The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley

The title is The John Martin Festival 2011: at The Garden Station Langley. This is a page which will be a work in progress so keep checking back. Just got back home from a fascinating morning and the sun even came out. By 0830 I was casing the joint at Haltwhistle preparing for a Hadrian's Wall Heritage event.

At 1000 I was arriving at The Garden Station, Langley. This was to plan an event for the 2011 John Martin Festival. It is supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our heading picture shows the old lead smelt mill flue in the woods. Clear as a path but actually all collapsed, imagine an arched roof covered in earth and with the arch now fallen into the flue. Some bits are intact however.

The date for your diary is Saturday 14th May from 1000 to 1600. John Martin was a painter heavily influenced by the industrial landscape and when a child growing up in Haydon Bridge, the nearby lead smelt mills at Langley would have been fully operational. Today Langley is a quiet hamlet and the evidence of its intense industrial past is cloaked in woodland. Seemingly innocent fishing lakes were once at the core of its power system. Our day will start in The Garden Station which last saw a train in 1950.

The draft timetable is:
1000-1020 Arrival and welcome.
1020-1120 A presentation by myself about Tynedale and Langley's industrial past and John Martin's industrial associations.
1120-1230 A walk to the old brickworks and Langley Dam lake.
1230-1330 Lunch available for you to purchase from The Garden Station's café.
1330-1530 A walk in the old smelt mill area seeing the remains of the flue and on up to the chimney.
1530-1600 Tea and wrap up.

Mention of wrap up: come well shod! And if the weather looks as if it might rain, make sure the waterproofs are in. The walks are not heavy grade but do require care about where to place your feet! The walk to the chimney on the moor is an ascentand is roughly a two mile round trip. The old chimney has been restored and those of you who follow my Auden interest will know that he was another artist who took inspiration from the industrial landscapes of the North Pennine dales. He certainly came to Allendale and wrote about the lead smelt mill, its flue and chimney at Allendale Town. He could have got there by train through Langley before the passenger service ceased in 1930. We can document that he visited Allendale before then (see 1924 poem Allendale).

Find out more about John Martin here.

Details about bookings will follow.

The L&YR and the ner

This is something of a teaser requiring some railway history knowledge as well as the present day franchises: explain why thinking of the L&YR and the ner is pertinent. The capitalisation is the clue.

I placed that on my Facebook profile. This blog entry will be used to explain. L&Y stands historically for the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. NER stood in history for either North Eastern Railway or British Railways North Eastern Region. Prior to 1923 the private companies were deadly rivals. This helped to ensure that the strong conurbations of Lancashire and Yorkshire were tied together which was a good thing but it also ensured the independence of North East England in railway matters. Today everything looks a bit different. I might suggest that it is quite appropriate to label the modern Northern Rail franchise the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Stand in Manchester, Liverpool or Leeds and you will see what I mean. Read up (as this blog has previously done) the investment plans for Northern. The conurbations of Lancashire and Yorkshire have triumphed through their Passenger Transport Authorities. And what of the North East. Divide and rule. One geographically small Passenger Transport Authority with only a handful of Network Rail stations but its own Metro to play with. Three weak shire counties plus the Tees Valley boroughs. No structure for a common voice in developing railway policy. And this is how the franchise to be let in 2013 for the North is being faced. A novelty for 2011 is a Tyne Wear Public Transport Users Group. Is this interested in examining the Northern franchise? Not as far as I can tell. It is more driven by the futile prospect of fighting the reletting of the East Coast franchise back into the private sector. If that francise is not relet then the whole private railway dream crumbles. Yet in effect North East England is just an island in the Northern empire. All the work of Heaton depot is isolated from other Northern operations. Setting up a North East Local Trains franchise would be relatively easy. No vast unpicking exercise. Last week the Labour Party Shadow Cabinet was on Tyneside. Did anyone mention the prospect of the new franchise. Was the question put and is anyone listening?

STOP PRESS: If the issue interests you, the Tyne Valley Line Rail Users Group is holding an open meeting 7.30pm Hexham Community Centre 17th February 2011 to discuss the new franchise.

Multi-Culturalism

David Cameron's speech on "muscular liberalism" in respect of the problems thrown up by Multi-Culturalism gets my accolade. It is high time that all of us in these islands appreciated the great benefits of being British and put the pleasures of being English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Hindu, Sikh or Muslim into proper perspective.

Prudhoe Priest reads the last rites?

The links I give below take one to a doom's day piece penned by Prudhoe's Roman Catholic priest. I don't think it has to be like this for either his congregation or anyone elses. My experience of the secular 21st century is that its members are desperate for grace. Families are being split apart in their inability to hear God's Word. We live in hard times but the gospel does bring joy. And I know I have seen that in congregations in the Tyne Valley both Anglican and Baptist to my personal knowledge. This is the link to the article. And here is another take on it including if you go far enough a comment from me.

Is the North Losing out on Transport?

Check out
http://www.transporttimesevents.co.uk/conferences.php/Is-the-North-
Losing-Out-on-Transport-Promoting-Balanced-Economic-Growth-through-
Transport-Investment-25/

This would seem relevant to the North-East. Pipe up please if you are going to this from north of Darlington. Make no mistake the choice of location backs up everything I have said about a Northumbria franchise. It will be quicker to go to a meeting in London for Tynesiders than one in Manchester.

Look at the speaker list, I can find one North Eastern speaker 15:45 - 16:05 How can LEPs bring forward transport investment to support growth? Jonathan Spruce, Senior Assistant Director, Tees Valley Unlimited and that is an interesting topic. How many in the audience will be from the North East despite Philip Hammond doing the keynote.

Mark 4:25

If you want to confront the fascinating detail of Bible translation and Jesus's morality this is very instructive http://bible.cc/mark/4-25.htm (You may need to realise, if you did not know, I have two Durham University degrees in theology although I struggle greatly with "church" religion (although not an iota of the extent to which I might struggle with another major religion which does not embrace critical study (meant in the academic sense))).

Ebchester Bank

This would likely have not been written unless at 1335 on Tuesday 4th January I had chanced across http://sajshirazi.blogspot.com/2011/01/i-ask-impossible.html . A poem had been posted which started with
I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single-mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred, advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.

The sentiments were already present. For weeks now a mix of Auden Amor Loci, Elliot's Little Gidding and the two books I have on Mother Julian had filled my mind. The focus has been through the Hexham Society for Sacred Studies working through Jeff Astley's Christ and the Everyday. I had drawn the short straw for the December meeting to lead on Providence.

This morning I had taken a shopping trip to Consett. It had not been easy. At the Post Office despite my letter passing through the small letter slot, I had been advised to buy a large letter stamp because a machine might think it is too large!!!!! A society which has absolutely given itself to insanity is the cause of this. "It nearly did not pass through" the lady said, but it had passed through and that was all that mattered to me and all that should matter.

I was trying to buy a Wii controller for the daughter. Consett was not the right place to be after I had tried three likely shops. Consett seemed exceptionally full of rolling derelicts and house after house had half hanging guttering and no-one apparently doing anything. That in turn because Health and Society now probably demands a full suite of scaffording to repair a gutter. Thank you snow.

I retired hurt but not before the Carlton Bakery had delivered me a superb corned beef slice. Such precious commodity required somewhere suitable for its consumption. I drove down to the park at Ebchester's old station and there in suitable peace I ate my corned beef slice and listened on a CD to the choir of St Edmundbury Cathedral sing "Lo he comes with clouds descending".

My Skoda's interior soon became numinous. I was parked right at the intersections of the lines of history. Beside me I had just pulled off one of the most famous of Roman Roads, the Dere Street. Crossing it at ninety degrees behind my bumper was the old trackbed of the Blackhill Branch. Nowadays a very pleasant resort for leisure, a cycleway and path but once an artery of industry. Seen in retrospect an industriousness that lasted for just a blink of an eye and yet one which when I first glanced at it, few would have realised was doomed.

Place and landscape are so regularly sacramental to me and a few precious minutes in this car park, alone with only a choir for company was no exception. Last night we had watched Brian Cox on Stargazing. What had I learnt from him? That reality is ever more awful than we first conceive. The writer's of Genesis conceived an awful creation. Yet they hardly knew the start of it. They were wrong to think that the pain was the consequence of our misbehaviour and even more misguided to lay the blame on the temptress Eve even if sex can so easily play a role in our misdeamours.

The reality is that the more science unpacks about creation, the more violent and extreme it becomes. If there is a Living Universal Loving Creating God, his explanation for our existence in the face of such raging forces of such age has to be clever and neat. The Christian would say Incarnation and Resurrection are just that. They would add that the history of Christendom shows many authors who have understood that this is not matter of science or of theology but of love. Save that you understand the nature and mysteries of love, you cannot readily find a way to faith in Christ. It is a matter of passion and strangely the consideration of human passion may help you to understand how it is, that even in the face of immense creationary violence, one can still have faith in the loving God and submit to the wild and frightening ride that is life and death.