Mother of Parliaments

It’s our very own National Theatre of Cruelty, an antiquated forum of futility.  On one side the benches are occupied by the defenders of property rights and privilege, drawn from the products of private education and Oxbridge, supported by subaltern recruits from the lower orders attracted by the prospect of personal enrichment and all too happy to identify with the interests of their social superiors.  All of which enables them to operate in a culture of impunity. Opposite them is a motley assortment of lost causes including sundry nationalists, an official opposition with a nominal commitment to social justice, minority parties and some empty spaces that the most intransigent of nationalists refuse to occupy.  Bewigged courtiers in pantomime costume strut back and forth bearing fundamentally useless objects of veneration without which proceedings cannot go ahead.  

Teams of scribes and record keepers toil away in the orchestra pit while the Remembrancer lurks in the under gallery, poised to intervene should anything arise that is less than favourable to the interests of the City of London. (The Wikipedia description of this shady character is at such great pains to point out how little influence he has, that you may wonder why he exists at all.)  The chamber has been designed to facilitate the exchange of insults and though much time is devoted to this, it’s an offence of the utmost gravity to accuse another member of lying.  Otherwise accountability is nugatory, members may attend as little as they wish without sanction and their degree of participation and voting is for them to decide.  As a general rule the greater their majority, the poorer the service offered to constituents leaving them well placed to take on additional, often better paid jobs.  These tend to be in the legal profession, in business and financial services (in an advisory capacity) or as well rewarded gobshites on GB News. There is no inspectorate of MPs and no requirement to report their activities to constituents.

Supporters of these anachronisms loudly proclaim that they are what makes Parliament so unique and special while remaining silent on the point that they act as enforcers of the status quo, inhibiting any change that might result in wealth redistribution or rebalance the existing power structure.  Even the architecture has a part to play - Barry and Pugin’s Gothic Revival extravaganza invokes the England of stately homes, medieval Oxbridge colleges and ancient private schools - a Hogwarts orgy of ornamentation entirely familiar to members who have grown up with it but disconcerting and intimidating to those of more humble origins for whom the message is “this place is not for you”. Every attempt to update facilities and procedures fails in the face of furious opposition and an exorbitant refurbishment plan is currently stalled while ongoing repairs are costing the taxpayer £2 million a week.  There’s an almost irresistible impulse in British public life to employ delay as an avoidance strategy (contaminated blood scandal, Grenfell, Hillsborough, Post Office/Fujitsu IT scandal) so it seems inevitable that Parliament itself should fall victim to institutional procrastination.  In the spirit of doing more with less (so often commended by government), a budget solution would be a repurposed fulfilment centre in the Northumbria town of Haltwhistle, the geographic centre of the UK.  Appleby Parva in Leicestershire is the centre of population in the UK and suggests an alternative location.  Ancillary services and committee rooms could be housed in site offices and Portakabins which would have the merit of giving parliamentarians a taste of the working conditions enjoyed by millions of their constituents.  Compulsory annual reports to constituents could include attendance, voting and speaking record, donations received and freebies, income earned from additional occupations, assistance to constituents, links to lobby groups and details of overseas jollies. A little bit of accountability and transparency, could be simply posted online once a year - it’s never going to happen.

Leipzig 1931

YouTube’s relentless algorithms invade our minds with recommendations designed to trap us in an ever shrinking universe constructed from our innermost prejudices and secret preferences but there are rare moments when they pull a hidden gem from the deep seams of mediocrity and something of unexpected beauty rises to the surface.  Which is how this mesmerising, sunlit portrait of a world that was creeping toward a dark decade of destruction and mass murder landed on my screen. For 30 dreamlike minutes we travel through the high summer streets of Leipzig watching the city street life in orbit around a tram driver’s view of a world in motion.  None of this was planned - the film was produced for driver training purposes.

Along the way an army of local citizens saunter across the tram tracks - businessmen and lawyers, street cleaners, road repairmen, shop workers, window cleaners carrying ladders, postal workers, and a succession of handcarts and trolleys to and fro, desperate to avoid any unseemly haste, each one calculating their margin of safety to the last second. No sign of the stereotypical Teutonic submission to rules and regulations in 1931 - motorists drive their cars, trucks, and delivery vehicles at every conceivable tangent across the path of the tram.  Cyclists, male and female alike, weave through the traffic as if defended by an invisible forcefield.  Most alarming are the passing horse-drawn wagons piled high with parcels, packing cases, sacks, beer barrels and items of furniture that make slow and deliberate turns in front of the oncoming tram just seconds away from tragedy.

In the suburbs the tram runs along the centre of broad, straight boulevards lined with trees.  Closer to the city we pass along residential streets with tall mansion blocks, streets that contract on the approach to the city before expanding again into grandiloquent squares and plazas linked by busy shopping streets where luxury hotels trade side by side with stately department stores and shopping arcades. Tram tracks divide and converge at complex junctions and snake around opera houses, banks, court rooms, theatres, museums and concert halls. A thousand commercial signs of every dimension announce their services and compete for attention. City landmarks, including the massive Hauptbahnhof and the Hotel Astoria glide past. For the dedicated observer of street life it’s a glorious treat.

 

Postcard of the Day No. 100 - Orange Street, Kingston, Jamaica

British rule in Jamaica had more than half a century to go when in 1905, man of few words, Herbert, scrawled his brief message on the front of the card and posted it to J O’Shea at the Great Eastern Omnibus Company in Leyton, Essex. The electric tram service we see here between King Street and Orange Street had been running since 1899 and was praised by visitors for its efficiency. A Canadian controlled company (West India Electric Co.) operated the service using tramcars similar to those used in Montreal. 1905 was also the year that Marcus Garvey arrived in Kingston and found employment as a printer. Less than two years later, in January 1907 the city would be largely destroyed in an enormous earthquake in which over a thousand people died. Sound system pioneer, Prince Buster (1938-2016) was born in Orange Street and recorded his own instrumental tribute, Freezing Up Orange Street and a vocal version, Shaking Up Orange Street. In the 1960s Orange Street was the centre for Ska and Rocksteady recording where rival producers and studios battled for supremacy.

Postcard of the Day No. 97 - Trolley to the Shore, Norwalk

Another snapshot of long lost transit. This is what was known as an open car on a trip to the coast in the small town of Norwalk, Connecticut. Probably from around 1900. Well patronised - an informal gender segregation seems to be in operation with female passengers occupying the front two thirds of seats while the men are confined to the back. Hats are universally worn. The streetcar styling borrows from the architectural language of the municipal bandstand and the seaside pavilion. Despite some smudgey blemishes and variable print quality, there’s a lot of well defined detail to be seen. The uniformed motorman and his nattily dressed acolytes form a commanding trio at the helm. Behind them, the respectable ladies of the town follow on, their modesty protected by high necklines and low hemlines. Some make little effort to conceal their discomfort at having their likenesses mechanically recorded while others display the frozen expressions that come with long exposure to the camera lens. The Norwalk Street Railway was swallowed up in 1900 by a larger rival which in 1906 leased all operations to the mighty New Haven Railroad - a reminder that rapid turnover of ownership is not unique to our own times. Open sided streetcars, known as toast racks in Britain, were popular across the world and a selection are shown here - from Honolulu to Stockholm, from Malta to Cairo and from Rothesay to San Antonio. 

Postcard of the Day No. 93 – Panorama du Carrefour du Châtelet

Gridlock by the banks of the Seine, conflicting traffic flows observed from above. Horse drawn vehicles and open-top limousines compete for road space while Parisians circulate at will, oblivious to the confusion. Seen from on high, interlocked vehicles form a pleasing abstract composition but there’s little of the extreme visual drama that Soviet photographer, Rodchenko obtained from his vertiginous photos of Moscow trams. Meanwhile in Chicago, below, we have another spectacular vision of traffic mayhem – overloaded trucks and columns of streetcars jostle for position. Mounted police officers observe but don’t intervene – pedestrians cluster on the street corners, few are brave enough to take their chances in the traffic.

Streetcar Propaganda

At first glance these postcards seem to be an expression of an aesthetic impulse to embellish the harsh rectilinear forms of a streetcar with the soft and organic forms of floral decoration. Japanese visual culture places the highest value on refinement but something else appears to be going on here. More sinister and militaristic imagery appears on closer inspection, alongside a profusion of national flags and naval ensigns. Airplane cut-outs could be taken as celebrations of technology but there’s no ambiguity about the slender forms of falling bombs. A formidable armoury has been deployed in floral disguise including aircraft propellers, torpedoes and artillery. The best guess is that this is a souvenir of a morale-raising street procession to remind the local populace of their patriotic duty to submit to the war effort. Which would date these postcards to the early 1940s.

Postcard of the Day No. 84 - Uchikoshi-bashi Bridge, Yokohama

The foreground figure could be the elderly Matisse although his presence in Kanagawa Prefecture can’t be easily explained. Utilitarian streetcars ghost by in the roadway. Up above, an observer looks down from the iron bridge in the early Spring sunshine. Only 5 minutes walk away is the famous Street of Many Temples. The bridge was built in 1928 when the road connecting Yamate and Tokyo was extended through the cutting – all evidence of a rapidly westernising infrastructure. Judging by this Panoramio photo from 2014 the scene is little changed, though the trams stopped running in 1972. A few more vintage postcards of trams in Japan below – two each from Yokohama and Tokyo and one from Nagoya.

Hull Streetlife Museum

Hull is one of those cities that is automatically disparaged even by people who’ve never been there, on the basis that however mediocre your hometown may be, it is demonstrably superior to Hull. It’s a useful rule that any universally despised place is well worth a visit and almost always much more interesting than many more over-valued places. Despite being one of the Luftwaffe’s most favoured and easily accessible targets, Hull still possesses a fine group of Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian buildings, significant medieval churches and a great collection of swing bridges and lifting bridges. There remains a strong sense of local identity and civic pride typical of Northern cities. One of Hull’s many attractions is the Museum of Streetlife – an ambitious title that perhaps promises more than it can deliver. It’s really a collection of vintage transport, imaginatively presented in a series of recreated street tableaux that provide context for the exhibits – at one time it would have been called Transport of Yesteryear.

The museum presentation is a masterpiece of compression in which a signal box, a complete level crossing, and a parade of small shops serve as a backdrop to a collection of road and rail vehicles. The world of manual labour is memorably evoked in a dramatic presentation that includes stacks of hessian bales and heavy wooden crates loaded on to a 1933 Scammell 3-wheeler plus trailer, familiarly known as a Mechanical Horse. My only complaint is the absence of litter and detritus – the odour of stale tobacco and burning coal would have been a bonus. It’s interesting to speculate on what might be included in such a museum in the future. Looking back half a century or more to today’s shopping streets might find a place for Betfred, Greggs, Wonga, a Food Bank and a Charity Shop from the days when charity was still a legal activity. The vintage vehicles might include an Ocado van and a selection of delivery vans from Yodel, Hermes, Interlink, DHL and Fed-Ex. Dioramas could feature a crowd of juvenile inebriates spilling out of a pub on a Friday night or a road rage episode involving a cyclist, a black cab, an Uber driver and a Night Bus.