Last month I went to the launch of Taj Ali's excellent and timely new book 'Come what may, we're here to stay: the story of South Asian resistance in Britain'. The launch took place at Marsh House in Luton, the town where Taj, like myself,  grew up. 

The book gives a fascinating overview of South Asian activism in the UK, starting with anti-colonial fighters for Indian independence in early 20th century London and working through the workplace struggles of migrant workers to the fight back against police and far right racism. Where possible Taj has supplemented archive research with interviews with people involved.

I consider myself fairly well informed about some of this but the book made me realise how many stories have never been fully told. I had no idea for instance that the Indian Workers Association was first established in this country during the Second World War. 

The Asian youth movements of the 1970s and 1980s are at the heart of this book and are clearly a model from which Taj has taken inspiration:

'The Asian youth movements often supported families on outlying housing estates who were vulnerable to racist violence. In an era without social media, they were able to connect with activists and victims of racist violence up and down the country. Their resourcefulness at a time when Asians had few resources is inspiring. Today, when there are much greater resources among British South Asians both in terms of wealth and technology, what might our resistance look like? Who is doing the work of connecting communities up and down the country? And how do we navigate new challenges in the form of religious divides and the growing number of South Asians being influenced by far-right narratives about newcomers?'

In the context of a recent upsurge in racist attacks, he asks what kind of movements we need today, based around a 'plurality of tactics' and 'a strategic approach to anti-racist organising' able to 'prioritise time, energy and resources based on where the real threat is. It's easier to mobilise in diverse urban areas, but what about the smaller, more isolated Black and Asian communities'? Above all he is clear that 'Racism will not be defeated from above. It will only be defeated by us - ordinary citizens who refuse to look away'

The audience was perhaps a cross section of what a successful anti-racist movement might look like in 2026. The starting point for such a movement would surely be to be rooted in the communities most directly affected, draw upon existing relationships of friends, neighbours and families.  It would be outward facing, connecting with other communities and making the best use of people's different skills and positions - e.g. from those confronting racists on the streets to faith leaders doing multi-faith community work. It would have a strong sense of place and of history, but also not be confined to local areas or stuck trying to uncritically replay a template from the past.

The book's conclusion quotes Fahim Qureshi of the early 1980s Luton Youth Movement: 'Come out and organise. Take up the baton. We're sleepwalking into disaster if we don't organise ourselves and confront racism. It's only because we confronted racism in the streets and politically that there were changes made at that time; we need to do the same thing now.'

Luton Pride

I was pleased to see the short lived but lively Luton Youth Movement referenced in the book, with interviews with a couple of its leading activists. As I've written here before, I was involved in some of these events though as a quite weedy Luton Sixth Former wasn't much use as an anti-fascist streetfighter. 

There was a lot of civic pride at the book launch, people are sick of Luton being associated with racism due to the antics of Tommy Robinson (sadly also from the town) and want it to be known as a town - and ideally a city - known for its multicultural diversity and conviviality. So it is with some dismay that I read about the latest ill-informed attack on Luton,  this time at the Conservative Party 2026 conference where Shadow Home Office Minister Blake Stephenson, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, claimed that 'There are parts of that town - and unfortunately the police will tell you this - it can be a very dangerous place. There are parts where white people won't go. They are like no-go zones'. This is nonsense. It may be true that there are parts of Luton - in fact the whole town - where racists won't go, presumably because they don't like seeing black and brown people in any numbers. But there are no areas where white people can't go, or are under any threat. The historic heart of the South Asian community in Bury Park is probably one of the safer areas, not to mention one where thousands of white people regularly go to see Luton Town play at Kenilworth Road. 

Meanwhile the real Luton moves on, part of quite a Beds cultural renaissance that includes Imran Perretta's touching coming of age film 'Ish', set in Bury Park and the debut album from  Ahadadream (I know he grew up in Sandy rather than Luton, but hey it's Bedfordshire!).

There have been South Asians in the Luton area since at least 1918, when five 'Indian subjects' were reported to be working at the Blows Down Lime Works (Luton Reporter, 28 January 1919) and as Taj mentions in the book there were members of the IWA in Luton as early as 1946. Larger numbers from Pakistan and elsewhere arrived from the late 1950s in search of work, and faced racism from the start. 

People were making similar ill-founded arguments to Blake Stephenson even then so let's give the last word to Zafar Iqbal Qureshi of the Pakistani Welfare Association writing in the Luton News on 28 June 1962 in response to a previous racist letter in the paper: 'As regards the Dunstable Road area being full of "gipsy looking Pakistanis creeping about" well, physically and mentally, as well as in looks, we Pakistanis can hold our own against any people on earth. There is nothing debased in our characters, or defective in our looks, that we should creep about like insects. We Pakistanis, by the grace of God, walk erect, dignified, and hold our heads high everywhere we go'.

The Leisure Lounge was one of the great mid-1990s London clubs. Located in a former snooker hall at 121 High Holborn, the main room downstairs was basically just one large cavernous space dominated by a huge video screen on one side and two-tiered bench seating on the other - giving a slight school gym feeling. There was a small seating chill out area and bar at one end. According to the DJ magazine 'UK Club Guide' (1995) it had a capacity of 800 with a '22K rig with Amcron amps and custom built speakers'. It stayed open until 6 am initially but I think later opened from 10 pm to 10 am.

The club's opening party was in April 1994 and included the Buzzcocks playing live. Promoter Sean McClusky told the Independent: 'I want a fashionable crowd, but I want to encourage the nutters as well. Punk has energy and colour. It attracts all the characters. All I've done is give them a beautiful club to play in.' (Independent, 6 April 1995).  In its early days there was an exhibition of portrait photographs by Rankin in the chill out area. 

The club continued until at least 1998 (not sure exactly when it closed). My peak time going there would have been 1995, at that time there was Graham Gold's Peach on Friday and the club's own Leisure Lounge night on Saturdays, promoted by Sean McClusky and the late Bernie Schumann. The latter two had previously been involved with Club UK among other adventures and there was a similar 'uplifting house' vibe. 

Later Simon Hobart's gay indie night Popstarz was there too, and legendary drum'n'bass night Metalheadz. Oasis had a party there after playing at the Astoria in 1994.

Flyers below from May/June 1995, seemingly I must have been at that one with John Kelly, Fabio Paras, Tall Paul etc. on 10th June as I put a cross by it! 'Join the International Disco Jetset' says one, and we did. Glammed up beautiful people dancing to beautiful music, or so it felt. Maybe not so much on the way home afterward.

Note too the Red Bull sponsorship. I remember the first time I tried one of these energy drinks was in the queue at Leisure Lounge where they were handing them out as part of a promotion.  The drink had started out in Austria in 1987 but wasn't launched in UK until 1994/95 when for a while people going out at the weekend were largely replacing their alcohol consumption with other recreational substances.

I enjoyed the 'Wham! 10 Days in China' film if only for the footage of peak-Wham, especially George Michael's beautiful singing of Careless Whisper - who then or now can sing like that live? Seeing that second show in Guangzhou in April 1985 would be up there on my fantasy list of gigs I would have loved to have been at.

Still, it feels strange to have a film with George Michael in 2026 that doesn't wonder out loud what it must have been like for a closeted gay man to be in the middle of this media circus in 1985? Or what it was like for performers of colour like 'Trevor' (what was his full name?), who warmed up the Beijing crowd as a break dancer?

The overall narrative of China 'opening up to the West' seems somewhat anachronistic now. There's mention of the old world meeting the new world but which was which? What Andrew Ridgely correctly identifies as the colonial hangovers at the British embassy were not really the future were they? Ironically many in the Chinese audience now look cooler than the 1980s pop stars and their entourage.

And there's a total absence of historical context beyond the obvious 'first Western pop band to play in China'. For instance, the gigs in April 1985 took place in the month after the end of the bitter miners strike in Britain - not directly relevant perhaps even if  Wham! had played a benefit gig for a strikers' hardship fund, but some acknowledgement that they weren't simply ambassadors of an unproblematic British affluence would have been appropriate. Not to mention the fact that four years later the Chinese state was gunning down protestors in the same Tiananmen Square that George and Michael wander across at the beginning of this film. Still if you feel the terrible injustice that Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou is no longer wandering across Hampstead Heath you will probably watch and have a bit of weep, like I did.

The total eclipse of the sun in 1999 coincided with a high point of activity for the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. On its email discussion list (AAA-list@onelist.com), various AAA operatives posted their reports of the action.

Did Parasol AAA really launch an umbrella-shaped spacecraft under cover of the eclipse in Leicester?  Perhaps it's still too soon to say...

From AAA Kernow:

Total Eclipse of the Sun, 11.8.199. AAA Kernow claim responsibilty.

From Steve Ash (Dionysian AAA):

Thank you. A job well done. But you should have held it a few minutes longer than the official two minutes to make the bourgeois experts shit 

The DAAA sent agents to Roumania and France, as well as drifting through the streets of London (having no ties to the vulgar world of work) . 

In London we were impressed by the eerie blue quality of the light produced by the partial eclipse and laughed heartily at the foolish birds who thought it: was evening. Strange ritualistic behaviour was observed amongst many who gathered in in small groups with smokey glass and pin holes, releasing stifled sounds of awe, perhaps an atavistic resurgence of sun worship. 

Even stranger ritualism was found amongst our alter egos in the Dionysian Underground, who made a sacrifice to the Moon, as Dionysos Sabazios, Killer of the Sun, and called for the death of centralisation and the solar consciousness of western civilization, and a return to the nomadic, lunar-sea of spiritual anarchy. 

We of the DAAA above such naive primitivism retained a disciplined scientific observation of events at all times. Technical instrumentation was set up and some startling data obtained that may drastically change our conceptions of space travel. One anamoly as yet unexplained was the sighting of what appeared to be some sort of flying parasol heading away from the eclipse into Earth orbit. 

Reports from Cornwall informed us of a wonderful Baudrillardian spectacle of people watching the eclipse on a huge TV screen as the clouds engulfed the natural phenomenon. We laughed ourselves silly.

From Henri Beauchamp (Parasol AAA):

Here at work, in Leicester, the sky darkened somewhat at around 11. 10 and  everything fell silent. All the porters went home, the nurses went to sleep and various members of the Human Resources dept were seen foraging in the long grass. Meanwhile a little brolly craft slipped into the sky unobserved. 

From John Eden (Raido AAA):

The eclipse action was pretty good in central London, with people pouring out of offices for extended fag breaks and complete strangers chatting each other up for a lend of eclipse-specs. Pin hole projections are better for more participatory and communal viewing and you could even see the reflection on the side of some of the new office blocks . 

We got a good view of it all (and thankfully we didn't see the Parasol Mission, so I guess we 're safe there!) . It got pretty cold and dark. Someone was smoking a spliff in Red Lion Square . 

We are now trying to persuade our boss that we have gone blind and should have the rest of the day off to "recover" . So far this has involved lots of knocking things over. I don't think it's going to work. Ah well . 

From ElvinAAA:

and fairly good from the top of a 20 storey south London tower block too! though strangely less impressive than i had hoped really. gonna keep those glasses though might come in handy ! ! 

From Stuart (Nomad AAA):

Returned from Prawle point (southernmost Devon tip).  the sky went out— i wanted my mom (nearpanicattack); bassbins, fireworks, lights on the channel ships all over. again, again, again 

From Jez (heterotopiAAA):

We went down the road to Trafalgar Sq and got a pretty good view the clouds acted as a pretty good filter in any case although looking  through a strip of unexposed ektachrorne did the trick in the cloud breaks. (I had seen a picture in one of my wife's magazines which had a woman using slices of cucumber, although I guess that you'd have to be careful that you didn't cut them too thinly.) thought it'd get darker than it did in the end. It was quite strange looking over the scene,  with a strange dull light, but still bright highlights and blue sky in the distance. So just like wearing sunglasses then. Oh, so not so  strange. 

From Nigel Ayers:

A lovely day yesterday. We went in a party of seven down along the Fowey river from Lostwithiel -in the wilds really. Armed with shamanic rattles, etc. Sky was cloudy. Around ten we saw the moon advancing over the sun. 

Cattle in fields huddled together, birds started to settle down. Silvery clouds, like dusk. River birds paddled in the mud . A cormorant, a heron and a buzzard flew by. 

Through gaps in the cloud we could see the crescent of the sun getting thinner.  Eclipse glasses were useless, you could see it all with naked eye thanks to cloud cover . 

Then it all suddenly went dark, like midnight. Everyone went silent. Spooky. A couple of minutes later, we could see the crescent of the sun on the other side, and a patch of light dawning from the "wrong" side of the sky. 

We could hear shouts and applause in the distance, fireworks going off. Then we opened up the champagne and got plastered Then we went home and watched it all over again on the telly. 

[Disconaut AAA watched the eclipse from Telegraph Hill Park, New Cross]

Previous AAA posts:

Everybody is a Star! - Disconaut AAA

Mission accomplished but the beat goes on: the Fantastic Voyage of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts

Summer Solstice 1999: AAA on Parliament Hill

Military out of space - AAA at J18 Carnival Against Capital 1999

AAA at Brixton Reclaim the Streets 1998

Skinheads as Independent Travellers in Space

We were brought up on the space race, now they expect us to clean toilets

Intergalactic conferences and raves in space

AAA texts on Internet Archive

On June 10 1984 the left Labour-led Greater London Council, on the verge of being abolished by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, put on the free 'Jobs for a Change' festival by County Hall on the South Bank. I was one of the estimated 150,000 who went along, with the line up including  Billy Bragg, Misty in Roots, Mari Wilson, Hank Wangford, Gil Scott-Heron and Ivor Cutler. 

The biggest draw was The Smiths, at that time my favourite band. It was the fourth and last time I saw them, and in less than a year they had gone from being third on the bill at the Lyceum (where I saw them supporting the Gang of Four) to becoming the focus of something like mass hysteria. To be honest though I can't actually remember much about The Smiths performance that day, with events earlier in the day leaving a stronger impression.

 Socialist band The Redskins played too, and while they were on stage a largish group of neo-nazi skinheads stormed the stage and attacked people in the crowd. Although the fascists were massively outnumbered by the festival goers, many of the latter fled in panic. Indie kids were never known for their streetfighting skills! I wasn't very handy either but I did end up with a group of punks, anarchists and Red Action members chasing and scuffling with the nazi boneheads round the South Bank.

Fighting continued by St Thomas Hospital, where casualties from both sides had gone for treatment, and later that night anti-fascists stormed an Islington pub that had become a haunt for nazi skins (The Agricultural on Liverpool Road).

Here's Red Action's reports on the events from Issue 13 of their paper (Summer 1984), including their reflections that they should have attacked the fascists when they first saw them.

Emma Warren's 'Up the Youth Club: illuminating a hidden history' is an enthusiastic account of 150 years of recreational provision for young people. This has taken many forms, but she identifies a number of common themes:

'A central quality connects all the spaces in this book, whether they're attended by five young people or five hundred, in a shed or a purpose-built centre. A youth club, as far as I'm concerned, is a broadly warm and welcoming space where those who are in their second decade of life can gather regularly, in person, without compulsion, to do things they like doing, or to discover what they like doing, where restorative 'hanging out' is welcome. Some of these are officially designated, others less so. Youth clubs are places of mutual aid, not easily flipped into private profit'.

Warren doesn't shy away from the fact that many such initiatives have been motivated in various ways by attempts to influence or control young people amidst panics about 'juvenile delinquency', lack of patriotism or religion, or the physical fitness of the next generation of workers and soldiers. But she is less interested in the motives of funders and organisers than in what happens when young people are given, or sometimes take, a space of their own.

She is particularly interested in connections with music, with clubs not only hosting music events but sometimes giving access to music production equipment. Examples highlighted include the Holyhead in Coventry, attended in the 1970s by some of those later involved in the ska scene, and the Basement in Bristol in the 1990s, where Roni Size started out his DJing/music production career. Warren notes that: 

'There are significant youth work histories in UK music and culture, particularly those that relate to global majority creative expression. Think, for example, of the youth clubs across the UK that hosted reggae sound systems in the 1970s, or the widespread practice in the '80s of using the space as a practice pen for hip hop, dance, DJing or MCing. The youth club disco has been replaced by studios, adding to the discography of UK music'.

• The Saints - This Perfect Day - my 14 year old diary from 14 July 1977 mentions seeing this on Top of the Pops along with The Sex Pistols 'Pretty Vacant'. The next day somebody had the 12" of this at the youth club which had an extra track (Do the Robot). I phoned round every record shop in Beds and Herts trying to find a copy but failed. But I did get the 7" - my first punk single and still one of the greatest. Never heard Do the Robot again until recently on Spotify.

• The Clash first LP - August 1977 was momentous for me,  I started reading NME and bought this, my first proper album from HMV in Luton. I can also vividly remember buying the Clash 'Complete Control' from FL Moore on the day it came out (thanks to Wikipedia I now know this was 23 Sept 1977). We went on a school trip that day to see David Lean's Great Expectations at Luton Odeon, just down the road from the independent record shop where I bought most of my punk singles. My diary records that at the youth club in February 1978, 'Gordon Charlton offered me £1 for my Clash Complete control picture sleeve'. I declined; he went on to work in A&R for Polydor I think. A friend recalls a similar experience of a school trip to see Wuthering Heights at same cinema and sneaking off to buy Squeeze 'Cool for Cats' on pink vinyl.

• Coloured vinyl was a big deal. I remember another friend bringing 'Crossing the Red Sea with The Adverts' to club, 12" of red plastic and singing of 'Bored Teenagers...watching the planes burn up through the night like meteorites'. Well we weren't far from Luton Airport.

• The Stranglers - Black and White LP - there was an annual trip to St Marys church, Meppershall, in the north Beds countryside where we camped in the grounds and went on long walks. One of our number turned up late having just bought this freshly released album (in May 1978). Nice'n'Sleazy on the vicarage record player.

• Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead - the younger brother of one of our friends through this was called 'Bela the Goose is dead' and painted this on a t-shirt.

• Joy Division 'Transmission' - I got this from Matrix, a short lived (1979-81) shop in John Street behind Luton Arndale Centre run by Luton punk band UK Decay and associates. The band had a rehearsal space in the basement which 'once housed a memorable after tour party with The Dead Kennedys. During the proceedings Jello Biafra from the 'DK's and the UK DK's, ran amok amidst the Arndale car parks where Jello graffiti-ed his name over the place' (the tour was in 1980). I'd seen UK Decay by then, and we played 'California Uber Alles' at the youth club, but I didn't know the Dead Kennedys had been in town (albeit not to actually play a gig) until years later.

Today, as in the past, the fight against the far right has to be taken to small towns as well as to city streets. Back in 1971, the town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire was one such place. On this occasion the openly racist National Front had been refused permission for a rally in London's Trafalgar Square so they landed 40 miles north in Hitchin instead. On 27 March 1971 around 400 NF supporters from around the country took part, countered by between 1,000 and 2,000 anti-racists mobilised by Hitchin Indian Workers Association and other groups. The NF were led by a pipe band from Wolverhampton (something the local Wolverhampton seemed almost proud of - see below!). Smoke bombs were thrown into their ranks as they passed.

Quite an early interview with the Fugees from Minneapolis anarchist paper 'The Blast'  (March 1995 - though interview was at time of their December 1994 show in MN).

' I was telling you about that whole immigration rap thing. You know what I'm sayin', it's like people hear refugees and I want people to know it's not a gimmick. My mother was really pregnant and immigration was knocking on her door, and they broke the door open. The baby that was in her stomach was my brother...  they wasn't legal, you know what I'm sayin'. Yeah, It was immigration tryin' to deport them back. Man, my father had to run from immigration. There was a time in New York where it was a chase, man' (Wyclef Jean)

'you've got to understand, this whole thing is not even between Black and White, its between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor. We're trying to keep people aware, and it's not a contrived thing we are doing' (Lauryn Hill)

Protests are taking place throughout France against a proposed new law targeting free parties. Thousands took part in a demonstration in Montpellier yesterday (30 May 2026, pictured here) and more are planned over the next two weeks.

The law is known as RIPOST - 'Réponses immédiates aux phénomènes troublant l'ordre public, la sécurité et la tranquillité de nos concitoyens' (Immediate Responses to Phenomena Disturbing Public Order, Security and Tranquility of Our Fellow Citizens) and also includes measures against 'motorized assemblies' (gatherings of motorbikes and vehicles), nitrous oxide and for more video surveillance.

In terms of unauthorised free parties, the law requires events of more than 250 people to be authorised by local authorities (as opposed to 500 people as at present).  Organisers of parties could be jailed for up to six months, with a very broad definition of an organiser:

'the following constitute participation in the organization of said gathering: setting up the system for disseminating practical information relating to this gathering, participating in the construction of the sound system, transporting sound equipment to or from the site of the gathering, setting up a rest and social area on the occupied land or setting up a food truck there'.

The free party movement has set out a statement/petition against the law: 

'At a time when a large portion of young people have limited purchasing power, and therefore limited social life and access to culture, free parties allow them access to free and unrestricted spaces for socialization...

Furthermore, the free party represents a space for artistic and social experimentation, primarily based on sharing and inclusion. It is a creative refuge that attempts to mitigate the impact of capitalism on our lives. Different techniques and art forms are combined, and skills are pooled: circus arts, sound and lighting technicians, crafts, electronic music, and video projections, among others. It is through these activities and creations that artists, the public, and all other participants can experiment, perform, learn, and develop professionally. This richness must be protected, lest it disappear with the free party movement, without any other scene to re-emerge in.

It is therefore important today to mobilize to defend our movement, our culture, and our values. Free culture defends freedom, sharing, mutual aid, and solidarity'.

The statement has been signed by an impressive range of collectives and sound systems

Collectifs: Collectif Tekno Antirep;  Coordination Nationale des Sons; Collectif IDF;Coordination Rhône-Alpes des Sons; Coordination Occitanie des Sons; -Art et Culture 29

Sounds-systems: Maraudeur.euse, Collectif Eclypsis, Oblyk-Dfroké La Chafouinerie, Déchetterie, KrâneKC, Highnoon Soundsystem, k'rabass, BTPutes, Cabatek, Sonokracie, Hobbitek, skro, gptk, foxakif, Mafia, Dissonant Orchestra , Cptk6tm, insolent.e.s, D-TRA-TEK, Diablo'Core, ZQR, GÉNEZ1S, Amplithorynques, Neuroatypik, Lobotonik, Larsen Actif, Collectif Courtoisie, Armatek, RAR Family, ITF, Sub'Nambule, Adekwatt, Dystopyk Circus, Bondatak, free confits, ABDK, SKS, Otarcik, Fanfarons, Tribal Skankers, Inadekwatt, frénésie sonore, deci'bass 29, BDK, System K, Collectif des Insoumis, SA Free System, ECLE7IK, Dechniller, 46tem, 12H, Baba Punk Monster, MBS, MLK, Tekmanta, Infraktus, collectif MiniBeats, Tikitek, ORB²EAT, albertotek, Guinguette Grooverz, Defazotek, Arketyp, les Anonymes, Riboultek, Mirage, ADSR, An'artschitek, Les Affamés, SNT, Tekno Rokette, D-CenTré, Dubeatatif, 1-SURGÉ, Paradoxeteck, 1konform, OTC, Sonot'Ohm, Signal Sonore, TouTanTeK, Soul6Tem, Arrêt Kardiak, Les Insolents, Hpss, S23, DTR, Raveoltek, Meck.401, 1Trakable, Bivouac Tekno Partisans, RBT, D.A. Vagabond, Acid6'trik, BlackBass, No Limit's, Beausniaq, Symbiotek, AKF, Mushroom-CUBN6, NVC, KMTK

Of course there are similarities here with the 1990s Criminal Justice Act in Britain, and indeed in introducing their Bill, politicians made explicit reference to this: 'These rave parties also affect many other European countries , with varying legal responses. British police can fine organizers of illegal gatherings of more than 30 people, compared to 500 in France, with fines reaching up to €11,600. Since 2022 in Italy, organizing and participating in an illegal rave party constitutes a specific offense, carrying prison sentences ranging from three to six years for organizers and one to four years for participants. A fixed fine is also imposed, along with the confiscation of sound equipment. If our European neighbors manage to toughen their legislation regarding these illegal gatherings, France could do the same'.

Earlier this month, up to 40,000 people attended the unauthorised Teknival on an old military firing range in Cornusse, near Bourges (central France). 

Follow @teknoantirep on insta for updates

See also

Revolt of the Ravers - The Movement against the Criminal Justice Act in Britain 1993-95

From NME, 1 October 1983, a report of anarchist squat centres in London including Kafe Kollapse in West Hampstead, the Burn it Down Ballroom in Finchley and the Peace Centre at 99-119 Roseberry Avenue, London N1

My mum mentioned to me recently that she went to a jazz club in Luton at the TUC Hall in Church Street around 1960, which got me searching the archive. Its seems that the town, like many other parts of the country, experienced a jazz boom in the late 1950s with several weekly clubs running.

In 1958 the New Orleans Jazz Club was running a Sunday night 'Jazz at the Dome' at the Cresta Dome Ballroom in Alma Street, while the New Luton Jazz Club was happening every Thursday at the TUC Hall.

Over the course of that year some of the big names on the trad jazz circuit played in Luton, including Mick Mulligan, George Melly and Acker Bilk at the New Luton Jazz Club, and Cy Laurie. The latter's gig at the Cresta was promoted by the Delta Jazz Club - not sure if this was the New Orleans Jazz Club renamed  or a different faction in the fractious jazz scene of the time. There was a promise of 'non-stop jiving'.

There were local bands too including the Leaside Seven (sometime Leaside Six), the Wayfarers and Savannah City. 

Max Horkheimer - Max Horkheimer (1935)- ' Der Wolkenkratzer / The Skyscraper':

'A cross section of today's social structure would have to show the following: At the top, the feuding tycoons of the various capitalist power constellations. Below them, the lesser magnates, the large landowners and the entire staff of important co-workers. Below that, and in various layers, the large numbers of professionals, smaller employees, political stooges, the military and the professors, the engineers and heads of office down to the typists. And even further down what is left of the independent, small existences, craftsmen, grocers, farmers e tutti quanti, then the proletarian, from the most highly paid, skilled workers down to the unskilled and the permanently unemployed, the poor, the aged and the sick. 

It is only below these that we encounter the actual foundation of misery on which this structure rises, for up to now we have been talking only of the highly developed capitalist countries whose entire existence is based on the horrible exploitation apparatus at work in the partly or wholly colonial territories, i.e., in the far larger part of the world. Extended regions in the Balkans are torture chambers, the mass misery in India, China, Africa boggles the mind. Below the spaces where the coolies of the earth perish by the millions, the indescribable, unimaginable suffering of the animals, the animal hell in human society, would have to be depicted, the sweat, blood, despair of the animals. 

[...] The basement of that house is a slaughterhouse, its roof a cathedral, but from the windows of the upper floors, it affords a really beautiful view of the starry heavens'.

 From 'Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969', translated by Michael Shaw, Seabury Press, New York 1978, 66ff.

Horkheimer's text is remarkable for the time in including the suffering of animals in a litany of the abuses of capitalism. The image of society as a hierarchically ordered building is not unique but the acknowledgement that other species could be said to occupy the foundations is unusual in the 1930s, as far as I am aware.

Working for many years in the shadow of the Shard in London, this is what I always imagine as the archetypal skyscraper.  Yes there are expensive penthouses and restaurants further up, no actual slaughterhouse underneath but it overlooks the suffering and caring of Guys Hospital.  The photo above was taken in 2022 when striking nurses at the hospital were picketing directly opposite the Shard (hence the strike placard in image).

Another story from the Shard's history reminds us that whatever the implied hierarchy of such buildings, animals - like humans- refuse to know their place. When the building was under construction in 2011, a fox was found to be living at the top of the building! The fox was nicknamed Romeo and was later released on to the streets of Bermondsey. Possibly only a Frankfurt School critical theorist would be up to the task of analysing the fact that cuddly souvenir toys of the fox were later sold at the Shard, as well as the fox featuring in a children's book.

So a mere 80 years after it was first published there is finally a movie version of Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree - the favourite book of my childhood. Having got too much to say about the film at this stage, I enjoyed its quite rightly modernised take and it certainly renders a very good tree. But does it fully explore the anarchist/communist tension of the  Land of Do-as-you-Please vs  the Land of Take-What-You-Want?! Luckily for you (!) I wrote 5000 words on the Enchanted Wood series of books  as part of a 'children's literature and cultural diversity' module at Goldsmiths a few years ago, exploring among things its counter cultural influence and its utopian dimensions. This is the slightly edited text from 2013.

Enid Blyton was the best selling British children's author of the 20th century and nearly 50 years after her death remains in the top twenty most-borrowed children's authors in British libraries (British Library, 2013). Nevertheless, her reputation has been controversial, with her work frequently criticised for its perceived lack of literary quality and later for its archaic treatment of class, gender and race (discussed in Ray, 1982, and Rudd, 2000).

This essay focuses on a series of Blyton's fantasy novels known as the  'Enchanted Wood' or 'Faraway Tree' trilogy. Having established their popularity and influence, I will draw upon critical literature on fairy tales and children's fantasy literature to explore whether these works can be dismissed as vehicles for socialising children into the dominant ideology or whether they provide scope for more utopian readings. 

In the course of a writing career spanning almost fifty years, Blyton (1897-1968) covered most of the genres of children's literature, including detective stories, holiday adventures and school stories. In an overview of Blyton's work, Ray (1982) identifies another thread as being her 'Fantasy World' stories, starting with 'Adventures of the Wishing Chair' in 1937, in which two children travel to magical lands via a special chair. This was followed by the trilogy of 'The Enchanted Wood' (Blyton, 1939), 'The Magic Faraway Tree' (Blyton, 1943) and 'The Folk of the Faraway Tree' (Blyton, 1946).

In the 'Enchanted Wood' trilogy, a group of children who have recently moved from the city to the countryside discover a mysterious wood at the centre of which is 'the oldest and most magic tree in the world' (Blyton, 1939, p.16). This 'Magic Faraway Tree' is populated by various fairy tale-like characters and is the gateway to different lands which can be accessed from its upper branches as they pass by like clouds. Journeying into these worlds, the children have numerous adventures accompanied by Moon-face (a benevolent magician who lives at the top of the tree), his fairy neighbour Silky and the cookware-clad Saucepan Man.  

The series does not tend to feature in the canon of children's fantasy literature conventionally taken to run from 'Alice in Wonderland' via the 'Chronicles of Narnia' on to Ursula K Le Guin's 'Earthsea' series and beyond. There is no mention of Blyton in Goldthwaite's 'The Natural History of Make-Believe' (1996) - a 'history of the world's imaginative literature for children' - or in Deborah O'Keefe's 'Readers in Wonderland:  the liberating worlds of fantasy fiction' (2004).

Conversely, the books tend to be somewhat overlooked in works which focus on the life and writings of Blyton. They are mentioned only in passing in Duncan McLaren's 'Looking for Enid' (2007) and Barbara Stoney's standard biography of the author (Stoney, 2006). David Rudd's 'Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature' (2000), which seeks to positively reconsider Blyton's oeuvre, focuses primarily on the Famous Five, Noddy and Malory Towers books. 

Nevertheless the Enchanted Wood novels have remained in print continuously and have had an enduring impact on the memories and imaginations of generations of readers. In 2003 for instance, The Magic Faraway Tree was the only one of Blyton's books to feature in the UK Top 100 Best-Loved Books selected in the BBC's Big Read survey (BBC, 2004).  Recent spin-offs have included a 2000 audio book featuring the actress Kate Winslett, a 2004 animated TV series and a 2012 BBC radio adaption.  The books featured prominently in a major exhibition in 2013, 'Mystery, Magic and Midnight Feasts - The Many Adventures of Enid Blyton' held at Seven Stories: the National Centre for Children's Books. In the same year the national 'Storytelling Superstar' competition to mark World Book Day was won by somebody reading from 'The Folk of the Faraway Tree' (Bayne, 2013).

In his history of the fairy tale, Jack Zipes (2012. p.x) distinguishes between  the oral storytelling of anonymous folk tales passed down through generations, and 'literary fairy tales, which emanated from the oral traditions through the medium of manuscripts and print'  from the 16th century onwards.  These literary tales were rarely if ever straightforward renderings of oral folklore, but involved the reworking and adapting of traditional material by named authors for diverse purposes. The classic rewriting of older folk tales developed into a wider genre in which new stories were, and continue to be invented along similar lines featuring characters, tropes, and situations from older stories combined with additional elements.

Fairy tales were at the heart of Enid Blyton's early writing, including her own versions of classic stories such as Cinderella and the Sleeping Beauty in 'Fairy tales for the Little Ones' (1924) and new stories composed by Blyton herself in 'Enid Blyton's Book of Fairies' (1924). She wrote numerous fairy-themed and fantasy stories for the 'Sunny Stories' magazine that she edited, and in which 'The Enchanted Wood' was first serialised in 1938.

Notwithstanding Rudd's characterisation of Blyton's style as closer to oral storytelling than the literary tradition (Rudd, 1997), the Faraway Tree novels can certainly be considered as literary fairy tales, as they are written texts within which Blyton blends folkloric and traditional fairy tale elements with the products of her own imagination to create new stories.  In a manner which Hunt  (2000) characterises as Blyton's 'pot pourri' approach and  Rudd (2008, p.263) interprets more generously as her 'diffuse and extended' intertextuality, we find traditional supernatural creatures such as fairies, gnomes and pixies; animal helpers and magical tools; and nursery rhyme characters such as the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe. Perhaps most striking is the Faraway Tree itself - with its roots in the earth and its branches in the sky it recalls 'Yggdrasil, the norse World Tree', perhaps derived from Blyton's childhood love of Norse mythology (Ray 1982, p.141). The novels also feature episodes and characters familiar from other literary fairy tales. For example McLaren (2007, p.274-277) suggests that the malevolent goblins in the stories may have been inspired by the book that Blyton declared was her favourite as a child - George MacDonald's 'The Princess and the Goblin'.  

For Zipes (2012), literary fairy tales are used 'either to bring about conformity or to question conformity to the dominant civilizing process of a society' (xi); they may 'reconcile us to our social conventions and religious beliefs' or 'project alternatives to the status quo' (xii).  Zipes argues that many of the classic literary fairy tales written by the likes of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Anderson 'function as part of the bourgeois socialization process'  (p.69) and 'reinforce dominant religious and patriarchal attitudes about gender, mating, law and order' (p.xi). On the other hand he identifies a body of 'provocative counter-cultural fairy tales' from the likes of Oscar Wilde, George MacDonald and L.Frank Baum which criticise social mores and aim at 'inverting and subverting the world with hope' (p.103). Alison Lurie (1990, pp.x-xi)  likewise celebrates what she terms 'subversive works of children's literature', loosely defined as texts that 'mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, non-commercial view of the world'.

Before moving on to consider where the Faraway Tree trilogy should be placed in relation to Zipes' socialisation/subversion dichotomy, I have to acknowledge that much of what follows is based on adult reader reactions to the texts, and of course I too am approaching the subject as an adult. In fact over the course of my life I have read the Faraway Tree trilogy from several different subject positions - as a child reader, when these were among my favourite books; as a parent reading these books to my own children; and now from an academic perspective. In practice it is difficult to disentangle childhood and parental memories, nostalgia and apparently theoretically grounded interpretations.  As Jacqueline Rose (1984, p.12) argues, part of what she terms 'the impossibility of children's fiction' is that childhood 'is never simply left behind' but 'persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history'.  In reflecting on how Blyton's work appeals to children, I recognise that I cannot avoid approaching the subject through the filter of my adult self with its own investment in my childhood and those of others.

Radical critics of Blyton from the 1970s onwards saw her work as situated firmly within the camp of reactionary socialization. Blyton was one of the main authors taken to task in Bob Dixon's 'Catching them young', which sought to critique racism, sexism and class bias in children's fiction.  For Dixon (1977b), 'What overwhelmingly pervades every aspect of Blyton's work… is the insistence on conformity to the most, narrow, establishment-type beliefs, practices and values' (p.68), the converse of which is 'a fear of what is different or unusual… a fear of anything that's new and threatens change' (p.79).

Dixon (1977a, p.100) finds evidence of 'gratuitous racism' in Blyton's Noddy books and elsewhere, with their golliwogs and their association of 'fear with black faces'. He also argues that Blyton's works feature 'culturally-conditioned "masculine" and "feminine" roles'' (1977b p.66) and the presentation of 'the middle-class English' as the 'assumed norm' (p.68-9). 

Dixon  mainly draws his examples from Blyton's Famous Five books. While it may be legitimate to criticise the author on the basis of this major series, it may also be true that not all texts in Blyton's huge body of work treat race, gender and class in exactly the same way. I would argue that Dixon's critique is not entirely accurate in relation to the Faraway Tree novels.

Firstly racism does not really feature in these stories, if only because the exotic otherness which Blyton and other authors of her time may have routinely projected on to 'foreigners' is supplied instead by supernatural and fairy tale creatures who do not seem to relate to any particular racial or national stereotypes.  

In terms of gender stereotypes, there is a clear gender-based division of labour in the children's household. 'Mother' looks after the house while the barely-mentioned Father goes out to some undefined job. As for the children, the very first paragraph of The Magic Faraway Tree tells us that 'The girls had to help their mother in the house, and Jo help his father in the garden' (Blyton, 1943, p.5).

Jo, the older brother of the siblings, tends to take the lead in the action and tell his sisters what to do. But the girl characters are hardly passive. They participate fully in most adventures, climbing the tree and sometimes initiating action. For instance, when Jo is taken prisoner by The Magic Snowman it is his sisters who come to his rescue, taking part in the giant snowball fight of the Battle of the Bears (Blyton, 1939, p.62).

We should also bear in mind that in writing stories in which girls and boys participated in adventures together, Blyton was amongst the authors breaking new ground in this period.  Ray (1982, p.18) observes that  'Before 1930, books about everyday life had tended to be about boys for boys or about girls for girls' whereas subsequently 'there was a definite trend towards writing books that would appeal to both boys and girls'.

If class snobbery is a feature of some of Blyton's fictional worlds, it is less so in the Enchanted Wood trilogy.  In the opening chapter of the series it is made clear that the children are from a relatively poor family whose 'Mother hoped there would be some one to give her washing to do, then she would make enough money to buy a few hens' (Blyton, 1939, p.8). While in other Blyton stories the main characters may sometimes seem to look down on children of a lower social class, in these stories it is the children themselves who are the subject of condescension. When their 'stuck up' cousin Connie comes to stay she looks down on them and their 'country' clothes (Blyton, 1946, Chapter One).

It is undoubtedly true that Blyton intended her work to put across a message about how she believed children should behave and to promote certain values. Blyton 'often builds the narrator into the text as an intrusive persona, by turns 'jolly' and insistently moralizing' (Hunt, 1994, p.38)  and there are many examples in these stories of  characters variously castigated as 'naughty' or 'spoilt', while unhappy outcomes sometimes 'serve them right'. 

In a 1949 article  Blyton wrote that she was 'not only out to tell stories' but to 'inculcate decent thinking, loyalty, honesty, kindliness, and all the things that children should be taught' (cited in Stoney, 2006, p.195). While Blyton may have believed these were solid 'British' values, they are relatively politically neutral. The Enchanted Wood novels lack the explicit appeals to Empire, Queen and Country found in the fiction of some of her contemporaries, a fact that may explain the global success of many of her books in translation. 

Moreover these 'decent' values do not always equate simply with 'narrow, establishment'  ideology (Dixon, 1977b, p.68). When basic fairness is violated for instance, Blyton sanctions her characters' disobedience and rebellion against authority. Unjustly incarcerated in 'Dame Slap's School' with its regime of arbitrary violence and impossible to answer questions, the children throw down their pencils in protest at the 'silly nonsense' and escape (Blyton, 1939, p.127).  

In any event, as Sarland (2005, p.46) notes, the notion that children's fiction simply 'constructs readers in specific ideological formations and thus enculturates them into the dominant discourse of capitalism' has been challenged by a greater emphasis on the different ways texts are actually read and interpreted, with readers 'not simply determined by what they read'.  Judging by the reminiscences of adult writers, the Faraway Tree series is certainly not recalled as a narrow, conformist morality tale. New Zealand poet Bill Manhire (2000, p.56), choosing 'The Magic Faraway Tree' as the special book of his childhood, argues that the author's  'imaginative power... makes the usual criticism of Enid Blyton - as stylist and moralist - irrelevant'. These stories were also amongst those children's writer Susan Hill (2009, p.24-5) had in mind when she wrote that 'Enid Blyton excited us, took us into worlds of mystery, magic, adventure and fun'.

V for Vendetta - Evie gets a bedtime story from the Magic Faraway Tree

Intriguingly the Faraway Tree stories have achieved a particular cachet in British alternative political and cultural milieus.  The Magic Faraway Tree is referenced in Alan Moore and David Lloyd's cult graphic novel 'V for Vendetta' for instance, a copy of the book being left as a gift by the anarchist main character who later refers in a speech to the Land of Do-as-you-Please and Land of Take-What-You-Want (Moore and Lloyd, 1990, p.195). Other examples include A Faraway Tree festival held in Suffolk in 2012 &13 and an Irish folk music collective, The Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree (formed in 2002).

The novels also supplied imagery to the opponents of the Government's road building programme in the 1990s who established direct action protest camps.  A participant recalled that The Enchanted  Wood was  'One of the most  popular books at Skyward camp at Newbury…  At Fairmile in Devon, protesters referred to themselves as "Fairies." At the centre of the camp stood one large oak tree, complete with four tree houses,  which, for protesters, came to resemble the magic faraway tree' (Letcher, 2001,p.150).

With all this mind, I will now consider the extent to which the Faraway Tree books can be read as offering potentially utopian visions and to embody 'the liberating potential of the fantastic' that Jack Zipes (2012,p.168) identifies in some children's stories. 

At the heart of the Faraway Tree series is the possibility of escape from the everyday into other lands, some benign, some less so. Alternative dimensions directly accessible to children are a feature of popular fantasy literature, from the Narnia chronicles to the 'differing space of multiple worlds' (Cantrell, 2010, p.303) in Pulman's His Dark Materials. Typically, the portal into these worlds is something relatively mundane - a wardrobe (C.S. Lewis), a knife (Pulman) or in Blyton's case, a tree a short distance from the house. 

The Enchanted Wood is a liminal space, reached by crossing a boundary - leaping over a ditch - and in which the rules of the everyday world are partially suspended. But as Manhire (2000, p.56) suggests, its appeal is partially that 'Faraway is quite close by', with Blyton overriding 'our habitual distinctions between what is real and what is fantastic. If children can climb a ladder into other lands, the people of those lands can as easily descend to ours'. 

This proximity carries with it the dream of escape. In Jacqueline Wilson's novel Best Friends  (2004, p.74), the troubled narrator hides a letter 'between the pages of my best-ever book, The Enchanted Wood' and wishes that she 'could find the Enchanted Wood, climb up the Faraway Tree, and clamber up the ladder into the land above, and never ever come back' (p.74) [Wilson herself wrote 'The Magic Faraway Tree: a new adventure' in 2022]. Similarly, in her transgender memoir, Lo (2007, p.19) recalls a Singapore childhood reading Blyton on a balcony overlooking a forest: 'I imagined that Moon-face and the Saucepan man were tucked away somewhere in the trees. I longed to find the Faraway Tree whose branches pierced the sky'. 

If escapism is intrinsic to the pleasure of children's fantasy literature, it is 'not so much an escape from something as a liberation into something, into openness and possibility' (O'Keefe, 2003, p.11).  The Enchanted Wood is both a fantasy world of possibility in its own right, and a place from which the children can journey on to the other lands that pass by the top of the Faraway Tree.  Some of these lands could be described as dystopian spaces where children are potentially in peril, such as the The Land of Tempers or The Land of Dame Slap. But many more of them are places where children's wishes come true: there are Lands of Marvels, of Presents, Treats and Birthdays. 

To what extent can this assemblage of lands be termed utopian?  Bradford at al  (2007, p.2-3) have sketched out what they term as 'transformative utopianism' in children's literature, characterised as 'fictional imaginings of transformed world orders… which propose new social and political arrangements' but they also describe utopias more broadly as visions that  'imagine a better world than the one that readers/audiences currently know' (p.4)..  In his 'Utopia and Science Fiction' (1978) Raymond Williams likewise distinguishes between the 'systematic utopia' of new social structures and a looser 'heuristic utopia' in which 'the substance of new values and relations is projected, with comparatively little attention to institutions'.

In these stories, Blyton certainly does not propose a new political and social order as any kind of systematic/transformative utopia. In fact one feature of the Faraway Tree worlds is that it is not burdened by an over-arching cosmology or hierarchy. In some Lands there may be soldiers, policemen or wizards (easily befuddled by children where necessary), but it is unclear who, if anybody, is in charge in this parallel universe. In this respect, Blyton's work is akin to the children's literature of Victorian and Edwardian England which O'Keefe (2003, p.14) describes as featuring 'loosely organised worlds where characters wandered through episodic adventures'.

The utopian aspects of the Faraway Tree books are more 'heuristic', for while Blyton does not delineate new social structures she does invite the reader to dream. If nothing else the multiplicity of different lands implies that other worlds organised on a variety of principles are imaginable and indeed in some cases desirable.  As Fanny exclaims in The Magic Faraway Tree, it's 'so queer being awake and having dreams' (Blyton, 1943, p.76).

Blyton's utopian lands can be seen as part of a wider tradition of imagined worlds of abundance and license, perhaps best summed up in the names of two of the most vividly imagined lands at the top of the tree - The Land of Take-What-You- Want and The Land of Do-As-You-Please. In the former, as Moon-Face describes it, visitors can 'take whatever you want for yourselves without paying a penny' (Blyton, 1939, p.112), while in the latter the children are told 'Just think of all the things you want to do - you can do them all in the Land of Do-As-You-Please' (Blyton, 1943,  p.80).

This 'utopia of free consumption', to use Raymond Williams' term (1978) has echoes of Rabelais' 16th century fictional Abbey of Theleme with its one Rule of 'Do what thou wilt' and its abundance of fine food, clothes and other pleasures (Rabelais, 2006, p.367-373). Echoes too of the Medieval trope of Cockaigne as the land of plenty,  'a realm of miraculous abundance' in a 'World Turned Upside Down' where food and drink of every kind are freely to be had (Minton, 1991, p.39).

Blyton was certainly well-read enough to have been familiar with these antecedents, but the fantasy of plenty is one that might be expected to spontaneously arise wherever people are hungry and in this respect the period in which the books were written is surely significant. The Enchanted Wood was first serialised in the late 1930s, towards the end of a period of high unemployment and economic depression. The second two books were written during and immediately after the Second World War, when food shortages and rationing were a feature of everyday life. Before setting off to the The-Land-of-Take-What-You-Want we are told that 'money was very scarce, and the children did not have as much to eat as they would have liked' (Blyton, 1939, p.35). For children living through the austerity of this period the abundance of food in these books must have been tantalising, but even in relatively more affluent times the fantasy of an instant gratification of bodily appetites has a strong appeal. The books are filled with feasting featuring both familiar and fantasy foodstuffs, such as exploding 'Toffee Shock' sweets,  'Pop Biscuits' and sherbet-filled 'Google Buns'.

Many children's stories seemingly offer this kind of wish fulfilment only to teach a lesson that children cannot always have what they want, and must learn to control their appetites. In his Freudian account 'The Uses of Enchantment' (1976), Bruno Bettelheim argues that teaching such lessons is precisely the function of fairy tales - children are taught to temper the Pleasure Principle with the Reality Principle. Hansel and Gretel for instance forces 'children to recognise the dangers of unrestrained oral greed', with their eating of the gingerbread house provoking the witch as 'personification of the destructive aspects of orality' (p.162).

Blyton however allows her child characters to have their cake and eat it too. While they get into some scrapes in the The-Land-of-Take-What-You-Want they are able to return home with the goat and chickens that their mother had wished for to supply them with eggs and milk. And no harm comes to Bessie in the Land of Birthdays when her wishes are granted with 'an enormous dish of strawberries' and 'jugs of all kinds of delicious drinks, and cakes and jellies and fruit' (Blyton, 1939, p.182).

We can see parallels between the centrality of food in The Faraway Tree and the ubiquity of 'banquet images - food, drink, swallowing' that Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, p. 278) identified in the work of Rabelais and more broadly in carnivalesque popular-festive culture. For Bakhtin, 'The feast means liberation' and 'is a temporary transfer to the utopian world' (p. 276).  Oittinen (2006, p. 86-7)  argues that  'carnivalism (folk culture) and children's culture have many... things in common' (p.86) and sees Blyton's focus on feasting as exemplifying a recognition of children's culture, intrinsic to which is the fact that  'tastes are part of the child's world of experience, part of his/her emotional life' (p.87).

Other aspects of the 'carnivalesque' also feature in Blyton's novels, perhaps helping to explain part of their appeal to children. The nonsense rhymes of the Saucepan Man and his humorous mishearing of other people's remarks  are 'comic verbal compositions' (Bakhtin, p.5) which play with language and laughter, and the adventures in many of the lands are essentially festive episodes of play and license where children can take-what-they-want/do-as-they-please  in a carnivalesque 'suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions' (Bakhtin, 1984,p.10).

Fred Inglis (1997, p.131) remarks that Blyton's work often features 'a harmony of free, mutual life' and we can identify this as a further utopian element in these texts. There is a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, with the children encountering various animal helpers, such as the rabbits that join the fight to save the faraway tree from destruction (Blyton, 1946, p.157). These relationships are an extension of those that exist between the children, who despite occasional bickering look after each other in unfamiliar situations away from adult supervision, and between the inhabitants of the Faraway Tree. The latter, including Moon-face, Silky the fairy, the Saucepan Man,  the Angry Pixie and Dame Washalot, form a kind of alternative non-familial household of relative equals. 

Writing about Blyton's beloved 'Princess and the Goblin' by George MacDonald, Zipes (2012, p.111) notes that 'There is never one hero, rather there are always male and female protagonists, who learn to follow their deep inclinations, respect each other's needs and talents, and share each other's visions'. Much the same could be said of Blyton's approach of having a group of friends and/or siblings as a kind of collective hero in these and many of her books, providing too multiple points of potential identification for child readers of different ages and genders.

One of the 'regressive' aspects that Zipes (2012, p.176) identifies in classical fairy tales is that the 'happy end' is usually dependent upon 'arbitrary authority (generally in the form of monarchs or monarchs in the making)' whose 'Raw power is used to right wrongs'.  Blyton departs from this convention - when the future of the Faraway Tree is threatened by Trolls mining for jewels at its roots, it is the children and their animal and tree-dwelling friends who defeat them and save the tree without any recourse to external powers (Blyton, 1946, pp.138-157).

The woodland setting for such imaginings has a long history in English culture, including in the work of Shakespeare who sets his suspension of social norms in comedies such as 'As You Like It' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in  enchanted forests of his own. Northrop Frye's influential interpretation of this as the 'drama of the Green World' can also be applied to Blyton's  Enchanted Wood, an 'ideal world of innocence and romance' away from the confines of 'the normal world' which is also linked 'to the dream world that we create out of own desires' (Frye, 1957, p.182-3). If in Shakespearean comedy the desires unblocked in the Green World are sexual ones, Blyton attends to the desires of young children - for endless treats, fairground rides, sweets and presents. 

In fairy and fantasy stories there is typically a tension between what Tolkien (2006) termed the 'primary' world of the everyday and the imagined 'secondary world' of adventure and mystery which the characters slip into.  The latter can be a frightening place, but Blyton always manages this tension in a way that ultimately reassures her young readers. 

Within the various Lands the children visit, the main dangers are those faced by children everywhere - separation (as the Lands move on) and the unpredictable outbursts and occasional violence of beings larger than themselves. There is little sense of danger to life itself, and the supernatural creatures encountered tends to be mostly benign (brownies and elves), mischievous or disruptive (the 'red goblins') rather than terrifying or evil.  Blyton's fairies are of the whimsical kind criticised by the folklorist Katherine Briggs (1967), who noted the gradual diminution of literary fairies from the 19th century compared with their fearsome traditional counterparts. 

To use one of Blyton's own chapter headings in The Magic Faraway Tree, it is always the case that 'Everything Comes Right'. However wild the adventures, there is always the comforting order of home where there is nothing more to worry about than helping out with chores - in the eternal holiday of these books, even school is never mentioned. As with many of the best children's fantasy books 'readers immerse themselves in the journey of characters… in doing so, they experience the same movement away from and back to daily life, and the same exciting interval in between, in a brave new place' (O'Keefe, p.33)

When Jack Zipes  writes about subversive/counter-cultural children's literary fairy tales, the examples he gives are from writers who have 'expressly tried to make their tales more emancipatory and critical' (2012,p.170). As I have argued above there is ample material in the Faraway Tree books to enable utopian readings, but this does not mean that the author had any deliberate subversive intent. Blyton seems to have been commercially ambitious (and of course successful) and to have held fairly conservative views on matters such as Royalty, capital punishment and the family (Stoney, 2006).  There was though at least one area where Blyton does seems to have had a broadly progressive intent - in relation to child development and the natural world.

Enid Blyton completed a National Froebel Union kindergarten teaching course in 1918 and long before she became a children's novelist had achieved national recognition for her columns in 'Teachers World' magazine and other education writings. Frederick Froebel's 'belief in the importance of understanding nature' and learning 'through spending time in gardens and forest' (Bruce, 2012, p.15) clearly influenced Blyton who designed nature lessons with the aim of arousing in the child 'something that will stay with him and delight him all his life - a lasting love for Nature with its many beauties and wonders' (Blyton cited in Cadogan, 1997, p.105). The wonder at the natural world certainly shines through in the Faraway Tree books.

Beyond this, a Froebelian influence can perhaps be discerned in Blyton's child-centred approach to writing. Blyton famously listened to children's feedback about her stories, and took inspiration for her work from her observations of and interactions with children. (Stoney, 2006). This market research may have been sound business sense, but it also reflected a belief that children were worth paying attention to. As Blyton wrote in an early Teachers World column, 'A child's mind is wonderful in its simplicity, directness and sensitiveness' and 'as Froebel knew, a child is always seeking to express himself' (Blyton, 1923, cited in Stoney, 2006, p.186).

It would be oversimplifying matters to say that this perspective enabled Blyton to directly address children in a manner unmediated by ideology, in particular the social constructions of childhood prevalent at the time. As Nodelman (2008, p.5) observes, since adults usually buy children's books, the writer must make judgments based 'not on what they believe will appeal to children but rather on what they believe adult consumers believe they know will appeal to children'. However it is clear that for the most part Blyton's implied reader is the child not the parent.  She 'writes uncompromisingly for a single audience, not winking over the children's heads at other adults for approbation' (Hunt, 2000, p.38).  In doing so, Blyton sometimes breaks the rule 'which demands that the narrator be adult or child, one or the other' (Rose ,1984, p.69). While generally she takes the narrative position of an adult, at times she appears to slip into sharing a child's language and view of the world.  Blyton was criticised in this respect for 'her irrationality as a child' (Walter Hildick, cited in Rose, p.69), but this narrative device was perhaps a deliberate strategy to involve the child reader in a literary simulation of a peer-to-peer conversation.  The final line of the trilogy is a striking example of this. After Connie wishes that she could live by the Wood and 'go up the Faraway Tree whenever you like' the narrator concludes: 'So do I, don't you?' (Blyton, 1946, p.185).

Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree novels do not fit neatly into a typology which neatly divides children's literary fairy stories  into either conformist morality tales or subversive utopias. Blyton has a clear agenda of promoting children's behaviours she approved of, and the novels reflect then-contemporary values in regard to gender even if the racist and class-biased attitudes critics have identified in some of her works are largely absent in these.  On the other hand, she grants her child characters agency to act autonomously in utopian settings of companionship, abundance and freedom.  While Blyton may not have had a subversive intent, if latter day eco-protestors, graphic novelists and others of a radical persuasion can draw positively on their childhood memories of these books it is not as a result of a wilful misreading of the texts.  Blyton's early Froebelian training and personal inclination led her to positively promote wonder at nature and to be attentive to children's culture with its carnivalesque fantasies, and these found full expression in the worlds of the Faraway Tree.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M. (1984) Rabelais and his world. Indiana: University Press.

Bayne, R (2013) 'Hackney mum wins national storytelling prize', Hackney Post , 13 March 2013. Available at http://hackneypost.co.uk/2013/03/13/hackney-mum-wins-national-storytelling-prize (Accessed: 1 July 2014).

BBC (2004), The Big Read Top 100. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100_2.shtml (Accessed: 1 July 2014).

Bettlelheim, B. (1976) The Uses of Enchantment: the meaning and importance of fairy tales. London: Penguin.

Blyton, E. (1939), The Enchanted Wood. London: Dean.

Blyton, E. (1943), The Magic Faraway Tree. London: Dean.

Blyton, E. (1946), The Folk of the Faraway Tree. London: Dean.

Bradford, C. et al (2007) New World Orders in Contemporary Children's Literature: Utopian Transformations. Basingstoke: Palgarve Macmillan.

Briggs, K.M. (1967) The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. London: Routledge

British Library (2013) Public Lending Right Most Borrowed Authors - July 2012 to June 2013. British Library Public Lending Right: Stockton on Tees.

Bruce, T. (2012) Early Childhood Practice: Froebel Today. London: Sage.

Cadogan, M. (1997) 'The Magic of Enid Blyton' in Tucker, N. and Reynolds, K., Enid Blyton: a celebration and reappraisal. London: National Centre for Research in Children's Literature, pp.104-110.

Cantrell, S. (2010) 'Nothing Like Pretend: Difference, Disorder, and Dystopia in The Multiple World Spaces of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials'. Children's Literature in Education, 41: 301-322.

Dixon, Bob (1977a) Catching them young 1: sex, race and class in children's fiction. London: Pluto Press.

Dixon, Bob (1977b) Catching them young 2: political ideas in children's fiction. London: Pluto Press.

Frye, N. (1957) Anatomy of Criticism: four essays. Princeton: University Press

Goldthwaite, J. (1996) The natural history of make-believe: a guide to the principal works of Britain, Europe and America. Oxford: University Press.

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Inglis, F. (1997) 'Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville and the Good Society' in Tucker, N. and Reynolds, K., Enid Blyton: a celebration and reappraisal. London: National Centre for Research in Children's Literature, pp.127-133.

Hunt, P. (2000), Children's Literature. London: Blackwall.

Letcher, A. (2001) 'The Scouring of the Shire: Fairies, Trolls and Pixies in Eco-Protest Culture', Folklore, Vol. 112, No. 2.

Lo, L. (2007) Leonard to Leona: A Singapore Transsexual's Journey to Womanhood, Singapore: Select Books.

Lurie, Alison (1990) Don't tell the grown-ups: the subversive power of children's literature, Boston: Little, Brown and Company

Manhire, B. (2000) 'Early Reading: The Magic Faraway Tree' in Manhire, B., Doubtful sounds: essays and interviews. Wellington: Victoria University Press, pp. 55-56

McLaren, D. (2007) Looking for Enid: the mysterious and inventive life of Enid Blyton. London: Portobello Books.

Minton, J. (1991) 'Cockaigne to Diddy Wah Diddy: Fabulous Geographies and Geographic Fabulations, Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 1, pp. 39-47

Moore, A. and Lloyd, D. (1990), V for Vendetta. New York.

Nodelman, P. (2008), The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

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O'Keefe, D. (2004) Readers in Wonderland: The Liberating Worlds of Fantasy Fiction. New York: Bloomsbury.

Rabelais, F. (2006) Gargantua and Pantagruel. London: Penguin Books

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Rudd, D. (2008) 'From Froebel teacher to English Disney: the phenomenal success of Enid Blyton' in Briggs, J., Butts, D. and Grenby, M.O. (eds) Popular children's literature in Britain, pp. 251-270. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

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Neil Gordon-Orr (2026), 'It was so queer being awake and having dreams':  social conformity and utopian subversion in the Magic Faraway Tree.

Andrew O'Hagan's novel 'Mayflies' (2020) is his well-observed take on the theme of a group of young friends meeting up again in later life, in this case music and film-obsessed Scottish teenagers in the mid-1980s who bond over a weekend in Manchester and whose later lives aren't quite the adventures they hoped for.

I can only assume there is something of O'Hagan's own youth in this, and it is centred around some real events - the main one being the Factory records 'Festival of the Tenth Summer' held on 19 July 1986 at the Greater Manchester Exhibition (GMEX) Centre to mark the anniversary of the two famous Sex Pistols gigs at the city's Lesser Free Trade Hall in June and July 1976. 

The bands playing at the 1986 event included several founded by people who had been at one or both of the Pistols gigs, including The Smiths, The Fall and New Order (one of the characters in 'Mayflies' mistakenly mentions Magazine playing, they had split up by this point, but Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was on the bill). O'Hagan describes the Fall's Mark E Smith as 'the Fine Fare Baudelaire... sloping about the stage. He didn't sing the words, he inebriated them'. He also enthuses over peak era Smiths, 'romantic and wronged and fierce and sublime, with haircuts like agendas'.

On the night before, the Shop Assistants played at the International in Anson Road, Manchester and O'Hagan gives a good account of the indie-pop vibe: 'She swayed with composed embarrassment, the sort of embarrassment all members of small independent bands had then, a form of shyness, or stage absence, that seemed to go well with their accidentally perfect tunes'

There is also a visit to the pre-acid house Hacienda with dancing to 'Candyskin' by the Fire Engines.

Thirty years later, dancing at a wedding, narrator James is less enthusiastic: 'It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step. Then it leaves you. Or does it? Saturday night changes and your body forgets the old compliance. You're not part of it any more and your feet hesitate and your arms stay close to your sides. It's there somewhere, the easy rhythm from other rooms and other occasions, and you're half convinced it will soon come back. It's not the moves - the moves are there - but your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo'.

I'm not sure that it is inevitable that music becomes less exciting as you get older - you can discover whole new genres that you previously overlooked - but perhaps it is true that much music becomes part of your past and can never be heard for the first time again.

From 'Luton Street Press' (December 1975), an alternative take on the 12 days of Christmas:

More Luton stuff:

Marsh House Luton - from punk to henge

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Irish Artists for Palestine have issued a powerful statement in solidarity with the pro-Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Britain. It is signed by most of the great Irish musicians active today (Kneecap, Fontaines DC, Mary Wallopers, Christy Moore, The Pogues, Kevin Rowland, David Holmes), as well as writers and other cultural figures (including Sally Rooney, Annie Mac and Aisling Bea):

'We, Irish Artists for Palestine,  write to express our solidarity with the political prisoners currently engaged in hunger strike within British prisons. Their decision to place their bodies on the line is a profound act of resistance — one that echoes the long histories of both Irish and Palestinian political prisoners who have used hunger strike as a non-violent act of sacrifice to assert their dignity in the face of state violence and repression. This collective protest is the largest hunger strike in British prisons since the 1981 hunger strikes, and it demands urgent public attention. 

The prisoners — Qesser Zuhrah, Teuta Hoxha, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed (the Filton 24), Amu Gib, Jon Cink, Umer Khalid and Lewie Chiaramello (Brize Norton 5) - have been incarcerated by the state without trial for allegedly protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza, in which the British government has been actively complicit. Some individuals have been imprisoned for over a year without trial and it will be up to two years before they are heard. This is a grotesque violation of the UK's standard pre-trial custody time limit of six months. 

Prisoners have now entered their fifth week without food. Their bodies are deteriorating, with five hospitalisatjons so far and, the risks to their lives are escalating rapidly. Throughout this period. their basic rights have been heavily restricted and their demands have gone unanswered. Mainstream media outlets remain silent on the issue and there has been little to no coverage of this protest or of their demands. 

The hunger strikers have five demands:

1. End to all prison censorship and withholding of all letters, phone calls and books 

2. Immediate bail for an Palestine Action prisoners currently held in UK prisons 

3. Right to a fair trial for all Palestine Action prisoners held in UK prisons 

4. Deproscription of Palestine Action and the removal of its terror classification 

5. Shutdown of all Elbit Systems sites and subsidiaries in the UK 

We, the undersigned, call on the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Justice Secretary David Lammy. MPs and public representatives across Britain and Ireland to take immediate action, using all parliamentary and civic channels available to ensure these demands are addressed with urgency and transparency. 

We  demand that media organisations uphold their duty to the public by reporting the hunger strike, as well as the demands of the hunger strikers, to the public at this critical stage.

We believe this state repression is unfolding within a wider global crackdown and criminalisation of the Palestine solidarity movement. Increasingly, artists, activists and other dissenting voices are being censored, silenced, or smeared with baseless 'terror' allegations as a means of suppressing political  expression. These systemic and structural efforts to marginalise dissent affect all of us — not only those targeted at the moment. 

Our solidarity with the hunger strikers is rooted in our broader commitment to freedom and justice for the Palestinian people who have faced seventy eight years of occupation and over two years of genocide in Gaza. There are currently 3,368 Palestinian prisoners being held hostage in Israeli prisons under administrative detention, without a trial. 

We stand with the hunger strikers, Palestinian hostages and with all those who continue to struggle for freedom and justice in Palestine. 

In Solidarity, 

Irish Artists for Palestine 

I went to see Luton punk band UK Decay at a rare hometown gig at the Luton Hat Factory arts centre last Saturday (8/11/2025).  As expected a peak of their set was their 1980 song 'For my country' with its chorus 'for the honour, I don't ask why, it's my pleasure, my honour to die, for my country.'

The song riffs on Wilfred Owen's First World War poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est' which contrasts the reality of soldiers 'guttering, choking, drowning' in a gas attack with 'The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' ('It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country').

The poetry of Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other First World War poets had a big impact on the first punk generation. Penny Rimbaud of Crass has credited Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), which set Owen's poems to music, as a key influence on his pacifism. But I think most of us probably encountered these poems in school and/or through Brian Gardner's anthology 'Up The Line To Death: The War Poets 1914-1918', first published in 1964 and reissued in a 1976 paperback edition. A lot of punk anti-war sentiments were expressed through an imagery from this time, and UK Decay's song is a good example from its lyrics to its sleeve.

More Luton stuff:

Marsh House Luton - from punk to henge

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Sorry to hear of the passing today of D'Angelo. Quite a lot of obituaries focusing quite rightly on his sexy neo-soul, but some tough politics in there too. His 2010 album 'Black Messiah' is a classic of radical black liberation theology, the track '1000 deaths' including a sample from murdered Chicago Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton:

'Because the people that we're asking for peace

They′re a bunch of megalomaniac war-mongers and they don't even understand what peace means

But we′ve got to fight 'em, we've got to struggle with them

To make them understand what peace means'