Roman London

This paper discusses two fragmentary stone pillars, one decorated, which were recently discovered at Trefollwyn, near Llangefni, Anglesey. These are the first examples of their kind from Britain but they belong to a tradition of La Tène carved stone pillars from the Rhineland, Brittany, and Ireland. They may be connected with burial. In antiquarian sources an early Christian inscribed stone (fifth-sixth centuries A.D.), now lost, was reported from Capel Heilin in the same immediate vicinity and suggests that the area was used for burial in the early medieval period.     

Rooflessness in London

Rooflessness in London emerged as a media issue and political problem during the 1980s. While "rough sleeping" undoubtedly increased, numbers are hard to quantify because studies are unreliable, use different categories, and people seamlessly drift from one category to another. This article analyzes the causes of rooflessness in London, focusing on central government policy change at a time when London, atypically among major cities, had no overarching metropolitan government. The creation of multiple quasi-governmental agencies and charities whose responsibilities for homelessness overlap does not help coordination. Many short-term initiatives have been attempted, but solving rooflessness may require more radical changes if endemic homelessness is not to be the condition of the post-welfare state.     

Monthly London Meeting

When the Catholic Mass was outlawed by Edward VI, ‘The sacrifice of Masses, in which it was commonly said that the Priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits’—the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 1553, Article Thirty-one (Bickwell 1955, 410), not only were priests loyal to Rome forced underground, but altars, vestments and chalices used in the Mass were destroyed. Clandestine priests had to either rescue and hide such items or purchase new ones.

Few chalices survived this iconoclasm and most Catholic priests must have had to purchase new plate, and there is evidence that some such plate was made in base-metals, an area which has so far been little researched.     

Life in Medieval London

Abstract

This is the first detailed published study of the stained-glass ‘band’ window which survives in the east end of St Mary’s church, at Selling in Kent. It is argued that the Selling window was installed in the second decade of the 14th century; not, as is usually thought, the first. The window is a hierarchical statement, embodying a number of interrelated levels of meaning. Its primary function is to celebrate Christ’s incarnation, and the role of the Virgin and other saints as intercessors for mankind at the Last Judgement. The window clearly also commemorates the glory days of Edward I, who died in 1307. The historical evidence and the iconography suggest that, in addition, it is a memorial to the Clare family, installed after the English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314, commemorating the death of Gilbert III of Clare, earl of Gloucester and Hertford. The window was probably commissioned by the local lord Bartholomew Badlesmere and his wife, who was Gilbert’s cousin, between 1314 and 1317, when Bartholomew was executor of Gilbert’s estate.     

Planting Peace: The Greater London Council and the Community Gardens of Central London

‘Peace’ has not lent itself easily to emblematic or mnemonic forms of representation. In Europe’s furnished urban landscapes of the 19th century peace was often personified in female allegorical form. She can be seen in many of the sculpted memorials that commemorate distant battles fought on the edges of Empire. Invariably, however, the figure of ‘Peace’ had a more modest role in the allegory of commemoration than that of ‘Victory’ or ‘Triumph’. As an ideal, peace and pacifism is more often regarded as a process, a long‐term goal that cannot be captured in single static form. To this end, the promotion of peace has most often been realised through intervention, occupation, and fluid, temporal forms such as campaigns, marches, songs, dances and other extended programmes. Peace has also been promoted through slow, evolutionary forms such as designed landscapes, parks and gardens. Drawing on international parallels, this paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London. Each owes its origins to radical local agendas set within the political climate of the Cold War of the 1980s, but both were born out of grand visions for world peace, multilateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation, the author explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage.     

The geographies of Swinging London

The processes of modernisation that re-capitalised London in the post-war period can be located in both dominant and resistant movements. Many aspects of the city's discursive fabric in the 1950s and 1960s were underpinned by a similar geographical imagination. This geographical imagination was characterised by a desire to visualise and represent nature and the real afresh and can be found in modernist architecture and planning aesthetics, Pop Art, Op Art, Angry realist writing, the style of Swinging London, and the tactics of counter-cultural rebellion in the city. Acknowledged geographies of modernity and anti-modernity are therefore questionable. Similarly, the geographies of power and resistance are constituted by more than spatial tactics and moral or behavioural boundaries as they are often rendered. An approach that understands hegemonic processes in terms of geographical imaginations allows an analysis that moves beyond outward manifestations of resistance and enables an engagement with the less palpable aspects of dissent such as ideology and aesthetics.