Discover Roe Green Walled Garden at free Open Day today & learn about volunteering opportunities

The brilliant and hard working Barn Hill Conservation Group have their Open Day at their Roe Green Walled Garden today.

Apart from running the garden the volunteers do invaluable conservation work in Fryent Country Park. They also run other activites in the park. Like any such organisation they can always do with more volunteers. This is an opportunity for you to help preserve a valuable green space, get healthy outdoor exercise without the expense of going to a gymn, and meeting like-minded people.

See the Group's full programme below:

Brent to stand in solidarity with youth climate activists on September 20th - please join in

“This is not a single-generation job. It’s humanity’s job... Let’s all join together, with your neighbours, co-workers, friends, family and go out on to the streets to make your voices heard and make this a turning point in our history.” Greta Thunberg and 46 youth activists from the international school strike movement

Local environmental activists, including Friends of the Earth and Divest Brent; trade unionists, politicians and parents are planning to answer the call from Greta Thunberg and other youth activists  adults to support the global climate youth movement by assembling at Brent Civic Centre at 9.30am on Friday September 20th in a display of support and solidarity. There will be a wide range of speakers united in recognising the urgent need to address the climate emergency.

Brent Council has given permission for staff to join the rally for 30 minutes as long as they seek their manager's permission and there is minimal impact on service provision.
Brent recently adopted a motion declaring a Climate Emergency and is planning to set up a a Citizens' Panel on Climate in October,

Brent National Education Union is urging its members to take creative action on the day:

After the rally many activists and supporters will move on the Central London to join the youth strikers at Mill Bank:

Further information:

UK Student Climate Network

Campaign Against Climate Change

Friends of the Earth

'Change your body; change your mind; change your life' - Author event at Preston Community Library

By Kazuaki Obazaki; numbered limited edition shikishi card print

From Preston Community Library

 

GUEST AUTHOR EVENT AT PRESTON COMMUNITY LIBRARY

Tuesday 17 September 2019 at 7.30pm

Please join us for an evening with Julian Daizan Skinner Roshi, the first Englishman to go to Japan and become a Zen master in the rigorous Rinzai tradition, and artist and meditator Lazz. They will be talking about and reading from their new book, Rough Waking.

Daizan is also the teacher of Samantha Warrington, Preston Community Library's yoga and meditation teacher.

Rough Waking is a project to raise funds for and awareness of people who are homeless or in prison, and to provide them with yoga and meditation, under the motto:

CHANGE YOUR BODY; CHANGE YOUR MIND; CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Prize-winning photographer and meditator, Lazz, uses words and images and an intimate knowledge of homelessness to illustrate his path through brokenness to creativity.

Inspired by Zen Master Shinzan’s joke that Zen life combines prison and homelessness, “Autumn in the monastery and other poems,” by Julian Daizan Skinner depicts pains and joys arising through his three decades in the Zen world.

Zen artist Kazuaki Okazaki who, after 18 years incarceration on death row was executed last summer, contributes a sequence of images depicting a spiritual journey from lostness and wandering, through the intense confinement of Zen training, and then onwards into a new homelessness – a vastly expanded realm of liberation and service.

The whole book underscores the Zen emphasis on direct confrontation with reality and how for all of us that alone leads to liberation

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Capitalism cannot solve the Climate Crisis - John McDonnell & others address the issues

John McDonnell MP

 Cllr Roxanne Mashari

Many thanks to Peter Murry of Brent Green Party who filmed the meeting for Brent FoE and Brent Trades Council

Friends of the Earth is a non-party political campaign but in the current febrile atmosphere with expectations of a General Election in the Autumn it was perhaps inevitable that a bit of party politics entered last night's meeting on Green Jobs which was addressed by John McDonnell MP. The meeting was co-organised bt Brent FoE and Brent Trades Council.

In fact a consensus emerged about what was required to enable a transition to a zero carbon economy with much much shared by eco-socialists in the Labour Party, the Green Party and those affiliated to no party.

Perhaps the main point of agreement was that capitalism, based as it is on exploiting finite natural and material resources for profit, cannot solve the climate crisis. We should look to a different economic system to meet the climate emergency and transform society so that lives are actually better whilst not destroying the planet. The Green New Deal is a starting point for such a transformation based as it is on a just transition to a zero carbon economy and environmentally sustainable and socially useful production.

Aaron Kiely of Friends of the Earth

Northwick Park: How your community garden has grown!

I popped into Northwick Park Community Garden last sunny Sunday to see how it was progressing and was truly impressed. This great community project, using permaculture principles to produce an environmentally friendly edible garden ,is supported by many volunteers and is a great tribute to the local people - growing community as well as plants!

To visit alight from Northwick Park tube and leave via Westminstre University/Hospital exit and turn  sharp left and follow the wildflower meadow to the corner of the park.

Labour Council votes to close top perfoming local authority school

Speaker after speaker, parents, teachers, other staff and supporters passionately made the case for Brent Labour Council not to close Strathcona School at tonight's meeting of the Labour Council's Cabinet. They pointed out flaws in the officer's report: incorrect data, the failure to consider the school's case for additional provision at the school and pointed out Brent's failure to market the school to address spare spaces. The Council itself had asked Roe Green Infants to operate on two sites with additional classes at Strathcona and the staff had fought hard to meet the challenge to make the two-sites operate efficiently despite them between 10 minutes drive apart. Now the Council was citing the expense of maintaining two sites, and the additional funding needed, as the reason for closing one of them.

The crowded public gallery at the Cabinet meeting

The Strathcona school is in the top 3% of schools for pupil progress and speakers read out heart-rending messages from pupils expressing what the school means to them. Mary Adossides, speaking on behalf of Brent Trades Council, challenged the Council, asking why a Labour Council was ignoring Labour's manifesto commitment to supporting state schools. Cllr Daniel Kennelly (Preston) attacked the poor report being presented to the Cabinet raising Council leader Muhammed Butt's ire and also asked what a Labour Council was doing closing its own schools.


Apologies for the shaky video at times - there was standing room only at this point in the meeting!

In a closing statement Butt made a speech that became a rant citing the leadership's responsibility to make 'hard decisions' and voice rising began to throw everything into the pot including the proroguing of Parliament in an increasingly incoherent justification for the closure. The headteacher of the school rose from her seat in the public gallery to inform him that as a school leader she knew what leadership really was and that it was not leadership that she has seen from Cllr Butt this evening.

The Cabinet voted unanimously for closure but with determined parents, staff and union we may not have heard the end of it yet.

Brent Green Party backs striking Strathcona School staff

Peter Murry, Trade Union Liasion Officer for Brent Green Party and the London Federation of Green Parties has issued the following statement about today's strike:

Brent Green Party and London Federation of Green Parties send support and solidarity to the staff of Strathcona School  who will be going on strike today with the support of the NEU to oppose the closure of the school.

This closure which damages the education of students at Strathcona and the communities which it serves, is happening in spite of numerous objections from students' parents and other members of the public. Brent council should be acting to defend local authority education and not diminish it. 

A fascinating lady from history – with a local connection

Guest blog by Philip Grant

Almost everyone living in England 125 years ago would have heard of the Duchess of Sutherland. Anyone interested in social history, or who just likes a great story, should know more about her, and her times. You have the chance to do that, with an illustrated talk at Wembley History Society on Friday 20^th September.

Mary Michell was born in 1848, the daughter of an Oxford don, and grew into a striking woman (reputedly six feet tall). She could have married an Egyptian prince, but her first husband (of three – she was widowed twice), Arthur Blair, was a former army officer. He was shot with his own gun on a Scottish grouse moor – the inquest verdict was accidental death, but some doubted that.

She was the mistress of the 3^rd Duke of Sutherland (who was 20 years older!), and he married her in Florida not long after the original Duchess died. The relationship may have begun as “a bit of sport” on his part (like his close friend, the Prince of Wales, he had a long history of affairs), but it developed as a deep love on both sides, which only ended with his death in 1892.

The Duchess in her diamonds, probably
 at their London home c. 1890.
[Photo courtesy of Bruno Bubna-Kasteliz]

  
 Although the Duke’s will left his title and huge estates to his heir, he left all of his money to the Duchess! The will was, understandably, challenged by the 4^th Duke of Sutherland, and it was this case which led to the most famous, or notorious, time in the life of the Duchess, including being jailed for contempt of court. 

 

The court settlement left her a very wealthy Dowager Duchess, but in 1896 she married the M.P. for Islington South, Sir Albert Rollit. Mary may have been attracted by some of his ideas – although a Conservative, he had put forward a private member’s Bill in 1892 to give (limited) votes for women! Around the same time, while married to the Duke, she held “open house” at their London mansion for 600 shop girls from West End stores, to highlight their poor working conditions.

And her local connection? In 1898/99, she had a country house, in 10 acres of grounds, built in Kingsbury. It was named “The Cottage”, but is now called Kingsbury Manor, in Roe Green Park. Although the house is not open to the public, its award-winning community Walled Garden, with exhibits commemorating the Duchess, has an open day on Saturday 14^th September (11am to 4pm).

“The Cottage”, as drawn by the architect, W. West Neve, in 1899.
[Brent Archives online image 0386]

There is no evidence that the Duchess ever lived in Kingsbury, and she may have intended “The Cottage” as a potential home for her daughter, Irene. Ms Blair did live there, after her marriage to an Austrian Count, Johann Bubna, in 1901. They had two daughters, the youngest of whom, the Countess Ina Bubna, was the mother of the History Society’s guest speaker.

Irene Mary Blair, aged 18, in 1894.
[Photo courtesy of Bruno Bubna-Kasteliz]

When I first saw this photo of Irene, the name that sprang to my mind was Oscar Wilde! He was then writing successful comedy plays, satirising the English Upper Class, and some of his characters have stories which could be based on incidents from the Duchess of Sutherland’s life. Was she “a woman of no importance”? Decide for yourself, when you have enjoyed “a tale of Victorian values”!

Philip Grant

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