When you walk around London, beneath your feet are layers and layers of history. There are also, so we’re told, millions and millions of rats, massive but leaking Victorian sewers, and more than the odd plague pit. These are the aspects of the city that captured the imagination of Stephen Smith, and in his Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets he seeks to find all of these and more.

He’s a journalist, and has the journalist’s knack of talking his way into the oddest places and situations, from the crypt of St Andrew’s Holborn as workmen clear out a noxious mix of bodies, coffins and maybe the odd anthrax spoor, to a river boat from which a small boy is being dangled by his ankles while he beats the water with a cane. (No, we’re not talking hideous Satanist ceremonies there; rather an old City tradition.)

He starts out in the Tube – noting that in 2002 a new record for visiting all 272 stations was set (19 hours, 18 minutes and 45 seconds) – and ends up at the Thames Barrier, (the definition of underground sometimes being rather loose), with a nasty reminder that the foundations of the city might be less secure than they seem, its use having risen from only nine times between 1982 and 1991, to 14 times in one week in 2002.

Smith writes with brio, if sometimes self-conscious brio. He’s setting himself up as a character, and that “personality” side of his writing, like those TV archaeologists who leap around like Archimedes on his best day just because they’ve found a pot sherd, can get annoying. But the writing moves fast enough that this is only a momentary irritation.

The research is somewhat scanty in places, but its breadth is its redeeming feature. So a visit to Berry Brothers, the “Italian warehouse” set up by the Widow Bourn in 1698, opposite the royal tennis court in St James’s Palace provokes reflections on everything from Pitt the Younger and Napoleon III weighing themselves in the basement to a 1991 cause celebre when six Barclay Bank employs got themselves into hot water by spending £44,000 on one lunch. Then he joins in a wine tasting at the firm (that’s now their specialty):

“To the accompaniment of the silky, ship’s-screw noise of air conditioning, tipplers circulated among damask-draped tables, accepting the equivalent of an optic or so of the ruby-coloured stuff from the Berry staff. The punters glugged and spat – or swallowed, at their discretion – before jotting down their thoughts on the ports. The illusion that these smartly dressed men and women were fastidiously keeping dance-cards reinforced an impression that the evening belonged to a bygone age.”

The focus on being below soil produces some surprising results. I don’t know that under the Merton Abbey Savacentre – in the southwest corner of the Tube map – there is indeed the remains of an abbey – one that once rivalled Westminster in size and wealth. Nor did I know that fragments of Henry VIII’s tennis court survive in the Cabinet Office, and can be viewed on the London Open House weekend. (Something got the diary there.)

As a potted introductory history to the city for the neophyte, or as a reminder to a jaundiced veteran that there are still many things to discover, Underground London digs in nicely.

It might be as much fashion as real action, but interesting to learn that second-hand hybrid cars are appreciating in value:

A few days ago I got a call from one of my hybrid-owning friends, who is about to trade in her 2003 Honda Civic hybrid for a new one. Apparently her Honda, which has low mileage and no dings or scratches, is worth $21,000, because demand for the new models cannot be met by the manufacturers. Not bad, given that she bought it three years ago for $18,600.
“I can’t believe it,” gloated my friend. “Houses are supposed to appreciate, not cars.” So, it seems, conspicuous thrift can actually result in a conspicuous profit.

Then, more cheery news, on cancer – yes really – a fascinating analysis of increasing evidence of the role of infections in cancer. Which presents the possibility, as in the case of cervical cancer, of a vaccine against it.

If conscience is to be your guide, is it actually possible to live in the world? If you put every action, every dependency, to intense moral questioning, how can you act at all? In today’s secular world that’s a question with which many individuals wrestle, and it is one that Quakers, and religious groups that like them put the focus on a guiding inner light, have been grappling for centuries.

These are the questions facing the two central characters in Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife, which has just transferred from Dublin, the setting of the play, to the Soho Theatre in London. But this is the 1840s Irish city, in a nation already on the edge of economic and social collapse.

Hannah Tewkley (Jane Brennan), an intense, mid-30s, childless Quaker wife almost consumed by a career in “good works”, has an uneasy relationship with her own body, but an even more uncomfortable relationship with her husband Samuel (Barry Barnes). He is a tea, coffee and sugar merchant who plans to branch out into oriental tea-houses. He squares his own rather flexible conscience in using America – slave-grown – sugar, amidst other moral “crimes”, by funding his wife’s philanthropy and pointing to the likely fate of his employees were he to go out of business.

Into this volatile, uncomfortable house are invited – at the insistence of Hannah – two visiting anti-slavery campaigners, the former slave Sarah Worth (Susan Salmon) and the man who bought her out of slavery, the rich-boy turned rebel Alfred Darby (Robert Price). The latter has apparently solved the problem of conscience by living entirely by his principles – to the point, it emerges, of living on Sarah’s earnings so he can devote himself to his “work” and to “art” (producing daguerreotypes). READ MORE

“House of Commons] On Saturday the 12th day of December [43 Eliz., 1601]. . . . An Act for redress of certain abuses used in Painting was read the third time.”

Mr Heyward Townsend … shewed, that in the statute of 25 Ed. 3 Cap. 3 Plaisterers were not then so called but Dawbers and Mudwall-Makers, who had for their Wages by the day three pence, and their Knave three half-pence (for so was his Labourer called) they so continued till King Henry the Sevenths time, who brought into England with him out of France certain men that used Plaister of Paris about the Kings Sieling and Walls, whose Statute Labourers these Dawbers were. These Statute Labourers learned in short time the use of Plaister of Paris, and did it for the King …

… They renewed their Patent in King Henry the Eighths time, and called themselves Plaisterers aliàs Morter-Makers, for the use of Loam and Lyme.

… In all their Corporations at no time had they the word Colours, nor yet in their Ordinances. … The Plaisterers never laid any Colour upon any of the Kings Houses, nor in the Sheriffs of London, but this Year. … They have been suffered to lay Alehouse Colours as red Lead and Oaker with such like and now intrude themselves to all Colours; Thus they take not only their own work but Painting also, and leave nothing to do for the Painter.”

Reading between the lines, it seems the debate in the lower house lapsed without agreement, the subject went to the Lords, who appointed a few members to try to mediate in the dispute. And people complain about modern-day regulation!

From Tudor Economic Documents: Being Select Documents Illustrating the Economic and Social History of Tudor England by (eds) Eileen Power, R. H. Tawney; Longmans, Green and Co., 1924, p. 136-39.

While you still have the occasional dinosaur judge making stupid comments in rape cases, increasingly in Britain we have cause to thank them for defending civil liberties, and even women’s rights. The latest today is a ruling that parents do not have a “right to know” if their under-16 daughter has an abortion.

Mr Justice Silber ruled that Ms Axon, who has five children – or any other parent – had no right to know unless the child decided otherwise.
He said he would not change the law as Ms Axon’s lawyers had requested. Lawyers for the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, had fought the legal challenge.
The judge added that to force a girl to tell her parents “may lead her to make a decision that she later regrets or seek the assistance of an unofficial abortionist”.

Obviously it is preferable for girls to be supported by their families if they are considering an abortion, but those reluctant to do so may well have VERY good reasons for their choice.
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Then a gimmick, yes, but I’d go to garage with an all female-staff for preference, even though my upbringing means I can talk “mechanic”, even if I’m only talking the talk. (I once had a 45-minute discussion with a mini-cab driver about whether the problems he had with third and fourth gear were the clutch or the gearbox. I then regretted being able to talk the talk.)
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Turning serious again, micro-loan schemes for women have proved enormously popular and effective, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the mother of them all SEWA, has run into political problems in Gujarat. Empowering women, and women from disadvantaged communities, is always likely to stir up those who’d like to keep them poor and vulnerable.
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And I get the impression often from talking to Britons that they think Australia is some sort of natural paradise – well no, the cities are often a traffic-packed hell. The calculation for Sydney:

ROAD transport is costing Sydney $1.4 billion a year in greenhouse gas and other air pollution, with the city’s heavy congestion exacerbating ill health and climate change.
That is the conclusion of a report by the Centre for International Economics, which also found that over the next 15 years the annual cost of greenhouse gas emissions would rise by almost a third, to $187 million.

Another calculation: “commuters are wasting more than three days of their lives every year stuck in traffic”.

Despite all of the hysteria about the “sexualisation of society”, and you wouldn’t think it when you read the Daily Mail, but it seems that in Britain a significant number of teenagers are waiting longer to have sex. Perhaps sex education is working?

The poll reveals that the number of people having sex before 16 years old has fallen from 32 per cent in 2002 to 20 per cent now.
The age at which the typical Briton loses their virginity has increased since they were last asked in 2002, when the figure was 17.13 years. Young women generally have sex younger than their male counterparts – at the age of 17.44 years, compared with 18.06 for men.

And sanity is striking in terms of long-term relationships: “The number of people who believe that monogamy is natural, from 74 per cent to 67, showed that with Britons living longer and healthier lives, the idea of lifetime fidelity is in decline.”

The figures on homosexuality are also interesting, with “those admitting to having had sexual contact with someone of the same sex” rising from 11 per cent to 15. Does that mean more sex, or just more openness? Pretty hard to tell.

There’s more analysis of the survey here.

Although of course some things never change, with the News of the World salivating today over the resignation of the Liberal Democrat Home Affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, after it revealed his relationship with a rent boy. (He is supposed to be, and who knows, maybe even is, “happily married”, with two children.) Now that’s traditional Britishy sexuality …

We’d better watch out, however, since American missionaries will probably be over here soon, trying to reverse the trends, as they are elsewhere.

From Peru to the Philippines to Poland, U.S.-based conservative groups are increasingly engaged in abortion and family-planning debates overseas, emboldened by their ties with the Bush administration and eager to compete with more liberal rivals.
The result is that U.S. advocacy groups are now waging their culture war skirmishes worldwide as they try to influence other countries’ laws and wrangle over how U.S. aid money should be spent.