Quotulatiousness

February 4, 2023

A lobster tale (that does not involve Jordan Peterson)

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Food, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes relates some of his recent research on the Parliament of 1621 (promising much more in future newsletters) and highlights one of the Royal monopolies that came under challenge in the life of that Parliament:

European lobster (Hommarus gammarus)
Photo by Bart Braun via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the great things about the 1621 Parliament, as a historian of invention, is that MPs summoned dozens of patentees before them, to examine whether their patents were “grievances” — illegal and oppressive monopolies that ought to be declared void. Because of these proceedings, along with the back-and-forth of debate between patentees and their enemies, we can learn some fascinating details about particular industries.

Like how 1610s London had a supply of fresh lobsters. The patent in question was acquired in 1616 by one Paul Bassano, who had learned of a Dutch method of keeping lobsters fresh — essentially, to use a custom-made broad-bottomed ship containing a well of seawater, in which the lobsters could be kept alive. Bassano, in his petitions to the House of Commons, made it very clear that he was not the original inventor and had imported the technique. This was exactly the sort of thing that early monopoly patents were supposed to encourage: technological transfer, and not just original invention.

The problem was that the patent didn’t just cover the use of the new technique. It gave Bassano and his partners a monopoly over all imported lobsters too. This was grounded in a kind of industrial policy, whereby blocking the Dutch-caught lobsters would allow Bassano to compete. He noted that Dutch sailors were much hardier and needed fewer provisions than the English, and that capital was available there at interest rates of just 4-5%, so that a return on sales of just 10% allowed for a healthy profit. In England, by comparison, interest rates of about 10% meant that he needed a return on sales of at least 15%, especially given the occasional loss of ships and goods to the capriciousness of the sea — he noted that he had already lost two ships to the rocks.

At the same time, patent monopolies were designed to nurture expertise. Bassano noted that he still needed to rely on the Dutch, who were forced to sell to the English market either through him or by working on his ships. But he had been paying his English sailors higher wages, so that over time the trade would come to be dominated by the English. (This training element was a key reason that most patents tended to be given for 14 or 21 years — the duration of two or three apprenticeships — though Bassano’s was somewhat unusual in that it was to last for a whopping 31.)

But the blocking of competing imports — especially foodstuffs, which were necessaries of life — could be very controversial, especially when done by patent rather than parliamentary statute. Monopolies could lawfully only be given for entirely new industries, as they otherwise infringed on people’s pre-existing practices and trades. Bassano had worked out a way to avoid complaints, however, which was essentially to make a deal with the fishmongers who had previously imported lobsters, taking them into his partnership. He offered them a win-win, which they readily accepted. In fact, the 1616 patent came with the explicit support of the Fishmongers’ Company.

It sounds like it became a large enterprise, and I suspect that it probably did lower the price of lobsters in London, bringing them in regularly and fresh. With a fleet of twenty ships, and otherwise supplementing their catch with those caught by the Dutch, Bassano boasted of how he was able to send a fully laden ship to the city every day (wind-permitting). This stood in stark contrast to the state of things before, when a Dutch ship might have arrived with a fresh catch only every few weeks or months, and when they felt that scarcity would have driven the prices high.

January 8, 2023

The (historical) lure of London

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the puzzle that was the phenomenol growth of London, even at a time that England had a competitive advantage in agricultural exports to the continent:

Ogilby & Morgan’s Map of London, 1677.
Scanned copy of reproduction in Maps of Old London (1908).

… the extraordinary inflow of migrants to London in the period when it grew eightfold — from an unremarkable city of a mere 50,000 souls in 1550, to one of the largest cities in Europe in 1650, boasting 400,000. I’ve written about that growth a few times before, especially here. It may not sound like much today, but it has to be one of the most important facts in British economic history. It is, in my view, the first sign of an “Industrial Revolution”, and certainly the first indication that there was something economically weird about England. It requires proper explanation.

In brief, the key question is whether the migrants to London — almost all of whom came from elsewhere in England — were pushed out of the countryside, thrown off their land thanks to things like enclosure, or pulled by London’s attractions.

I think the evidence is overwhelmingly that they were pulled and not pushed:

  1. The English rural population continued to grow in absolute terms, even if a larger proportion of the total population made their way to London. The population working in agriculture swelled from 2.1 million in 1550 to about 3.3 million in 1650. Hardly a sign of widespread displacement.
  2. As for the people outside of agriculture, many remained in or even fled to the countryside. In the 1560s, for example, York’s textile industry left for the countryside and smaller towns, pursuing lower costs of living and perhaps trying to escape the city’s guild restrictions. In 1550-1650, the population engaged in rural industry — largely spinning and weaving in their homes — swelled from about 0.7 to 1.5 million. Again, it doesn’t exactly suggest rural displacement. If anything, the opposite.
  3. There were in fact large economic pressures for England to stay rural. England for the entire period was a net exporter of grain, feeding the urban centres of the Netherlands and Italy. The usual pattern for already-agrarian economies, when faced with the demands of foreign cities, is to specialise further — to stay agrarian, if not agrarianise more. It’s what happened in much of the Baltic, which also fed the Dutch and Italian cities. Despite the same pressures for England to agrarianise, however, London still grew. To my mind, it suggests that London had developed an independent economic gravity of its own, helping to pull an ever larger proportion of the whole country’s population out of agriculture and into the industries needed to supply the city.
  4. As for the supposed push factor, enclosure, the timing just doesn’t fit. Enclosure had been happening in a piecemeal and often voluntary way since at least the fourteenth century. By 1550, before London’s growth had even begun, by one estimate almost half of the country’s total surface had already been enclosed, with a further quarter gradually enclosed over the course of the seventeenth century. A more recent estimate suggests that by 1600 already 73% of England’s land had been enclosed. As for the small remainder, this was mopped up by Parliament’s infamous enclosure acts from the 1760s onwards — much too late to explain London’s population explosion.
  5. Perhaps most importantly, people flocked specifically to London. In 1550 only about 3-4% of the population lived in cities. By 1650, it was 9%, a whopping 85% of whom lived in London alone. And this even understates the scale of the migration to the city, because so many Londoners were dropping dead. It was full of disease in even a good year, and in the bad it could lose tens of thousands — figures equivalent or even larger than the entire populations of the next largest cities. Waves upon waves of newcomers were needed just to keep the city’s population stable, let alone to grow it eightfold. In the seventeenth century the city absorbed an estimated half of the entire natural increase in England’s population from extra births. If England’s urbanisation had been thanks to rural displacement, you’d expect people to have flocked to the closest, and much safer, cities, rather than making the long trek to London alone.

It’s this last point that I’ve long wanted to flesh out some more. The further people were willing to trek to London, the more strongly it suggests that the city had a specific pull. I’d so far put together a few dribs and drabs of evidence for this. Whereas towns like Sheffield drew its apprentices from within a radius of about twenty miles, London attracted young people from hundreds of miles away, with especially many coming from the midlands and the north of England. Indeed, London’s radius seems to have shrunk over the course of the seventeenth century, suggested that they came from further afield during the initial stages of growth. Records of court witnesses also suggest that only a quarter of men in some of London’s eastern suburbs were born in the city or its surrounding counties.

January 6, 2023

This is the most interesting roof in London

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 5 Sep 2022

The @Royal Albert Hall is 150 years old; the roof is 600 tonnes of glass and steel. And it turns out that there’s a terrifying technicians’ trampoline, acoustic-dampening mushrooms, and a complete lack of connections.
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December 15, 2022

“Intense staring” aka the “Toxic Male Gaze” on the London Underground

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jennie Cummings-Knight on a recent publicity campaign to discourage male passengers on the London Underground from “intense staring”:

“London underground” by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

… there might be reasons that a man stares intensely without sexual intent. For example, he could have autism and not really understand his behaviour might be considered as “staring”. Or he might be short sighted, or daydreaming about his holiday. Moreover, London Transport trains are used by people of all kinds from all over the world, including ordinary people from countries where staring is not seen as threatening e.g. in Spain. Indeed people in the UK are relatively comfortable with eye-contact, though those from outside London might not be aware that in the confined spaces of the London Underground “tube” trains, people tend to be unusually sensitive to eye contact. Although London Transport’s idea may be well intentioned, it doesn’t seem to take these individual and cultural differences into account. Perhaps its main effect will be to make women excessively worried about being stared at, and make men excessively worried about being jailed for accidentally looking at a woman in the “wrong” way.

But there are many layers to this issue. Speaking as a woman, I am always fascinated by the double standards exhibited by women with respect to male behaviour. We are only interested in being looked at by men if we find the said man or men to be attractive to us. This means that we can be potentially offended by the gaze of any man who falls into the following short list:

  • Men we don’t know
  • Men who we don’t find attractive
  • Men who we feel are “punching above their weight” with regard to giving us their attention in this way

At the same time, the curious paradox is that, in spite of our assertions that we don’t need male attention (see the Toy Story 4 Bo Beep character, developed by feminist writers) and that we want to be taken seriously as we pursue our careers, we still take a lot of trouble to look attractive to men. This behaviour can start very young and persist into later adulthood. Teenage girls growing up in the 2000s are still hitching up their skirt waistbands as they come out of school on an afternoon. Teenage girls clubbing at the weekend still dress as provocatively as possible (if the ones I see on late night trains on a regular basis are anything to go by). Why dress in this way if we don’t want to be looked at?

I would suggest that the need to be seen by the male is deeply wired in the subconscious of most women. Sadly, girls as young as 9 years old are worrying about the shape of their intimate private parts. The fact is that women are having more cosmetic procedures than ever before in order to look the most attractive that they can. Men are having more cosmetic procedures too, but not to the same degree. Women who are only attracted to women seem, in my experience, to be less concerned with their physical attractiveness per se and more concerned with dressing in a way that fits in with lesbian group culture.

If we truly believe that we are liberated females, how is it that we are still so obsessed with having the perfect body/and or face? Where does this female need “to be seen” come from? On one level, what they do not realise is that they are looking for “ideal shapes” imagined at least in part, by the porn industry. On another level, if we look at evolutionary history, we see that male and female roles are rooted in survival behaviours appropriate to a hunter/gatherer society, and to the safe nurturing of children. The men were the hunters looking out for prey, and women were tied closer to the homestead because of child rearing. The more inward “yin” role for women, arising from their nurturing role and the physicality of the growth of the baby inside the woman’s body, followed by the nourishment in the early months from her body for the baby, has resulted in women being especially responsive to touch.

Men on the other hand, tend to be more visually aroused, and have an inborn, primeval need to look outwards (the outward thrusting nature of “yang”) which includes looking at the female. In the same way, the need to look around the field when hunting results in looking at whatever is in their peripheral vision. It is simply not possible for a man to stop looking at women unless he goes against this instinctive behaviour and keeps his eyes to the ground. If he does this, he may then also miss other visual cues which give him important information about dangers around and in front of him. 

November 5, 2022

Repost: Remember, Remember the Fifth of November

Filed under: Britain, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Today is the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot:

Everyone knows what the Gunpowder Plotters looked like. Thanks to one of the best-known etchings of the seventeenth century we see them “plotting”, broad brims of their hats over their noses, cloaks on their shoulders, mustachios and beards bristling — the archetypical band of desperados. Almost as well known are the broad outlines of the discovery of the “plot”: the mysterious warning sent to Lord Monteagle on October 26th, 1605, the investigation of the cellars under the Palace of Westminster on November 4th, the discovery of the gunpowder and Guy Fawkes, the flight of the other conspirators, the shoot-out at Holbeach in Staffordshire on November 8th in which four (Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy and the brothers Christopher and John Wright) were killed, and then the trial and execution of Fawkes and seven others in January 1606.

However, there was a more obscure sequel. Also implicated were the 9th Earl of Northumberland, three other peers (Viscount Montague and Lords Stourton and Mordaunt) and three members of the Society of Jesus. Two of the Jesuits, Fr Oswald Tesimond and Fr John Gerard, were able to escape abroad, but the third, the superior of the order in England, Fr Henry Garnet, was arrested just before the main trial. Garnet was tried separately on March 28th, 1606 and executed in May. The peers were tried in the court of Star Chamber: three were merely fined, but Northumberland was imprisoned in the Tower at pleasure and not released until 1621.

[. . .]

Thanks to the fact that nothing actually happened, it is not surprising that the plot has been the subject of running dispute since November 5th, 1605. James I’s privy council appears to have been genuinely unable to make any sense of it. The Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, observed at the trial that succeeding generations would wonder whether it was fact or fiction. There were claims from the start that the plot was a put-up job — if not a complete fabrication, then at least exaggerated for his own devious ends by Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, James’s secretary of state. The government’s presentation of the case against the plotters had its awkward aspects, caused in part by the desire to shield Monteagle, now a national hero, from the exposure of his earlier association with them. The two official accounts published in 1606 were patently spins. One, The Discourse of the Manner, was intended to give James a more commanding role in the uncovering of the plot than he deserved. The other, A True and Perfect Relation, was intended to lay the blame on Garnet.

But Catesby had form. He and several of the plotters as well as Lord Monteagle had been implicated in the Earl of Essex’s rebellion in 1601. Subsequently he and the others (including Monteagle) had approached Philip III of Spain to support a rebellion to prevent James I’s accession. This raises the central question of what the plot was about. Was it the product of Catholic discontent with James I or was it the last episode in what the late Hugh Trevor-Roper and Professor John Bossy have termed “Elizabethan extremism”?

October 14, 2022

That time that H.G. Wells fell afoul of Muslim sentiments

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New English Review, Esmerelda Weatherwax recounts an incident from the 1930s where Muslim protestors took to the streets of London in reaction to a recent Hindustani translation of H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World:

Screen capture of the 1938 Muslim protest march in London from a British Pathé newsreel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADausiEe4pM

… my husband was at the Museum of London and spotted a very brief mention of this protest in 1938 on a list of 20th century London events. I did some research.

The book they objected to was HG Wells’ A Short History of the World. This was originally published in 1922 but in 1938 an abridged version was tranlated into Hindustani and published in India. His observations about the Prophet Mohammed did not find favour with Indian Muslims (and as you know pre-partition the area called India covered what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh). There were protest meetings in Calcutta and Mumbai (then transliterated as Bombay) and the consignments of the books that WH Smith the booksellers sent to Hyderabad mysteriously never arrived. Investigation showed that the Sind government banned its import. Protests spread to east Africa and were reported in Nairobi and Mombasa.

The paragraphs concerned said “He seems to have been a man compounded of very considerable vanity, greed, cunning, self-deception, and quite sincere religious passion”. Wells concludes, not unfavourably, that “when the manifest defects of Muhammad’s life and writing have been allowed for, there remains in Islam, this faith he imposed upon the Arabs, much power and inspiration”.

There had been a number of Muslims living in east London for some years, sailors who came through the docks, retired servants, some professional men and in 1934 they formed a charitable association for the promotion of Islam called Jamiat-ul-Muslimin; they met on Fridays at a hall in Commercial Road.

On Friday 12th August 1938 a copy of A Short History of the World was, as apparently reported in the Manchester Guardian the following day “ceremoniously burned”. The main Nazi book burnings were over 5 years previously but I can’t but be reminded of them. I can’t access the Guardian on-line archive for 1938 as I don’t have a subscription, but I have no reason to doubt what they reported.

A few days later Dr Mohammed Buksh of Jamiat-ul-Muslimin attended upon Sir Feroz Khan Noon, the high commissioner for India. Sir Feroz tried to explain that in Britain we could (or could then) freely criticise Christianity, the Royal family and government as a right. He reminded Dr Buksh that Muslims were “a very small minority in England, and it would do them no good to try and be mischievous in this country, no matter how genuine their grievances were”.

October 5, 2022

The Amusing Inspiration Behind Dire Straits Classic 70s Hit | Professor of Rock

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Professor of Rock
Published 16 Jun 2021

The story of the 1979 classic “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits. Mark Knopfler was inspired to write the song after witnessing a band playing Dixieland Jazz in a dive bar.

Hey music junkies and vinyl junkies Professor of Rock always here to celebrate the greatest artists and the greatest 70s vinyl songs of all time for the music community and vinyl community.

If you’ve ever owned records, cassettes and CD’s at different times in you life or still do this is your place Subscribe below right now to be a part of our daily celebration of the rock era with exclusive stories from straight from the artists and click on our patreon link in the description to see our brand new show there.

Mark Knopfler was performing in London’s pub scene in the mid 70s, living on next to nothing in a flat with aspiring bassist John Illsley. Knopfler’s younger brother, David, introduced him to Illsley, following the dissolution of Mark’s first marriage. Mark, John, and David teamed up with “Pick” Withers, another London area musician, to form a group they aptly named Dire Straits.

The 4 members all had day jobs, but they lived a “hand to mouth” existence — struggling to pay their utilities bill. One rainy evening, Mark & a few friends decided to go to a nearby pub for a couple of pints in a dilapidated (dih-lap-ih-dated) section of South London. The pub was nearly empty, except for a couple of guys playing pool. In a corner of the bar, a band was playing — seemingly unaffected by the lack of an audience.

The band was “blowing Dixie — double-four time” as Knopfler would later transcribe. “Dixie double” is a performance style that was popularized by Django (jang-go) Reinhardt (rain-hart), and in the early days of Les Paul — where the guitar, bass, and drums are played harmoniously at a very fast pace.

If you’re playing “Dixie double-four time” as Knopfler describes in “Sultans of Swing”, you are playing twice the speed of the normal 4/4 time, and the drummer is working extra hard to keep up with the tempo. Knopfler remembered asking the hapless Dixie outfit to play “Creole Love Call” or “Muskrat Ramble”, much to the band’s delight, because they were undoubtedly shocked that someone in the pub actually knew some of the songs in their repertoire.

At the end of the band’s performance, the leader announced triumphantly to the 3-4 people in attendance … “We are the Sultans of Swing!”, as if they were playing in front of a packed house of ardent fans. Mark found the irony of the scene very amusing; a frumpy looking band playing a hole in the wall pub in a dodgy part of town, declaring themselves “the sultans of swing”.

To be a “sultan” would be to rule over a country, or hold a dynasty over people. The term originated from the Arabic language meaning to have “authority” or “rulership” over others. The true “Sultans of Swing” would’ve been the “swing” genre’s originator Fletcher “Smack” Henderson in the late 20s & 30s, or one of his revered disciples, Duke Ellington & Benny Goodman.
Babe Ruth and the Yankees legendary murderers row of the 20s if you’re talking baseball.
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September 1, 2022

QotD: The origins of the Bloody Mary

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Yes, yes please dear boy. You can prepare me a small rhesus negative Bloody Mary. And you must tell me all the news. I haven’t seen you since you finished your last film.” Uncle Monty, the lubricious booby in Bruce Robinson’s wonderful Withnail & I, selects his pre-prandial from a drinks table pregnant with possibilities with all the care one would expect from a seasoned practitioner. And so he might. For a Bloody Mary is perfect at almost any time of day and in every kind of weather.

All the best bars serve Bloody Marys. But the best Bloody Mary is served in The Grenadier, the one-time officers’ mess of the Foot Guards and the long-time public house in Wilton Row, Belgravia. Pass beneath the low lintel of this tiny tavern, pick your way through the crowded tap room and press up against the burr mahogany bar to order the world’s premier pick-me-up.

[…]

The Grenadier is rightly proud of its reputation for restorative remedies and particularly this one. Into the glass go vodka, and a sizeable slug (preferably Stolichnaya), a stirrup of sherry (the secret weapon), tomato juice, then spices (Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce), citron (lemon or lime) and salt to personal taste. The addition of a celery stick is entirely superfluous but for those in search of their hair of the dog, a little light salad I suppose is a help — of sorts.

Yet this pub, though an historic watering hole, cannot claim to be the home of the Mary. That right is retained across the Channel in Paris by Harry’s New York Bar. There exactly a century ago in the City of Light, Fernand Petiot, perfected his “bucket of blood”. The name was soon changed to something a little less Madame la Guillotine and the Mary as we know it was born.

Christopher Pincher, “Hail Mary”, The Critic, 2022-05-30.

August 24, 2022

“A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of whingers”

Filed under: Britain, Business — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A pub that was partially an inspiration for George Orwell’s description of the “perfect pub” is under threat from post-covid NIMBY complaints:

Google street view of the Compton Arms in Islington.

George Orwell’s favourite pub could be closed down because four neighbours have moaned about the noise.

A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of whingers. The dead hand of NIMBYism is felt on so many of our national crises, from the housing crisis to the “drought” to the energy crisis. The comfortably off classes have fought tooth and nail, all too successfully, in recent decades to block the building of anything – from houses to reservoirs – that might make life easier for everyone else. But their killjoy war on pubs might just be their most grating accomplishment.

The Compton Arms in Islington is the latest pub, still struggling in the wake of lockdown and now faced with soaring energy costs, to be threatened with closure over a handful of complaints. It’s been open since the 1800s. George Orwell drank there and it reportedly inspired his essay “The Moon Under Water”, published in the Evening Standard in 1946, which laid out his idea of the perfect pub. Now it has been slapped with a licence review by the local council after four neighbours complained that it was a “public nuisance” and posed a danger to health.

Given the Compton Arms was just voted the second-best pub in the UK by Time Out, with a review that hails its “seasonally led” “small-plates menu”, it seems unlikely to have become some den of criminal depravity. The furious explanation of Nick Stephens, the pub’s owner, seems more plausible – that some killjoys on this well-to-do Highbury side street got used to the pub being shut during lockdown and are now throwing their toys out of the pram.

“Our managers have gone to extreme lengths and worked their socks off to run the pub considerately (and exceptionally) – in spite of some more than challenging behaviour from some of the four complainants”, Stephens posted on Facebook. “A minority get used to the quiet then decide the pub that’s been there since the 1800s, that is an asset of community value, is now a nuisance.” He says that if this “minority of four” succeeds, the Compton won’t be financially viable “for us … or any other responsible operator”.

This is a story we have seen playing out time and again across the UK. An unholy alliance of whingers and council bureaucrats are shutting down and imposing punishing restrictions on much-loved pubs, stopping them from staying open later or blocking the opening of new venues over often ludicrous claims of noise and disruption. There seems to have been a particular flurry of this in recent months, following the end of lockdown and the entrenchment of working from home.

August 15, 2022

Look at Life – Goodbye, Picadilly (1967)

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

nostalgoteket
Published 1 Sep 2011

U.K. Newsreel. A look at the Piccadilly Circus of the Swinging Sixties! A lot of what is shown here no longer exists as it was soon “modernized” to meet the demands of a changing world. Also a look at underground Piccadilly to see sights that few people have ever seen.

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July 11, 2022

British Transport Films: Elizabethan Express (1954)

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

mikeknell
Published 6 May 2014

This 1954 documentary is uploaded in a couple of places, but here it is without breaks and in the correct aspect ratio. One of the classic railway films.

June 2, 2022

For Queen and Country (2010)

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

emptyangel
Published 14 Jun 2011

“Documentary following the Grenadier Guards as they prepare to lead the 2010 Trooping the Colour. But these men have had precious little time to prepare; as fighting soldiers, they have just spent six months on the front line in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. This is the story of how one and a half thousand men and women join together to create one of the greatest military ceremonies on earth. It is a ceremony with just one standard: Excellence.”

May 25, 2022

British lack-of-flair in naming things

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West wonders why the Brits come up with such boring names for, well, everything:

A detail from the Mapping London Tube Zones map – https://mappinglondon.co.uk/2021/tube-zones/

Back in the 1850s, when London was getting its first proper government, the authorities had a problem with street names – they were just so boring that it was actually confusing.

According to Judith Flanders’s The Victorian City: “In 1853, London had twenty-five Victoria Streets, thirty-seven King and twenty-seven Queen Streets, twenty-two Princes, seventeen Dukes, thirty-four Yorks and twenty-three Gloucesters – and that was without counting the similarly named Places, Roads, Squares, Courts, Alleys or Mews, or even the many synonyms that designated squalid backcourts: Rents, Rows, Gardens, Places, Buildings, Lanes, Yards and Walks. One parish alone had half a dozen George Streets.”

Bearing in mind how small London was at the time, no more than zone 1 and bits of zone 2, it’s quite impressive that they managed to have so many Victoria Streets. Impressive, and obviously stupid. The Metropolitan Board of Works forced parishes to rename duplicates; but even as the capital expanded, borough councils continued the practice, so that dozens of new Victoria roads and streets were created (many of which have since been changed).

Perhaps it reflects a deeply content and loyal public, but it’s more a testimony to how dull and unimaginative the British are about naming things. And it’s a fine tradition we continue today with the Elizabeth Line.

[…]

Although the new Elizabethans are in many ways the anti-Victorians – declinist, slow to get things built, filled with civilisational self-hatred – in our naming patterns we are recognisably the same people.

A few years back, when Britain launched its biggest ever warship, weighing in at 65,000 tons, they named it HMS Queen Elizabeth. This came after it was decided we needed a new name for our part of Antarctica – with huge originality, they went for “Queen Elizabeth Land”. Even Big Ben was renamed the Queen Elizabeth Tower in 2012.

The Queen, bizarrely, has twenty hospitals named after her, which led to a small revolt when the South Glasgow University Hospital became the latest. Considering how many brilliant scientists Scotland has produced, you might think they could have found someone else. Alexander Fleming, one of the alternatives suggested, grew up not far away in Ayrshire and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives.

Edward Jenner, meanwhile, has the Viale Edoardo Jenner in Milan named in his honour, and a town in Pennsylvania. While there is a Jenner Road in Stoke Newington, you wouldn’t necessarily know it was in tribute to the man who discovered vaccinations. That is because, when we honour someone with a street, the British shyly only feature their surname; the only time we follow the continental pattern of including the full name is, bizarrely, with local councillors. The people who run local government in Britain are not against honouring heroes in theory, they just think the real heroes aren’t explorers, scientists or military leaders, but the people who run local government.

May 7, 2022

“Urban conservative” has become a modern oxymoron

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the increasingly rare creature known as the city or urban conservative (he’s primarily talking about the UK, but it applies equally well in Canada and the United States):

20 Fenchurch Street in London has been nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” due to its distinctive design.
Image by Toa Heftiba via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s largely forgotten now, but political polarisation is written into the very fabric of London. In the 18th century, when rivalries between Whigs and Tories were at their most intense, different West End squares were built so that the two groups could live among their own kind.

Hanover Square in Mayfair was built for Whigs to live cosily while, further south, St James’s Square was a home for Tories. This was close to the Cocoa Tree coffee house in Pall Mall, their unofficial meeting place, where in the 20th century workmen found a bolt hole so that they could make a quick escape if the authorities turned up.

At the time the Whigs were the party of London merchants, and the Tories that of the country, where they enjoyed widespread support from the rural population. They had once been seen as dangerously close to the old Jacobite dynasty, hence their fear of being arrested, but as that issue receded their popularity in the country at large become stronger. The Whigs were an out-of-touch metropolitan elite, sipping on their fancy “coffee”, but this didn’t stop them ruling the country for decades, nor shaping its political and historical narrative.

Two or three political realignments later, we have arrived to where we started again. As of today the City of Westminster, home of those fashionable West End squares as well as the seat of government itself, is no longer controlled by the Conservatives, as seismic an event in the great realignment as the loss of Kensington was in the 2017 election.

In fact the whole of London is emptying of Conservatives, the party losing Wandsworth and holding onto just three boroughs. It’s not just London: the Tories have no councillors in most large cities now.

As with many social patterns, in this we are following the United States, where Bill Bishop coined the phrase “The Big Sort” to describe how Americans were becoming more polarised by geography, and which Will Wilkinson described as the formation of “communities of psychologically/ideologically similar people”.

This has resulted in cities becoming one-party enclaves, as progressive values become the norm, and conservative-minded people leave. My own parliamentary constituency, in north London, was from its formation in 1983 a suburban Tory seat but shifted between three different parties during the 80s and 90s; at the last election Labour had a 20,000 majority. Labour has now run my borough, Haringey, for 51 years, and the last time the Tories won it, back in 1968, they also took Hackney, Lambeth, Lewisham and in total 28 of London’s 32 boroughs. Truly a different world. Today they do not even fully-field candidates in some wards.

May 1, 2022

The Victorian-era “guarantee fund” model for risky enterprises

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Inventions newsletter, Anton Howes wonders why we don’t have a modern equivalent to the funding mechanism that helped create the Great Exhibition of 1851 and other events that provided benefits to the public without government backing:

The Crystal Palace from the northeast during the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Image from the 1852 book Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 via Wikimedia Commons.

As I’ve mentioned before, exhibitions of industry were not just celebrations of technological progress, but could become engines for progress as well. For the inventors, artists, and engineers who exhibited, the events were a direct inducement to improvement. And for the public who visited, the events exposed them to what was possible, encouraging them to raise their demands as both consumers and citizens, ideally inspiring them to become future innovators too.

But how was it all paid for? Unlike its national-level precursors in France, the Great Exhibition was not a state-run event. Even more remarkably, its organisers also failed to raise anywhere near enough private subscriptions to cover their costs. Instead, they used something that called a “guarantee fund”.

Instead of asking for donations from supporters up-front, the organisers asked them to commit to covering the exhibitions potential losses up to certain amounts — to be paid only if the money was required. Based on the security provided by this crowdsourced guarantee fund, the organisers then raised an ordinary bank loan in order to get the cash they needed to actually hold the event. Crucially, the guarantors didn’t actually have to spend anything unless the event made a loss, and if the event broke even or even made a surplus thanks to ticket fees, then they would never spend a penny at all. (Luckily for them, that’s exactly what happened in 1851, and for many later exhibitions too.)

What’s interesting to me about the guarantee fund is that I can’t quite think of anything quite like it today. There are perhaps more individualised versions of it, like when a neighbour or friend acts as a guarantor for a mortgage. And governments sometimes provide guarantees for certain sectors or industries too. There have also been a few profit-making versions of it in certain industries, where the guarantors potentially get some share of the upside too (“Names” at the Lloyds of London insurance and reinsurance market sounds similar, though even these are disappearing). But I’ve not seen anything like what the Victorians did, essentially using a guarantee fund to leverage philanthropy.

This is surprising to me. It seems like it has a lot of major advantages, especially for those who might want to replicate the exhibitions of industry today, or indeed for any kind of capital-intensive philanthropic endeavour that could eventually be expected in some measure to pay for itself. (I can’t help but think it would be useful in efforts to speed up the de-carbonisation of the economy, for example — a potential application that I’ve been exploring in my conversations with the people at Carbon Upcycling.)

Consider that with a guarantee fund anyone able to afford the risk could considerably increase the philanthropic value of their assets. Say that you could afford to donate £100 right away, but could donate three times that amount at a pinch (e.g. by having to liquidate some funds in shares). You could thus guarantee £100 each to three different causes, potentially without ever actually having to donate it, and knowing that in the worst case scenario you would never have to spend more than the £300 you can afford.

After all, those signing up to the guarantee fund essentially chose what their maximum liability would be if the event were to make a loss. If they were confident in the event’s success, then they probably believed that they would not have to pay anything at all. And if not, they had at least named the maximum donation they might eventually be asked to give.

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