Planners have approved designs for what is believed to be Britain’s first women’s-only tower block.
The scheme for 102 flats to be rented to single women is to be built in west London by a housing association founded in 1920 as part of the suffragette movement.
Each home will have a deep balcony and will be designed specifically for women. Details could include slightly lower kitchen work surfaces and careful attention to ventilation to ensure comfort for menopausal women, said Women’s Pioneer Housing (WPH), the landlord.
The 15-storey tower in Ealing will offer homes for low social rents to women who face inequality, abuse and disadvantages in the housing market. Tenants are likely to include victims of domestic abuse and black and minority ethnic women who face a significant pay gap, making housing less affordable.
The person taking the tenancy must be a single woman, and men will only be able to live in the tower block if they become a tenant’s partner. The only way a tenant could be male is if they are the adult child of a female tenant and inherit the tenancy. Transgender women, including people intending to undergo gender reassignment, will be allowed, but men who cross-dress, transgender men, and anyone with a known history of male violence against women or children will not.
Men will only be able to live in the tower block if they become a tenant’s partner. Photograph: GRID Architects
“The benefit is security,” said one woman who has lived in a current WPH property on the site since she was a previously homeless student 20 years ago. “We’re not dealing with different types of people moving up and down [the stairs] all the time. I feel comfortable because I am around women only.”
But the project is proving controversial with some of the current tenants who face years living elsewhere before returning to the tower or not being practically able to come back because their households are now too large. Several legal cases are under way arising from disputes over rehousing, residents have said.
A woman who has lived in the complex for 40 years after a private landlord threatened her with rape said: “The benefit for me is there is more safety.” But she said she feared a high-rise could bring with it social problems seen in other tower blocks.
The scheme also attracted opposition from some locals, who argued such a high concentration of women “will put the women at risk” and that “single women would find a high-rise very unpleasant”.
“It’s a very 1950s attitude that if a women goes up three flights of stairs they might faint,” said Colin Veitch, the director of GRID Architects, which has designed the tower. “It’s ridiculous.”
More people supported the scheme saying “we need cheaper housing especially for women” and “affordable housing is good. Nimbys are bad”. One person responding to the planning consultation said: “WPH rescued me from abusive and controlling relationships. Happier and more confident now. Without this housing, women like me face an almost impossible challenge.”
WPH’s latest annual review said: “There is no region in England where a single woman on an average woman’s salary can afford to rent a private-sector home of her own. The gender pay gap builds up over a lifetime and older women are particularly impacted.”
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The same landlord is also planning to build another low-rise women’s-only complex in Shepherd’s Bush, in west London. It operates as a cooperative and community benefit society.
The tower design features red brick and reconstituted stone walls, a roof garden and a green roof. Veitch said there were few differences in the design process compared with a mixed block, but there was “more focus on security and a feeling of safety”. Particular attention will be paid to lighting the surrounding areas so residents feel safe at night.
The scheme is being developed in partnership with L&Q, one of London’s largest housing associations.
Tracey Downie, the WPH chief executive, said the block would be home to women who “have been unable to afford good affordable housing themselves because of their level of income or vulnerability”. That may be because they have been sexually harassed by a private landlord, are full-time mothers relying on income from a partner from whom they are now separated, or have been the victim of domestic violence.
She said the idea was to create homes where people could rebuild their lives. “We try to build in desirable locations where people can feel safe – Ealing is a leafy suburb.”
She said the women would benefit from having a shared understanding of security they might not get in mixed blocks where men might leave doors on the latch.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
London: Britain’s Queen Consort, Camilla, has chosen a crown without the controversial colonial era Kohinoor diamond for her coronation ceremony with husband King Charles III at Westminster Abbey in May, Buckingham Palace said on Tuesday.
Camilla’s choice of the Queen Mary Crown for coronation means it may only have a replica of one of the world’s largest cut diamonds, as the original now adorns the crown of Queen Elizabeth II’s mother Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
The palace said the Queen Mary Crown was removed from display at the Tower of London to be repurposed for the ceremony on May 6 with jewels paying tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II.
While the current version of Queen Mary’s crown has a front cross set with a detachable rock crystal replica of the Kohinoor diamond, it isn’t known yet if that would be retained after the changes are made for the coronation.
“The choice of Queen Mary’s Crown by Her Majesty is the first time in recent history that an existing crown will be used for the Coronation of a Consort instead of a new commission being made, in the interests of sustainability and efficiency,” Buckingham Palace said.
There had been speculation over the crown to be chosen by Camilla, with reports suggesting that the one worn by Charles’ grandmother, the Queen Mother, which bears the Kohinoor was a likely choice.
However, it is believed that diplomatic sensitivity may have been considered in the final choice, even though the Queen Mary Crown also has a history of once being adorned with the controversial diamond.
Kohinoor, which means mountain of light in Persian, came into Queen Victoria’s possession from the treasury of Maharaja Ranjit Singh a few years before she was to be crowned Empress of India, and has played a starring role in British coronations of the past.
“Some minor changes and additions will be undertaken by the Crown Jeweller, in keeping with the longstanding tradition that the insertion of jewels is unique to the occasion, and reflects the Consort’s individual style. These changes will in particular pay tribute to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, as the crown will be reset with the Cullinan III, IV and V diamonds,” the palace said.
The Cullinan diamonds were part of Queen Elizabeth II’s personal jewellery collection for many years and were often worn as brooches by the late monarch, who passed away aged 96 in September last year.
The diamonds have been set into Queen Mary’s Crown on previous occasions as well, when Cullinan III and IV were set temporarily in the crown for the 1911 Coronation, and the Cullinan V was inserted when the crown was worn as a regal circlet at King George VI’s coronation in 1937, the palace said.
In addition, four of the Queen Mary Crown’s eight detachable arches will be removed to create a “different impression” to when it was worn by Queen Mary at the 1911 coronation.
Meanwhile, the palace also confirmed that St. Edward’s Crown, which will be used for the Coronation of King Charles, has now returned to public display at the Tower of London, following the completion of its modification work for the grand Westminster Abbey ceremony.
LONDON — As nations around the world scramble to secure crucial semiconductor supply chains over fears about relations with China, the U.K. is falling behind.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the world’s heavy reliance on Taiwan and China for the most advanced chips, which power everything from iPhones to advanced weapons. For the past two years, and amid mounting fears China could kick off a new global security crisis by invading Taiwan, Britain’s government has been readying a plan to diversify supply chains for key components and boost domestic production.
Yet according to people close to the strategy, the U.K.’s still-unseen plan — which missed its publication deadline last fall — has suffered from internal disconnect and government disarray, setting the country behind its global allies in a crucial race to become more self-reliant.
A lack of experience and joined-up policy-making in Whitehall, a period of intense political upheaval in Downing Street, and new U.S. controls on the export of advanced chips to China, have collectively stymied the U.K.’s efforts to develop its own coherent plan.
The way the strategy has been developed so far “is a mistake,” said a former senior Downing Street official.
Falling behind
During the pandemic, demand for semiconductors outstripped supply as consumers flocked to sort their home working setups. That led to major chip shortages — soon compounded by China’s tough “zero-COVID” policy.
Since a semiconductor fabrication plant is so technologically complex — a single laser in a chip lithography system of German firm Trumpf has 457,000 component parts — concentrating manufacturing in a few companies helped the industry innovate in the past.
But everything changed when COVID-19 struck.
“Governments suddenly woke up to the fact that — ‘hang on a second, these semiconductor things are quite important, and they all seem to be concentrated in a small number of places,’” said a senior British semiconductor industry executive.
Beijing’s launch of a hypersonic missile in 2021 also sent shivers through the Pentagon over China’s increasing ability to develop advanced AI-powered weapons. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added to geopolitical uncertainty, upping the pressure on governments to onshore manufacturers and reduce reliance on potential conflict hotspots like Taiwan.
Against this backdrop, many of the U.K.’s allies are investing billions in domestic manufacturing.
The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, passed last summer, offers $52 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. The EU has its own €43 billion plan to subsidize production — although its own stance is not without critics. Emerging producers like India, Vietnam, Singapore and Japan are also making headway in their own multi-billion-dollar efforts to foster domestic manufacturing.
US President Joe Biden | Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Now the U.K. government is under mounting pressure to show its own hand. In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak first reported by the Times and also obtained by POLITICO, Britain’s semiconductor sector said its “confidence in the government’s ability to address the vital importance of the industry is steadily declining with each month of inaction.”
That followed the leak of an early copy of the U.K.’s semiconductor strategy, reported on by Bloomberg, warning that Britain’s over-dependence on Taiwan for its semiconductor foundries makes it vulnerable to any invasion of the island nation by China.
Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory, makes more than 90 percent of the world’s advanced chips, with its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) vital to the manufacture of British-designed semiconductors.
U.S. and EU action has already tempted TSMC to begin building new plants and foundries in Arizona and Germany.
“We critically depend on companies like TSMC,” said the industry executive quoted above. “It would be catastrophic for Western economies if they couldn’t get access to the leading-edge semiconductors any more.”
Whitehall at war
Yet there are concerns both inside and outside the British government that key Whitehall departments whose input on the strategy could be crucial are being left out in the cold.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is preparing the U.K.’s plan and, according to observers, has fiercely maintained ownership of the project. DCMS is one of the smallest departments in Whitehall, and is nicknamed the ‘Ministry of Fun’ due to its oversight of sports and leisure, as well as issues related to tech.
“In other countries, semiconductor policies are the product of multiple players,” said Paul Triolo, a senior vice president at U.S.-based strategy firm ASG. This includes “legislative support for funding major subsidies packages, commercial and trade departments, R&D agencies, and high-level strategic policy bodies tasked with things like improving supply chain resilience,” he said.
“You need all elements of the U.K.’s capabilities. You need the diplomatic services, the security services. You need everyone working together on this,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above. “There are huge national security aspects to this.”
Referring to lower-level civil servants, the same person said that relying on “a few ‘Grade 6’ officials in DCMS — officials that don’t see the wider picture, or who don’t have either capability or knowledge,” is a mistake.
For its part, DCMS rejected the suggestion it is too closely guarding the plan, with a spokesperson saying the ministry is “working closely with industry experts and other government departments … so we can protect and grow our domestic sector and ensure greater supply chain resilience.”
The spokesperson said the strategy “will be published as soon as possible.”
But businesses keen for sight of the plan remain unconvinced the U.K. has the right team in place for the job.
Key Whitehall personnel who had been involved in project have now changed, the executive cited earlier said, and few of those writing the strategy “have much of a background in the industry, or much first-hand experience.”
Progress was also sidetracked last year by lengthy deliberations over whether the U.K. should block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab, Britain’s biggest semiconductor plant, to Chinese-owned Nexperia on national security grounds, according to two people directly involved in the strategy. The government eventually announced it would block the sale in November.
And while a draft of the plan existed last year, it never progressed to the all-important ministerial “write-around” process — which gives departments across Whitehall the chance to scrutinize and comment upon proposals.
Waiting for budget day
Two people familiar with current discussions about the strategy said ministers are now aiming to make their plan public in the run-up to, or around, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s March 15 budget statement, although they stressed that timing could still change.
Leaked details of the strategy indicate the government will set aside £1 billion to support chip makers. Further leaks indicate this will be used as seed money for startups, and for boosting existing firms and delivering new incentives for investors.
U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt | Leon Neal/Getty Images
There is wrangling with the Treasury and other departments over the size of these subsidies. Experts also say it is unlikely to be ‘new’ money but diverted from other departments’ budgets.
“We’ll just have to wait for something more substantial,” said a spokesperson from one semiconductor firm commenting on the pre-strategy leaks.
But as the U.K. procrastinates, key British-linked firms are already being hit by the United States’ own fast-evolving semiconductor strategy. U.S. rules brought in last October — and beefed up in recent days by an agreement with the Netherlands — are preventing some firms from selling the most advanced chip designs and manufacturing equipment to China.
British-headquartered, Japanese-owned firm ARM — the crown jewel of Britain’s semiconductor industry, which sells some designs to smartphone manufacturers in China — is already seeing limits on what it can export. Other British firms like Graphcore, which develops chips for AI and machine learning, are feeling the pinch too.
“The U.K. needs to — at pace — understand what it wants its role to be in the industries that will define the future economy,” said Andy Burwell, director for international trade at business lobbying group the CBI.
Where do we go from here?
There are serious doubts both inside and outside government about whether Britain’s long-awaited plan can really get to the heart of what is a complex global challenge — and opinion is divided on whether aping the U.S. and EU’s subsidy packages is either possible or even desirable for the U.K.
A former senior government figure who worked on semiconductor policy said that while the U.K. definitely needs a “more coherent worked-out plan,” publishing a formal strategy may actually just reveal how “complicated, messy and beyond our control” the issue really is.
“It’s not that it is problematic that we don’t have a strategy,” they said. “It’s problematic that whatever strategy we have is not going to be revolutionary.” They described the idea of a “boosterish” multi-billion-pound investment in Britain’s own fabricator industry as “pie in the sky.”
The former Downing Street official said Britain should instead be seeking to work “in collaboration” with EU and U.S. partners, and must be “careful to avoid” a subsidy war with allies.
The opposition Labour Party, hot favorites to form the next government after an expected 2024 election, takes a similar view. “It’s not the case that the U.K. can do this on its own,” Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said recently, urging ministers to team up with the EU to secure its supply of semiconductors.
One area where some experts believe the U.K. may be able to carve out a competitive advantage, however, is in the design of advanced semiconductors.
“The U.K. would probably be best placed to pursue support for start-up semiconductor design firms such as Graphcore,” said ASG’s Triolo, “and provide support for expansion of capacity at the existing small number of companies manufacturing at more mature nodes” such as Nexperia’s Newport Wafer Fab.
Ministers launched a research project in December aimed at tapping into the U.K. semiconductor sector’s existing strength in design. The government has so far poured £800 million into compound semiconductor research through universities, according to a recent report by the House of Commons business committee.
But the same group of MPs wants more action to support advanced chip design. Burwell at the CBI business group said the U.K. government must start “working alongside industry, rather than the government basically developing a strategy and then coming to industry afterwards.”
Right now the government is “out there a bit struggling to see what levers they have to pull,” said the senior semiconductor executive quoted earlier.
Under World Trade Organization rules, governments are allowed to subsidize their semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, the executive pointed out. “The U.S. is doing it. Europe’s doing it. Taiwan does it. We should do it too.”
Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
On the road to Twatt, a message arrives from a resident there. Am I making the pilgrimage up through Scotland to this hamlet on the island of Orkney only to admire its notorious, unwittingly rude road sign? If so, don’t bother. “Our council was so frustrated by that sign being stolen, they have now not replaced it,” says Judith Glue, who runs a gift shop selling pictures of the old Twatt sign to tourists who might otherwise leave the region disappointed. Grateful for her warning, I thank Glue and read over a list I’ve made of those other dwelling places in the UK that through some quirk of linguistic evolution have found themselves with fantastic, filthy-sounding names. At Cock Bridge, in Aberdeenshire, they have the same trouble as in Twatt. “Our sign is constantly being pinched,” says Geva Blackett, a councillor for the region. “People have been taking them away as mementoes. Why do they do it?”
It’s an early lesson from my road trip around these towns, villages, parishes, hamlets and farms, many of which are irresistible to Insta-tourists and sign thieves – always phone ahead. One autumn day, I drive for over an hour to visit an Ass Hill in Dorset, just to find it’s an unremarkable and uninhabited lane between hedgerows. The village of Shitterton, about 20 miles away, is much more interesting. Residents here are quite accustomed to hobby-horse types like me wandering through to have a nose around and ask questions. Most are proud, even defiant about this startling name of theirs, which derives from the fact that about 1,000 years ago the site was an open sewer.
One local, Peter Gordon, tells me he always makes sure to include Shitterton on his driving licence, because it’s a reliable conversation starter if he’s ever asked to show ID. Gordon directs my attention to an enterprising local plumber who has gone all-in on a branding opportunity, renaming his premises Pooh Corner. Not every local person takes quite such pleasure in their geographic distinction however. One of Gordon’s neighbours, Ian Ventham, tells me about a quarrel he used to have with his late mother-in-law. She always swore that the “h” in Shitterton was silent. “There are still adherents to the ‘Sitterton’ variant today,” sighs Ventham.
Residents in Fucking, Austria, grew so tired of visitors taking selfies and stealing signs that they changed the village’s name to Fugging. Photograph: Shutterstock
I first became curious about these places – what it was like to live in them, what the benefits were, what were the frictions and frustrations for locals – when I read about the put-upon citizens of Fucking in Austria. This remote, socially conservative village had suffered from decades of unwanted attention, ever since the second world war when British and American soldiers passed through and took home word about a truly unforgettable little place. (The name is thought to stem from a centuries-old landowner.) By 2005, Fucking was so routinely overrun by backpackers and bucket‑listers, all of them chasing selfies or keepsakes, that CCTV cameras had to be pointed at every Fucking sign in town. Even this wasn’t enough to deter people, and in 2020 the local mayor, Andrea Holzner, oversaw a change of name to Fugging. Holzner did not respond to my requests to be interviewed, and no wonder, having told reporters in 2020: “We’ve had enough.”
When I chat to Shittertonians about the plight of the Fuckingites, though, they’re sympathetic, having adopted their own special measure against sign thieves in 2010. Instead of a standard aluminium sign, too easily dug up and thrown in the boot of a car, residents invested in a great big lump of limestone, about the size of a fridge and surely heavier. It would require some sort of mobile crane to spirit away this engraved rock as a memento. After I’ve admired it for a while, I give councillor Blackett in Scotland a call. You should see this thing, I say to her! It’s the answer to Cock Bridge’s problems. She promises she will look it up online.
Browsing on Google images becomes a risky business should you ever undertake to research such a trip. Internet queries about Three Cocks, a village in Powys, or Three Holes, a hamlet in Norfolk, can go wrong, quickly. It’s no fault of the places themselves. The etymologies of these names trace back hundreds of years. Pare away a millennium of British history, says John Baker, associate professor of name-studies at the University of Nottingham, and most of our towns and villages were named for features of the landscape, or a landowner, or an agricultural quirk. “The names tended to reflect immediate local circumstances,” says Baker. “A particular hill. The condition of the soil.”
Many such meanings have been obscured or eliminated by time. Languages evolve. Different citizenries come and go. Suddenly you find yourself learning about a place called Clench in Wiltshire, and instead of that name summoning the idea of a hill in the vicinity, as it would have done in the 1200s, the modern ear hears only something lavatorial. (Or mine does.) A Viking settlement comes to be known in Old Norse as Hill of Sekk, or Sekkshaughr, and 1,000 years later we have the wonderful enigma that is the Yorkshire parish of Sexhow. There are actually two Twatts in the UK, one in Orkney and another in Shetland. We might have ended up with more, says Tom Birkett, a linguist from University College Cork, only the Old Norse word for “meadow” evolved somewhat more innocuously south of the Scottish-English border, becoming Thwaite. Residents of Haithwaite in Buckinghamshire might want to breathe a sigh of relief.
Baker makes the point that we are hardly the first people in history to find ourselves snorting with amusement, or blushing with embarrassment, as placenames become unmoored from their meanings. There is an Ugley in Essex that for decades in the 19th century was primly rebranded as Oakley. “Locals didn’t want the association,” says Baker, who tells me about a district of Leicester, now known as Belgrave, that was once down in the records as Merdegrave. Norman conquerors, arriving in the 11th century, didn’t like the sound of that merde. Why not make the place sound less shitty and call it something beautiful, or belle, instead?
Tom Lamont in Wetwang, east Yorkshire. Photograph: Owen Richards/The Guardian
Knowing all this, I start to feel more impressed by those places that have stuck fast to their filthy names, despite the pressures of genteel bowdlerisation. In the late 00s, there was a decision made by the ruling council in Castleford in Yorkshire to alter the name of a thoroughfare in the middle of town. Tickle Cock Bridge became Tittle Cott Bridge, albeit briefly, because locals were so irritated by the prudish switch that they campaigned for a reversal. Tickle Cock Bridge endures. When I drive to Sandy Balls in Hampshire one day, it’s a surprise to find that this ancient place – once a sandy, bumpy field, thus the name – has been turned into a modern holiday park. There’s now a boules court on site, and a Segway garage. When I pass through, some children are being introduced to a domesticated alpaca. The name Sandy Balls is up in lights, everywhere, no squeamishness whatsoever.
I get the same impression when I visit the village of Wetwang in east Yorkshire. Here, notoriety has been embraced, even greedily courted. Since the late 1990s, the people of Wetwang have taken it upon themselves to invite minor celebrities to serve as honorary figureheads. The tradition started when the TV presenter Richard Whiteley, then the host of Countdown, made a few fond mentions of the village (it once meant “wet field”) on air. He was invited to be mayor, and agreed, holding that title for years until his death in 2005. “When Richard died, they wanted him replaced,” says Paul Hudson, a weather presenter at the BBC. “For God knows what reason, I won an election in the village.”
Hudson, like Whiteley before him, had never so much as visited. But he had mentioned the village on TV a few times, during some lighthearted weather segments, and he was installed as Wetwang’s second mayor in 2006. “I help choose the best vegetables at the summer fair,” Hudson says. “I judge the annual scarecrow competition. I do it for fun, I’m not even paid mileage … I get the feeling the residents just like it that they’re different. They’re small. But they’re on the map for something. I suppose it’s quite a British thing.”
In the village of Penistone, 70 miles south-west of Wetwang, I meet photographer Dominic Greyer. After many hours spent driving, and bleary from travel, I’m quite star-struck to meet Greyer in person. This 50-year-old must have put in more miles than anyone alive in his pursuit of obscure and obscene British placenames, establishing himself as the Indiana Jones of his field. Sure, every few years some well-intentioned hiker or cyclist takes it upon themselves to tour the notorious sites, starting at one of the two Twatts and working south, fundraising for charity. But these men and women are amateurs, mere hobbyists, compared with Greyer, who has made a career out of a niche of all niches. “I’ve done 20 years at the coalface of great British placenames,” he says, when we’re sitting down together for lunch.
He says he first got interested when he was a student in the 1990s, doing data entry for a transport consultancy firm in York. The firm had a large collection of maps, and Greyer started poring over them, noting down the tiny-lettered names of any farms, footpaths, fields or thoroughfares that caught his eye. High Back Side near Pickering? He’d have to go there one day. Long Fallas Crescent in Brighouse? He added it to his list. In 2004, Greyer published the first of three photobooks that presented his more abstract discoveries (Seething in Norfolk, Tiptoe in Northumberland, Fryup in Yorkshire, Minions in Cornwall) with those placenames that had a bit more tang, including Penistone itself, which derives from the older, more innocent-sounding Peningston, or “farm on a hill”.
After years spent running a magnifying glass over Ordnance Survey maps and truckers’ atlases, and trudging with his camera over farmland, ditches, clifftops, Greyer has been mistaken for an animal-rights campaigner and a drains inspector. He’s also been quizzed at least once by police officers about his intentions while lingering to take photos in places such as Dancing Dicks Lane in Essex or Busty View in Durham. Once he realised there was money to be made from those pictures in his archive that got people laughing, Greyer founded a company called Lesser Spotted Images and started manufacturing Penistone mugs and Sandy Balls greetings cards, as well as all the Twatt merch that Glue has been selling for years from her shop in Orkney.
Greyer once got into an argument, he says, at a Women’s Institute fair in Harrogate, when a male security guard made him cover up his Titty Ho tea towels. (It’s a junction of roads in Northamptonshire.) On another occasion, he was laying out his wares at a fair in the village of Muff in County Donegal in Ireland – he sells Muff products, too – when a local person looked over his photos from Happy Bottom in Dorset and Slack Bottom in Yorkshire, and asked why Greyer didn’t take photos of something nice instead, like flowers.
Why don’t you take photos of something nice instead, like flowers, I ask? “If it’s there, I want to see it,” is all Greyer can say to explain his lifelong compulsion to catalogue these places. He points out that his work has been recognised by the art world, and that Grayson Perry invited him to exhibit at a Royal Academy show in 2018. Greyer remembers stewing over what to submit. A photograph of No 2 Passage in Manchester? He settled on one of Cumcum Hill in Hertfordshire, instead.
As we’re talking, a passing hiker notices one of Greyer’s photographs on the table between us. He comes over to inspect it (Lady Gardens, Herefordshire) and introduces himself. Turns out this hiker has a similar eye for placenames. He and Greyer briskly compare notes, as if they are butterfly hunters or birdwatchers meeting in the field. Greyer asks: “Have you ever been over to Scarborough, and those cliffs called Randy Bell End?”
“No. But we do live close to Upperthong,” says the hiker.
“I have a photo of the sign at Netherthong,” says Greyer, “not Upper.”
“I prefer Upper.”
“I think Nether is better.”
“Have you ever heard of Fanny Moor Crescent in Huddersfield?”
“Trumped,” says Greyer, “by Fanny Hands Lane in Ludford.”
I leave them to it, driving south out of Penistone into wilder country. Earlier that day, on the roads around Wetwang, I passed evidence of a traffic accident. Tyre tracks left the road towards a ditch – exactly where Wetwang’s big welcome sign loomed, as though a passing driver had seen the name, been distracted by mirth or disbelief, and lost control. Leaving Penistone, I almost get into similar grief. The landscape is stunning here, rolling hills of green and brown, moss-covered walls, brooks. When I pass a craggy rock that’s engraved with directions to the nearest village, I have to hit the brakes, and come to a screeching halt. It’s a marker for Penistone, forged from actual stone. It has been scratched all over by long-gone vandals, some of their faded carvings surely meant to be penises.
I sit beside the stone for a bit, feeling unusually in tune with my compatriots. There is so much that divides us and makes us frustrated with each other, politically, economically, tonally. But we do share these ridiculous islands, with our Twatts, our Clench, our churches named after a saint called Sexburga. I find something comforting and levelling about it, whenever I hear of a new one. Assington in Suffolk. Cuckoo’s Knob in Wiltshire. Out of pride or perversity, sometimes because of the conservation efforts of unsung heroes, we’ve stuck by these names. When a petition was launched in Rowley Regis in the West Midlands, to try to alter the name of a local road that was felt by some to be bad for house prices, a counterpetition was launched: Save our beloved Bell End! I like what these campaigns say about us, stubborn little weirdo nation that we are.
Villages like Shitterton and Penistone have resorted to village signs that aren’t so easy to take as souvenirs. Photograph: Alamy
Ever since the start of my trip, I’ve been trying to get in touch with Linda George, the woman who stood up for Bell End (which probably referred to a bell pit in a bygone mine), successfully petitioning for its protection in 2018. When we finally speak my travels are almost done. I ask her, why go to battle for Bell End?
“I lived there with my grandmother as a baby,” George explains. “She was a great storyteller about her village. There used to be a coaching house dating to the 1700s. There used to be Georgian pubs. By the time I was an adult, almost all of this was gone. It had been demolished for modern buildings. Even the church has been rebuilt several times. My kids fall about laughing whenever I talk about Bell End and protecting it – but it’s an ancient name. It’s one of the few things the village has left in terms of its history. In a way, if we lose Bell End, we lose everything.”
I wish George luck, and she does the same, asking me where I’m heading next on my road trip. I tell her I’m not sure. I have my eye on Butts Wynd in Fife. Or maybe Pant in Shropshire. We’ll have to see.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Behind a 10-foot tall door, in a secret location, lies a treasure trove of bones. Some of the biggest bones are laid out on storage units made of scaffolding, others are stacked against each other on racks – rows and rows of specimens. The smallest are tucked into drawers of faded-yellow metal cabinets. A selection of skulls lies on a low table; crudely stuffed animals hang from the painted breezeblock walls. Everything is carefully labelled.
This vast room houses the Natural History Museum’s cetacean collection – a globally unique hoard of 6,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises. The artefacts are so enormous and irreplaceable, they’re housed at a secret location away from the main museum building.
It is the most complete collection of these creatures in the world, containing specimens of 90% of the world’s 90 cetacean species, including 24 from UK waters.
“It’s visually stunning, yes, but also incredibly scientifically and culturally significant,” says Richard Sabin, the Natural History Museum’s principal curator of mammals. “You’re looking at one of the best research collections of its kind in the world – what makes it unique is the species representation.”
The room’s cool temperature and low humidity have been designed to preserve its precious contents, from bones to baleen. As well as specialist biology and evolutionary history, the collection enables scientists to look at how everything from DNA to hormones vary across time and space.
Crucially, collections such as this (one of only five of its kind in the world), may provide clues about how whales, dolphins and porpoises might respond to future stresses such as the climate crisis. “These institutions are like reservoirs of scientific information,” Sabin says. “[Not only can we] look back in time and see how things have changed, we can plan for the future. That’s one of the greatest uses for this collection.”
The Natural History Museum has been officially recording whale and dolphin strandings since 1913, and many remains end up here after postmortem. In addition to 800 strandings, there are remnants from whaling expeditions and archaeological finds, some stretching as far back as 500 years.
One of the largest occupies a big glass cabinet, which dominates the main gangway. Here, the Thames whale lies in state: the northern bottlenose whale that became something of a celebrity in 2006 when it swam upriver, stranded on the sand in front of crowds of Londoners, and despite efforts to save it, died.
Another was uncovered in 2010 as builders dug new jetty foundations at Greenwich, in London. Huge bones sticking up out of the muddy Thames foreshore were identified by Sabin as a headless North Atlantic right whale. “The skeleton was at right angles to the flow of the river, with the tail facing up the slope of the beach … that’s not a natural stranding position,” he says. It had likely been pulled up by the tail, then beheaded for its precious baleen, once used to make corsetry and other garments.
Carbon dating pinpointed the Greenwich whale’s death to between 1580 and 1660, while cut marks on the bone surfaces indicated “defleshing”. “Everyone took what they could from it before the skeleton collapsed under its own weight,” says Sabin. “This animal is now the largest, oldest dated specimen of this species anywhere in the world – this skeleton can tell us a lot.” For example, its DNA could reveal whether limited genetic diversity, climate or competition contributed to right whales’ vulnerability before commercial whaling.
Elsewhere, dozens of jaw bones are stacked up. One lower jaw of a male sperm whale is abnormally twisted into a corkscrew shape: this unusual specimen came from an Antarctic whaling ship in 1959. At first glance, the jaw seems to make feeding an impossibility. But the back teeth, worn down to “stumpy pegs”, indicate that this whale was successfully eating giant squid, thanks to its highly specialised echolocation and efficient suction feeding.
Sabin, still fascinated by each revelation after 30 years as curator, is particularly proud of the insight garnered from crates containing 800 baleen plates from a blue whale stranded in 1891. Nicknamed Hope, the young female died on a sandbank near Wexford, Ireland. Now, her 25m-long skeleton is on display in the museum’s Hintze Hall.
By analysing her baleen – layers of keratin that are used to trap krill – scientists at Southampton University learned, using a technique known as stable isotope analysis, that in summer she fed near Norway, Iceland and Greenland to accumulate her fatty blubber layer, then in winter migrated south to the Azores and west Africa for the breeding season.
What’s more, visible ridges on this hard, black baleen represent the annual peaks and troughs of her feeding cycle, and scientists found that about 18 months before she died she remained in the south for 10 months – probably to have a calf. In the Wexford archives, Sabin found that violent storms were recorded in the days before she beached, storms that could have steered her off course.
In addition, researchers at Baylor University in Texas analysed her earwax and found her pregnancy hormone progesterone levels were elevated during the last 18 months of her life for 10 months – the blue whale gestation period. “Suddenly we have this rich information about the life of an individual whale that was living in 1890,” Sabin says.
With Sabin’s help, the same Texas team studied persistent chemical pollutants and the stress hormone cortisol in plugs of whale earwax to reveal how, between 1870 and 2016, human activities from commercial whaling, war, industrial pollution and shipping noise, have caused physical stress responses in whales.
“This information is written into the tissues of these animals,” Sabin says. “Suddenly, in the past 20 years, we’ve developed technologies that mean we can liberate information from this kind of material. We can take single hairs and do genome DNA testing or stable isotope analysis, which gives info about diet, distribution, movement, indicators.”
The museum is entering an era of digitisation, uploading 3D surface scans or CT scans of specimens to a free online database. It allows researchers anywhere in the world to collaborate. “This collection gives these specimens a life after death,” says Sabin. “What are we going to learn in the future?”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
When Britishvolt, a startup hoping to transform UK car production by making batteries for electric vehicles, rented a seven-bedroom £2.8m mansion with a swimming pool and Jacuzzi-style bath for workers, some employees were uncomfortable with the impression it gave of lavish spending.
Founded in 2019, Britishvolt began with grand ambitions – hailed by the then prime minister, Boris Johnson – to become the first domestically owned battery factory in a car industry that employs tens of thousands of British workers, but where the big manufacturers are all overseas companies. The planned factory would have been able to supply 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of batteries a year, enough for hundreds of thousands of cars.
That ambition gave way last year to a desperate scramble for investment. Fundraising efforts ended on Tuesday, with the company entering administration with the loss of more than 200 jobs. The planned site for its plant, at Blyth in Northumberland, is now up for sale.
A Britishvolt presentation given to investors in June laid out the scale of the opportunity it had seen. In 2028, it thought European battery demand would outstrip supply by 554GWh – enough for 15 Britishvolts, or millions of electric cars. With that giant opportunity came a giant valuation: it achieved the coveted “unicorn” status of being worth more than $1bn (£809bn). Backers included Ashtead, Glencore and the abrdn-owned Tritax from the FTSE 100.
By the end, Britishvolt was worth a tiny fraction of that. DeaLab, an Indonesia-linked suitor, considered a bailout but the talks did not lead to agreement. Its offer would have valued the whole company at only £32m, according to a letter sent by the executive chair, Peter Rolton, to shareholders. That was equal to the £32m Britishvolt spent on the May 2022 purchase of a German battery cell maker.
Many of those who supported Britishvolt have chosen to remain in the background, but filings searched by the data company AlphaSense/Sentieo show Ashtead invested $39m, while the British investment trust Law Debenture Corporation had £5m. Norway’s Carbon Transition invested $1.7m in August 2021, and the valuation more than doubled by 2022. As late as 27 June 2022, the Indonesian battery company VKTR joined the backers.
The Britishvolt executive chair, Peter Rolton, at the site of the planned battery plant in Blyth. It is now up for sale. Photograph: Nick Carey/Reuters
Yet within a month of that investment, Britishvolt was in trouble. Documents revealed by the Guardian showed that by late July Britishvolt had put construction of its gigafactory on “life support” until it could find more funds. That was made more difficult by the financial market turmoil caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising interest rates.
The mood got steadily worse as the year went on, according to former insiders. After a hiring spree during late 2021 and early 2022, spending was reined in, and a company aiming to employ 3,000 people within two years stopped hiring.
By late October, the company was in serious trouble, amid evidence of chaotic management. When the Guardian approached Britishvolt before a report that it was considering administration, an external media lawyer hired by the company forcefully questioned the accuracy of the Guardian’s sources and referenced a risk of defamation. Within hours it became clear that Britishvolt was indeed considering administration – a fate it only escaped after a last-minute cash injection from the mining company Glencore.
The cash allowed Britishvolt to continue for 10 weeks, but none of the three bids it received would guarantee the hundreds of millions of pounds it still needed.
The financial difficulties irked insiders who claimed to have seen evidence of an extravagant approach early on. As well as the mansion, the company had hired a fitness instructor to take yoga lessons over video call, while executives travelled on a private jet owned by a shareholder. (The company said company money was never spent on the jet.) Many staff were provided with top-of-the-range curved 4K computer monitors at considerable expense, said a former employee, who declined to be named.
“Money was being spent recklessly, really badly,” they said. “There was a lot of bad management at this organisation.”
Britishvolt was spending heavily on consultants as it considered how to launch products for boats, planes and drones – all promising opportunities, but ones likely to rely on different types of battery. Among the key consultants was EY, which earned millions of pounds in fees while Britishvolt was still operating, two people said. The company has since been tasked with carrying out the administration, despite being owed money as an unsecured creditor.
A Jacuzzi-style bath in a bathroom at the £2.8m mansion near Blyth that was rented by Britishvolt. Photograph: Rightmove
An EY spokesperson declined to detail how much money it is owed, saying: “EY was an unsecured creditor of the company at the time of the appointment of administrators, but will not vote on any creditor resolutions that may be required as part of the administration process. Creditors of Britishvolt and moneys owed will be disclosed in due course as part of the administrators’ report.”
Britishvolt also paid £3.2m to Rolton Group, an engineering consultancy of which Peter Rolton is a director, during the year to September 2021. When asked in September about the spending and how Britishvolt had managed the potential conflict of interest, the company said: “The board of directors supports the company’s latest business plan which has been refocused and sharpened given the negative global economic situation and continues to have full confidence in the senior management team and in the company’s robust governance processes.”
Rolton denied, through the same lawyer as Britishvolt, that there had been bad management. He said “high-spec monitors were purchased if required for specific tasks/roles”, and that fees for all consultants “were entirely proportionate to the scale and complexity of the project and in line with accepted industry benchmark standards”.
Rolton Group said the £3.2m was “for design services provided on a highly complex and innovative project”.
EY declined to comment on the company’s management style on behalf of Britishvolt.
The collapse will also affect companies that were hoping for a big new customer. South Korea’s Hana Technology and Creative & Innovative Systems reported contracts with Britishvolt worth £74m apiece, while Germany’s Manz will miss out on a “major order”.
The collapse raises questions for Aston Martin Lagonda, which signed a memorandum of understanding to work with Britishvolt. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/Reuters
The collapse also raises questions for Aston Martin Lagonda, the British sportscar maker which, along with its Chinese-owned rival Lotus, signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to work with Britishvolt. In a prospectus last year Aston Martin suggested that Britishvolt’s “failure could affect the group’s ability to maintain its electrification timeline”.
This week, Aston Martin said the collapse “will have no impact [on] electrification timings, with the launch of the first battery electric Aston Martin targeted for 2025”.
The administration has left the UK with only one large-scale gigafactory planned: the Chinese-owned Envision’s plant in Sunderland. It also leaves big questions over the future of the UK automotive industry.
Andy Palmer, the former Aston Martin boss who is now chair of InoBat, a Slovakian battery company, said Britishvolt’s collapse was an “unmitigated disaster” and “certainly not good for the UK”.
Palmer has been outspoken about the need for better government support, and InoBat had been deciding between sites in Teesside and Spain for its own plants.
There is still hope for the Blyth site. InoBat could be a contender to switch its interest there, while EY confirmed it was “liaising with a number of interested parties” for a sale of the Britishvolt assets – the site and its intellectual property. Tata, the Indian owner of Jaguar Land Rover, the UK’s largest carmaker, is thought to be among interested companies, the Financial Times reported.
Glen Sanderson, the Conservative leader of Northumberland county council, said he was “quite positive” a buyer could be found.
“I think there’s still hope for the site,” said David Bailey, the professor of industrial strategy at the University of Birmingham. He said there was “a deal to be done” between the government and Tata – which declined to comment – possibly in exchange for government support for upgrading Tata’s steel plant in south Wales. Yet the collapse should be a wakeup call for the UK government to match the support on offer in Europe, he said.
“We’re lagging very far behind the EU,” he said. “It requires a much more active industrial policy. At the moment we don’t have one.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
