An Absence Explained

It has been a very long time since I wrote anything - so I had better explain:

Holidays are bad for your health!

At the end of February I had a short break in Mallorca, to gather a few rays of sunshine and so lighten a dreary English winter. It worked perfectly: the sky was blue, the sea was clear and the mountains were beautiful. All was good. Unfortunately as soon as I came back I started coughing, my chest felt heavy and I felt as if I was breathing through a blanket. Not good. Even worse the infection dragged on and on for weeks. Even when the cough went I was left feeling week and feeble.

For two months I have not only not run I have not done anything apart from get through each day. The thought of writing about running felt like a cruel joke - so I didn't.

But now things are looking up. I have run for 30min (quite slowly it must be admitted) and think things will soon get back to normal - which, of course, includes blogging

P.S. The picture is of the studio of Joan Miro, who lived and worked in Mallorca in his later years. I have posted it, not only because I think it is rather fine, but because it was built at the same time (1955) as the New Town of Hemel Hempstead was being developed. None of our buildings from the period look anywhere near as stylish (we specialised in a rather earnest plainness) . I know, I know - the quality of the light makes an enormous difference and a one-off building designed by an architect for his friend is bound to be more distinctive than town development in Hertfordshire but even so ...

Is There Still An Active Travel Strategy?

A post in which I witter on about the politics (with a small p) of active travel. If you find this a bit boring you can skip to the end where there is some local interest in a link to a 1948 COI fi extolling the virtues of the New Towns

A couple of days ago I mentioned the ‘Active Travel Strategy’ had been pulled from the Department of Transport website but not from Department of Health’s. Interesting...

Public health is the reason there needs to be a policy to encourage behavioural change . We need to be more active because there is an obesity epidemic and the costs of dealing with all the related problems, such as diabetes, are rising fast and will be huge. These are costs for the health budget, which has burdens enough with an ageing population and the rising costs of treatments. However the expenditure for an infrastructure to encourage a healthy lifestyle would fall to transport, planning and leisure services departments and they do not necessarily have the same priorities.  The most likely bureaucratic outcome in such situations is nothing - stasis, inaction, a stand-off, followed by some empty gestures to show things have not been completely forgotten, whilst turf wars are fought.

Resolving overall priorities is what cabinet government is meant to be about but at any one time there is a clamour of urgent events forcing the long-term to take its place furtherand further back in the queue.

Especially when the health benefits are not direct and require a number of behavioural changes. It is impossible to say how many cases of diabetes will be avoided by an extra cycle path. You might have an enormous figure for the health implications of doing nothing but that is difficult to transfer to an individual planning application. 

In Victorian times there was a huge investment in public works to benefit public health as drains, sewers and water mains were built. But this was done to eliminate cholera, a disease that could strike anybody of any class.The cost was immediate and staring everybody on the face.  However obesity and health are mostly seen as lifestyle choices and matters of individual responsibility - there is not the same overwhelming urgency for collective action.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that I can understand the slow progress. In 2001 there was a Select Committee report on Walking in Towns and Cities, which concluded that pedestrians have been treated with contempt. Since then there has been little direct action. Cycling has fared a bit better and starting in 2005 there were some demonstration projects to increase the use of bikes in designated cycling towns. But now the body that organised those schemes (Cycling England) has been abolished and the largely positive evaluation report has been deposited in the National Archives 

As far as the Department of Transport is concerned the whole Active Travel Strategy seems to have gone to the same place. It does not help that the Department is car-centric with many of the new ministers pledging to end the war on the motorist. What war was that? As well as walking and cycling I also drive a car and I have failed to see the bullets.

The attitude of the Minister in charge of roads, road safety and deregulation (Mike Penning, MP for, ahem, Hemel Hempstead) is shown in these notes of a meeting he had with some cycling representatives. It does not give one a lot of hope.

But all is not lost. Although walking is still not treated with enough seriousness, there is some momentum behind cycling. The focus is very much on safety because that is an issue with direct impact (and the Times has to be commended for putting so much weight behind their  #cyclesafe campaign ) but if if that can cause a rethink in the provision of separated cycle paths and the design of junctions, we may be able to edge towards Amsterdam or Copenhagen

Actually planning for active communities is not new. It was widely accepted as a good idea in the post war period and was embodied in the layout of the first generation of New Towns (e.g. Hemel), as  illustrated in this rather wonderful COI film of the time. 

2011 Streak Day 289 (Wednesday Oct 19th): Planning

2011 Streak Day 289 (Wednesday Oct 19^th): Walk 3 miles, time 1hr, Weather - blue sky pleasant temperature

Another post about local government but this is much shorter because all it really says is Boo! and Hiss!:

The photo shows the way the Old Town ends.  There is a house and then some green space, which is as it should be. There needs to be a buffer to give the old buildings some visual breathing space. 

But the council does not agree. It will allow this land to be used for housing. Buggeration! 

Our council is run by the Conservative majority - a party that somehow seems to have lost contact with the meaning of its name

2011 Streak Day 241 (Tuesday Aug 30th): Water Gardens

2011 Streak Day 241 (Tuesday Aug 30^th): Walk - 3 miles, Time 1hr 10min, Weather - greyish once more

When I started this 2011 project one of the objectives was to talk about exercise and training, as normal, another was to notice things I found visually interesting and take photographs, but the third strand was pay attention to my home region, especially Hemel Hempstead where I live.

What particularly interests me is the differences between the ideals and hopes invested in the New Town project immediately post-war and the way they are now. I am tremendously attracted to the early idealism but am equally aware that some things have not turned out as planned.

Today’s photo is a good example and it is a disgrace.

You would not guess from the overgrown planting, eroded banks, grass destroyed by too many canada geese, and eroding concrete, that this is a listed in the Register of Parks and Gardens of Particular Historic Interested (in other words it is Grade II listed). 

It was designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe (a eminent landscape architect of the Twentieth Century who was also responsible for the gardens of the JFK Memorial at Runnymead) and planted by his wife Susan, both of whom thought it one of their most successful projects. Interestingly Jellicoe was interested in the way the unconscious influenced all design and in this project admitted being influenced by Paul Klee.

Today you would be hard put to identify the artistic ideals. What should be a pleasant civic space has been neglected over the years and is now a just a scruffy area with water (kids can still feed the ducks so that is OK).

It is an example of how anything can degrade without care and attention. Everything has to be maintained or it starts to fall apart. Changes may be gradual at first, barely noticeable, but eventually they reach a point where you  realise things have become so bad major reconstruction is needed.

It looks like we are now at that point. The Garden History Society had a study day in Hemel on the Water Gardens, a Friends Group is being formed to work with the council to prepare a bid for lottery funding and the council itself is talking of improving the area. But “actively pursued when the cash is available” probably means we should not expect immediate action.

2011 Streak Day 228 (Aug 16): Giving blood

2011 Streak Day 228 (Aug 16): Run 2.25 miles, Time - 20min 35sec,  Weather - guess

Another short run today but the simple reason was lack of time. It was something I had to fit in before giving blood. The photo is of the church in which I bled.

It was started in 1952 and shows more than any other building the poverty of the architecture of the time (a stretched brick box does little to lift the spirits). This was a combination of two things: the first was a prevailing design philosophy that took Scandinavian modernism and toned it down to dull; the second was an actual lack of resources as the country was recovering from the war.

Inside though the church is surprisingly bright. The windows let in lots of light, the walls and ceiling have been freshly decorated in bright colours, and there are plenty of flowers. It only goes to show that you should not judge a building solely by its exterior.

in our mixed group of blood donors there were only two young girls but both of them were in trouble. They were laying on their beds with a damp flannel on their brow,  feet raised, and being attended to by nurses. They looked very pale and shaky. It made me wonder if any particular demographic is likely to react badly to giving blood; in other words are girls particularly susceptible or is this a random quirk.

I have no answer and probably never will. It is just one of those questions that flits across your mind when you are doing nothing but clenching and unclenching your fist.

2011 Streak Day 227/365 (Aug 15th): Pathetic

2011 Streak Day 227/365 (Aug 15^th): Run - 1.1 miles, Time - 10min, Weather  - Gloomy

Pathetic! I think I will draw a veil over this run except to say that I followed the dictum of Joe Henderson. He advises you to run for a mile before you deciding the sort of session you should complete. A mile is enough to warm up and clear away the usual early run sludge and allow you to tell how strong you felt. Today the answer was not strong at all and I didn’t want to go any further. There was no spring in my step and no enthusiasm to force myself onwards. So I stopped, looked up the hill and walked back.

I am not sure whether that is failure or realism. It is what I did and that is all there is to it. The veil is drawn.

Today’s picture shows a couple of things: 

The first is how unremittingly dull the weather is. The pattern for almost every day has been to start with grey cloud, which may or may not bear rain, followed by patches of blue sky later in the afternoon. As I tend to go out in the morning I only get to see the wet or the grey.

The second is to show something about Hemel - it is a low rise town. The initial plans were drawn up by one of the leading landscape architects of the time, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, who envisioned not a city in a garden but a city in a park. It is still a town of low density, with many green spaces. There is no vantage point from which you can see its full extent.

If I had been feeling strong, this particular green space would have been good for a tough hill session. But as we already know I did not feel strong

Juneathon 2011 Day 21: Quoting Cobbett

2011 Streak Day 172/365:  Walk - 3.1 miles, Time - 1hr, Weather - same as last couple of weeks, changeable

Not wishing to be out Cobbetted by Tom I thought I ought to set down what was said in Rural Rides about my area

Of Hemel Hempstead itself he says:

"Hempstead is a very pretty town, with beautiful environs, and there is a canal that comes near to it, and that goes onto London. It lies at the foot of a hill. It is clean, substantially built, and a very pretty place altogether."

Nobody would use those words now to describe the New Town. With over 82,000 people it is not as small as all that (it is the second largest town in Hertfordshire) and the quality of the building of the New Town is neither substantial nor pretty. However the Old High Street remains intact and as you can see from the photo it is quite picturesque. Pevsner even described it as one of the most attractive in Herts.

However the paragraphs of Rural Rides that described the land between Redbourne and Hemel are also interesting. Cobbett was much taken with its attractiveness, especially the trees.  "Very fine oaks, ashes, and beeches … make the fields look most beautiful. No villainous things of the fir-tribe offend the eye here."

He also described a local system of agriculture that left a border of grass around a ploughed field to bear grass for hay making so that "every field has a closely mown grass walk about ten feet wide all around it, between corn and the hedge. This is most beautiful!. " 

"And thus you go from field to field (on foot or on horseback), the sort of corn, the sort of underwood or timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedge-rows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of pleasure-grounds indeed! What, that man ever invented,under the name of pleasure-grounds, can equal these fields in Hertfordshire?"

Now that particular system of field management might be long gone but we still have the trees, irregular fields and the hedge rows. It is still pretty and it is the pleasure ground I explore.

Photothon 12: Kodak town no more

This is yesterday's photothon. I went to the gym for a bit of strengthening and resistance training but I have no interest in presenting a photo of a weight machine. They are dull and cannot lift the spirits but I still use them once or twice a week. As you get older you have to work harder. on muscle-tone.

I have mixed feelings about gyms and, referring back to my last post, they are an example of the way you can split what you think and what you do to contain a degree of conflict. I do not like the way they are activity factories and institutionalise fitness. (It really annoys me when people conflate getting fit with going to the gym and when you hear people talking about them as the default solution to problems of lack of exercise and obesity. They are not, they might help,but getting out and about more, for longer periods of time is likely to have a much greater effect). But they are a convenient way of doing certain exercises and I use them for that..



Anyway along a bit from the gym is this.

It used to be the Kodak Building, which loomed tall over the entrance to Hemel Hempstead, guarding the Magic Roundabout. At one time Kodak was important to the town. It was their European marketing headquarters and there was a big film processing plant in the industrial area. Film processing, of course, has long gone and a few years ago they closed their offices, which are now being converted into flats.

So what you see is a skeleton that at some time in the future will have a shiny new skin. Gradually they have reduced the height, so it is not so out of scale with the rest of the town. It will be interesting to see what this development will look like, especially as the market for this type of accommodation has gone haywire.

I hope it turns out well and the project is not frozen. The entrance to any town is an important site and should not be marked by a skeleton.