Daily photos no. 49: Welcome to Brexit Country

A stroll around Stoke (the town, not the City of Stoke-on-Trent) is a stark reminder of why so many of Britain's urban centres are festering sores of Brexit-coloured resentment. An entire population of skilled, hard-working and cultured people were just abandoned as global capitalism conspired to shift their jobs to an automated factory somewhere else. The political class, largely indistinguishable from those who live on dividends rather than wages, sat by and talked about UK Plc or some such, while the worst of them diverted the blame: to foreigners, immigrants, socialists, environmentalists, black people or do-gooders. The city deteriorates. The middle-classes flee to the suburbs or the countryside. Jobs dry up. Health plummets. Drug addiction soars. The occasional lottery-funded shiny new building goes up but there's still no answer to the question of how 200,000 can meaningfully use the time between birth and death when there's no interest amongst the rulers in developing an economic, social and cultural model. When the rulers don't come from anywhere like this, never meet people from here, don't attend the same schools, workplaces, clubs or universities. The population voted Brexit because it promised a false clarity, an easy target. If they think Westminster cares for them more than Brussels did, they're utterly deluded. It has no faith in politicians: those who vote, vote for whichever cynic offers them the simplest, most vicious lies because 'it's complicated' never won an election. And the place – like so many others – rots away.

The mighty Trent

Am I angry? Yes. I live in another battered post-industrial city where it's assumed that the poor have no higher aspirations, to beauty, art, clean air or nice things.  So they don't get any of them. Not long ago I was leafletting for the Labour Party in an area near my house. More than once I realised that the abandoned houses, cardboard where the window glass should have been, were in fact occupied, owned by distant landlords who just didn't care as long as the rent arrived. We lost that election. Perhaps we should have. At least the Tories don't pretend to care about the losers in the social-Darwinist struggle, but Labour had its chance and still these places existed as a rebuke to its disconnection.

These photos aren't ruin porn. They're angry. They're about the struggle between pride and degradation. There's a lot of talk now about regeneration, about human-centred cities, guaranteed incomes and dignity. I wish I believed that any of it will last longer than the next polling statistics.

Daily photos no. 48: past futures

A salutary thing to do whenever, as is happening a lot right now,  someone's trying to sell you a new runway, a high speed train line or indeed a monorail is to look at past utopian ideas and compare them with the lived reality. This is one of my favourites: Telly Savalas – already famous as Kojak – was paid to pretend he'd visited various British cities undergoing regeneration. Here's the Birmingham one.



Not all Utopian schemes are bad of course, but they do all tend to be prey to the vested interests that always want more concrete, more consumption, more pollution and more control of people they think of as a mob. This is why Birmingham, having been flattened in the war, was then sentenced to generations of toxic air: the local car industry was determined to turn the-law into a fantasy of hyper mobility, showcasing its sleek but filthy wares.

Poor old Stoke similarly suffered. A coalition of six towns became a city. Then the trams were shut down and ring roads went in, encircling every one of the towns with a choking belt of poison, making them inaccessible on foot or by bike from each other. A desultory attempt was made to provide public transport but it was woeful. And so one day I found myself with half an hour spare amidst the faded glory of semi-abandoned Hanley Bus Station the product of an architect who'd seen the arcades of Renaissance Italian cities and a funding authority that hadn't. The mismatch between the original station and its accretions, and the ambition and the care not taken make me weep, especially when places like Preston have such pride in such mundane places as bus stops. Hanley has a new station now: not as whimsical but rather elegant. Still 3 miles from a train station…

This place used to do the best (worst) egg sandwiches. I used to collect my dole money, buy a Guardian and eat one while posing as a member of Blur, circa Modern Life is Rubbish. Which now feels genuinely decadent.  

Daily Photos no. 47: Romani ite domum

If I was asked to define a certain kind of Englishness, this terrible picture snapped on my phone would pretty much summarise it. Here we have some members of the Ermine Street Guard off duty in the café of the Potteries Museum and Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. They were there to provide some added interest to a display of Roman or Anglo-Saxon coins, I think. I loved the contrast between the military gear, its' owners and the cosy surroundings.

I'm fascinated by middle-English male hobbies. Steam train enthusiasts. Metal detecting. Train-spotting. The Sealed Knot. Neighbourhood Watch. Dogging. Brexit. Tight-knit groups generate their own cultures, factions, languages, habits, styles and power structures - a cultural studies dream. The homosociality of it all. The obsessions with accuracy and precision. Often the preference for exactitude over historical complexity. The centenary of Irish Independence and the Civil War is coming up. I wonder if the Daily Mail would think it too soon for squads of middle-aged Irish men to dress up as IRA flying columns…

I once taught a module on cultural representations of the Vietnam War. A highlight was discovering a local group which spent every weekend in the woods recreating key Vietnam battles. They all had authentic gear, from uniforms to Jeeps. Organised command structures, the right lingo - everything.

All they lacked was an enemy. So who did they enlist to play the Vietcong and to rather unhistorically lose every week?

Their wives.

I cannot even begin to imagine the psychological ramifications of this.

Daily photos no. 46: The Other Miliband

My university was twice blessed by the presence of a Miliband: the vanquished David made an appearance early 2012 in conversation with Keith, a great colleague, friend and mentor. The fratricidal Labour leadership contest was only 18 months or so in the past, but David hadn't yet made the move to America to become part of the highly-paid charitable sector troposphere. No doubt everyone wanted to talk about the fallout with his brother, but what we got instead was a fairly candid and thoughtful account of the state of contemporary politics from someone who'd been a decent Environment Secretary, and average Foreign Secretary, and a man who appeared to have no strong opinions about the big questions beyond a vague sense that a tightly knit group of upper-middle class chaps with the right instincts should be able to manage a country pretty well, thank you. I asked him whether there was enough self-doubt or self-reflection in modern politics, which I hoped would elicit a few thoughts about the way PR had overtaken principles, and the homogenisation of the political class, but alas not.

He also isn't as photogenic as his brother. More Inaction Man than Fozzy Bear.

Daily photos no. 45: Miniature Mountains

One of my regular haunts is the Marches - the region along the Welsh-English border, an historically and culturally porous society with a rich history and beautiful geography. I particular love Shropshire's Church Stretton, the Long Mynd and the hills surrounding it. It's like a pocket Alps, with the remains of older industries and polities scattered about the landscape. I go at least once year, often in January when it's deserted and beautifully cold. These are from January 2012, when I seem to have been particularly interested in framing things through arrow slits and broken windows.

When I posted this in 2012 a man got in touch to ask where it was: it was his Ford Capri, stolen years before

Stokesay Castle entrance lodge (more a manor house fortified for style)

Cheery admonition in the Craven Arms church

Daily photos no. 44: rural repetition

I like patterns in nature, especially glitchy ones. I took these out for a stroll on Stephen's Day 2011 - one of those cold, clear winter days that I'm currently yearning for.

Daily photos no. 43: That There London

A floating population of colleagues and their partners/friends form The Escape Committee which organises an occasional foray to other cities for cultural refreshment. I can no longer remember what this particular trip was about but we saw Grayson Perry's Alan Measles show - a tour he undertook on a customised motorbike carrying an effigy of the teddy bear at the heart of his mythos.

Oddities like this always catch my eye. It's in Bloomsbury on the University of London campus. While UL and/or its constituent colleges own the buildings, some of the land is still the property (no doubt via tax-efficient trusts and offshore shell companies) of the landed aristocracy, like an enormous swathe of central London. The university had legal rights of compulsory purchase but cut a deal that the Russell family would have approval rights over the design of any building facing their remaining holdings, including Russell Square. For some reason this didn't happen in this case, and the Russells' lawyers exacted this petty revenge, determining the wording, design and placing of the plaque. The university's counter-revenge was to install the award the building won immediately below the apology as a silent rebuke to the noble duke's lack of taste. 

It's not a particularly good or bad building so I guess it's an aesthetic score draw, but the controversy makes it one of my favourite curiosities.