Poverty

Pibisi podcast on suurin jälkeen. going into a low-paid job, people end up getting into debt, which is cumulative and has a knock-on effect. Over time, people are pushed back on to benefits and then again they have to try to get back into employment. So basically often people are getting the first step on the employment ladder and that isn't really such a great problem for people but they get knocked off and fall off that first step for all sorts of reasons and then they have to try and clamber back on. I was talking there to Tracy Schilderig. Well, I suppose I might have guessed that including a piece of research on hunting in last week's programme were prompt a significant number of emails about the immorality of the practice and the blood-tirsty character of its adherence. Of course, I recognise the strength of feeling over this issue but I'm afraid social science research necessarily deals with behaviour which often doesn't attract universal approval. There were fortunately some emails which directly addressed the subject to the research, the manner in which the hunt and its followers imposed itself upon country landscapes. Sandy Beecher resented such an imposition. Laurie, we've just taken over an acre of land in an area where two hunts exist. We keep chickens and a pony and grow our own fruit and vegetables. Thus we do not appreciate the horses and hounds charging over our land. Anyway, we're anti-blood sports. It took some time to get the hunts to understand that they did not have free use of our land and at one point when I complained a man on the horseback explained to the master of the hunt who was with him in a tone of incredulity and disgust, this woman does not want us to go on her land. Well, a discussion of the value of craft aroused by the gender emotions. Elena McGinnis, who teaches furniture design, thought that, quote, "a tremendous quality of craft skills could be learnt in much less than the 10,000 hours cited by Richard Senet." While Charles Crisp wrote eloquently about, quote, "that strange mixture of art and science which used to characterize photography a time when several hours of your life could be devoted to making one print." By thanks also to Roberto Wedge for a delightful quotation from Ursula the Gwyn, "Nothing we do," she wrote in her novel, "Always coming home is better than the work of hand mind. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written work slows the thought of things and lets it be subject to accident and time." Words that stick in the head. And that should be remembered was what I also asked for last week. Those phrases that simply won't go away. Here's Mike Dawson's favourite. Holding onto resentment is like taking poison and then hoping that the other guy gets sick. While Martin Gregory went for writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But I wonder it was Martin Wright to credit that to Frank Zapper, just asking. I thought he was somebody else. But thanks also to Pauline Littlewood and Unicmoira in case you'd like to nominate a phrase or comment on anything in today's programme, here are our addresses. Thinking aloud, BBC Radio 4, Broadcasting House London W1A1AA, or you can email us if thinking aloud at bbc.co.uk. And of course if you'd like to hear the program again, consult our archive, sign up for my newsletter, discover some of the ways the Open University is now augmenting our programmes all you need to do is go to our website and click through BBC.co.uk/ Radio 4. Back to the land where else? Wow a power in bloom. We got to get ourselves back to the garden lines from Joni Mitchell's song Woodstock performed by Cosby Stills, National Young Back in 1970. I'm afraid that even then when I was some sort of, well at least a weekend hippie, I found this idemic injunction to get back to the garden rather at odds with the pro-Zayk's bourbon reality of gardening in the UK. But that's very much the sort of sniffy attitude which is strenuously attacked in a new book called Radical Gardening, politics, idealism and rebellion in the garden. Its author is George McKay, whose professor of cultural studies, at the University of Salt. He now joins me in the studio together with Tim Jordan, senior lecturer in culture, media and creative industries at King's College London. It is difficult in a way George, isn't it? To start off with, to think about the garden as being radical. I mean let's talk about its general image. It's a bourbon, it's restful. Well but look at that song you've just played, right? They want to go down to a farm back to the garden. Why do they want to go there in order to form a rock and roll band? There's this marvellous combination of the garden, the green space, the possibility of escape from your urban environment and then you're going to go there in order to pollute it with noise and to invert and turn it inside out. There's an excitement, there's a possibility, there's a youthful privilege in cultural experimentation and just precisely that song. Okay well Tim what about this? I mean you're your image of the garden. I suppose I think of it as I mean it's essentially private really, as a private place, a place where you're constantly erecting higher, higher, a laylander in order to keep away from the neighbours rather than commune with them. And also just may I say also feminine, the idea of the cultivation of flowers in the garden, all those plays in which women enter through French to the winter windows carrying their, are they trugs of flowers? Yes feminine. Very, and maybe this is something to do also with different times of the world but also with England. And I suppose one of the things that I was thinking about when you were talking to George was the the transition when Jeff Hamilton rather suddenly and sadly was succeeded by Alan Titchmarsh on the kind of Friday night gardening program and the concern around that he's, Jeff Hamilton's kind of campaign around peat and organises and would suddenly be overtaken by a kind of Alan Titchmarsh private, you know, bonkbuster right in kind of individual who would kind of take gardens back into the borders and the panesies and the flowers. Yeah but look what happens there. I mean I think that's interesting, that switch. I mean Hamilton as the presenter before Hamilton is Percy Throer who is actually sidelined out of the job because he starts doing adverts for ICI fertilizers and the BBC doesn't really like that, doesn't think it's quite right for their head gardener effectively to be sort of having this little commercial line around chemicals. And so Hamilton comes in and you know I think there's a sort of communist tradition actually in Hamilton's family part, you know some fellow traveler thing going on there and then also there's this organic sort of impetus on his part. Titchmarsh comes in and then after Titchmarsh right we get Monty, right and what does Monty do, you know, he sees it in Blight. Monty has this extraordinary focus on the social possibilities of gardens, even doing a whole program where he's a series where he tries to get young people, damage young people and you bring them to the garden because he really believed in that period of time that the garden could sort of cure them and help them and move them into something something more, something better for them. All right let's let's let's let's let's let's let's pick up let's let's let's let's pick up hot radical let's pick up on that song that we were listening to. I mean you know late 60s early 70s flower power movement. I suppose now most people who hear the phrase flower power movement tenders are a rigid opposite of a little temporary aberration, a little bit of silly California nonsense, but you want to rescue it and say that something was going on here which was significant and you wanted to trace it actually back to the 17th century as well. Well I do, I mean I want to go back and look at the 17th century diggers and they're there ways of their kind of strategy of land grabbing and squatting on the land and taking it over and forming a kind of commonwealth, communal space where they will plant food and that that food will all be distributed freely will be freely accessible and so on and that that notion that of the 17th century diggers is picked up in the 1960s by the diggers in the United States, the counterculture, the freaks, the new tribes of hippies that are around then and also it's picked up a couple of years later in England there's a group called the Hyde Park diggers you know so that what you've got there is you have those social experimenters from the 60s looking in the past four models and ideas even if they don't you know make it perfect or even if they don't kind of make it absolutely accurate they want the idea and they want to take it on and sort of transform it in some other way. Rather as they did we say the people's park in San Francisco, we take it. Yeah so in 1969 you've got this vacant lot in San Francisco which is you know taken over by the the hippies the professors the people in the local university and they they transform it into a community garden a new space we're also there's rock music played where there's a children's playground and so on and this is very interesting because that strand continues on into the kind of development of Silicon Valley in that just south of San Francisco you know the development of notions of network world and so because a lot of the people who went back to the land who went back to some of the communists then moved into networking and moved back into San Francisco and were core to developing some of the ideas around that. I mean the obvious example of someone like Stuart Brand who was part of the Mary Pranksters who was a member of who went back to the land on various communes was also the man who invented the slogan "information wants to be free". Let's have a look at another, you've got various chapters on a whole variety of ways in which different sorts of gardens announce some form of radical intent. Let's just turn to, I hadn't thought about this before, to peace gardens. The notion of peace gardens, can you explain what lies behind this and perhaps give me some examples, George? I was looking at cultures of peace and at the way in which culture can be used for peace campaigns, for example, a way in which CND in the past has used the festival as part of its sort of cultural expression of its political viewpoint and I've also looked at the way in which music, say punk rock music has done that and I started thinking about some other forms, some other ways in which cultures of peace could manifest themselves. And in the 1980s, lots of municipal authorities, particularly socialist authorities, up down the land, started having as one of their gestures in support of an anti-nuclear campaign, they would set aside a piece of ground in one of their public parks and they would plant it in a slightly different way, design it slightly differently. It might have bamboo or it might have a cherry tree for the spring blossom, it might have Japanese maples, peace rosers, maybe even a little pagoda in some instances and these became called peace gardens and they were seen as the sort of horticultural manifestation of the councils anti-nuclear policy. And this is at the time of sort of the huge debates and protests going on around cruise missiles in Britain so it's quite a radical sort of horticultural gesture. So I mean it was saying that here is a space which we set aside here is a garden which is devoted to this. One of the other ones you've mentioned that I do know is Tabestock Square in London, perhaps you just described what happens there. I walk through there today in fact whenever I come down to London I come at Houston, I always go to Tabestock Square and walk through there. Tabestock Square is in a way it's become a peace garden because of the design elements that are in there and they include for example when you walk through it. If you look at some of the trees that are planted there and this is the notion of planting as an act of political protest. If you look at some of the trees that are planted there they will have signage at the bottom that says this tree is planted in the memory of the victims of Hiroshima. Or if you look elsewhere in the garden there are lots of benches around them, they'll be carved in memory of such and such a lifelong campaign of false socialism and against nuclear energy or something like that. And so you walk through the garden and there are these constant references within that space to political campaigners to the lives of people that have been involved in it. Jim are you are impressed by this. I mean you feel this is a phenomenon which deserves more recognition. Certainly I mean I think it's very welcome the looking at gardens in this kind of context. I suppose I'd pose some questions though around notions like memory and history, whether particularly in some way like Tavis. Square, what you're seeing is not so much radicalism is but is a memory of radicalism. It's a kind of and it's a place for contemplation and thinking and so on but what part it plays in radicalism anymore once it's established once the chair is there once the statue is there. I'm not quite so clear on. Yes I mean one might say the same about the festivals that you talk about. I mean maybe those early festivals taking over a piece of land turnies, do you like if a playground, a playground, a playground, I mean quickly evaporated when commercial elements began to take over. Well no in those instances they quickly evaporated when the authorities came in, trashed the ground and in fact in the case of people's part when the authorities came in and started shooting people. Five people were injured, one person was blind and one person was killed. Ronald Reagan who was the government of California at the time then sent the helicopters in when they were more protested to tear gas the crowds. In fact if a garden can have that kind of effect I'd say that actually it's got a presentism and a power about it. People listening now will probably be thinking of one form of gardening which could be described or which immediately suggests it's radical in some way. That's organic gardening. Just perhaps a little tiny bit of the history here because you make the interesting point that this organic movement is radical of the right and of the left. Yeah if you look at the early and the early decades of the 20th century you've got the developing organic movement in Britain and in Germany for example within Europe and and what you see there is that in Germany it's quite quickly tied into the the new agendas and doctrines of through the rise of Nazism and actually some of the organic precepts which include things like you know the Nazi slogans would include would include and keep the soil healthy. And then this sort of fetishization of the land that you get within Nazi ideology so you've got the the blood and soil movement for instance and that doctrine that's really sort of quite carefully picked up and presented manifested through organisism as well. Even references which I was quite surprised to find to the idea that being bound to the soil and part of the soil the Jews could be picked out as being somehow dislocated and even referred to as weeds because they had no set permanent home. Yes you would look at that for instance not just Jews but also Gypsies and Native Americans these were identified by the Nazis as nomadic tribes and therefore lacking in a close relationship with the soil. Jim I want to bring you in on one other one because the other contemporary manifestation which people would possibly point to as perhaps a sign of the times is the increasing ways in which the British have taken to a lotment. So I'm looking at about 330,000 allotments now the revival of this movement. I mean it's suggested in George's book that perhaps here we see more examples of radicalism. Do you take it that way? Well partly but I think it's questionable it is also very much part of a kind of middle class concern with organisism and George's book is very powerful on on the connection of organisism and the connection with how people conceive of the soil in allotments and so on. But as also George outlines allotments in the UK are very much part of a kind of regularised system managed by local authorities, often at threat and sold off at times when local authorities are short of money. So I think allotments pose a number of problems in that they allow people to garden and I when I had a lot of time for a short time took a class of kind of you know 20 odd you know 12 year olds down so they could pull out a carrot and see what it was like. Where would I look then for example would you look at would I go to a lot of the lotments look for example I would look at a lot of them yes you know in fact I argue I've got this reading of allotments in the book which isn't to do with the practice of the sort of hands in the dirt it's more to do with the ideas behind the allotment movement and they include include two which are they make a suggestion that they they show that there's a certain anti-capitalist impulse within the allotment movement but probably surprising new tumour eyes are raising as I say that. That's based on sort of two areas of thinking about one is the way in which the rents for allotment are such a powerful rejection of can't contemporary land values you know by local authorities it's almost a sort of sweeping you can have this piece of land for you a lotment for 30 pounds a year and the land is worth half a million or something like that and then secondly within the allotment when you have all your your glat of produce through the year right in most instances you're not actually allowed to sell that you can't have a commercial transaction you have to go through the gift and glad economy. I take it you neither be would agree with the contention of some of my old left wing friends the reason we hadn't had a proper proletarian revolution in this country was because the proletarian was far too busy cultivating their gardens. Absolutely not. I think of the French will be Italian's marvell scarling traditions and pretty lively with revolution as well. Alright and there we have the sort of Tim Jordan the George McKay thank you very much. Let's have one last celebration of the garden good heavens let's have it from what an extraordinary coupling Lenin Bernstein and Voltaire Candide and Kunigander embarking upon at last a modest human project. You build a house and chop a wood and make a garden through and people go near. Happy gardening. Well I do hope you enjoyed that program and if you'd like to hear something similar why not try downloading the in our time podcast at bbc.co.uk/radio4 When you're done you have a lot of work to do. What do you think about the future? When you're working on the market you have to do the private banking and you have to work on the market to get a job. You have to work on the company you work on to the private banking. We have to work on the market to get a job. Let's start with the next one.