Changing Cities, Hidden Histories and Radical Walking

Danny Bee

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wildflower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Non-linear developments, spontaneous expressions, unmapped routes; objects, artefacts, relationships, events which come together unexpectedly and generate new ideas and experiences. A chance remark, a conversation with a stranger in a busy street or quiet churchyard, a carved stone head above a doorway in Throgmorton Street, searching for the gothic in the City of London, filming the river Thames for hours just to see what happens. Everything is both connected and miscellaneous. The process is opaque, submerged and half-hidden. The outcomes are apparent as sensory experiences. Any walk from one point to another will illuminate the power of Blake’s words and vision.

I walked through a glass abyss, in a roundabout way to London Wall. The church of All Hallows is neglected and defiant, smouldering with thoughts and resentments. Unwanted plants grow from the mortar of its stones. There are three men sitting on the steps outside the main door. Drinking beer, smoking cigarettes. They look as if they have been working on a construction site all day. I should have asked them where they came from and what journey brought them here. But they had a clannish clique about them and sometimes a ripple in the air creates a distance.

There was dirt and litter, odd corners which the City cannot use. In this square mile millions of financial transactions every second.  It is worth noting that this church still stands, and the red bricks of the church rooms refuse to move. They have an anti-money value, they cannot be priced, they cannot be turned into commodity, nor can they be financialised or monetised. In some ways they are the most interesting values in the area. But what value do they represent if not that of money and exchange?

The Dynamic Emergence of Radical Walks

The idea for Radical Walks was unexpected. One summer evening I turned north out of St Pancras station instead of the usual route along Judd Street into central London. This was unfamiliar. This walk was described on a blog I'd been writing.[1] It has a modest readership which at first terrified me. An audience is a different matter to writing private reports of one's inner life. The modest readership made several comments and some even asked for more. 

It was clear that several commentators knew a great deal about the history of St Pancras. This included a powerful rent strike, a Communist mayor, progressive housing and welfare policies, Peggy Duff as a councillor, George Bernard Shaw on the Vestry, Karl Marx's unsuccessful application for the post of railway clerk at Kings Cross station (no-one could read his handwriting).

It was now the second summer of lock-down, semi-lock down and the strange time of Covid. I was missing people. My friends, long conversations, casual encounters. It felt as if there were so many tales that had not been told, private jokes unshared, gentle teasing and shared grief unspoken. Perhaps a second walk with some companions?

I spent time exploring the area more, started reading, internet research, immersed in the British Library Newspaper Archive, examining paper maps with a magnifying glass, tracing changes in the digitised layers of historic maps. A story started to emerge and the outline of a route. The idea of a route was to help tell the story, rather than simply 'wander'. That's a different sort of walking.

On the day itself, with five minutes to the start, no-one had turned up. Oh well, I'll walk around alone. But then people I recognised started to appear, in twos or threes or larger groups. By the time we started fifty people had arrived and a couple joined from the streets 'to see what was going on'. The Red Flag was held high (on the end of a hiking pole) and I did an introduction by standing on a wall. Jumping off was the signal for the start.

I thoroughly enjoyed that walk and so it seems did all the participants. We stopped at various places and a small story was told. The Suffragettes who met the trains at Kings Cross station in 1908, full of women and their supporters arriving to take part in a great national demonstration. The northern mill girls who lined up in their contingents had sharp retorts to the riff raff who heckled them. They slunk away in silence, ears burning, knocked back by working women with a cause.

We explored some of the street corners where anti-war meetings were held from 1916 onwards. These street agitations were sometimes attended by hundreds of people. Uniformed soldiers could be seen on the fringes, grim faced, battle hardened, shell shocked, telling the jingoists to shut up in no uncertain terms.

We walked through the Ossulston Estate, based on the housing of Red Vienna, a 1920s monument to the aim of building good quality low-cost housing for the working class. A reading from the Mask of Anarchy.[2] at the monument to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, an exploration of the new development at Coal Drop Yard, an unofficial protest outside the offices of Google, demanding they pay their taxes. 'We want more Radical Walks!', the crowd demanded.

The Next Steps and Unexpected Developments

Many Radical Walks have now taken place and a great deal has been learned through experience and feedback.  It is not the length of the walk (in fact the first ones were probably too long) but the amount of interest. Short distances and longer discussions at each point on the walk seems to work more effectively. Part of the template is that the walks cover a certain set of themes which are discussed in more detail below. I've realised that the walks are really about the social, economic, political and cultural history of the period from around the 1880s (the beginnings of mass production and consumerism) to the 1980s. This works for me.

Jumping around from 1433 to 1657 to 1920 can confuse the participants and make them feel they don't know anything. Using themes within a specific time period helps to locate and organise all the stories. The great advantage of this time period of the 1880s to the 1980s is that it can all be illustrated in the built environment. There is something exciting, at least to me, to stand outside Carlisle Mansions in Carlisle Place and point out where a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation lived, in a flat paid for by Daisy Greville, the Countess of Warwick. History can be bought alive, and as Lenin said, to understand history we need a historical imagination. A building in West Ham Lane was once the headquarters of the local Transport and General Workers Union, a proletarian fortress used by the dockers to defend their interests. What might just look like a council estate in Bermondsey was the outcome of real people fighting hard battles for decent housing.

One of the many fascinating aspects of the walks is tracing the history of the city through the built environment and how this has changed through time. This can be harder than might be imagined. There is no comprehensive directory of when each and every building was built, who the architects were, where the money came from and much else besides.

For the Radical Stratford and West Ham Walk, I really wanted to find out when the social housing estate that I had included in the walk was constructed. Eventually an ex-housing council worker in the area sent me a list of all the estates and when they were built. 'This is what we used in the housing office', she told me. It seems incredible that these histories are lacking but unfortunately, they are.

One of the things I have discovered is that all over England there are fantastic examples of good quality council housing. In general, it has been rubbished as part of the endless neo-liberal campaigns of discordance. Many council estates have had their services and maintenance budgets cut and have declined as a result. But there are so many fine examples that still stand, monuments to ideas of progress, a better England, the provision of good quality and low-cost housing for the working classes. There is a need to approach this housing in the way that John Berger approached art in Ways of Seeing. It is important to learn how to see this housing for what it once was. In the process we might understand better what has happened to England in the past forty years or so. And from that, the question, why?

The history of London between the 1880s to the 1980s is one of unrelenting class struggle. Of constant agitation between the forces of labour and capital. Reformers, socialists, Marxists, Suffragettes, trade unions, organic intellectuals, those with inarticulate belligerence where all involved in this. It delivered a great deal. Radical Walks have explored the creation of the London County Council in 1899 and the establishment of the metropolitan boroughs in 1900. Some of these, including St Pancras, Bermondsey, Battersea and West Ham soon became known as the 'red boroughs'. They built some of the first council housing, usually with direct labour paid at union rates. Health care in St Pancras and Bermondsey was significantly better than in richer neighbours where ad hoc charity was used to deliver services rather than well-organised and properly funded interventions. Maternal and natal deaths fell significantly when the socialists were in control, diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis much better controlled and eventually eliminated.

The Radical Stratford and West Ham walk took place on a wet and windy November afternoon. One of the features of all the walks is that people have turned up who I haven't seen for 20 years or more. People bring their mum, their children, their dogs, relatives who are visiting from New York, their friends and neighbours. This walk was no exception. We explored the history of West Ham Town Hall. Keir Hardie who was carried through the streets after becoming elected the first 'socialist MP'. The work of Daisy Parsons; working woman, suffragette and the first woman mayor of West Ham.

As we walked through one of the estates, I asked a friend who grew up in the area if she knew the age of the housing. 'No', she replied, 'but my mum might'. Her mum was on the walk too. She didn't know but she has a friend how lives on the estate. 'I'll give her a call', she said, and added, 'also a docker's wife'. In a matter-of-fact way that conveyed an enormous weight of history of docks, dockers, strikes, Pentonville Five, Micky Fenn, Vic Turner and much more.

'1971', she said, 'and would we all like to go round for a cup of tea?"

In one of the streets of terraced houses I set out to describe the lack of bathrooms, the way everyone had lodgers, how people didn't like some types of housing because they weren't allowed to do any home working which was so important in times of economic uncertainty. I was aware that local people were on this walk and they looked at me intently.

'That's exactly right', one said, 'do you remember when we had that demonstration in Canning Town and everyone carried their tin baths on their heads?'

On the Radical Dover Walk,[3] which was organised as part of the Dover Arts Development Digital Festival, something else happened. Part of the walk was to the port to outline the protracted and bitter strike of 1988. Anyone who wishes to speak on such things, in close proximity to the place and time must either know the story exceptionally well or be sharply aware of their own limitations. The latter is a useful sense to have. I stood on a wall, holding the microphone of a portable PA.

'This is where the strike of 1988 happened. Does anyone have a story they want to tell?’

Someone stepped forward. I had no idea who they were or what they might say. I held the microphone in front of them as if interviewing them in the street.

'I used to be a seafarer', he started, 'and know all about that strike'.

What followed was a blistering critique of the company involved, the response of the trade unions and the nastiness of the Tory government. We stood in a circle listening on the sea front, the gulls swooping and cawing, the waves with their thud and hiss upon the shingle of the beach. The history came so alive it touched us all.

A great deal has been learned through the organisation and running of the Radical Walks. I'm not aware of any books on 'how to plan a Radical Walk' and would appreciate any references should such a thing exist. The two or three people I know who do similar things guard their secrets like medieval stone masons. Not one has given me any useful instruction. Having a portable PA has certainly helped as it means everyone can properly hear.

The next piece of equipment acquired was a clipboard, which cost £4. This is a great piece of equipment. It confers authority and sometimes, but not always, it is useful to have a vague sense of officialdom about one's person. The benefit of the clipboard is that it will hold an A3 paper map. These are immensely useful when planning the walks. There is something satisfying about scribbling ideas down while walking around. Adding notes, circling particularly streets on the map for later desktop research. The experience can be more spontaneous and if one stops to talk to someone it's less intrusive to make a note or two on paper than getting out a laptop or start tapping away on the tiny screen of a smartphone. The A3 map also enables an overview to be seen. Proximity of places and streets to each other. A better sense of distance is acquired. The relationship between rivers, parks, estates, main roads are all easier to understand.

How the Themes Emerged

Themes have emerged, and as they are common to each walk some fascinating connections have developed. Let us look at these in a little detail.

Housing

London is full of well built, interestingly designed and good quality housing. And much of this was built by local authorities in an eighty-year period roughly between 1900 and 1980. There are fantastic examples still extant; the Churchill Gardens and Millbank estates in Westminster, the Boundary Estate in Shoreditch, Wilson Grove in Bermondsey (built on Garden City principles), the Ossulston Estate in St Pancras and much more. Once Thatcher and the neo-liberals came to power in 1980 this house building stopped. The last gasp of the great municipal housing includes Lillington Gardens in Pimlico and Oakshott Court in St Pancras. The focus is often on the system built high rise which are rightly not without controversy. But these smaller low rise estates showed what was possible.

Not only did the building of council housing stop in the early 1980s but there was a relentless ideological campaign against it. The language became that of 'sink estates', 'failure', 'everyone wants to own their how house'. People were then offered the carrot of right to buy. A carrot which tasted sweet at the time but has left a poisonous aftertaste. The supply, use and search for housing is now a catastrophe for many people.

One has to be respectful when exploring housing. People live there. How would you feel if someone was walking around outside your home with a camera, notebook and clipboard. I am careful how this might be photographed. It can be done, but it has to be done sensitively. All the walks have looked at housing and for some of the participants this has been a revelation. 'I didn't know this was here', 'this is fantastic'. Although there are also other points of view. 'Why does he like this?' I heard someone say to their friend.

Protest and Dissent

London was once a huge manufacturing city with, for a time, the world's largest enclosed docks (the Royals in Newham). East London was as David Widgery described it, '...a vast proletarian city'.[4] The story of the way in which the gas workers, the dock workers, the low paid women at the Bryant & May's factory in Bow fought and organised is one of great courage and raw working-class power and ambition.

There were enclosed docks in east London for almost 100 years before the workers organised their union in 1889. The fight for the docker's tanner is well known. Less so the involvement of Marxist socialists. William Morris, Will Thorne, Eleanor Marx, Ada Salter were all involved in supporting and helping to organise industrial struggles. Eleanor Marx, a woman in the misogynist and patriarchal world of the late nineteenth century was relentless in her support for the working class. She fought and smashed the glass ceiling. For her heroic work with the gas workers, one of the most brutalised sections of London’s working class, she was appointed an honorary member of their new union. When she got up to speak in front of thousands of low paid, poverty racked, ground down gas workers they would shout out in unison, 'Come on Stoker'. They reserved the infamous 'Beckton Growl' for their enemies.

Hidden history is everywhere and exploring the streets is a great way to find it. Take the example of the Suffragettes. Demonstrations outside parliament, window smashing in Oxford Street, sabotage, and protests. They constantly held street meetings, agitated, chalked slogans on walls and pavements and sold their newspapers. They were often heckled and physically attacked and sexually assaulted. They regrouped, learned lessons and adopted new tactics.

Huge demonstrations were held with all the women wearing white, purple and green. One of their leaders, the witty and sharp Charlotte Despard, added gold to her personal colours. On one occasion while she was standing on top of a cart hooligans started shouting and jeering. Local Irish labourers assumed she was a representative of the Pope as she wore his colours and chased them off. When Sylvia Pankhurst spoke at a meeting in Bow (she would be arrested if caught), George Lansbury's son provided her with a bodyguard, Kosher Hunt who was a legendary bare-knuckle fighter. As she left the meeting he put a protective around her shoulders. The police advanced, Kosher stepped forward, the police stepped back. Outside in the cold foggy London night Kosher insisted that Sylvia wore his scarf.[5]

On one of the walks, we traced the history of Radical Battersea. John Burns and the building of the Latchmere Estate, one of the first council estates to be built in London and with direct labour on union rates. We followed in the footsteps of John Archer, London's first Black mayor and Shapjuri Saklatvala, London's first Indian and Communist MP. The sense of London being a centre of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism can be felt strongly as the 20th century developed. We stood outside the flat where George Padmore lived in St Pancras. Someone stepped forward from the walking group and gave a superb overview of his life and politics.

Development of Welfare Services

One of the landmarks in the development of radical, socialist and progressive politics in London was the establishment of the London School Board in 1870. For the first time women could be elected to positions of political power and influence. And step forward they did. The first woman to be elected was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson who was also the first female surgeon in Britain. School building now became a planned and organised process. The schools would be built so they would be full of air and light and sun. They were deliberately well built and attractively designed to encourage learning and develop civic pride. Many of these schools are still in use and have none of the debt associated with the modern practice of PFI deals. In both Battersea and Bermondsey there are good examples, yet more expressions of how topography is influenced by politics and people fighting for class interests; it had been a constant demand of the workers' movement in the nineteenth century for free education for working class children.

In Battersea and St Pancras in particular, progressive policies in the development and delivery of health services led to huge reductions in maternal and infant mortality. Disease was pushed back, campaigns of public health were launched, clinics and mother and baby services established. Despite these being some of the poorest parts of the city they had better health outcomes in some areas than richer areas which relied on charity. This built legacy is everywhere and provides rewarding exploration. There are still clinics and health centres in London, built in the 1930s in modernist style, and still being used to deliver health and welfare services. People on the walks have been delighted to learn this history. The radical ideas they hold, their confidence of a better future can still be felt. But they are fighting hard, very hard indeed and from their past they need the solidarity of now. This combination might help to build the better world they fought for.

One of the most moving occasions we've had was at the Radical Bermondsey Walk. Our final stop was Dr Salter's Daydream, the statues of Dr Alfred Salter, Ada Salter and their daughter Joyce. The whole walk had been infused with their spirit of fighting for the working class, their bravery as pacifists in the First World War and courage in staying with their principles.[6] A tribute was paid to Ada and Alfred. People sitting in the vicinity stopped and listened. 'Let's hear it for Ada and Alfred and let's hear it for Radical Bermondsey!' A huge cheer went up.

Architectural Styles

There can be a strange sectarian approach to art, craft, design, architecture. William Morris suffered from this affliction (so did Pugin but in a much more entertaining and convincing way). 'Must be medieval! Must be gothic!'. This is countered by the sects of the new; 'Must be modernism! Must be brutalist!'. The fun about the topography of London is that there are so many different architectural styles to discover and explore. There isn't much original gothic or Renaissance architecture. But from the late 17th century onwards there are plenty of good - and excellent - examples - of a wide range of architectural styles. Some of this is easier to get inside than others but there are ways and means.

For the second 'Radical Fitzrovia' walk I had written to All Saints Church in Margaret Street, WC1. I wondered if we could look around the church on a Sunday afternoon (I never like turning up with possibly 30 people without asking). 'Sorry', came the reply, 'but there are a lot of services on a Sunday and we are very busy'.

However, there is a lovely coda to this. On the day in question, we stood as a group in the garden outside the church. I was explaining Christopher Alexander's idea of 'the quality without a name'.

'It's what we really live for, certain moments, meeting a friend in the street, an elderly relative telling an extraordinary story from one of the books of their life, the kindness of a stranger'. A door in the side of the church opened. 'Oh, I hope you don't mind but we're just on a radical walk and I wanted to show people this wonderful church'. 

'Would you like to come in?' the man asked, 'I'm really busy but I can give you five minutes'. We went in, through the back door of the church as it were, through rooms and corridors that we would never have otherwise seen. And then into William Butterfield's masterpiece. For those who had never seen it before it was genuinely astonishing. He gave us much more than five minutes of his time and he gave us a greater gift still, for he crafted a lovely example of the quality without a name.

On both the Radical Ramsgate walks we have been treated to a short tour of Pugin's St Augustine's church by the very knowledgeable manager. People who didn't know Pugin have been delighted to discover his work. Pugin in Ramsgate has a good radical edge; Pugin despised the cheap and poor-quality building of the first phase of the industrial revolution. He also hated the way in which skill and craft were being swept away by the relentless drive for profit. There is an intriguing symmetry here. Marx and Engels and their families often went on holiday to Ramsgate. Pugin wrote about the impact of capitalism on architecture and aesthetics, Marx and Engels defined what capitalism was, how it had come into existence and what the consequences of all its tensions and contradictions might be. All three put human labour at the centre of the development of productive forces, and thus, of human history.

Work and Industry

The topography of work and industry is constantly changing. It is easy to imagine a mythical past where everyone worked in factories concentrated in northern towns and cities. But it's a myth and thus it never was. One of the single largest group of workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were domestic servants. Small scale manufacturing rather than factories, increasing numbers working in shops, the development of department stores and offices, the expansion of welfare services and education. These have all changed the composition and organisation of the workforce.

In Mortimer Street in Westminster, it is possible trace some of the relationships between the development of the rag trade to service the new department stores and the increasing demands for women's emancipation. We spend good time exploring this. The first women's hostel in an Arts & Crafts style, at no. 21, the first women's social and political club in 1881, at no. 27, a women's shirt and dress making cooperative was set up in the 1880s.  Also at no. 27, the Rational Dress Society which fought to end the wearing of corsets and to liberate women from their own clothing. Bustles, corsets and long skirts were impediments to playing tennis, cycling, swimming and much else.

Look behind the facades and how warehouses have been turned into luxury apartments, how once grand department stores have uncertain futures, how the pattern of working-class housing was affected by jobs and occupation. Some of the estates built in the early 1900s were unpopular because costers were forbidden to park their carts and stalls there at night and rules were enforced against home working. We explored such places when we walked around Bermondsey one hot sunny summer afternoon. Industrial buildings may appear to lack a hidden history, but everywhere they formed part of the canvas against which people painted the story of their life.

The Expansion of Capital

Cities such as London have dramatically changed in recent years. The key force in this has been the expansion of capital. Much of this has poured in from countries with poor human rights records, authoritarian governments, lack of basic freedoms and state sanctioned used of torture and imprisonment. It can be difficult to trace the flows of this capital or who exactly owns what. Investments are hidden behind shell companies based in tax havens, there is a great deal of obfuscation and money-power buys a great deal of secrecy. But it is known that the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and others now own large chunks of London.

But they are not the only ones. There are huge property development and management companies with billions of pounds worth of assets. When we walked around Pimlico, we spent time mapping out some of the property portfolio of Landsec. In Fitzrovia, we looked at the re-development of the Middlesex Hospital site and the involvement of the Candy Brothers. Someone on the walk pointed out, correctly, that part of the hospital had been built through public subscription in the 1930s. What had happened to that?

Everywhere we have walked we have found the influence of big money, of significant capital investment. Coal Drop Yard, the London headquarters of Google and Facebook. The latter has no signs upon its doors to explain exactly what it is. I rang the bell and asked if this was Facebook's offices. The suspicious and paranoid response to this perfectly reasonable question is in marked contrast to the secretive algorithms of Facebook which constantly scrape and store our personal data.

Capital is shaping London's skyline but also what sort of city it is and what sort of city it will be. This is a monetisation of landscape, a commodification of topography, a financialisaton of the very experience of just walking around the streets, minding one's business, adsorbing decades of history, listening to the voices from the past that are suddenly imagined, unexpectedly, in an alley, a street where all the noise of London seems to have been sucked away, in a doorway, a mews, or sometimes in the busiest parts of town.

Conclusion

Is there a conclusion? The Radical Walks are ongoing and are becoming more confident and ambitious. Only once have I been dejected, when I received a flurry of apologies just before a walk was about to start. Learning, it's a learning process. One toughens up. 'What would you do if only one person turned up?' someone asked. 'Well if they wanted to do the walk, let's do it'.

I have resisted calls to set up WhatsApp groups and a booking system. The walks are better for having an informal character. Just turn up, bring your friends. They walks are free with a hat passed around at the end to help to pay my train fares. The cost-of-living crisis is hitting everyone and let's not forget that a lot of people have been struggling for some time anyway. If the walks are free, then people who are hard up can still come along. There are a lot of people who haven't got a 'spare' £10. They can come and it's almost certain they'll get bought a pint or two in the pub afterwards. Let's look after each other. That too is the quality without a name. Let's have radical in practice as well as theory.

In the spring of 2022, a Radical Pimlico Walk was organised. This had quite a crowd and was full of energy and involved a lively, interesting group of people. An ex-bin worker who became a jazz musician, civil servants, a former brick layer, software developer, someone who's homeless, union rep, a research scientist, someone who works in a record shop, someone who works in luxury sales, a surveyor, administrators, office clerks, ex-teachers, a founder member of Rock Against Racism, housing activists, a school caretaker, a professional artist. The composition of the group, in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, occupation reflected well the London that I know. Without trying, it seemed to have organically come together. As we walked through Pimlico it was like being part of a large moving social gathering, which in fact it was.

As way of an introduction, I pointed out that in 1957 Guy Debord had set out to organise a walk through Paris. No one turned up. It rained. He went home. But this wasn't the end of Guy Debord. In 1967 he published The Society of the Spectacle, which possibly had a great deal to do with the events of May '68 in France and beyond. I secretly hope that the Radical Walks will be part of a much wider, revolutionary process against Capital. And I note, that from the Pimlico walk onwards and that reference to Debord, that there has been an ever-increasing level of class struggle in Britain. Strikes, demonstrations, real victories for groups of workers in relation to pay, hours and working conditions. Walk outs by Amazon workers and the unorganised, union recognition where it didn't exist before. The first national strikes of railway and postal workers for 30 years or more. A sense of revolt, a sense of revulsion with neo-liberalism and a system where the government borrows money to increase the wealth of the already wealthy; while teachers report increasing hunger among the children they teach, a child pretending to 'eat' from an empty lunch box, elderly people terrified of turning on their heating, food banks and four million people living in poverty. The Radical Walks hope to play a small part in that modest ambition of working to change the world.

Radical walks are an opportunity to explore place, people, events, histories, memories.

To look at architectural, art, design and space.

To explore what history is and how it changes.

Histories are hidden, unknown, unspoken, unofficial.

But histories are made by people at ground level, within the rank and file, in opposition to the dominant ideas, in conflict with exploitation and oppression.

Step forward and tell your tale!

Find out more about Radical Walks and news of upcoming events here

Notes

[1]https://commodityfetishism.com/2021/07/29/the-revolution-could-be-televised/

[2]These were the verses read:
"Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another!

What is Freedom? Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own

Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words, that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free.

The old laws of England—they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo—Liberty!

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

[3]https://www.dadonline.uk/digital-festival/danny-budzaks-walk/

[4]Some Lives! David Widgery

[5]The Suffragette Movement - Sylvia Pankhurst

[6]On the route of the Bermondsey walk we looked at the impact of war on the area, including the Blitz. The following passage by Alfred Salter was read out, part of his brave pacifist stance against the First World War. Salter had suggested that the Christian must do what Christ would do; that is, not fight.

'Look! Christ in khaki, out in France thrusting his bayonet into the body of a German workman. See! The son of God with a machine gun, ambushing a column of German infantry, catching them unawares in a lane and mowing them down in their helplessness. Hark! The Man of Sorrows in a cavalry charge, cutting, hacking, thrusting, crushing, cheering. No! No! That picture is an impossible one - and we all know it'

The Bermondsey Story - Fenner Brockway, p 59