Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
Blue plaques everywhere
As part of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, one of the last acts of the outgoing government was to authorise Historic England to extend the blue plaques scheme to the whole of England. English Heritage will continue to deliver the scheme in London, where it was launched in 1866 and managed first by the Royal Society of Arts, then successively by the London County Council (1901-1965), the Greater London Council (1965-1986), and English Heritage (since 1986). The City of London Corporation has been responsible since 1879 for erecting plaques within its own boundaries.
Once upon a time you had to be eminent and well-known to be considered worthy of a blue plaque, and among the first to be unveiled outside London were those marking the birthplace of George Harrison (1943-2001) in Wavertree, Liverpool, and the flat in Shelton, Stoke-on-Trent, where ceramic artist Clarice Cliff (1899-1972) lived at the height of her success.
However, in announcing the scheme’s expansion, Arts Minister Lord Parkinson said: ‘I encourage people to get thinking about who has helped to define their community and makes them proud of where they live.’ Even more explicitly, Historic England has said it wants nominations of ‘inspirational people from all walks of life, including those whose history has been hidden or largely fogotten’.
If the scheme is to include the ‘complete unknown’ (to quote Bob Dylan: honoured with a blue plaque at the venue of his first UK gig, the Water Rats in London’s King’s Cross), this could easily lead to a flood of nominations. Then (in the interests of diversity, inclusion, fairness, and levelling up) houses without blue plaques will have to have them as well, and soon blue plaques will be everywhere
This is a clever marketing coup for Historic England – reminders of their brand wherever you look. Might it also be part of a scheme to improve the nation’s sense of wellbeing and happiness? Historic England recently published some research purporting to show that ‘individuals residing close to dense cultural heritage areas report higher levels of life satisfaction’. With blue plaques everywhere, we are surely certain to overtake Finland as the No.1 Happiest Place in the World (currently the UK is No.20, according to the annual survey carried out for the United Nations by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford).
Vanishing volunteers
By serving as a constant encouragement to emulate the deeds of community do-gooders, blue plaques might also help to resolve the current crisis in volunteering. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport reported in its most recent Community Life Survey that numbers of regular volunteers have fallen by 11% in eight years and that ‘participation rates are the lowest recorded since data collection started’. The same theme was picked up in the Church Times for 15 March 2024, where Madeleine Davies reported that 60% of parishes are struggling to fill parochial church council posts, 40% of parishes had only one church-warden, and 21% had none.
As of 2022, 36% of the Church’s worshipping community was aged 70 and above, and 68% of churchwardens are above state retirement age. One reason for the shortage might be that people are now retiring much later in life, and 40% of those who have retired, according to Age UK, are busy providing childcare. Working patterns have changed, with more people in employment and greater work demands. Meanwhile, a churchwarden’s responsibilities are becoming more onerous: fund-raising, fabric repairs, safeguarding, and administrative demands are leaving them feeling ‘overwhelmed by compliance’. Just dealing with banks has become a major headache, and 78% of churchwardens said they would be happy to give up their position if they could find a successor.
Simplified governance is being offered as a possible solution, to relieve the legal and practical responsibilities of being a churchwarden. Parishioners are also being urged to make a greater effort to reach out to the wider community and engage people in caring for the buildings. A Church Commissioners’ survey found that most people value church buildings as an important part of the landscape, but that there was ‘little public understanding’ of who owned or cared for them, and an assumption that ‘they will always be there as they have for hundreds of years’.
England’s least-visited museums
Volunteers are not only essential to keeping places of worship in use: they are also vital to many museums. A recent BBC news report celebrated the doughty work of those who keep the lights on at some of England’s least-visited museums. Top (or bottom) of the list, with fewer than one visitor a day, is the Bay Museum, on Canvey Island in Essex. Housed in a 1960s naval monitoring station, it is packed with military items from both World Wars, including weapons, medals, uniforms, and models. Martin Daniell, a curator at what is officially Visit England’s 18th least-visited attraction, says that when people do turn up ‘they expect to spend ten minutes but are still here three hours later’.
Alan Brimmell is one of the Nene Thorpe Trust volunteers who give bespoke guided tours of the 14th century secular and religious murals that cover every wall of Longthorpe Tower, Cambridgeshire – another attraction with fewer than 200 visitors a year. This doesn’t worry him, because he can give more attention to those who do turn up, including younger visitors who are intrigued by the bonnacon, a mythical bovine creature whose self-defence mechanism involves expelling large amounts of hot caustic faeces.
Terms of insult
The Spectator’s account of the volunteering crisis in the Church of England included an excellent clerical joke. It quoted Marcus Walker, Rector of Great St Bartholomew’s Church in the City of London, who deplores the mentality of some Church leaders with regard to volunteers, an attitude that he says amounts to ‘you’re lucky to be allowed to help and if you don’t like it you can just… Nunc Dimittis’ (the title of one of the anthems sung at Evensong and strictly meaning ‘now let thou depart’, but you get the sentiment).
According to research carried out by the consumer research agency Perspectus Global, there are hundreds of ‘old school’ terms of insult that are dying from lack of use. The researchers asked a panel of 2,000 respondents aged 18 to 30 to identify which terms they did or did not understand, and the ones they had never heard of included cad, trollop and bounder, pillock, plonker and git, berk, prat and nitwit. A certain former prime minister still uses terms like bonk, nincompoop, balderdash, tosh, swot, and kerfuffle, but apparently these terms mean nothing to Generation Z (those born after the mid-1990s). Disco and boogie are equally unfamiliar, along with sozzled and randy.
Some of these words are used by innocent older generations without a full understanding of their meaning. Maiden aunts would be shocked if they realised that ‘berk’, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is a 1920s contraction of the highly offensive rhyming slang Berkeley Hunt. Some of these terms have a long life: git (or ‘get’ in northern England) dates from the 14th century as a contraction of ‘misbegotten’, meaning illegitimate, though Millennials will have encountered it in Harry Potter being used to describe somebody considered to be contemptible because of their behaviour.
Some words seem to have reversed their meaning over time: prat (in the 16th century a cunning, deceitful or dishonest person) is now more often used to describe somebody full of themselves or deluded – someone clumsy and prone to pratfalls (a rival explanation has it that prat is a synonym for buttocks, hence prat face, dating from 1533, so that a pratfall means falling on to your backside).
Looking up the etymologies of some of these words provides endless hours of fun but also reveals some very inventive rationalisations. Does nincompoop, or ninny, really derive from ‘non compos mentis’, the legal term for somebody not of sound mind? It has the ring of a satirical literary invention from the pen of Pope, Dryden, or Swift. Vice versa, plonker is often attributed to the characters in Only Fools and Horses, but it has a solid history dating back to the mid-19th century, and Sherds is sure that CA readers are well aware of what it really means.
