just a third (32%) believe Jesus was physically resurrected, with one in five (18%) not believing in the resurrection even in a spiritual sense; half (49%) do not think of Jesus as the Son of God, with one in twenty-five (4%) doubting he existed at all.

Asked to select which one statement best describes what being a Christian means to them personally, 40% chose 'I try to be a good person' and around a quarter (26%) chose 'It's how I was brought up'. Around one in six (16%) selected the statement 'I have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour' and less than one in ten (7%) chose 'I believe in the teachings of Jesus'.

Overall, the findings suggest that the number of UK adults self-identifying as Christian has fallen significantly since the 2001 Census. This research found that at the time of the 2011 Census, just over half (54%) the public thought of themselves as Christian, compared with almost three-quarters (72%) in the 2001 Census.
Technical note
Ipsos MORI interviewed a representative sample of 2,107 adults aged 15+ across the United Kingdom. From this sample, a total of 1,136 adults defined themselves as Christians. Interviews were conducted face-to-face over the period 1st April to 7th April, 2011. Data are weighted to match the profile of the population.

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Religious and Social Attitudes of UK Christians in 2011

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A poll carried out by Ipsos MORI for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) in the week after the 2011 Census focused on the beliefs, attitudes and practices of UK adults who say they were recorded as Christian in the 2011 Census (or would have recorded themselves as Christian had they answered the question).

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The British Social Attitudes (BSA) 2016 survey dataset has been released via the UKDS. This post updates the long-term religious data available from the BSA surveys.

Figure 1 charts the data on affiliation for the period 1983-2016. Key features include the long-term decline in the proportion identifying as Anglican (which stood at 40% in 1983 and had declined to 15% in 2016), increased identification with non-Christian faiths over recent decades (3% in 1983, 6% in 2016), broad stability in levels of Catholic affiliation (10% in 1983, 9% in 2016), and the increase in the proportion with no affiliation (32% in 1983 and 53% in 2016). The proportion of other Christians has also increased over time, from 15% in 1983 to 17% in 2016. However, the composition of this group has shifted. The proportion identifying as non-denominational Christians has risen over time, with a decreasing share professing a denominational affiliation - in particular, with the Nonconformist churches.

Figure 1: Religious affiliation in Britain, 1983-2016

Source: Author's analysis of BSA surveys.

Figure 2 shows levels of religious attendance between 1983 and 2016. Attendance has been divided into three categories: attending once a month or more often (or frequent attendance); attending less often (infrequent attendance); not attending. The proportion reporting that they never attend religious services (beyond going for the traditional rites of passage - baptisms, marriages and funerals) increased from 56% in 1983 to 66% in 2016. There has been some decline in the levels of frequent and infrequent attending: attending once a month or more fell from 21% in 1983 to 18% in 2016. The proportion attending on an infrequent basis declined from 23% in 1983 to 16% in 2016.

Figure 2: Religious Attendance in Britain, 1983-2016

Source: Author's analysis of BSA surveys.

Looking at patterns of attendance in more detail, Figure 3 charts, over time, the proportions of Anglicans, Catholics and other Christians attending church on a frequent basis. Clearly, Catholics and other Christian have consistently reported higher levels of regular churchgoing compared to Anglicans. In 1983, 55% of Catholics and 47% of other Christian reported attending church frequently. In 2016, the proportions had fallen to 43% of Catholics and 38% of other Christians. Anglicans actually show something of an increase in regular attendance, based on the full duration of the BSA data. It stood at 18% in 1983 and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, increased to 24% in 2016 (the highest proportion recorded by the BSA), having previously stood at 18% in both 2014 and 2015. Overall, though, those belonging to non-Christian religions show the highest level of regular attendance at services. In nearly all recent surveys, a majority of this group has reported attending on a frequent basis (51% in 2016).

Figure 3: Regular attendance at religious services by Christian tradition, 1983-2016

Source: Author's analysis of BSA surveys.

Table 1 provides a summary of religious data from the BSA surveys. The data on religion of upbringing show that the proportion saying they were raised within the Church of England has fallen from 55% in 1991 (when the question was first asked) to 28% in 2016. The proportion saying they were raised within a Catholic household was 14% in both years. The proportion raised within some other Christian tradition increased from 22% to 27%. The proportion raised within a non-Christian religion stood at 3% in 1991 and 6% in 2016. The proportion without a religious upbringing was 6% in 1991 and 25% in 2016.

Table 1: Summary of religion indicators

Source: Author's analysis of BSA 1983, 1991 and 2016 surveys.

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Religion and the British Social Attitudes 2016 Survey

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The British Social Attitudes (BSA) 2016 survey dataset has been released via the UKDS. This post updates the long-term religious data available from the BSA surveys. Figure 1 charts the data on affiliation for the period 1983-2016.

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Chavs and the demonisation of the working clas

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Chavs and the demonisation of the working clas

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The discussion on Chavs starts around halfway through the programme at 13.40.

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Chavs - Ageing Goths, Thinking Allowed - BBC Radio 4

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That word 'chav' and the characterisation of the working class. Also, ageing Goths.

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Handout to go with the video

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A new report by Ipsos MORI brings together and analyses research from various sources and explores the attitudes of British Muslims as well as the views of the public towards Muslims. The report was supported by the Aziz Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and Unbound Philanthropy.

The research findings shows that:

There are a lot of similarities between the views of Muslims and the general public

There are many aspects of life where Muslims are no different to the general population. For example, Muslims have very similar levels of life satisfaction to the general public, they tend to be satisfied about the area where they live (82% satisfied for Muslims vs 86% for the general public) and slightly more optimistic that their local area has improved (23% vs 17% for the public). Muslims are positive about community spirit in their area, which is in line with the general population.

Muslims have a strong sense of belonging to Britain

Fairly consistently across all the data that we examined it is evident that Muslims feel a part of British society (88% say they very or fairly strongly belong to Britain) and they have a strong sense of attachment to British identity. Muslims have strong sense of commonality with other Britons, which is higher among Muslim UK graduates.

Religion plays a far more important part of life for Muslims than it does for others

Religion is far more important to Muslims' sense of identity than it is for others, which is notable given that wider research points to a decline in religion in British life. Religion is a particularly important to Muslims holding a UK degree. The vast majority of Muslims believe they can practice their religion freely in Britain and that being a Muslim is completely compatible with the British way of life. However, there are concerns that not enough is being done to protect the rights of Muslims and the review shows that Muslims are more likely to be worried about being a victim of crime because of their religion, ethnicity or skin colour.

Young Muslims hold distinct views to older Muslims

Younger Muslims are quite a distinct group in their views and outlook and this is particularly the case among young Muslim UK graduates. Across a range of attitudes, younger Muslims demonstrate more outward looking and liberal views. For example, younger Muslims have a more diverse friendship groups than their older counterparts, and are more relaxed on issues such as inter-racial marriage. Younger Muslims - particularly UK graduates - are more likely to be politically active than Muslim non-graduates. At the same time, this group is more likely to report experiences of discrimination and feel that prejudice against Muslims is increasing.

The British public hugely overestimates the number of Muslims in the country

The public thinks that around 1 in 6 Britons are Muslim, when actually fewer than 1 in 20 are and while trends indicate people's estimates may be moving in the right direction, they are still overestimating by quite a distance.

The public's views on Muslims are mixed and understanding of Islam is limited - but age and knowing someone Muslim make a difference

The review indicates that public's understanding of Islam is very limited with a minority (32%) saying they have a good understanding of the religion. When asked about the compatibility of Islam with British life, views tend to be more negative. However, one finding that is consistent is that the views of young people overall tend to be more positive than older people. Similarly, those who personally know someone who is Muslim tend to be more positive in their views.

Kully Kaur-Ballagan, Research Director at Ipsos MORI said:

This report is an important study as it synthesises many of the surveys that have been done examining the attitudes of British Muslims as well as the attitudes of the British Public towards Muslims. The report highlights that British Muslims are a diverse group of people - much like the public as a whole. They have a strong sense of British identity and while religion does play a greater role in the lives of Muslims than the general population, the vast majority believe that being Muslim and being British is entirely compatible. Yet, the report indicates that there are increasing concerns that religious prejudice towards Muslims is rising. While the British Muslim population has a younger age profile than the population as a whole, the findings shows that younger Muslims are a distinct group; they are more open in their views and have more diverse social networks - this is particularly the case for those who are graduates.
The findings also show that public opinion towards Muslims is mixed. Muslims make up just under five percent of the population yet the British public think it's three times this figure. And while the majority think that Islam is peaceful religion, they believe that most people perceive the religion in a negative way. Again, in the general population we also find that the views of younger people tend to be more positive and open towards Muslims than other age groups.

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A review of survey research on Muslims in Britain

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A new report by Ipsos MORI brings together and analyses research from various sources and explores the attitudes of British Muslims as well as the views of the public towards Muslims. The report was supported by the Aziz Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and Unbound Philanthropy.

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Word of the day

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04 September 2017 | Tags: British Social Attitudes, religion and belief

The latest data on religious affiliation from NatCen's British Social Attitudes survey reveals that the proportion of people in Britain who describe themselves as having no religion is at its highest ever level.

More than half (53%) of the British public now describe themselves as having "no religion", up from 48% in 2015. The proportion of non-believers has increased gradually since the survey began in 1983, when the proportion saying they had no religion stood at 31%.
Church of England decline continues
The decline in religious affiliation is hitting the Church of England particularly hard. Just 15% of people in Britain consider themselves Anglican, half the proportion who said this in 2000.

The proportion of people describing themselves as Catholic has remained relatively stable - at around 1 in 10 - over the past 30 years. Around 1 in 20 (6%) of people belong to non-Christian religions.
Young people lose their religion
The fall in religious affiliation has been driven, at least in part, by young people. In 2016, seven in ten (71%) of young people aged 18-24 said they had no religion, up from 62% in 2015.

There has been a decline in religious affiliation among all age groups between 2015 and 2016, but among the oldest people, those with no religion are in the minority. 4 in 10 people aged 65-74 say they have no religion and this drops to 27% of those aged 75 and over

And when it comes to the Church of England, young people are particularly underrepresented. Just 3% of those aged 18-24 described themselves as Anglican, compared to 40% of those aged 75 and over.

Roger Harding, Head of Public Attitudes at the National Centre for Social Research, said:

"This increase follows the long-term trend of more and more of us not being religious. The differences by age are stark and with so many younger people not having a religion it's hard to see this change abating any time soon. The falls in those belonging to the Church of England are the most notable, but these figures should cause all religious leaders to pause for thought."

"We know from the British Social Attitudes survey that religious people are becoming more socially liberal on issues like same sex relationships and abortion. With falling numbers some faith leaders might wonder whether they should be doing more to take their congregation's lead on adapting to how society is changing."
ENDS
Download the data tables here.

For more information or to arrange an interview with Roger Harding please contact Sophie Brown on Sophie.brown@natcen.ac.uk or 0207 549 9550.
Notes to editors
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) is an independent, not for profit organisation. We believe that social research has the power to make life better. By really understanding the complexity of people's lives and what they think about the issues that affect them, we give the public a powerful and influential role in shaping decisions and services that can make a difference to everyone.

The 2016 British Social Attitudes survey consisted of 2,942 interviews with a representative, random sample of adults in Britain. Interviewing was carried out between 13 July and 30 October 2016. Addresses are randomly selected and visited by one of NatCen's interviewers. After selecting one adult at the address (again at random), the interviewer carries out an hour long interview.

The question asked to determine religious affiliation is: 'Do you regard yourself as belonging to any particular religion? IF YES: Which?' The respondent is not provided with a list of religions.

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04 September 2017 | Tags: British Social Attitudes, religion and belief The latest data on religious affiliation from NatCen's British Social Attitudes survey reveals that the proportion of people in Britain who describe themselves as having no religion is at its highest ever level.

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Traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st Century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles.

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups. To find out where you fit in use this calculator below.

In order to see this dynamic content you need to have Javascript enabled. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions.

Your personal information is safe - all calculations are carried out on your computer

BBC Lab UK's Great British Class Survey was launched in January 2011. More than 161,000 people took part, making this the largest ever study of class in the UK

The Great British Class Survey was designed and the data analysed by Professors Mike Savage and Fiona Devine and their teams at the London School of Economics and the Universities of York and Manchester

The class calculator provides you with an approximate position in the new class system compared with the full Great British Class Survey

Produced by: Steven Atherton, Kathy Neal, Harjit Kaura, Christine Jeavans and Applied Works

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Traditional British social divisions of upper, middle and working class seem out of date in the 21st Century, no longer reflecting modern occupations or lifestyles. The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups.

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Do you have what it takes to become a British citizen? Take the test here to find out!

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The new citizenship test for aspiring Britons, intended to place more emphasis on British history and achievements than previous versions comes into force this week. Take the sample questions below and see whether you score the 75% necessary to pass

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The all-new British citizenship test - take the quiz

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The new citizenship test for aspiring Britons, intended to place more emphasis on British history and achievements than previous versions comes into force this week. Take the sample questions below and see whether you score the 75% necessary to pass

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A wonderful resource of authentic spoken English and regional accents

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The Listening Project - Find a Conversation - BBC Radio 4

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Listen to conversations from the Listening Project.

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Here's the PowerPoint for Day Two, where we looked at family and women's issues in contemporary Britain.

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An interesting, thoughtful piece on ASBOs . . .

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This morning, shadow home secretary Alan Johnson launched a campaign to save anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) after their abolition by Theresa May.