Pub Tour In Hampshire - Shawford Station to Hedge End Station

Despite going from pub to pub in a district is a sporadic though enduring hobby of mine, it is something that I have neglected on this blog.  In part it may come from lacking a digital camera for many years and then lacking a scanner.  I never see the point of having a camera on a phone and anyway my latest phone is now broken when the place where you put the charger got stoved in.  I do not believe it is almost two years since I last did a pub tour posting here: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/bacchus-and-i-drinking-in-esher.html 

I did some up in the Midlands that I did not capture.  Now back in southern England I have done more visits to Hampshire, some distance away from where I am now living, but convenient for Bacchus to rendezvous with me (in both senses of the word!  Bacchus being the nickname of my best friend).  Our tour of Eastleigh was so desultory as to not be worth reporting.  Our return visits to Winchester have deserved better coverage than I have given them.  It is a good city, if you can stand the snobbier elements of the population, for visiting a range of pubs in close proximity with lots of food outlets across the spectrum in between.

This particular tour was prompted by my father who commented how many pubs there seemed to be in this stretch of Hampshire (Shawford lies 8 Km (5 miles) South of Winchester). Thus, I thought I would give it a go to see how many I could visit.  One warning, pubs in Hampshire seem not to open until 12.00, which has caused some frustration when in Winchester.  Thus, I planned my trip to start at 12.00 and was almost bang on.  It ran until about 19.30 and encompassed me drinking at 12 pubs, whereas it should have actually been 14, but more about the reasons for that in a minute.

Below is a crude map of the route.  The 'ßà' symbol represents the railway stations.  Shawford is a very small station but you can get trains there from Winchester and Eastleigh or Southampton.  You can also get the 69 bus which runs between Winchester and Fareham.  It stops in the centre of Twyford rather than Shawford.  The 69 and the 8 buses are your bale-out vehicles if you tire on the route.  Once you reach Fair Oak you can take the 2 to Eastleigh if you cannot stand any more.

Map of the Route

Round numbers refer to the text about the pubs below

Shawford Railway Station exit

1. The Bridge, Shawford
This is right by the station dominated by a high bridge across the valley.  This area is criss-crossed by rivers and navigations and you would think would be popular with walkers.  However, it would seem to be favoured by well-off Hampshire residents. There is a high-class patisserie opposite the pub.  I did not go into the heart of Shawcross itself which lies to the West of the railway, instead I was heading East.  The pub is Chef & Brewer but seems a bit less mechanical than some of those places.  I suppose because being so tucked away (the station platform is so short everyone has to move into the front carriage to get off) the clientele is well known.  Large garden.  Food clearly a focus as with the bulk of these rural pubs, ironically with a 1940s menu at present which I imagine is common across the Chef & Brewer pubs at present.  It was also in full-flow in terms of customers when I got there at 12.00, a different experience from other pubs in Hampshire I have visited.  It was one of the only pubs I have been in, where I felt under-dressed.  It is clear locals 'dress for lunch' even in a pub.  I drunk Kronenbourg 1664 which was available in most places I went to.

The walk to Twyford is very pleasant, crossing the river valley and looking to the next village in the distance.  I believe the name 'Twyford' comes from 'two fords' and that is suggested by the village sign. To the South there is a large private estate called Shawford Park.

Scenes along the Road from Shawford to Twyford

Central Twyford

Now, you may wonder why I have featured a post office and general stores.  One thing is that it sells local produce.  Though if you are on this tour, I suggest not buying free-range eggs!  More important for this trip is the 'Bean Below' cafe which you can see the sign of to the right of the traditional phone box.  This is a cafe actually beneath the post office.  The entrance to it is up that side road, not through the post office.  It has some nice basic food and if you need a coffee it is worth a stop.  Apparently its cooked breakfasts are renowned, but it only opens at 09.00 on the weekend.

From this sign, I realised that I had left my visit too late and could have once encompassed another Twyford pub in this tour.  I suppose given how many are closing down each month these days I was very lucky to be able to get to the ones I did.

2. The Phoenix, Twyford

This was a welcoming pub.  Very much a down-to-Earth place run by a middle-aged couple.  Basic food here, lots of jacket potatoes.  However, like most of the pubs on this tour, some interesting beers.  I am not a bitter or real ale man, but I was surprised by the choice along the route.  This seemed like the pub for the locals who are not snobby.  They seem to run a lot of events like bingo and things for charity; the landlord was getting ready for the fire-walking in the garden that evening.  Much cleaner and alert than many pubs of this kind.  The roadside face looks dusty but go in and you will see it is kept well-tended, no doubt one of the reasons it has survived.  I had a guest lager, I think from a micro-brewery.

3. The Bugle Inn, Twyford
'The Bugle Inn' is across the road from 'The Phoenix' but is clearly pitched at a very different clientele.  As I continued on this tour I was becoming conscious of how simply in pubs you can be exposed to the British class system.  In none of them did I feel unwelcome, but maybe my oddities set me outside many assumptions, people simply cannot put me into any particular category.  Saying that I was dressed in shorts and shoes from Asda and the shirt I had on had come from C&A which closed down in Britain over a decade ago.  The hat was from Marks & Spencer, but I was hardly in designer wear.

'The Bugle Inn' is an upmarket gastro pub.  Like almost every pub I went in, it has stripped floor and the usual accoutrements of leather sofas.  They did expect me to be staying for lunch.  It was quite with a very spacious and light bar area.  I drunk Staropramen in here; in an iced glass.  It was the just on the verge of pretentious.  Unlike 'The Bridge' it attracted couples rather than well-off families.  Looking around it did seem rather where you would come if having an affair. All the staff are young women dressed in black, apparently selected for being waif-like and with long hair.

Between Twyford and Colden Common

I was impressed by this barn, it looked like somewhere that might have been fought over at the Battle of Waterloo.

It is not unusual these days to find Thai and Indian restaurants in rural areas.  This one is still marked on online maps as 'Rimjhim' but as you can see is known as Banaras.  I imagine it is run by former Gurkhas or their descendants given the connection between Winchester and those troops.  I know some people insist on a curry when on a pub tour and this is a good opportunity, they do a 2-course set lunch for £8.95.  So if you did not fuel up at 'Bean Below' this might be worthwhile dropping into.

There is a farm shop along the road selling eggs and honey as well as live chickens and ducks.  Looking at the eggs I would doubt they are free-range and if they are the chickens are not getting a very varied diet.  I was not impressed by them at all.

4. The Black Horse, Colden Common
On the maps this area is shown as Twyford Moors but there is no sign of that designation, rather you are shown as being in Colden Common.  From a distance this pub looked open, but when I reached it, it was clearly closed down, but perhaps only recently.  As you can see other properties are up for sale here, so given what I saw elsewhere on this route, it will all be levelled and made into expensive, cramped housing.

5. The Rising Sun, Colden Common
Having missed out on a drink in 'The Black Horse', scraping the edge of Colden Common which seems to be a very large 'village', I took a detour off the main road, following one of the brown signs which are common in this area, mainly indicating pubs, golf clubs or equestrian centres.  Fortunately it was a short walk into the village.  Though the day was advancing, I was surprised to find myself as the only customer.  This looks like a 'housing estate' pub which has lifted itself pretty well up to the next rung on the ladder, without becoming a gastro-pub.  It has a pool table but it also has leather sofas.  Given there seems to be a lot of housing around it I thought it would be busier.  Maybe it has fallen between two stools, not sufficiently posh for those who might go to 'The Bugle Inn' but too uppity for those who might frequent 'The Phoenix'.  It was a spacious place with friendly staff, though that might be because I was spending money.  I did see a three-generation family re-packing their car at length and it seemed they had been in for lunch; the man had even taken one of the menus with him!

Between Colden Common and Fishers Pond

Despite what it shows on the map as the area being 'Fisher's Pond', the apostrophe for Fisher's was missing from every sign I could see.  I went past this pleasant church which looked like it belonged in an Alliance area on 'World of Warcraft'.

6. Fishers Pond, Fishers Pond
This is a large, rambling pub, named after the area it is in, with its own river and both a swan and a black cat which have adopted the pub.  It was by far the busiest I had visited, exceeding even 'The Bridge'.  It is above all a family pub for middle income families.  Perhaps the styling of the pub was why they were here rather than a short distance away in 'The Rising Sun'.  It is stone floors and that grey paint which seems universal if you have pretensions of grandeur viz 'The Bugle Inn' and the exterior of  'The Rising Sun'.  Lots of small children running around.  I was pleased to be able to get Staropramen here.  I must say that the staff were friendly and seemed to be very competent in dealing with the complexities thrown up by large families ordering food, moving tables, etc.  I imagine the place would collapse if they were not.

7. Queen's Head, Fishers Pond
This pub is right next door to the 'Fishers Pond'.  It was slightly more down market, looking like a 'housing estate' pub in style and with the food it provided.  Again, like many of the pubs I went in on this walk, it was spacious.  The staff were friendly, but the customers few.  Probably a good place to escape to if you cannot stand the noise of children next door.  As in Twyford, it did strike me as odd that two pubs were so close together, but I suppose they deliberately target different sorts of customers.

After Fishers Pond you have a steep climb up a hill which has caravan sites - in fact there are quite a few right along the route both for mobile and static caravans.  If in need of some non-alcoholic input there is a cafe in the garden centre at the top of the hill.  Once you reach the flat you are heading into Fair Oak which is not really well supplied with pubs.  None of the three I visited, I would recommend.

8. Fox and Hounds, Fair Oak
I must apologise for the picture on this one.  Maybe the result of being six pints, a bowl of peanuts and a packet of salted cashews (provided in error) up to this point.

This place aims at being very much a 'family' pub.  However, it is rather a down-market place which I imagine attracts customers from the numerous housing estates of Eastleigh.  It is run by quite an intimidating one-legged ex-military man.  The 1980s style red leather sofas and the fish tank are worth seeing.  However, you are probably best off in here if you like pool or darts.  The signs suggest there is an issue with underage drinkers.

9. The Cricketers Arms, Fair Oak

Fair Oak, though small, is well equipped.  It has a fancy Indian restaurant, an Indian takeaway, two Chinese takeaways, a cafe, a tearooms, a large Tescos for a petrol station, a Morrisons and another convenience store.  So if you need to refuel or get more cash or have something other than beer, it is fine.  The two pubs sitting opposite each other in the centre of the village are very disappointing.

'The Cricketers Arms' exterior is the best part of the pub.  Inside it is very shabby.  The barmaid's young daughter had taken over one corner for her plastic slide and my-little-ponies.  The barmaid was far harder to find and even the locals had difficulty in getting served.  I know it was the middle of the afternoon, but even so they were losing money as a result.  Much of what was on tap was 'off' and so I ended up having bottled Becks.

10. The Old George

While in 'The Cricketers Arms' it was all about horse-racing with customers and staff heading out to the betting office on the main road which apparently only recently opened, across the road in 'The Old George' it was about football.  Again not unusual on a Saturday.  The service was far better in this pub than its rival.  The place had a bit of a stark feel to it and when you see the list of bands playing you understand while it feels a little like a venue out of hours.  I could imagine it would be a lot better in the evening when a band was playing.  I imagine the clientele changes too.  It was not as bad as 'The Cricketers Arms' but I felt I had come at the wrong time to see it at its best.

Having been disappointed in Fair Oak, I decided not to follow one of the brown signs down to the 'New Clock Inn' on the western edge of the village.  In part because that was the direction in which Eastleigh lay in and I knew from past experience that pubs in Eastleigh lack character.  Everything is national chains and the town shuts down early.  I pressed on instead into Horton Heath and was glad that I did.

11. The Lapstone, Horton Heath

I crossed the border from Fair Oak to Horton Heath, a little apprehensive about the quality of the next pub.  It turned out to be very pleasant.  The customers seem to be people who feel themselves better than those in Fair Oak and dress up to come out, certainly the women.  This had a more mixed clientele in terms of genders since I had left the 'Fishers Pond'.  It was a little like 'The Rising Sun', stripped floors but not to the extent of being a gastro-pub.  It is awkward to get through the front door.  I was back on Kronenbourg 1664 here.  They seem to specialise in curries and have a good range of them.  It is right next to a farm and apparently sheep appear in the field you can just see.  However, this felt more like an adult pub rather than a 'family' pub.  It be that I was now into late afternoon.

Just a gathering of birds I noticed as going through Horton Heath.

12. Brigadier Gerard, Horton Heath

This is a pretty if modern-styled pub at the other end of the ribbon village of Horton Heath.  Its pizzas are apparently acclaimed.  However, it had a mix of local drinkers (who would not move an inch to let you get to the bar) and families eating out, though with less frantic manner than at 'Fishers Pond'.  They also do takeaway pizza, The staff were very friendly.  The pub is named after the racehorse which itself was named after stories by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle.

13. Farmers Home, Durley

Now, my next pub should have been 'The Southampton Arms' on the edge of Hedge End.  However, reaching the roundabout which would have turned me South-West towards it, I was tempted by another brown sign.  This pointed North-East to the 'Farmers Home' and 'The Robin Hood'.  There was a lack of apostrophes to show how many farmers were involved; the sign suggests just one.  Having had a good experience at 'The Rising Sun', I thought another detour would not do any harm.  However, there was no indication of distance and it turned out to be quite a hike.  From 'Brigadier Gerard' to 'The Farmers Home' proved to be farther than from 'Fox & Hounds' to 'Brigadier Gerard' without stopping points on the way.  Furthermore, in contrast to my route so far, though at times I had had to cross the road to reach a pavement, down this road, at times there was none and lots of well-off locals powering their 4x4s towards me as I clung to the edge of the road.

I was quite relieved to penetrate right into Durley which turned out to be another of these villages that covers many hectares.  There is a cafe-bar at the equestrian centre I passed but at this stage I was recognising my error and wanted to reach the pub.  It turned out to be very pleasant.  Again a mix of eating in the garden and people drinking seriously, with local children but not too noisy.  Mobile phone reception is poor there, but it felt nice to be in a real village rather than sitting on the edge of another housing estate.  Having reached my twelfth pint and had some far-too-large pork scratchings, I bottled out the rest and got a taxi to Hedge End station (hence knowing mobile phone reception was poor, though not non-existent).  How much farther on 'The Robins Nest' is and whether it is still open I could not find out.  The brown signs tend to last years longer than the locations they point to.

14. The Southampton Arms, Hedge End and 15. Shamblehurst Barn, Hedge End

These would have been the last two pubs on the trip if I had not taken the mistaken detour to Durley.  The former is a 1930s-style pub looking like a large mixed use pub like the 'Farmers Home' and certainly above the Fair Oak level in quality.  'Shamblehurst Barn' is a Hungry Horse pub though built into an old barn, looks like a 1980s housing estate pub of the kind the Hungry Horse chain favours ('New Clock Inn' back in Fair Oak is one of theirs too).

Right, so in the space of 11Km (7 miles) you can get through fourteen pubs in this area which is a pretty good figure outside of a large town.  The countryside especially in the early part, is attractive.  The pubs vary considerably in the type of customers they favour so you might pitch your tour to what sort of person you are and where you might fit in.  The weak stretch is clearly Fair Oak, so you might just want to grab some food there and power on into Horton Heath.

Be Patriotic: Be Paranoid

Driving through Hampshire this week I heard the Hampshire police announcing the re-launch of an anti-terrorist hotline for members of the public to telephone in and report suspicious behaviour that they feel might be connected with terrorism. Given that the last terrorist attack in Britain (so excluding Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not Great Britain) was in July 2005, this seems to be an incredibly tardy response from the county which has the major port and rapidly developing airport of Southampton, the port and naval base of Portsmouth, numerous Army regiments housed across the country and the major Army base at Aldershot.


In 2006 Hampshire Constabulary set up its Special Branch Contact Unit and has been whining recently that no-one is calling its hotline and clearly felt that the public needs a new jolt of warnings about terrorism? Local authorities have been criticised by the Local Government Association and by the House of Lords Constitution Committee for abusing the powers they were granted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which gave them the ability to put members of the public under surveillance. Not finding any terrorists, local councils have used these powers to keep people under surveillance suspected of applying to schools from outside the catchment area or allowing their dogs to foul the highway or putting out their dustbins on the wrong day for collection. In total 794 bodies including 474 councils as well as health service trusts and fire service can use the powers and apparently across Britain there are over 1000 covert surveillance operations (it is important to note the use of the word covert here, because for example, the used of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) is overt surveillance) being mounted each month. The most criticised council is that of the town of Poole in Dorset (a county bordering Hampshire) which used the powers to monitor people for all kinds of suspected things in most cases they were found not to be breaking regulations, e.g. on school applications, let alone the law. Its representative Tim Martin admits that the council has put 50 such covert operations into effect since RIPA was introduced in 2000, though it is clear usage has stepped up in the past couple of years.


So being stymied in its development of our authoritarian society through the means of what previously seemed to be legal covert surveillance but is now being challenged, a new approach has been adopted which is to get people to start reporting their neighbours. The radio advertisement which has followed the announcement says 'if you are suspicious, report it'. It features the sounds of a busy nightclub saying that it is only like this because the bomb that would have been planted here was prevented by someone reporting the theft of chemicals which could have been used to make a bomb, presumably this means fertilisers, so there seems a danger thay any Muslim or Irish people shopping in a garden centre better watch out (though I advise not looking at the CCTV cameras, the reason why you will see below). It then follows with a sound of a busy shopping centres, saying that a bomb was prevented by someone reporting a person looking at the CCTV cameras in the centre. The two locations are probably intended to remind the listeners of real bomb attacks, such as the Bali nightclub bomb of October 2002 and the bombing at the Arndale Centre in Manchester in June 1996. The implication is however, that we are currently under constant threat of bomb explosions across Hampshire's town centres and it is only the hard work of the Hampshire Constabulary and its informants that is preventing carnage. Where is the evidence for this high level of threat?


Informants never need encouragement. I have worked for three branches of the civil service and every day in every office in which I have been employed we received about twenty letters from informants 'shopping' (i.e. reporting them to the authorities) their neighbours who they were sure were committing some offence. The usual accusations are that the person must be committing benefit fraud or not paying their tax. Certainly where I worked the number of genuine cases were less than 1% of the ones reported to us. If I worked for 5 days x 48 weeks per year, that meant that I saw say, on average 2000 informant letters per year and that was at just one office. In one job there were three offices of the same branch of the civil service receiving coming on for 6000 informant letters per year and I imagine the Inland Revenue offices, Social Security offices, Job Centres and the police all received similar volumes of information. These days with email it is probably even easier.


It is interesting to note what the suspicious behaviour Hampshire Constabulary want you to look out for and this comes from their website: observing security procedures and routines (such as the regular marches of regiments through Winchester, home to five regiments which seem constantly on parade?), taking photographs or video (a very unusual activity in historic Winchester and Portsmouth or the New Forest also in Hampshire and basically anywhere someone might be with their family), note taking (I will make sure not to amend my shopping list or do any train spotting in Hampshire and will advise all teachers not to send their children to do projects in town) and repeat visits to a location (so I will buy my newspapers and groceries for a different shop each week and not be a regular at any pub in Hampshire and suggest that people try not to go daily to their workplace if it happens to be in Hampshire). This is utterly ridiculous. What they do not add, but is assumed is that these things are suspicious if done by a man of Middle Eastern appearance or with an Irish accent. The ironic thing is, that in Hampshire the most active terrorists are people like the Real Countryside Alliance campaigning to reinstate fox hunting and Motorists Against Detection which burns speed cameras and are made up of the middle-aged, middle-class white males that both make up the senior ranks of Hampshire police and are presumably immune from such suspicion.


To add to the paranoia that there are terrorists lurking in every shopping centre, the Hampshire police are running a seemingly unrelated poster campaign asking 'Who's walking down your street?'. The poster tells you to keep an eye out for burglars and advises you that they may be of different age, ethnic, social or gender groups to what you might expect. So the implication is to spread the paranoia far and wide and not just suspect what young, white workling class man of being a burglar but also that elderly Asian woman too. How long is it before we have checkpoints at the end of each road where you have to show your identity card and explain why you want to walk down that street before being permitted to do so. Has no-one heard of the block wardens that the Nazis introduced to their residential areas?


Parts of the government has been trying, especially since the Bradford race riots of 2001, to try to bring communities, especially those of mixed ethnicity. Yet in one of Britain's largest counties we seem to have a policy which seems to be encouraging citizens to turn on their neighbours no matter what their background. As it is, British society is incredibly insular with people closing their front doors and only looking out surepticiously to spy on happenings in the street. This is why children get abused and the corpses of elderly people lay undisturbed for weeks. This approach is the wrong one, it will simply encourage vigilanteism and hounding of people who look a little different or are simply new or disliked or are just behaving in one of these ill-defined 'suspicious' ways. This kind of reaction does nothing to make our towns safer in fact it makes them inhospitable and dangerous. Yet, the urging of some, influential in British society, if we are not sufficiently paraniod and not reporting the suspicious people the authorities assume must be active in our towns (even though the police and Security Service cannot find them), we are being unpatriotic and of course it is a short step to lacking patriotism being seen as suspicious itself. I once read a science fiction short story in which everyone in a community reported each other to the authorities and the whole village was taken away, but I will simply return to the Del Amitri song, 'Nothing Ever Happens' (1990), which reached Number 1 in the UK: 'They'll burn down the synagogues at Six o'Clock/ And we'll all go along like before/ We'll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow.'


P.P. 30/03/2009 - I notice from radio advertisements that the Hampshire initiative seems to have spread nationally very quickly. Also interesting to note is that the government has been saying that anti-G20 summit protests this week will be violent and police are saying they will have to use anti-terrorist legislation. This is an unsurprising public behaviour as agents provocateur. Clearly the government wants no protest so they are seeking to provoke a violent response and scare off peaceful protestors. Next time anyone wants to do some peaceful protesting they can say 'no, look what happened last time' and ban it. Despite the shift from Blair to Brown, the step-by-step move towards an authoritarian state in the UK is continuing. These tactics are not new and you can easily find examples from European, African, Asian and American history of the past 80 years of them all being used.

P.P. 23/07/2010 - Being unemployed I currently look through all kinds of vacancies that I would not normally have encountered; this is increased by the fact that I look for work right across the UK not just in my local area.  I was struck when at my local Job Centre Plus by the three separate advertisements on their job search computer, posted by the University of Brighton.  They were seeking recruits who have previously served in the Security Service, i.e. MI5, to work for the university at three locations in southern England, only one of which seemed to be Brighton itself, vetting their students.  Clearly this university alone (or perhaps it is simply more open about the fact than the others) believes it runs the risk of having terrorists among its intake and thinks it needs skilled people to check them out.  The salary seemed pretty desultory for the kind of skills they are seeking, but I guess that is an implication of cutbacks in higher education.  The radio advertisements encouraging paranoia may not be currently running, but the outlook they have fostered seems to be living on in various corners of UK society.

Flags of South-West England

I read this week that the county of Dorset had selected a flag for the county. Apparently before this it simply had a design of three lions in a row that looked very like that used by the England cricket and football teams rather than being distinctive. I sometimes drive through Dorset, which is where the South-West region of England begins, though of course the capital of what in the early Medieval period was the Kingdom of Wessex was at Winchester in Hampshire, the next county East, which now falls in the South-East region of England. The impetus for Dorset, which apart from the Poole-Bournemouth-Christchurch conurbation is primarily rural to get its own flag, comes quite clearly from Cornwall.

The St. Pirn Flag of Cornwall

A few years back, probably encouraged by steps towards greater establishment of a Welsh identity with the increase of learning the Welsh language from the late 1970s onwards and the Welsh Assembly more recently, the Cornish began to rediscover their identity and to promote the Cornish language. Cornish, like Welsh, is a Celtic language and its popularity has now reached an extent that there is now a Cornish language Wikipedia. Anyway, the flag of the white cross on the black background often accompanied by the Cornish word for Cornwall, 'Kernow' began appearing on cars right across the South of England. Even when you are two or three counties away from Cornwall you will see it emblazoned in numerous places. Partly I think this stems from the English love of tiny states, a sense of wanting your locale to be independent and of esoteric languages. The Cornish flag is the negative of the medieval flag of the kingdom later duchy of Brittany, another state with Celtic people many of whom came from Cornwall to settle. However, Brittany part of France from the 14th century remodelled their flag in the 1930s to resemble the US flag though keeping the black and white colours.

Not to be outdone by Cornwall, the next county East along the peninsula, Devon, which is often lumped together with Cornwall (for example the Devon & Cornwall Constabulary of police) though the Cornish often dislike the people of Devon, well, in 2003 Devon developed a similar flag but with dark green in the place of black. I have seen this on some cars but not to the extent of the Cornish ones which I feel sell to tourists as well as locals. Devon also lacks that historic identity of being a separate state that Cornwall was until the 10th century and also does not have its own language.

The St. Petroc Flag of Devon

In online discussions there was a debate that with Devon ,which borders Dorset to the West adopting even unofficially such a flag, Dorset should have one too. In a vote ran by the county council, the winning design won 2,086 votes (54% of the share) with the next nearest of the four designs put forward, winning only 856 votes (22% of the share). This is a small proportion of the county's population (145,000 people live in Poole alone) but it follows the theme established by Cornwall and Devon, so I guess it is not going to cause offence. The gold and red were in Dorset's coat of arms and in the badge of the county regiment and it was the colour of the Wessex dragon too, plus, as people have pointed out, local landmarks like Gold Hill and Golden Cap. One of the two designers lives in Sweden and as with the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish flags which all share the cross of St. Olaf as their basis, you can see a developing shape with the South-West flags, though attributed to different saints.

The St. Wite flag of Dorset

It is certainly bright and colourful. I know the red lines are in keeping with the black ones of Devon's flag but they are sensible, as from the numerous examples of this flag that I have seen flying this weekend, the gold becomes very pale in sunlight and it would be difficult to distingush this from the white cross if the red did not mark it out.

Are we going to see a sweep of flags across England now, all associated with local saints, as I suggested for local replacements for St. George's Day? Possibly. A lot of this has to do with the branding of counties and their corporate identity. This may be a challenge now especially in those counties broken up by unitary authorities such as Berkshire (North of Hampshire) and Somerset. Somerset which borders Devon and and Dorset, is in a similar situation to how Dorset was until recently, with a heraldic badge but no flag per se.

The Badge of Somerset

Though parts of Somerset were in Wessex, its dragon is different. A red dragon does appear on the Welsh flag to the North-West of Somerset. I can imagine now, Somerset will come up with its own flag, there are already online discussions about this. Maybe it could adopt something along the lines of 'Land of the Setting Sun', I could envisage that, with a nice blue sky and green base. However, it might also go with the same kind of cross as Cornwall, Devon and Dorset perhaps with the red and blue on white, probably a blue cross, outlined in white, so it does not appear too close to the flag of England as a whole.

The flag of Wessex

Wiltshire, the other county in the South-West (it borders Dorset, Somerset and Hampshire) seems to have gone for something entirely more exotic and which looks more like a flag of some Caribbean island. It was introduced in 2007. The golden bird is a Great Bustard extinct in the UK since 1832 but has been re-introduced in the county. The green and white represent grass on chalk hills of Wiltshire. The circle apparently represents the standing stones at Stone Henge and Avebury in the county and the three white and three green refer to the six counties that currently border Wiltshire. So lots of references in there. However, it does not look that English.

The flag of Wiltshire

Like many people I prefer Chrys Fear's 2006 alternative which was stimulated by chalk horse carvings on hillsides in Wiltshire and seems to sum up the prehistoric culture of the region. The green also echoes that of the Devon flag, a nearby county.

Chrys Fear's flag for Wiltshire

Just to wrap up, I looked at the flag of the main component of Wessex, which is Hampshire, though it falls into the South-East region rather than the South-West. There is a rather dull flag which looks like something that was created by the council in 1977, though it was adopted in 1992 to celebrate the centenary of the county council which had been established in 1889. It had to have special permission due to the inclusion of the crown.

Current flag of Hampshire

The 'Daily Echo' newspaper has launched a campaign for a better Hampshire flag and of the designs on show I like the two from Michael Jacobs:

Designs by Michael Jacobs for flags of Hampshire

These would seem to keep with the style which is gathering momentum along the South coast counties. The rose is an important symbol in the county, which has the Rose Bowl as a key sports venue too. The Tudor rose shown here does appear on Hampshire county badges already. The green and gold of the first design are reminiscent of the flags of Devon and Dorset which seems sensible. The latter references the Wiltshire green but also the naval traditions which are very strong in Hampshire due to Portsmouth and Southampton.

I like the fact that there is cross-referencing between these newly appearing county flags and I hope that Hampshire, unlike Wiltshire, adopts something sensible and that people of the county can be proud of. To show how different things can be when you move to a new region, I include the flag of Mercia which covers what is primarily today the West Midlands of England. This has a Cross of St. Andrew, also known as the saltaire, best known from the flag of Scotland. This could far too easily be mixed with the Scottish flag or even just iconography of the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party).

The flag of Mercia

Stepping Into A Parallel British Society

I am in the fortunate position of having leave to 'use up'. Many businesses force you to take a certain amount of leave in a year and partly due to my failure to have a holiday I have been compelled to take time off despite the fact that this is generally a costly experience. Anyway, it gives me some more time for blogging. Like today I was on leave yesterday and that enabled me to step into a very alternate British society. No, I did not slip through a portal into a world where Hitler had won the Second World War or even just where Callaghan won the 1978 election, I simply went to the New Forest & Hampshire Country Fair. There are many of these kinds of events, I used to run into much smaller ones in Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire when I lived in Milton Keynes, and I guess that I probably encountered the kind of people I am about to talk about there. I think the thing about this fair was the scale of it and probably Hampshire is more prosperous than those Midlands counties. Also the New Forest which I sometimes skirt while driving around the South of England, attracts the very wealthy. It is picturesque and comparatively close to London so probably no surprise. So scale, prosperity and the fact that unlike Buckinghamshire-Northamptonshire-Bedfordshire which for some reason are the realm of bikers, there were not the usual leather-clad bike brigade to leaven the mix of people.


Why did I find it so unsettling? Well, many of the things there you would probably find at any fete in a country area. There were stalls selling cakes, there were marquees of flowers and handicrafts, there were car dealerships and various charities with stalls too. So, far so normal. There were more livestock. Having recently re-seen the episode of 'Father Ted' featuring the 'King of the Sheep' contest it was fun to see one for real. There were a lot of horses and people show jumping or driving coaches very fast or pulling those commercial carts with shire horses. So, it was rural. However, it was the people that made the whole thing a little scary. The event runs Tuesday to Thursday rather than over a weekend, so this presumably filters out office workers and shop assistants for starters. I would normally have been at work. So walking around, for all the conservationis and the modern farm technology on show (and a great deal of older stuff like 'vintage' tractors and a huge steam-powered combined harvester) you felt as if you had stepped back to 1928.


There were middle class people there but they seemed mainly to be traders. However, predominantly the people seemed either to be squires and big landowners and their numerous offspring or they seemed to be farm labourers granted the day off and their families, greatful for a day's break, tugging their forelock in their gratitude. There was a clear pecking order with 'members' areas where men were wearing suits and ties (despite the heat) and there was a commissionaire in full uniform to police entry into these areas. Colonel and Mrs. Blimp seemed to be everywhere, he in a navy blue jacket, carrying a shooting stick and she in a floral dress and large straw hat. There is a younger version too, who presumably in time will grow into these people. Their dress code was different but equally as alien: young women in leather hats with jodhpurs and these peculair knee-length boots in a kind of hard suede. The young men dressed the way Princes William and Harry do off duty, I suppose unsurprisingly, because they belong in this same alternate reality. There were dogs, dogs by the score. Some were for showing in events, but the bulk were just brought by visitors. Many people had two or more, everything from beagles to labradors and the odd poodle or dalmatian. You could believe if someone started shooting pheasants from the air there would be a thousand dogs rushing to catch the kill. There was a stall with a whole range of shotguns sitting on it, so maybe they do that when 'outsiders' like me have gone home. Despite the hunting ban it was interesting to see the book stalls there had hunting books in great prominence.


I clung to the conservationists because at least they seemed to have come from a world I knew. They were put at the far end of the event from the groups like the gundog handlers and the Countryside Alliance that seemed to be more in tune with attitudes of the bulk of the visitors. I do remember in the 1970s people spoke of the Green-Brown alliance in West Germany. By this they saw some commonality of interests between the Greens and the Browns (brown was the initial colour of the Nazi Party) who represented landed interests and the people who are subservient to them. Both groups want to leave rural areas untouched, though for very different motives. The Greens (in this situation represented by conservation groups, and by this I do not only mean pressure groups, but also official bodies such as the Forestry Commission who weree there in force) are democratic and want to encourage all kinds of people to enjoy the rural areas of Britain and the more Brown tendency founded on exclusive access for the 'right' people and no interference from outside. Now sometimes there is overlap but it is an uneasy relationship on both sides. You could almost see that represented physically at the event I was attending.


My concern, I suppose, was that I had stepped into a society (in large numbers, there must have been thousands of people there) which bore no resemblance to what I know UK society is like. What was frightening, was that the people there whether they were from the top or the bottom of society seemed to believe in a society founded on strict hierarachy and privilege. Most alarming they believe whole-heartedly that their view of Britain and especially the rural areas is the correct one. They believe that the elites should control everything, should be free to exploit the rural spaces and block out anyone else. Of course they need poor people to work for them, but these people must be grovelling and grateful for the meagre wages and the minimal privileges that the elite grant them. I was reminded by what I read in the 'Metro' (a free newspaper in London and some other cities) which had a comment from Claire Armstrong of Safespeed (an organisation opposed to speed cameras who talk under madness in trying to get people to have the 'right' to speed) commenting on the need that near Preston in Lancashire, the local authorities have had to put a CCTV camera to guard a speed camera to prevent it being constantly vandalised. Armstrong said '[t]he culprits were probably law-abiding citizens taking direct action against speed cameras'. How can these people be 'law-abiding' if they are vandalising a piece of safety equipment? I am sure these same people would want young taggers birched for vandalising through graffitti. In addition, these people are disabling speed cameras so that they can commit more crime, i.e. speeding, without being penalised. Of course, in the screwed-up parallel society which lives beside our own, there is a very different sense of what being 'law-abiding' is. Their definition is about protecting privilege while keeping down those who lack power and wealth or will not kow-tow to them.


The bulk of the attendees of the New Forest & Hampshire Country Show, feel that their view is the correct one. However, they are fortunately only a minority. The bulk of the population lives in cities and suburbs and has at least a semi-democratic view of how UK society should function. What is alarming is that the ordinary people of the UK in fact have so little power and with David Cameron on the horizon as the next prime minister or the one after next, they are actually going to climb into the ascendancy once more. In that kind of society wages are kept low while bonuses are in their millions; people are free to speed and run down people with impunity. The bulk of us come into a kind of serfdom and forced to be grateful for that. An afternoon at a country fair has shown me a potential UK of 2015 and unless you are of the navy-blue blazer brigade, for us it is going to be a country with an unfair, oppressive and divided society.