DEGROWTH, FROM THE EAST END TO THE CITY OF LONDON

Today, The Winsors and The Grandma have visited the East End of London and the City of London, an area that has suffered a big urban transformation from a worker borough to a finantial one. The family wants to do some investments in London.

Before the visit, the family has studied some English grammar with Shall, and they have talked about prepositions of transport, and they have talked about We shall overcome an hymn of civil rights.

More information: Shall

More information: 'We Shall Overcome', The Song That Cries Rights

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The East End of London, often referred to within the London area simply as the East End, is the historic core of wider East London, east of the Roman and medieval walls of the City of London and north of the River Thames.

It does not have universally accepted boundaries on its northern and eastern sides, though the River Lea is sometimes seen as the easternmost boundary. Parts of it may be regarded as lying within Central London (though that term too has no precise definition). The term East of Aldgate Pump is sometimes used as a synonym for the area.

The East End began to emerge in the Middle Ages with initially slow urban growth outside the eastern walls, which later accelerated, especially in the 19th century, to absorb pre-existing settlements. The first known written record of the East End as a distinct entity, as opposed to its component parts, comes from John Strype's 1720 Survey of London, which describes London as consisting of four parts: the City of London, Westminster, Southwark, and That Part beyond the Tower.

The relevance of Strype's reference to the Tower was more than geographical. The East End was the urbanised part of an administrative area called the Tower Division, which had owed military service to the Tower of London since time immemorial. Later, as London grew further, the fully urbanised Tower Division became a byword for wider East London, before East London grew further still, east of the River Lea and into Essex.

The area was notorious for its deep poverty, overcrowding and associated social problems. This led to the East End's history of intense political activism and association with some of the country's most influential social reformers. Another major theme of East End history has been migration, both inward and outward. The area had a strong pull on the rural poor from other parts of England, and attracted waves of migration from further afield, notably Huguenot refugees, Irish weavers, Ashkenazi Jews, and, in the 20th century, Bengalis.

The closure of the last of the Port of London's East End docks in 1980 created further challenges and led to attempts at regeneration, with Canary Wharf and the Olympic Park among the most successful examples. Paradoxically, while some parts of the East End are undergoing rapid change and are amongst the areas with the highest mean salary in the UK, it also continues to contain some of the worst poverty in Great Britain.

More information: BBC

More information: My London

The City of London, also known as the City, is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the ancient centre, and constitutes, along with Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London and one of the leading financial centres of the world. 

It constituted most of London from its settlement by the Romans in the 1st century AD to the Middle Ages, but the modern area referred to as London has since grown far beyond the City of London boundary. 

The City is now only a small part of the metropolis of Greater London, though it remains a notable part of central London. The City of London is not one of the London boroughs, a status reserved for the other 32 districts (including Greater London's only other city, the City of Westminster). It is also a separate ceremonial county, being an enclave surrounded by the ceremonial county of Greater London, and is the smallest ceremonial county in England.

The City of London is known colloquially as the Square Mile, as it is 2.90 km2 in area. Both the terms the City and the Square Mile are often used as metonyms for the UK's trading and financial services industries, which continue a notable history of being largely based in the City. The name London is now ordinarily used for a far wider area than just the City. 

London most often denotes the sprawling London metropolis, or the 32 Greater London boroughs, in addition to the City of London itself.

The local authority for the City, the City of London Corporation, is unique in the UK and has some unusual responsibilities for a local council, such as being the police authority, and in having responsibilities and ownerships beyond its boundaries.

The corporation is headed by the Lord Mayor of the City of London (an office separate from, and much older than, the Mayor of London). The City is made up of 25 wards, with administration at the historic Guildhall. Other historic sites include St Paul's Cathedral, Royal Exchange, Mansion House, Old Bailey, and Smithfield Market. Although not within the City, the adjacent Tower of London, built to dominate the City, is part of its old defensive perimeter. Beyond the City, the developments of Westminster (and the West End) Eastminster (and the East End) and Southwark, established the early geography of the metropolis. The City has responsibility for five bridges across the Thames: Blackfriars Bridge, Millennium Bridge, Southwark Bridge, London Bridge and Tower Bridge.

The City is a major business and financial centre, with both the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange based in the City. Throughout the 19th century, the City was the world's primary business centre, and it continues to be a major meeting point for businesses.

London was ranked second (after New York) in the Global Financial Centres Index, published in 2022. The insurance industry is concentrated in the eastern side of the city, around Lloyd's building. Since about the 1980s, a secondary financial district has existed outside the city, at Canary Wharf, 4 km to the east. The legal profession has a major presence in the northern and western sides of the City, especially in the Temple and Chancery Lane areas where the Inns of Court are located, two of which (Inner Temple and Middle Temple) fall within the City of London boundary.

Primarily a business district, the City has a small resident population of 8,583 based on 2021 census figures, but over 500,000 are employed there (as of 2019) and some estimates put the number of workers in the City to be over 1 million.

About three-quarters of the jobs in the City of London are in the financial, professional, and associated business services sectors.

More information: The Global City

  

 I don't suppose I shall ever see 

this horrid London again.

 

Oscar Wilde

VISITING BUCKINGHAM PALACE, GOD SAVE THE FOSTERS!

Today, The Fosters and The Grandma have established in Buckingham Palace, the London royal residence of the King of the UK and 14 other commonwealth realms.

Before, the family has studied some English grammar with Have to and Shall, two modal verbs

More information: Have to

More info: Shall

Buckingham Palace is a London royal residence and the administrative headquarters of the monarch of the United Kingdom. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is often at the centre of state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a focal point for the British people at times of national rejoicing and mourning.

Originally known as Buckingham House, the building at the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703 on a site that had been in private ownership for at least 150 years. 

It was acquired by King George III in 1761 as a private residence for Queen Charlotte and became known as The Queen's House. During the 19th century it was enlarged by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, who constructed three wings around a central courtyard. 

Buckingham Palace became the London residence of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the East Front, which contains the well-known balcony on which the royal family traditionally appears to greet crowds. A German bomb destroyed the palace chapel during the Second World War; the Queen's Gallery was built on the site and opened to the public in 1962 to exhibit works of art from the Royal Collection.

The original early-19th-century interior designs, many of which survive, include widespread use of brightly coloured scagliola and blue and pink lapis, on the advice of Sir Charles Long. King Edward VII oversaw a partial redecoration in a Belle Époque cream and gold colour scheme. Many smaller reception rooms are furnished in the Chinese regency style with furniture and fittings brought from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and from Carlton House. The palace has 775 rooms, and the garden is the largest private garden in London. The state rooms, used for official and state entertaining, are open to the public each year for most of August and September and on some days in winter and spring.

In the Middle Ages, the site of the future palace formed part of the Manor of Ebury (also called Eia). The marshy ground was watered by the river Tyburn, which still flows below the courtyard and south wing of the palace. Where the river was fordable (at Cow Ford), the village of Eye Cross grew. Ownership of the site changed hands many times; owners included Edward the Confessor and Edith of Wessex in late Saxon times, and, after the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror. William gave the site to Geoffrey de Mandeville, who bequeathed it to the monks of Westminster Abbey.

In 1531, Henry VIII acquired the Hospital of St James, which became St James's Palace, from Eton College, and in 1536 he took the Manor of Ebury from Westminster Abbey. These transfers brought the site of Buckingham Palace back into royal hands for the first time since William the Conqueror had given it away almost 500 years earlier.

Various owners leased it from royal landlords, and the freehold was the subject of frenzied speculation during the 17th century. By then, the old village of Eye Cross had long since fallen into decay, and the area was mostly wasteland. Needing money, James VI and I sold off part of the Crown freehold but retained part of the site on which he established 1.6 ha mulberry garden for the production of silk. 

Clement Walker in Anarchia Anglicana (1649) refers to new-erected sodoms and spintries at the Mulberry Garden at S. James's; this suggests it may have been a place of debauchery. Eventually, in the late 17th century, the freehold was inherited from the property tycoon Sir Hugh Audley by the great heiress Mary Davies.

More information: Buckingham Palace

The palace is not safe 
when the cottage is not happy.

Benjamin Disraeli

'WE SHALL OVERCOME', THE SONG THAT CRIES RIGHTS

Today, The Grangers & The Grandma have been talking about one of the most popular songs of the American civil rights movement, We shall overcome.

Before, they have been preparing their Cambridge Exam. They have studied Relative Pronouns and Shall.

More information: Relative Pronouns

More information: Shall

We Shall Overcome is a gospel song which became a protest song and a key anthem of the American civil rights movement. 

The song is most commonly attributed as being lyrically descended from I'll Overcome Some Day, a hymn by Charles Albert Tindley that was first published in 1901.

The modern version of the song was first said to have been sung by tobacco workers led by Lucille Simmons during the 1945–1946 Charleston Cigar Factory strike in Charleston, South Carolina. 

In 1947, the song was published under the title We Will Overcome in an edition of the People's Songs Bulletin (a publication of People's Songs, an organization of which Pete Seeger was the director), as a contribution of and with an introduction by Zilphia Horton, then-music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee (an adult education school that trained union organizers). Horton said she had learned the song from Simmons, and she considered it to be her favorite song. According to Horton, one of the stanzas of the original hymn was 'we will overcome'. ... It sort of stops them cold silent.

She taught it to many others, including Pete Seeger, who included it in his repertoire, as did many other activist singers, such as Frank Hamilton and Joe Glazer, who recorded it in 1950.

The song became associated with the civil rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in with his and Seeger's version as song leader at Highlander, which was then focused on nonviolent civil rights activism. 

It quickly became the movement's unofficial anthem. Seeger and other famous folksingers in the early 1960s, such as Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts in the North and helped make it widely known. Since its rise to prominence, the song, and songs based on it, have been used in a variety of protests worldwide.

The U.S. copyright of the People's Songs Bulletin issue which contained We Will Overcome expired in 1976, but The Richmond Organization asserted a copyright on the We Shall Overcome lyrics, registered in 1960.

In 2017, in response to a lawsuit against TRO over allegations of false copyright claims, a U.S. judge issued an opinion that the registered work was insufficiently different from the We Will Overcome lyrics that had fallen into the public domain because of non-renewal. 

In January 2018, the company agreed to a settlement under which it would no longer assert any copyright claims over the song.

Most people know that Pride Month is in June, however, many don't realize that's because on June 28, 1969, the catalyst for the LGBT movement occurred in riot form at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Inn was a well-known, mafia-run gay night club which hosted an array of illegal activities from an absent liquor license and prostitution to dealing drugs. While the bar owners were normally tipped off about police raids, on the night of the 1969 riot, they weren’t told anything would be happening. The police barricaded the 200+ patrons and employees in the bar and began to arrest all the transvestites they could find.

As the cops were arresting patrons, to their surprise, bystanders began to push back against the heavy police presence in the form of verbal taunts and thrown bottles. At that point, raids on gay bars were becoming routine and, for the LGBT community, the raid on the Stonewall Inn was the last straw. As police were dragging people into their paddy wagon, the crowd began to boil and violence soon erupted. Bricks and bottles were being thrown at the cops as more people from around the neighborhood began to join in on the protest, forcing the police into a rare retreat. While some of the crowd turned violent, many others committed to nonviolence in the form of jokes, kick-lines and songs.

As an unstable riot occurred all around, the protest hymn We Shall Overcome echoed through the streets long into the night. For days following the Stonewall riot, more protests, mostly nonviolent, began to pop up all around the city. A gay community began to form and within six months two gay activist organizations were established in New York.

The movement was given legs, and by June 28 of the following year, the first gay pride marches took place in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco to commemorate the anniversary of the riots.  

We Shall Overcome was a vital tool used to demonstrate nonviolence throughout each protest.

More information: The Kennedy Center

We shall all be free, we shall all be free,
We shall all be free someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.

Charles Albert Tindley

THE JONES VISIT LOCH NESS, WE SHALL OVERCOME!

Merche Jones is climbing The Old Man of Storr

Today, The Jones have continued their English classes. They have revised The Comparative of Superiority and Shall.

After working some Social English, the family has created some writings about their Hogwarts' friends, who they miss a lot, although Harry Potter has joined to them in their trip.

The family has been talking about Ireland, its kind people and its generosity and about how to work there and learning English at the same time. Later, The Grandma has been talking about Easter in Naples and Les Caramelles an ancient Catalan tradition. Both events are celebrated during Easter Sunday.

More information: Comparative Adjectives

Finally, The Jones have created a story to practise the three most important elements in a composition: adequation, cohesion and coherence. Before, The Grandma had explained the story of the bagpipe, the most popular instrument in Scotland, as important as the Loch Ness, cradle of one of the most wonderful legends: Nessie.

Noelia Jones inside Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness

This afternoon, the family is visiting Loch Ness because they want to meet Nessie and enjoy one of the most beautiful places of the world: the Highlands.

Fifty years ago, in a day like today, The Grandma was visiting Loch Ness for first time in her life. It was an experience impossible to forget for two reasons: because of the beauty of the place and because that day Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis. It was a senseless tragedy like everybody that someone use violence or force to shut up opinions and freedoms. The history shows us that you can kill a person but not his/her ideology meanwhile other people continue his/her struggle: We shall overcome!

More information: History

Loch Ness, in Scottish Gaelic Loch Nis, is a large, deep, freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands extending for approximately 37 kilometres southwest of Inverness. Its surface is 16 metres above sea level. It is connected at the southern end by the River Oich and a section of the Caledonian Canal to Loch Oich. 

At the northern end there is the Bona Narrows which opens out into Loch Dochfour, which feeds the River Ness and a further section of canal to Inverness, ultimately leading to the North Sea via the Moray Firth. It is one of a series of interconnected, murky bodies of water in Scotland; its water visibility is exceptionally low due to a high peat content in the surrounding soil.

Paqui Jones inside Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness

At Drumnadrochit is the Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition which examines the natural history and legend of Loch Ness.

Urquhart Castle is located on the western shore, 2 km east of Drumnadrochit and lighthouses are located at Lochend (Bona Lighthouse) and Fort Augustus.

Loch Ness is known as the home of the Loch Ness Monster, also known as Nessie, a cryptid, reputedly a large unknown animal. It is similar to other supposed lake monsters in Scotland and elsewhere, though its description varies from one account to the next. Popular interest and belief in the animal's existence has varied since it was first brought to the world's attention in 1933.

More information: Visit Inverness

In Scottish folklore, the Loch Ness Monster or Nessie, is an aquatic being which reputedly inhabits Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands. It is similar to other supposed lake monsters in Scotland and elsewhere, and is often described as being large in size, with a long neck and one or more humps protruding from the water. Popular interest and belief in the creature has varied since it was brought to worldwide attention in 1933. Evidence of its existence is anecdotal, with a few disputed photographs and sonar readings.

The Jones at Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness

The creature commonly appears in Western media where it manifests in a variety of ways. The scientific community regards the Loch Ness Monster as a phenomenon without biological basis, explaining sightings as hoaxes, wishful thinking, and the misidentification of mundane objects.

The creature has been affectionately called Nessie, in Scottish Gaelic: Niseag, since the 1940s.

The word monster was reportedly applied for the first time to the creature on 2 May 1933 by Alex Campbell, water bailiff for Loch Ness and a part-time journalist, in an Inverness Courier report.

More information: Historic UK

On 4 August 1933 the Courier published a report by Londoner George Spicer that several weeks earlier, while they were driving around the loch, he and his wife saw the nearest approach to a dragon or pre-historic animal that I have ever seen in my life trundling across the road toward the loch with an animal in its mouth. Letters began appearing in the Courier, often anonymously, claiming land or water sightings by the writer, their family or acquaintances or remembered stories. The accounts reached the media, which described a monster fish, sea serpent, or dragon and eventually settled on Loch Ness monster.

The Grandma with Niseag in Loch Ness, 1968

On 6 December 1933 the first purported photograph of the monster, taken by Hugh Gray, was published in the Daily Express; the Secretary of State for Scotland soon ordered police to prevent any attacks on it. 

In 1934, interest was further piqued by the surgeon's photograph. 

That year, R. T. Gould published an account of the author's investigation and a record of reports predating 1933. Other authors have claimed sightings of the monster dating to the sixth century AD.

The earliest report of a monster in the vicinity of Loch Ness appears in the Life of St. Columba by Adomnán, written in the sixth century AD. 

According to Adomnán, writing about a century after the events described, Irish monk Saint Columba was staying in the land of the Picts with his companions when he encountered local residents burying a man by the River Ness. They explained that the man was swimming in the river when he was attacked by a water beast which mauled him and dragged him underwater. 

More information: Scientific Exploration

Although they tried to rescue him in a boat, he was dead. Columba sent a follower, Luigne moccu Min, to swim across the river. The beast approached him, but Columba made the sign of the cross and said: Go no further. Do not touch the man. Go back at once. The creature stopped as if it had been "pulled back with ropes" and fled, and Columba's men and the Picts gave thanks for what they perceived as a miracle.

Download Inverness Area & Inverness Street Map

Believers in the monster point to this story, set in the River Ness rather than the loch itself, as evidence for the creature's existence as early as the sixth century. 

Sceptics question the narrative's reliability, noting that water-beast stories were extremely common in medieval hagiographies and Adomnán's tale probably recycles a common motif attached to a local landmark. According to sceptics, Adomnán's story may be independent of the modern Loch Ness Monster legend and became attached to it by believers seeking to bolster their claims.  

Watch Loch Ness Movie with Ted Danson & Joely Richardson

We shall overcome, we shall overcome,
We shall overcome someday;
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.
 

Pete Seeger

CRISTINA POPPINS: SO LONG, FAREWELL...

The Poppins

Today, The Poppins have lived an unforgettable day. First, they’ve studied how to use Shall in the polite questions and when to use So or Such. After that, they’ve talked about the importance of filling all the gaps in a web curriculum and about the importance of creating a good networking.

More information: Shall & So/Such

Next, the most important moment has arrived when Cristina Poppins has announced her decision of leaving the family and returning to Águeda, her hometown in Portugal. The family doesn’t know the real ideas of this decision but, of course, they respect and accept it and all of them have encouraged her to follow her new dream.

More information: Portugal's Umbrella Art

Involved by the emotion of the moment, the family hasn’t paid attention to Laura Poppins, who is missing since yesterday. Later, when the excitement of Cristina’s moment has finished, they have started to think in Laura and her possible unknown situation. Eli Poppins, like a detective, has the responsibility of finding Laura and the rest of the family is going to help her in this new search.

 There's a sad sort of clanging
from the clock in the hall
and the bells in the steeple, too.

Coo-coo. Regretfully they tell us.
Coo-coo. But firmly they compel us
to say good bye.

The Von Trapp Family, The Sound of Music