She Blinded Me With Science?

She blinded me with science? Or did she? Not really. Though she did render me short, or partially, sighted with science. She being Fiona Fox, a founding member of the Science Media Centre.

Fiona was with Skeptics in the Pub - Online (last night hosted by Gerard Sorko in Cologne) for a talk based on, and named after, her book Beyond the Hype:The Inside Story of Science's Biggest Media Controversies. It was, truth be told, a little dryer than that title suggests.

Beset by a few tech gremlins (not the first time the Twitch glitch has struck at one of these events), Fiona told us about the history of the Science Media Centre and some examples of the good (or you may think not so good) work they do. Lots of prominent scientists had their names dropped but for the most part they meant nothing to me.

Which, on its own, shows that the founding of the Science Media Centre was a good thing and, also, that they still have work to do. The new book, which Fiona briefly read from (a section about the Labour government's sacking of 'drugs czar' Professor David Nutt for suggesting taking ecstasy was no more dangerous than riding a horse), was written in 2019 but had has a couple of addendums to cover recent events.

 

It tells the story of the Science Media Centre which was set up, as an independent body, in 2002 and some of the big cases they've been involved with. Back in the late nineties/early noughties, there were lots of news stories floating around that were causing the public to lose their trust in scientists - and even science.

Fiona cited the case of the disgraced former physician, and now anti-vaxxer, Andrew Wakefield who falsely claimed that the MMR jab caused autism as well as stories about Monsanto and GM foods. She also brought up the BSE scare which to my, probably ailing, recall seems to come from further back.

No matter. The point being that every time a new science interest story broke it came attached with heated rows that alienated much of the public. Activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth would have an opinion and make it public and multinationals with vested interests, like Monsanto, would do so too. But the scientific voices were barely audible in the public debate.

Back at the foundation of the Science Media Centre (SMC from now on in), social media barely existed so they focused on the news media (or what some now disparagingly call the 'mainstream media') and they pioneered a more proactive approach from scientists. The idea wasn't to take either side in debates but to provide to the best information available to the public and to use maximum openness in doing so.

The first example Fiona spoke about was that of stem cell research/therapeutic cloning. Stem cell research is useful in helping scientists understand awful diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Motor Neurone but there was a shortage of eggs available to do the research and some felt the eggs of animals could be the solution.

It was happening in China (and, as we all know, interactions between animals and humans in China have never caused any major problems!!) but people here were being fed stories about "designer babies" and "Frankenstein's monster". Fox and her team called a press conference and, in her own words, won a lot of people over.

A vaguely contentious claim but probably a true one (she didn't seem like a liar). More difficult for me was when she went on to talk about 'animal research'. It's tough for me because I've been a veggie for nearly forty years, I used to buy Crass records that had huge and powerful anti-vivisection messages in them, and because my ex-girlfriend worked for the BUAV (the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection).

Fox spoke about violent protests at Cambridge University preventing the building of a new animal research laboratory. I remember that too, vaguely, but from a whole different perspective. 

She also spoke about how the Wellcome Trust, a place she attended for a talk on animal research', told her not to use the word animal, the 'a' word, because it brought the wrong sort of attention. Fox and others cajoled some of the animal lab people to at least speak publicly about what they are doing and why.

She wasn't saying, and didn't say last night, that animal research was or wasn't ethical. Just that those involved should be open and have their side heard. Not just hide away. I actually agree with that though it's probably easier said than done.

It seems to me that the SMC are, on the whole, on the side of good and even if I have trouble with the fews of vivisectionists I do at least realise it's a complicated and complex world and shutting people down, or shutting ourselves down, won't make it any better.

A Q&A touched on e-cigarettes, ebola, Twitter, the polarised society - polarised by Twitter, and, of course, Covid. It wasn't the most interesting Skeptics talk I've ever attended but, like all of them, I learned something about the world and then, by writing this blog, learned a little about myself.

Theatre night:Straight Line Crazy.

Do the people really know what they want? Is it not sometimes better that a man of vision uses his own forceful personality to push through major changes on their behalf? Is it not worth breaking a few laws to get a job done?

All of these questions, of course, could speak to the era of populists we find ourselves living in. But, equally, they have all remained pertinent throughout time. Nicholas Hytner's direction of David Hare's Straight Line Crazy at the Bridge Theatre, near Tower Bridge, takes us to last century New York to look at the life and career of one such man.

Robert Moses was, for over thirty decades, New York's "master builder". He built parks, bridges, playgrounds, and, most of all, expressways. But he never built rail stations, subway stations, or infrastructure for other forms of public transport. For Moses, it seems, the automobile was God and nothing should stand between the quickest route from A to B for the motorist.

We start in late twenties Long Island with Moses (played brilliantly, of course, by Ralph Fiennes) informing the wealthy businessman and philanthropist Henry Vanderbilt (Guy Paul) of the need for change. Of the need to build bridges and roads that allow New Yorkers to enjoy the clean waters and golden sands as well as the obscenely rich families that have built huge houses there.

Informing him. Not asking his advice or consulting with him. Moses is clearly a brilliant ideas man, with huge executive function, but for him 'no' tends to be an unacceptable answer and it is one he mostly ignores. He works, in an office full of wonderful maps and architectural models, with a small team who clearly admire his can-do attitude and skills to get a job over the line but sometimes question his tactics.

Ariel Porter (Samuel Barnett) is an eager to please young Jewish lad from Oklahoma with a mostly conciliatory nature but Finnuala Connell (Siobhan Cullen), an Irish woman who has grown up in poverty and worked her way out of it, is more prepared to lock horns with the boss. The nature of their exchanges, all scripted superbly, are among the play's most thrilling, and moving, moments.

The one man Moses is prepared to, sometimes, back down to is New York Governor Al Smith. Danny Webb plays Governor Smith, possibly correctly - I don't know, as a bow tie wearing, cigar chomping, Bourbon guzzling wise guy. He's not on stage for long but while he is he's completely captivating. Even getting a mid-act round of applause when he leaves the stage like some kind of sitcom character.

The second act takes us thirty years forward. Connell and Porter are still with Moses who has, in the three decades we've skipped, become hugely successful. Initially, on the back of Governor Smith greenlighting his Long Island project.

But now Moses wants to build an expressway right through the heart of Washington Square Gardens and, following a similar building programme in the Bronx, many aren't happy about it. Actress Shirley Hays (Alana Maria) and journalist Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) head up a campaign to stop the plan and some even go so far as to suggest pedestrianising the roads already around Washington Square Gardens.

Green ideas are coming into play, notions of urban renewal rather than slum clearance are evolving, and Moses is in danger of becoming a man out of his time. Highlighted by an exchange with a new member of his team, a young woman of colour by the name of Mariah Heller (Alisha Bailey).

But can Moses see change coming or is he just too pig-headed? Will his empire collapse around him as he refuses to listen to new ideas and what of those around him, Connell and Porter, who are beginning to feel the winds of change that Moses resolutely refuses to acknowledge.

It's to Straight Line Crazy's great credit that even at Moses' most bombastic, bordering on cruel, moments he is never painted as pantomime villain. Nor are his detractors depicted as angels. Straight Line Crazy tells a fascinating, and nuanced story, and kept me gripped to the very last, and powerful, line. Massively recommended. 

Concrete and Quercus:From Clockwork Oranges to Norman Conquests.

"See. I have taken England with both my hands" - William the Conqueror (aka William the Bastard)

"Then brothers, it came. Oh bliss, bliss and heaven. I lay all naggy to the ceiling, my gulliver on my rookers on the pillow, glazzies closed, rot open in bliss, slooshying open the sluice of lovely sounds. Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh" - Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange.

 

When I conceived the idea for a walk that took in the Brutalist architecture of Thamesmead with the ruins of the Norman conquest era Lesnes Abbey nearby we'd yet to enter our first lockdown. By the time the walk, finally, came round a lot had changed and I'd even heard rumours that many of the more ominous buildings of Thamesmead had been pulled down.

That certainly didn't feel the case when we got there but, to begin with, there were far more mundane concerns to deal with. I'd taken the 122 bus from Brockley Rise to Woolwich with the aim of meeting some of the other walkers in the Arsenal Gate Cafe on Plumstead Road, a breakfast location we had used a couple of times before and found to be highly satisfactory.

When I arrived it was (temporarily) closed. After scouting around a bit I met with Shep and we headed to a nearby Wimpy where we were joined by Mo for breakfast. I had a Coke and some beans on toast. When Michelle and Marianne arrived they had Marianne's dog, the adorable Pip, with them so they had to have a takeaway (from the Wimpy again) in a nearby, and windy, square.

On leaving the Wimpy we headed back to the station and met with LbF debutante Katie and that was to be our gang for the day. A good gang it was too, everybody - as ever - getting on brilliantly. Though I was disappointed to learn, later that evening, that Roxanne and Clive (who had joined our last LbF walk through the parks of Bushy and Richmond) had been at the station and that Roxanne had sent me a message on Facebook to let me know.

Facebook notified me of it nearly twelve hours later. Bad Facebook - and apologies to Roxanne and Clive. The six of us took the now familiar No 1 street down to the bank of the Thames, taking in the cannons and the Gormley sculptures and pondering gentrification as per usual, but, this time, we turned away from the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery and the Thames Path and headed easterly.

The sweep of the river is broad and impressive here and we continued along it until we reached the edge of Thamesmead and then, via a small lake (one of many) called Broadwater, we took a diversion  through the surprisingly pretty Gallion's Park. Festooned with waterfowl and occasioning a brief conversation on the shape of a duck's penis. 

You probably needed to be there. A few paths took us to Gallion's Hill (or, as I'd written in my spiel - a little harshly, the unimpressive Gallion's Hill). A manmade tor that gives 'unusual' views of London, a handful of us climbed to the top where Pip ran around with much happiness.

On descending into a playground that featured what appeared to be a climbing frame designed to look like 'lady parts', we managed to take a couple of wrong turns before returning to the riverside and following that into Thamesmead proper.

Which we'd soon discover is not the easiest of places to negotiate. The small, almost toytown like, town centre had an impressive clock tower and a decidedly unimpressive looking pub called The Cutty Sark. It was St George's Day but, still, the amount of flags depicting the St George cross hanging on bunting outside, and the lack of windows, soon deterred us from paying a visit.

We left the town centre, glamorously, through an ALDI car park and crossed the busy A2041 dual carriageway twice before finding a path that followed a man made canal that, of course, had an abandoned shopping trolley in it. Other than that, it looked quite nice in places even if it did take us through a couple of concrete tunnels that would probably not have been fun to walk through at night.

Avoiding, sadly, Twin Tumps, we passed through Hawksmoor Park (no known link to the architect of that name as far as I could see) and came out into a world of concrete. It was probably what I had expected and hoped for and although there were six of us and it was a sunny day it still felt pretty imposing. The graffiti that read 'WAKE ME UP WHEN IT'S ALL OVER' seemed to say it all. 

The legend TADZ on a concrete bridge we'd pass over was not, I must insist, our handywork. The Lakeside Bar (which boasted of no real ale but a full range of Slush Puppies) appeared to have been closed down and though we'd found another pub option on our phones it looked none too inviting so we decided we'd had our fill of Brutalism and concrete and instead we'd head to Abbey Wood where a promising pub awaited us.

If we had gone to the Lakeside Bar we'd been enjoying those Slush Puppies in the Tavy Bridge area of Thamesmead where some of the famous scenes of A Clockwork Orange were filmed as well as Alan Clarke's The Firm and music videos for Aphex Twin (Come To Daddy), The Libertines (What Became of the Likely Lads?), and Skepta/A$AP Rocky (Praise the Lord (Da Shine)).

You probably get the idea. Thamesmead stands in, so often, for urban dystopia because there's so much concrete from when it was mostly built in the 1960s to provide social housing. But its history does date back further. There is evidence, in the form of flints, charcoal, and animal bones, of prehistoric human activity and pottery and tools from Germany have been found here from when, in Roman times, the Thames was considerably wider.

In 1812-16 convicts built a canal to take material from the Thames to Woolwich (not sure why they didn't just use the river). The estates built at the end of the sixties were inspired by similar schemes in Sweden and it was believed the calming influence of the waterways and lakes would reduce crime and vandalism. The walkways between the blocks started off looking futuristic but soon became full of litter and many considered them unsafe.

So residents ignored official routes and created their own desire paths. The well intentioned ideas behind Thamesmead hadn't been fully thought out. When much of the area was built by the GLC for families moving out of overcrowded Victorian terraces in more central parts of London, flats were built with living accommodation at first floor or above because of the North Sea Flood of 1953 which affected the area.

The flood killed over 2,500 people (mostly in the Netherlands but 300 died across Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire), 30,000 animals, and flooded 9% of all Dutch farmland. It inspired the building of the Thames Barrier but that was not until 1984, after Thamesmead. So now you have the rather strange condition of having houses whose garages face out to the road but whose doors and windows don't.

Other problems contributed to Thamesmead's reputation. The plans to extend the Jubilee Lane to include Thamesmead never happened and the area sits in a fifteen mile gap between the Blackwall Tunnel and the QE2 bridge so crossing the river to Barking or the City, for work, became expensive and time consuming. Alongside transportation issues, to begin with Thamesmead's design had an almost complete lack of shops, banks, or pubs. Even to get to Abbey Wood you had to walk across the railway line.

There's a bridge takes you easily over now but, more intriguingly, there are also a couple of random horses just hanging around. We think they were something to do with a nearby veterinary centre

As Thamesmead became Abbey Wood it became noticeably leafier. We stopped for a drink in the Abbey Arms which seemed a pretty pleasant pub although there was a man dressed as a St George's Cross with a very unfit looking bulldog on a lead in there. His face was as red as the red on the cross and, of course, this occasioned the use of the word 'gammon' but he was probably harmless enough and certainly didn't ruin our pleasant little, and by then - quite long awaited, pit stop.

One in which I got to address the crowd with some more local history. Though the area isn't great for pubs what it is good for is prisons. Belmarsh (notable inmates have included Abu Hamza, Julian Assange, Anjem Choudary, Jo Cox's killer Thomas Mair, the far right nail-bomber David Copeland and Lee Rigby's killers Michael Adebolojo and Michael Adebowale), the unfortunately named Isis (a young offender's institute), and Thameside - a private prison (!) owned by Serco!

We were here, now, to visit somewhere much nicer and it wasn't far at all from the pub to the rather lovely Lesnes Abbey Woods, great views of London - the centre of which now looked very far, more bluebells than I've ever seen, some lovely walks, the promise of smooth newts, and a peculiar statue of a monk.

The centrepiece is Lesnes Abbey itself. We had a brief explore. Following the Norman conquest of 1066 the area of Lesnes fell into the hands of Bishop Odo (half-brother of William the Conqueror and, then, second in charge). In 1178 the Abbey of St Mary and St Thomas was founded by Richard de Luci, Chief Justician of England (a kind of proto-PM) who had been involved in the murder of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

In 1381, Abel Ker of Erith led a local uprising (linked to Wat Tyler's Peasants Revolt) which forced the abbot to support them. They ended up marching to Maidstone and joining Tyler and his men. In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey closed the abbey (which then had less than seven 'inmates') and within ten years, following Henry VIII's Dissoution of the Monasteries, most of the abbey was pulled down. What's left is what you see now. You can quite easily speculate about how vast it must have once been and I couldn't help wondering how I'd never got round to visiting before.

As we crossed through the woods themselves (now sadly without Katie who had other engagements and had had to dash off) I read the brief spiel I'd prepared about Abbey Wood. Notables include Steve Davis (he went to school there), Kate Bush, and Tinie Tempah. A less celebrated local is Robert Napper, the Green Chain rapist who killed Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992 as well as a few others including children

On leaving the park, we wandered roadside for a short while to Belvedere to two pubs that were both rammed and looked quite unappealing. We'd had a good walk and nobody seemed to mind missing out on Plumstead Common (despite the promise of deposits of puddingstone - pebbles that apparently look like Xmas puddings) so we hopped on a bus and jumped out at Plumstead to see if there was another pub stop we could make before we arrived back in Woolwich.

There was nothing that looked inviting, the busiest place was the mosque and you can't get a drink there, but the outdoor launderettes in a garage forecourt were, to say the least, curious. It wasn't that long before we reached Woolwich and, there, we retired to a table outside the far more pleasant Dial Arch public house for another quick drink.

Michelle, Marianne, and Pip headed back from there and Mo, Shep, and myself headed to the Nepali/Tibetan eaterie Kailash Momo for more food (lots of pics below, I didn't know what half the stuff on the menu was but it went down well with Shep and Mo) and Kathmandu and Gurkha beer.

From there we all took the train home. It had been an unusual LbF walk (is there such a thing as a normal one?) but I'd enjoyed the day and found it interesting. Others told me they had too (I hope they weren't just trying not to hurt my feelings, the fact they - mostly - keep coming back suggests they enjoy these days). Thanks to Shep, Mo, Michelle, Marianne, Katie, and, of course, Pip for being such great companions (and, in some cases, providing snaps for this blog). LbF goes again on Saturday 18th June for Salus Populi Suprema Lex Pt 1 (a celebration of the Borough of Lewisham, this year's London borough of culture) but, before that, TADS are back with The Walk That Space Managed Time (Pangbourne to Reading) on the 7th May. Hope to see you all again soon.