Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park (revisited)

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, a group on Flickr.

Historic Landscape Characterisation divides the landscape into character types. But then you need to draw an arrow, of direction. Ontologically "Everything is in the act of becoming". It is perpetually on the cusp of existence, only to be converted into a memory. "Now" is infinitely small, and the past infinitely big. The common understanding of "now" actually includes a fair chunk of what is past and gone, never to reappear. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, as the name implies, is a cemetery but is administered by the local council as a nature reserve for the purposes of recreation and education. So what is its "Type". Take a look at the photos and you decide. Not that having overlapping "Types" invalidates Historic Landscape Characterisation. Here, normally, a decision is made over which Type is "dominant". Would you say that THCP is predominantly a recreational park? a nature reserve? or a cemetery?...
Whatever it is, it is one of my favourite spots in London. Birdsong at dusk and dawn is as good as I've heard anywhere and the place is full of flowers (and trees and ivy). If you stand in the middle you can barely hear traffic!

EDL demonstration 3rd September & 75 years of opposing Fascism and Racism

The EDL are planning a "Static Demonstration" in Tower Hamlets on 3rd of September 2011; now that the Home secretary has banned all marches in 5 east-London boroughs (Home Office Press Release). They've been whipped up into a frenzy of Islamophobia by the popular press and have become a safe haven for a ragbag of racists.  3rd September is days after Eid ul-Fitr, the muslim celebration of the end of Ramadam, and the EDL demonsration would seem designed to provoke muslims. Unite Against Fascism is to hold a counter "Static Demonstration" in Weavers Fields (UAF website ).

I attended a very docile - if not to say tedious - static counter demonstration in Dudley. The trouble with that is that the EDL were  bussed to one spot and then "walk" to the static demonsration in what appears like a march. They then broke out of their containment and rampaged through the town, attacking an Indian Restaurant and a Hindu Temple (thereby giving the lie to their claim not to be racists and only opposed to "Islamicisation" of the UK ).

In addition to people coming for the counter demonstration, it would greatly help if volunteer citizen witnesses came and recorded, video and photographed, what happens on the day. 

We're not strangers to racist violence, Fascist thuggery and Nazi nut-jobs, in the East End of London. A car bomb exploded in Brick Lane in 1999 "Independent" news report   and Altab Ali was stabbed to death by racists in 1978 Altab Ali Park. And the Blitz, and later Nazi V-weapon rocket attacks lead to thousands dying. The Historic Landscape Character of this corner of London has been tempered by constant resistance to xenophobia and the poitics of fear and division.

Famously, this year is the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, when Jews, Irish Catholics, Labour, Communists, and local Anarchists barricaded the east end from a march by the Nazi Blackshirts

Cable Street Mural...., a photo by david sankey on Flickr.

It is unclear whether a planned march down Leman Stret (from Aldgate East Tube) to Cable Street will go ahead on 2nd October. A rally will be held in St George's Park and events held in Wilton's Music Hall on Grace's Alley. If you can make it - turn up to this. It will probably be one of the last times you'll meet participants from 1936

View Cable Street 75 in a larger map Click on blue blobs and lines for captions

Bagnoreggio, the "Dying Town"....

Bagnoreggio, a set by |nsane on Flickr.

...is apparently having a bit of a tourist revival. The town has suffered the classic Italian fate of rural depopulation (and I hear that the current round of cuts will remove mayors and local government from many historic towns - a fate that has also befallen many many English towns over the years, including both rural -Totnes- and urban -Stourbridge- but I digress). Now, however, it has been placed on the World Monuments Fund's 2006 Watch List of the 100 Most Endangered Sites, due to the threats it faces from erosion and unregulated tourism. The erosion is due to "arroyo" "badlands"-type arrid storm rainfall and will be made worse by global warming. This process started with too-intense farming during the Roman Empire and could be alleviated by planting trees. As for tourism. There you go, on the brink of terminal decline and you finally get a fillip of tourism only to risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs. It is indeed a tightrope you walk when the fact that a town crystallised long ago, through economic and population decline, is the thing that makes tourists want to visit, and which supplies a modicum of money and life for an otherwise moribund settlement.

Calcata had a more dramatic transition Wikipedia says, "In the 1930s, the hill towns's fortified historic center was condemned by the government for fear that the volcanic cliffs the ancient community was built upon would collapse. Local residents moved to nearby Calcata Nuova. In the 1960s, the emptied historical centre began to be repopulated by artists and hippies who squatted in its medieval stone and masonry structures. Many of the squatters eventually purchased their homes, the government reversed its condemnation order, and the residents of what had become an artistic community began restoring the ancient town.Click here for more views

This trend has continued. Today the town has a thriving artistic community described in the New York Times as what "may be the grooviest village in Italy, home to a wacky community of about 100 artists, bohemians, aging hippies and New Age types."

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