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| The view west from Kelston Round Hill, Somerset, on Good Friday (29th March) this year. In the middle distance, the river Avon in flood at Bitton; beyond, the city of Bristol. |
Wishing a very happy feast of St. George to all who call England home, or who wish her well!
Grim news yesterday evening (19th April 2024) of a serious fire at the Burn Bullock pub in Mitcham, south London. Eighty firefighters and twelve appliances were in attendance. Nobody was hurt, but the damage to the listed building is considerable, possibly beyond repair. Although the oldest, Tudor, part is apparently relatively intact, the devastation to rest of the building is obvious from the news pictures. Behind the handsome eighteenth-century façade overlooking the London Road — from whose false windows I first learned about the ‘window tax’ — the fire has ravaged all three floors, as well as most of the 17th-century wing. The roof is gone.
This former coaching inn was known as the King’s Head until 1975, when it was renamed in honour of the cricketer Burnett ‘Burn’ Bullock (d. 1954), who was also a previous landlord. Cricket is essential to the story of the pub and to this part of Mitcham. Right next door is the pavilion of the Cricket Club, while across the road the Cricket Green has a serious claim to be the oldest in existence: the game has been played here since 1685. The Association of Cricket Umpires and Scorers was formed in the pub, in an upstairs room now known to have been destroyed. The building is a Mitcham landmark, and for three centuries has been an unmistakeable part of the Cricket Green.
What is so painful is that this disaster has been entirely foreseeable. Since the pub closed in 2013, it has spent more than a decade sinking into dilapidation while its future has been debated. Various planning applications by an evidently elusive landowner have been found unsuitable by Merton Council (as well as by the neighbouring Cricket Club). Meanwhile the situation has been exploited by squatters, who have been occupying the building illegally since 2014, and ignored a series of council enforcement notices. Now the pub’s place on the ‘Heritage at Risk’ register of Historic England has been vindicated in the most horrible way.
A foreseeable disaster, and foreseen. The Burn Bullock has been ‘disgracefully neglected for years’, Mitcham Cricket Club has said. ‘Our worst fear’, was the opening to a Twitter thread reporting the fire by a member of the Cricket Green Community & Heritage Association. They and other organisations have been sounding the alarm repeatedly for some time. It is a nightmare we have long been dreading; I have been particularly worried about it since the affair of the Crooked House in the West Midlands in which criminal owners tore down the remains of a listed pub building suspiciously promptly after it (equally suspiciously) went up in flames. So it is very hard not to feel angry as well as bereft. The thought also crosses the mind that the fire might not have been an accident, not least because it was so spectacular, even after a day of rain. I suppose we shall soon find out.
It is also depressing because — without pointing the finger of blame at any party in particular — the whole slide to this point has felt so inevitable. It seems symptomatic of broader trends that seem to be all around us at the moment, not just in Mitcham but in Britain in general: a leaden sense of ineffectiveness, impotence, even hopelessness in public life. Why were the civil authorities unable to enforce the law; why did an ‘enforcement notice’ turn out to be nothing of the sort? Why did the landowner, who himself seems to be merely a representative of a larger and even more labyrinthine investment company, allow the building to decay, fail to secure it against intruders, and otherwise neglect his responsibilities — which were as much to his neighbours as to his shareholders? Why were the mechanisms which exist precisely to prevent such catastrophes ineffective in this case? The price of this neglect is now paid by the ordinary people of Mitcham who find themselves unable to hand down to the next generation another piece of their heritage, another familiar landmark. This pub stood for three hundred years, survived road-widening (as neighbouring buildings did not), suburbanisation and the Luftwaffe (which in 1941 scored a direct hit on the nearby Cricketers pub), but we in our own time have been powerless to keep it safe. Ten years were enough to bring about its downfall — and three hours sufficient for its finale.
Why does Mitcham always seem to lose out? In spite of the hard work and determination of many locals doing their best to maintain civic pride (the Pawełek ice-cream parlour and restaurants, the Wednesday Coffee Club at the Royal British Legion, the very welcome Canons refurbishment project, a number of dedicated local conservation groups), they seem to be fighting a losing battle against the encroachment of powerful, impersonal, faceless forces. Developers who know nothing of the place and seem to have little regard for Mitcham’s vestigal ‘village feel’ (or at least the sense of a ‘village suburb’), are always circling with various outlandish plans for flats as pricey as they are boxy. The town centre around the Fair Green to the north has slumped badly in the past ten years, and the indifference of the volumes of traffic coursing their way through along all points of the compass seems symbolic of these eroding, homogenising trends. The damage to the Burn Bullock is a further and irreplaceable blow to that intangible thing, the character of a place: the particular flavour, accumulated with many layers of years and generations of pride and care, that makes it feel like home.
A picture of the pub as it was some time in the late 1980s can be seen here.
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| Mitcham Cricket Green, where cricket has been played since 1685, with the Burn Bullock pub in the background to the right. Watercolour by Terry Harrison (1951–2017), reproduced with his widow’s kind permission. |
A century since the Spring that inspired Frederick William Harvey (1888–1957) to write these lines:
Spring came by water to Broadoak this year.
I saw her clear.
Though on the earth a sprinkling
Of snowdrops shone, the unwrinkling
Bright curve of Severn River
Was of her gospel first giver.
Like a colt new put to pasture it galloped on;
And a million
Small things on its back for token
Of her coming it bore.[…] If
Spring dreamed
Lazily in Earth’s half-frozen blood,
On Severn’s flood
Her presence bravely gleamed.
Yea, all who sought her
Might see, wondering, how Spring walked the water.
The full poem can be read on the website of Gloucestershire Archives here.
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| The hamlet of Broadoak, Glos., glimpsed from a Cardiff-bound train in June 2017. In the distance, the A48 road converges with the bank of the Severn estuary. |
Harvey was a very interesting figure. In adolescence he was very close friends with the composer Herbert Howells (1892–1983) and the poet-composer Ivor Gurney (1890–1937); all three were deeply influenced in their lives and works by the landscape of their native Gloucestershire, the Cotswold hills and the river Severn in particular, yet Harvey was the only one of the three to make a permanent home in county. He was also a Catholic convert, an adherent of the Distributist cause (an attempt, championed by by Chesterton and Belloc, to translate the teachings of the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum into an economic theory) and a solicitor whose sense of charity led him so often to practise pro bono that he eventually had to sell off his business. I have written more about Harvey, Howells and Gurney here.
The Benedictus from the Missa Sabrinensis (‘Mass of the Severn’, 1954) of Herbert Howells, a great friend of Harvey’s in their youth.
This year I went to one of South London’s larger churches for the Easter Vigil Mass. It was the night before the clocks went forward, so there in the last dark evening we stood, numbering at least six hundred I should think, outside the unlit church — without temple or tabernacle, like the wandering tribes of Israel. Up from the foot of the hill drifted the grimy surf of traffic-noise; more distinct was the high whine of the trains on the main line and their percussion over points; while the Crystal Palace and Croydon transmitters glimmered silent and sentinel on their far hill. Before the west door of the church a brazier stood ready, like the one by which Peter had warmed himself and hotly denied his Lord, except that over this brazier quite different words were about to be said:
“Christ yesterday and today;the Beginning and the End;the Alpha and the Omega.All time belongs to him,and all the ages.To him be glory and powerThrough every age and for ever. Amen.”
So proclaimed Fr. David, his voice thinned but strangely clarified by the outside air, while into the Paschal Candle he carved the Cross, the letters Alpha and Omega, and the digits of the year of our (risen!) Lord 2024. Then from the brazier the candle was lit – the first light – and we heard the first call, the first music: “Lumen Christi”. “Deo Gratias,” we answered. No verb; only nouns and names – but indicative, subjunctive and imperative were all implicit in that single candle-flame. This was a good light — a light by which, if we drew near it, we should find our hope. This was our signal to follow the candle as it was carried into the cavernous church, and so, slowly, slowly, we shuffled back through the west door. Passing through the porch we were plunged into such complete darkness that I was reminded of the beginning of Genesis, of the words which in fact we would hear again shortly afterwards – of the formless void and the darkness covering the earth. But there, straight ahead at the east end of the church, the head of the procession had reached the altar: from the light from the Paschal candle a host of other waiting candles had been lit, so that the whole apse was now aglow. “Oh my goodness,” whispered a girl behind me, “This is so beautiful.” The first day — and God saw that it was good.
For at Easter the world really is recreated. As the Paschal flame is passed from pew to pew and candle to candle, as this most dramatic of all the Church’s liturgies unfolds, everything grows gradually richer and fuller and brighter. By the light spreading and strengthening through the church we saw, as in the first chapter of Genesis, new creations appearing verse by verse: the vaults above, the flowers proliferating where on Good Friday there had been only bare stone — and the human face, in six hundred lovingly-crafted permutations, illuminated and transfigured by the new fire. Then, at the Gloria, as if on the seventh day, came the loudest and most exuberant possible noise – all bells jangling, all pipes blasting. It was the steady but emphatic banishment of darkness and death.
“I sometimes think we Catholics are better at Lent than at Easter,” observed Fr. David in his homily. “We have had fasting; now it is time for feasting. This is the beginning of the season of guzzling!” But no shallow or self-deceiving merriment, this. It follows naturally from a conclusion drawn in the light of reasonable faith, albeit faith in an extraordinary, even outrageous proposition. If Christ is God made man, if He took human flesh, and if, having been put to death, He is now, somehow, unaccountably but incontrovertibly alive, then we too are completely changed. And nothing and nobody good and rightly cherished or pleasing to God has ever been, or ever will be, lost to Him. Even death is not the end of us.
We have not forgotten the desolation of Good Friday, nor the fears and hardships of our own lives. Evil and death and all its schemes and attempts at reinvention have not yet been driven out. But they have been dealt a mortal blow. A mortal blow if Christ, wearing our flesh and our nature, standing for us and in our place, can undergo the worst that evil and death can deal out, can indeed be annihilated, but can yet rise bodily from the dead and walk free from his own tomb. If it is possible for His human body, then it is possible (through Him) for our human bodies. The forces of death and of evil can flail as wildly as they please, for a season, but the final plug is already pulled on them; the clock is ticking for them. We, meanwhile, are homeward bound.
The choir of Hereford Cathedral sing ‘Good Christians all, Rejoice and Sing’ to Melchior Vulpius’s tune ‘Gelobet sei Gott’ (1609).
