please empty your brain below |
Well done for tackling a potentially contentious topic in what seems to me like a fair and honest manner.
I am pleased that we are being reminded, through things like this, of a grim part of the history of "civilisation". Pleased by the rightful unease which results. |
I'll read them next time I'm there. This seems a reasonable approach by Brent Council.
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I lived in Willesden many moons ago it was run by local council. This park had an open air swimming pool shape like a kidney.
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Yes, there was a lido there until the early seventies. There are some details at lostlidos.co.uk.
On the question of BLM et cetera, the only thing that counts is fact. The great property of fact is that it exists independently of the observer. Study fact, and ye shall discern the scale and reality of slavery. All else is assertion, supposition, bullshit, propaganda, or worse. |
Thanks for this interesting read. We all benefit from learning more about the complicated history of slavery and acknowledging what today’s society owes to the suffering of people in the past.
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I am slightly ambivalent about our 'oppressive' colonial history because without it I would never have met my wife 52 years ago. She was born in the British colony of Sarawak, but even though when she grew up it was now part of independent Malaysia it was still natural for her to look to the UK for her nurse training.
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Facts are independent of the observer? Both the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics tend to disagree…
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In Gladstone Park, two prime ministers are memorialised: Gladstone, and down the hill, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president and then PM of Bangladesh after its secession from Pakistan in 1971.
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The park is one of the many places I have never visited in person, but which occupies notable space in my imagination, albeit in the past. As a small boy in the 1910s, my father would have roamed it. He attended Gladstone Park school and lived in one of the spanking new streets north of Dollis Hill station which were planned out with names in alphabetical order. Mark Twain said "Dollis Hill comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I ever occupied" and didn’t end the sentence with /s, so it must have been a little eden for a kid who was later removed to Farringdon Road. The park’s connection to slavery seems tenuous to put it mildly, but it would take quite a run up to object to this tastefully restrained educational display.
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above comment –how can a street spank?
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Such a well-written and informative post, thankyou. Having visited two former departure stations in West Africa for enslaved people, I am aware of how much more there is to learn about this topic.
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Fun fact: Gladstone Park was served by its own station until 1902.
dg writes: indeed. |
An interesting contrast with Haringey’s decision just to rename Black Boy Lane (a previous blogpost) rather than putting up any explanatory narrative.
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