St Nicholas Church

The parish church in old Stevenage. 50 feet from the door is a wooden headboard in memory of JaneF 1810 - 1859, my great great (great?) aunt. Because it is wooden it is replaced every few decades, so it is much more legible than all those other headstones surrounding the old church.

A bit beyond the church is a large house on its own - which EM Forster made Howard's End in his novel. There is a great description in the book of the walk from the old railway station up past Alleyne's School along the Avenue and past this church.

The extra is the view from Mum and Dad's bedroom window. These council houses were built in 1948 on the site of Cork Lines field (he was a farmer and had two hardware stores on the High St). The new labour government after the war insisted that all new houses were brick built with solid walls, and to good standards. The subsequent tory government in the 1950's changed all that. Plus ca change.

I still find it amazing that `Stevenage has a conservative MP. It first went that way in 1979 when Shirley Williams lost her seat, partly because Margaret Thatcher was a woman (I know one elderly lady whose decision was based on that fact alone !), and partly because of labour's resistance to right to buy for council tenants.Since 1979 the local result has matched the national one, so this town was labour through the Blair years. Since 1979 huge numbers of council tenants in this town have bought their houses - everyone aspires to something better, whatever the rights or wrongs of the policy. Whether people in this working south east town identify with Jeremy Corbyn, who strikes me as from the intellectual hard left .......

Our current government sees council housing as "welfare". The latest changes to policy are going to have big impacts on the poorest which I find very worrying. We have come a long way since 1948, and not always in a good way.