The latest edition of The Critic magazine has “Midlands marvels and mysteries”. Being a very long review of the new book Staffordshire (Pevsner’s The Buildings of England series) (2024). The review is freely available online…

“This greatly enlarged, updated guide to the architecture of Staffordshire completes the comprehensive revision of the Buildings of England series. The version is a great improvement in terms of the splendid illustrations alone, replacing the somewhat murky half-tones of the original.”

North Staffordshire gets prime place, at least in the key visuals, with Wootton Lodge (Staffordshire Moorlands) on the front cover and the Wedgwood Memorial Institute (Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent) on the back cover. And, so far as I can tell from a combination of the review and the blurb, mid and north Staffordshire are not at all overlooked. The book is available now, as a chunky 844-page £37 hardback. An ideal Christmas present, I’d suggest, for someone interested in such things.

Ahaha… so there are still wild wallabies living in the Staffordshire Moorlands. It was thought they had died out… until one came bouncing down Cheadle High Street late last night.

Update: April 2026. No noticeable change in my Morrisons. Still waiting. Looks like the announcement was just a headline-grabbing PR exercise?

Seemingly very good news today… “Morrisons ditches self-checkouts in major change as boss says ‘we went too far'”.

The headline is a bit misleading, though. They will only “decrease the number of self-checkouts in its stores”, not actually do away with the infernal robo-tills. They also say…

“We have invested additional hours in manned checkouts and that’s been within the existing physical infrastructure [of the stores]. It’s not more checkouts, it’s more colleagues on checkouts.”

Which is a bit mealy-mouthed. Times, numbers, number of stores with more staff? We want specifics. The start-time is what I personally want to hear stated. Are they going to 100% guarantee at least one checkout till is staffed by 7am? Or are the staff still not going to get onto the tills until 8am or even 9am? In which case the changes will be useless for many early shoppers who have to get to work for 8am. They’ll still be forced to try to use the robo-tills, or else abandon their trolley and walk out on finding there are no staffed checkouts.

The seven-year oak wood project in mid Staffordshire has reported its findings, in the journal Nature. The wood being studied is the 46-acre Mill Haft, full of mature English oaks, around six miles west of the county town of Stafford. In this wood, various plots of 32 yards diameter were studied, these being pumped with CO2 over seven years.

The results, now in, show that…

“over the seven years of treatment, tree growth was 9.8% greater […] Most of the observed increase was attributable to wood production; there was no difference in fine-root or leaf mass production”.

Also note that…

“Exudation of organic carbon from roots is rarely included in estimates [by others. But here, our repeated] analysis indicated a significant overall effect [stated as between 43% and 64% more exudation, depending on year].

Which means (in layman’s terms) that not only is elevated CO2 being used by the tree to make a bit more wood (hardly noticeable to the eye, for most people), but the tree is also rather usefully pumping a lot more of it underground than before. As the report suggests, this then benefits the microbes living in the soil below the tree…

[the exudation is] “disproportionately important to ecosystem biogeochemistry [since it primes] the microbial community and associated nitrogen and phosphorus cycling” [in the soil].

All of this is to be expected, as CO2 is ‘plant food’. But it has not before been proven in temperate mature woodland. Overall, the project’s results clearly contradict earlier assumptions that…

“older, mature forest systems have no capacity for response to [elevated atmospheric] C02”.

The project plans to continue for another seven years.

An interesting word I hadn’t encountered before. In parts of Tunstall, people call their rear alleyways “ginnels”, according to a local newspaper report today on fencing these to keep druggies out.

The word ginnel appears to come originally from Yorkshire, according to 19th century sources. Though one early Lancashire dialect book also found it there. There was speculation that it may perhaps go back to the Anglo-Saxon gin, a narrow channel, open. Similar, I would suggest, to the Old Norse gin, meaning mouth, open. Given the Yorkshire core of usage it may well come from Norse rather than Anglo-Saxon. Although Anglo-Saxon gynian was ‘to yawn’, so there were evidently close similarities between the two.

An early memoir gives it as “goonhole”, presumably as an onomatopoeia (writing down a word as it sounds), which would seem a strangely congruent folk-twist on Old Norse ‘open mouth’. If such it was.

Dialect studies now also note it being found in Manchester and across larger towns of the East Midlands, used to refer to back-alleys. And evidently now also in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent. Today it seems it can also be applied to un-walled paved “footways between strips of land” between estate houses (e.g. such as the ones which criss-cross the Bentilee estate in Stoke, though I’ve no idea what residents there call these).

The Witt Collection of British Art is now scanned and online. Over 500,000 reference cards with good images from auction listings and magazines, seemingly omitting the ‘portrait of a long-forgotten local worthy’ type of auction picture.

Regrettably it doesn’t seem possible to search by ‘location of scene’. Thus a search for “Birmingham” becomes swamped by items once belonging to Birmingham City Museum etc. Nothing for “Staffordshire”. Over 1,000 items from Samuel Palmer, though. Also many by Edward Lear and Turner.

Westward on the High-Hilled Plains: The Later Prehistory of the West Midlands.

The Color Blue In Pottery And Porcelain.

The Gawain Country – extended with bonus chapters.

The Staffordshire Hoard: An Anglo-Saxon Treasure.

A Month in the Midlands. Humorous sketches from a fox-hunting and horse-racing tour.

Letters to a Young Constable. A 1947 book by the Chief Constable of Stoke-on-Trent. General advice in a short book, no specific Stoke content that I noticed.

Ecological flora of the Shropshire region.

Vegetation of the Peak District.

War and society in medieval Cheshire, 1277-1403.

Also, some idiot has added archive.org’s PDF download URL to a default blocklist in the popular Ublock Origin browser add-on.

So, either remove the blocklist altogether, or select “do not warn me again” when the ‘blocked’ page comes up.

It appears ‘the lockdown effect’ on reading has not lasted, which seems a pity. At least among adults in the UK, if the most recent survey can be trusted. A new Reading Agency report, following their survey of 2,000 over-16s in the UK, found…

* In younger people, 24% of 16-24s tell the survey teams they have “never been regular readers”.

* 50% of all UK over-16s now read regularly for pleasure, down from 58% in 2015.

* 15% of UK adults have never read regularly for pleasure, an 88% increase since 2015.

Substantial changes then, especially in “reading for pleasure”, which are perhaps partly due to many older people passing away during Covid. Perhaps also partly because some of the “representative consumers” here surveyed may not have been born in the UK (the survey methodology is not at all clear, even in the PDF), which would then make comparison with older surveys problematic. The earlier survey was of “randomly selected British adults”, which seems to me likely to be a different baseline from a market research body’s set of “representative consumers” in the UK.

And, as always, one would want to know if unabridged audiobooks are considered to be “reading”. Or are the surveys only asking about print? Perhaps there has just been, among some, a shift to a new format?

Another factor is that many books have become so damned expensive, and postage likewise (Amazon free delivery, excepted). A paperback that was £15 before lockdown will now likely be £30.

I’m pleased to hear of a new “documentary film revealing for the first time the private man behind Britain’s greatest comic genius”. Completed, and set to premiere in the town of Malvern on 3rd August 2024, with an introduction by Lady Dodd.

“Not yet broadcast and produced over four years with full access from Ken’s widow Lady Dodd, the film takes an in-depth look into Doddy’s private world, exploring the many secrets of his comic talent”

New on Archive.org, The Diary and Will of Elias Ashmole, of Lichfield and Oxford.

1663. March. “I accompanied Mr. Dugdale in his Visitations of Staffordshire and Derbyshire.” [Note: “Ashmole’s notes made on this Visitation are preserved in MS. Rylands, e 27.]”

This followed his 1652 Noates in my Peake Journey into the Peak District. Which I see are now online with annotations…

Mostly the names of things and the diet of the people. But also an interesting naming of “Wagge of Wetton, the Staffordshire astrologer”, and at Dove bridge he met a diviner called Thompson who seems to have used a ‘call’ made under the bridge as a method of divination. Either listening to the echoes and water-sounds, or with an accomplice at the other end of the bridge making the ‘soft voice’ in reply.

New on eBay, a Victorian watercolour original of Alton Castle in the Staffordshire Moorlands.

May 1869, by an undecipherable name. Something Danbury Something? Or perhaps Dawtrey? Beewitt?

A classic example of how the BBC lies about the likely weather. A chance of a light shower at 7pm becomes headlined as “Light Rain” for the entire day. And on a General Election day, too. How many will see this, look no further than the day’s summary, and decide to stay at home tomorrow?