Tales from Havering-Atte-Bower

Snapshots from Havering-Atte-Bower 

(SA/2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Havering-Atte-Bower is a semi-rural village 345 feet above sea level. It lies just a few short miles up the road from my house in Harold Hill - or a world away, depending on how you measure these things.

 

The first part of the name is Saxon in origin, dating back to the 11th-century reign of Edward the Confessor. It refers to a great landowner known as Hæfer. Literally translating to he-goat, we can assume he was either a man devilishly aware of himself, or simply rank-smelling. 

 

The suffix - pronounced to rhyme with catty and flower - was added by 1272 and marks the village's history as the site of a royal residence. Known as The Bower, this part-palace, part-rustic retreat fell into ruin and was pulled down in the 17th century.

 

 

II. 

  

A 20-minute ride on the 375 bus from Romford station brings you to the village green. Alight here to find a sign announcing the village's 1042 founding, alongside the original village stocks and an old whipping post. 

 

Fortunately, these are no longer in use, though under the current Reform UK council you never know what the future will bring. Still, I doubt even Nigel Farage and co. would revive the practice of ducking witches, though the pond for such is located just across the road (if now overgrown with reeds). 

  

Other landmarks include St. John's Church, constructed in the 1870s by architect Basil Champneys on the site of a medieval chapel, and Havering Country Park, home to one of England's only two giant redwood plantations imported from California. There is also the white-walled water tower on Broxhill Road, built in 1934 (we were told as children in the 1970s that the pop star David Essex lived there).    

 

Finally, there's the traditional village pub: The Orange Tree, on Orange Tree Hill. Licensed premises have stood on this site since at least 1754, under various names, and not only does The Orange Tree serve food but they actively encourage vertical drinking for those who like to stand by the bar and socialise.  

III.  

As Essex villages go, Havering-Atte-Bower possesses all the features that make them so beloved. And despite the fact that it is, technically, part of Greater London, it still feels as if one were (almost) in the countryside, surrounded as it is by green belt fields and farmland, and offering some lovely views. 

 

However, I regret to inform readers that it's also an ecological dead zone: I spent an entire afternoon there and didn't hear a single note of birdsong, nor the distinct buzz of insects in the long grass. There's just the relentless sound of cars. 

 

Havering boasts of being one of London's greenest boroughs. Yet its tree canopy has plummeted from 25% in 2018 to just 14% today, and nearly all the wildflower meadows of my youth are gone. Natural habitats face relentless pressure and animal numbers continue to decline. 

 

It's not just the huge impact of new housing developments and the gradual erosion of green spaces. Decades of intensive agriculture - ripping up hedgerows and spraying fields with poison - have wiped out the insects, leaving birds and small creatures to starve. 

 

Intense summer heatwaves, arson-induced wildfires, and the illegal dumping of rubbish obviously compound the damage. 

 

The UK-wide biodiversity crisis is profoundly depressing. And, despite the efforts of conservation groups fighting to restore local ecosystems and rewild certain areas, I hold out little hope, to be honest.

 

One can't help wondering what Hæfer would make of the county he knew and loved now deprived of its breeding birds and large beasts, its rivers and ponds once teeming with fish now polluted.   

 

 

Musical bonus: Killing Joke, 'Goodbye to the Village', from the album Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (E.G. Records /Virgin Records 1986). 

 

 

A Brief (Somewhat Belated) Note on the Online Safety Act and the Peter Kyle / Nigel Farage Spat

Peter Kyle MP / Nigel Farage MP

 

A lot of people are expressing concern about the Online Safety Act (2023); a new set of laws passed to protect children - and adults - from all kinds of online content deemed to be potentially harmful by Ofcom (an independent regulator, albeit one established by Parliament and which is overseen by the Culture Secretary).  

 

Some critics worry about how it might impact on free speech and privacy; others say that it will be largely ineffective at restricting access to content and so is doomed to failure.  

 

To be honest, it's not an issue that particularly excites my interest. However, the moment I hear supporters of the Act pleading with us to think of the children à la Helen Lovejoy [1] - thereby transforming an important and complex question into a simple moral issue in order to effectively shutdown debate - I immediately side with the critics.

 

What does interest, however, is the manner in which everything moral, orthodox and conformist - i.e., everything which was traditionally associated with conservatism - has passed yet again to the political left and that it's members of Keir Starmer's Labour Party who most vociferously support the Act and, indeed, wish to strengthen it still further. 

 

Reform UK, on the other hand - a party on the populist right of the British political spectrum - have pledged to repeal the Act if elected into government, prompting the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Peter Kyle, to make the unpleasant and ludicrous accusation that Nigel Farage is on the side of those peddling hate as well as sexual predators like Jimmy Savile.

 

It's ironic that this remark should be made by the Rt Hon. Member for Hove and Portslade, as Kyle is someone who opposes all forms of hate speech and wants the online world to effectively become a virtual safe space; i.e., an inclusive, supportive, and secure environment ideal for monkeys who wish to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. 

 

Why is it that those on the virtue-signalling left are often the ones who spew some of the most vile and vicious invective? 

 

Might it be because they tie hate (disguised as love) to judgement rather than joy, unaware that by so doing they corrode and corrupt their own hearts and turn what begins as a desire for political correctness into a resentment-riddled ideology which "leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others" [2].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post published on 30 Jan 2016 in which I discuss this 'think of the children' ploy: click here. 

 

[2] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826. 

      I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 130, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and the Cashless Society

gbnews.com

 

 

I. 

 

As is well-known, D. H. Lawrence regarded mankind's money-mania as a collective form of insanity: "Money is our madness, our vast collective madness." [1]

 

And his proposed solution to this madness (which he elsewhere describes as a perverted instinct which rots the brain and corrupts the soul) is to terminate the present financial system: "Kill money, put money out of existence." [2]

 

Society, he says, must establish itself upon a different (revolutionary) basis from the one we have now; for endlessly chasing a fistful of dollars results in vicious competition and turns us all into fiends [3].    

 

Whilst these tiny snippets, taken from Lawrence's 1929 poetry collection Pansies, might not constitute a comprehensive political critique of capital - might, in fact, simply be the musings of a romantic poet dreaming of a socialist utopia in which food, housing, and heating would be free for everyone [4] - they do at least make it clear that Lawrence hated having to earn, save, and spend money. 

 

 

II. 

 

The question that arises, however, is this: would Lawrence have welcomed a cashless society of the type presently evolving and being promoted by many politicians and bankers? 

 

I doubt it: for clearly the so-called cashless society only allows those who govern us and run the financial system to exercise still more power and control; to strangle us ever-tighter in their octopus arms [5]. It's not a return to the a world prior to notes and coins, where barter was the system of exchange, but a slide into a (dystopian) future where money has been digitalised (i.e., turned into a form of electronic information or data).    

 

I know all the arguments made in favour of a cashless society - it's quick and convenient, it's safe and secure, it prevents crime, lowers business costs, and even reduces the transmission of disease [6] - but I'm also aware of the dangers that threaten from a society founded upon total surveillance of the individual and the complete control over their money (their savings and financial transactions).   

 

It's not just a loss of privacy that concerns - but a loss of freedom. There's also the question of what happens to those who don't have (or might not want) bank accounts; will millions of people effectively become non-citizens and be despised and discriminated against as such? 

 

In sum, I don't want to belong to a cashless economy and certainly don't welcome the idea of a central bank digital currency, allowing that coldest of all cold monsters, the State, to monopolise the cashless payment system. Thus, whilst I'm sympathetic with Lawrence's call to kill money, I'm (paradoxically) supportive of those, such as Nigel Farage, who are working to ensure the survival of cash [7].   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Money-madness', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 421. 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Kill money', The Poems, Vol. I, p. 422. 

[3] See the poem 'Wages' in the above volume, p. 452. 

[4] See the poems 'Money-madness' and 'Kill money' once more. In the latter, Lawrence writes: "We must have the courage of mutual trust. / We must have the modesty of simple living. / And the individual must have his house, food and fire all free like a bird." 

[5] See the poem 'Why?' in The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 391-92.  

[6] We should, I think, interrogate all of these alleged advantages of going cashless. Just to take the last of these claims, for example, whilst it's true that dirty old banknotes and grubby coins can carry disease-causing organisms (such as Salmonella, E. coli, and Covid-19), cash has been found to be less likely to transmit disease than commonly touched items such as card terminals and PIN pads. 

 

[7] Readers who also wish to protest the move towards a cashless society in the UK may like to support the GB News campaign - 'Don't Kill Cash' - which Farage is spearheading: click here. 

 

 

This post was inspired by a remark made by David Brock in a recent email, for which I am grateful.

 

 

On the Triumph of Donald Trump: Don't Say I Didn't Warn You ...

Photo credit: AP/LM Otero

I hate to be one of those people who says I told you so, but, back in 2008, in a series of essays on myth, history and cultural despair, I did suggest that - thanks to globalization - we in the West find ourselves today in very similar position to the people of Austria during the 19th century and that the potential for a new type of pessimistic and reactionary politics, based on notions of race, religion, and national identity, was thus a very real danger.   

Such a desperate response, I noted, might not be very desirable, but was perfectly understandable when mass immigration had resulted in the internal exile of indigenous populations in their own societies and concern over their future survival as ethnically and culturally distinct groups was increasingly widespread.

In order to provide some theoretical support for this argument, I referred to an essay by Jean Baudrillard in which he offered a painfully revisionist explanation for why it is that only figures on the far-right seem to possess the last remnants of political interest. This passage in particular seemed at the time - and still seems - absolutely spot on:

"The right once embodied moral values and the left, in opposition, embodied a certain historical and political urgency. Today, however, stripped of its political energy, the left has become a pure moral injunction, the embodiment of universal values, the champion of the reign of virtue and the keeper of the antiquated values of the Good and the True ..."

In short, the left has become boring and this results not only in their abject surrender, but in a situation where it’s only neo-fascist and populist politicians who have anything interesting left to say: "All the other discourses are moral or pedagogical," writes Baudrillard, "made by school teachers and lesson-givers, managers and programmers".

In daring to embrace evil and reject political correctness, I concluded, the far-right looks set to scoop the political jackpot ...

Now - just to be clear - this didn't mean back in 2008 and it doesn't mean now that I support or necessarily share the views of Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, or Donald Trump. But it does mean I can understand the attraction of these figures to voters who are sick to death of being spoken down to by those in power who think they know better than the people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

And it does mean I'm conscious of the more prosaic reasons why the above seem to speak to and for an angry white working-class who feel increasingly marginalized by high-tech industries and the enforced integration of ethnic minorities into their communities.

For, unfortunately, globalization doesn't only unleash flows of capital, information, and talent across national borders, it also brings with it crime, disease, and barbarism (by which I mean unfamiliar and often antithetical customs, norms, values and beliefs). And so, unsurprisingly, defensive ideologies arise that promise to counter threats to national and cultural identity and restore order.

And so Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump ...

Notes

Stephen Alexander, 'Reflections beneath a Black Sun', The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. IV, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).

Jean Baudrillard, ‘A Conjuration of Imbeciles’, in The Conspiracy of Art, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext[e], 2005). 

Alien Spring

Alien Spring  (2015)

To me, all flowering plants look decidedly alien: by which I don't mean extraterrestrial, so much as completely other or inhuman. That is certainly what I meant when I captioned the above photograph Alien Spring and sent it to a number of friends. I wasn't making a point about the environmental danger posed by invasive species; nor, indeed, was I offering a covert remark about UK immigration policy!

What anyway - since the subject has arisen - is the threat level to indigenous flora presented by non-native plants that have found a way to root and bloom in this green and pleasant land? 

Well, according to recent research carried out by researchers at the University of York, the answer is pretty minimal (if not actually negligible). Where alien species thrive, so too do the local plants; where they don't, neither do the latter. And so Nigel Farage can rest easy in his bed at night, happy in the knowledge that no delicate British flower is being driven towards extinction by overly-competitive newcomers (even if they make up 20% of species recorded in 2007).

The fact is that, unlike invasive animal species, plants seem to get along just fine growing side-by-side in chaotic harmony. Thus whilst eco-nationalists will always object to foreign plants growing on British soil and fantasise about a more natural state of affairs in some imaginary past, we can turn a deaf ear towards them and offer up instead three cheers for biodiversity whilst looking forward to an alien spring.