Jon Neale

Between 1934 and 1939 tens of thousands of upmarket apartments were built for rent in Britain’s cities : a phenomenon that is almost completely written out of history. An absolutely fascinating piece to write and research

@OldStationSt @BM_AG @OzzyOsbourne As i thought

@OldStationSt @BM_AG @OzzyOsbourne Outside sports related stuff, obvs.

The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions 2025 figures are out & it shows Birmingham MASSIVELY underperforming with ONE attraction in the top 200 (@BM_AG 62nd driven by re-opening & @OzzyOsbourne exhibit) alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=… Know of anywhere that could help solve this?

@OldStationSt @BM_AG @OzzyOsbourne These are specifically leisure trips.

@JonNeale @BM_AG @OzzyOsbourne Business conferences & meetings? Using Birmingham as a base for NEC / BHX / ICC / Stratford-U-A? Dunno. There is definitely a disconnect somewhere though.

@thomasforth @nouveaucolonial Completely tangential but apparently in the 19th century 40pc of the British army were Irish catholics, a higher number than the English, Welsh or Scottish.

@JonNeale @nouveaucolonial Yes, I think that's a fair point. All very much just a guess.

1/ Yes. 30M easily. 2/ In a world where Britain had properly joined Ireland as equals in 1800 and built a country together, Ireland and we would share that country which would have avoided famine, and we'd be 120 million today. Decent chance. . My favourite what if in history.

@thomasforth @nouveaucolonial One question would be how much Irish immigration contributed to growth, particularly in the north west. If that hadn’t happened…..

@nouveaucolonial Before the famines Ireland population was following the English trajectory. I don't imagine it would have grown by as much, so I conservatively guessed at 30M Irish. All of Britain would have been richer and thus grown a bit more I think. Gets you to 120M. All just a guess.

It’s tiiiiiiiime. The Brindleyplace blossoms are out and they’re just beautiful 😍 Get there quick if you want to see them - they only look this gorgeous for a few weeks.

Timely reminder of when this guy reviewed that guy... Iggy Pop on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Classics Ireland, 1995): Caesar Lives by Iggy Pop In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters — Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando — with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values, played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought. Eleven years later I stood in a dilapidated but elegant room in a rotting mansion in New Orleans, and listened as a piece of music strange to my ears pulled me back to ancient Rome and called forth those ghosts to merge in hilarious, bilious pretence with the Schwartzkopfs, Schwartzeneggers and Sheratons of modern American money and muscle myth. Out of me poured information I had no idea I ever knew, let alone retained, in an extemporaneous soliloquy I called ‘Caesar’. When I listened back, it made me laugh my ass off because it was so true. America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of Western life and institutions today are traceable to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman children for better or worse. The best part of this experience came after the fact — my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit: I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective. The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not. I find out how little I know. I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.

I got this fidget toy for my son, because he axolotl questions. ITHANGYOU

@OCpatriot_ @KeruboSk Late gen X had computers and internet, at least at university.

BWAHAHAHAHA! Gen X pulled off those monster research papers with zero internet. Picture this: a towering stack of library books on the desk, three more splayed open on the bed like casualties of war. No computers for most of us. Meaning the final draft was either painstakingly handwritten or hammered out on a typewriter (with White-Out as our only undo button). Spell-check? That was us flipping through a massive Webster’s dictionary like it owed us money. No autosave. No save at all. Lose that paper? Spill coffee on it? Drop it in a puddle? Tough luck! Start the whole damn thing over from page one. Sure, Gen Z has it easier today with AI, Google, and endless digital shortcuts. But let's be real: you had it infinitely easier than we did. We were out here forging term papers in the analog fires 🔥

Millennials are the elite generation because they cranked out 12-page essays the night before they were due. No ChatGPT. No Claude. Just lo-fi beats playing in the background, Black coffee at midnight, footnotes that were somehow correct, and pure delusion. Grade was an A minus. Period.

@apsamuelson @ursine_meeting @KallumPickering Those two things are not mutually exclusive. In fact they could be mutually supportive.

@ursine_meeting @KallumPickering We need to diversify away from oil and gas, into tidal, nuclear, wind, solar etc, not just try and keep trying to squeeze the North Sea lemon because the North sea lemon squeezers pay lobbyists, politicians and media types more than anyone else

The anti-North Sea brigade have no understanding of how terms of trade shocks work. Even if extracting more of the UK's oil and gas would not reduce domestic energy prices, running a trade surplus in hydrocarbons would drastically improve how the economy fairs whenever global supplies of these essential commodity markets are impaired as a result of geopolitical shocks. #northsea #netzero @afneil

The whole @bankofengland summary is worth reading in full. Market is interpreting this is "hawkish". In other words pointing towards further hikes. They're now pricing in two rate rises this year. An extraordinary turnaround. Not long ago they were pricing in two rate CUTS

@SSB_M0 @alexwickham What magical powers do we have to open the strait? Or rather, what military heft do we have that the US doesn’t?

@alexwickham Starmer's refusal to get involved to help secure Hormuz (to not lose Lab votes to Greens) risks extending the conflict and the inflationary damage from a closed Hormuz, in turn further hurting UK economy (which will likely lead to a loss of more Lab votes...)

This is why as we wrote at the weekend there is barely contained fury at Trump behind the scenes in the UK govt. His war knocks off course their hopes of the economy turning a corner this year. And there will be even less market tolerance for a more left-wing leader

@mmcp1878 @charlielfc_17

@charlielfc_17 Spot on. Liverpool was actually a conservative - dominated up until the 1970’s, and we also had this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool… Who regularly won some council wards by massive majorities.

Because we’re split. We’re much more akin to Glasgow or west Belfast than some pure, Dublin outpost. Yes, the city was glowing green yesterday but come July the Orange Order will be out in force. Why? Because the Orange order is an Irish institution

@bjrhfe44 Hmmm. My views are conditioned by spending a lot of time in provincial France (not the south) which is really very suburban when you get beneath the veneer. Most people live in and aspire to live in houses.

@JonNeale Wow interesting take... I also believe there is untalked northern European, Protestant modesty about our lifestyle and architecture

@rwatmo @thomasforth @timleunig Bristol and Edinburgh are as ever the counter examples. Places that don’t have the invisible wall where everything stops, where the inner suburbs feel like smoother continuations of the centre

@JonNeale @thomasforth @timleunig Tom lands his point well, that said, I don’t think Manchester has any intention of building out its ‘ring of fire’ at anything other medium density as minimum, but still trying to understand why a new tram stop in Collyhurst is £60M though.

I think this is now wrong. North English Cities are now just as dense as their European equivalents like Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, etc... with extremely strong economies. There are some different patterns within that density I admit, but I don't think it matters much.

@bjrhfe44 People in the Ruhr don’t aspire to city living either. People in Bristol, Brighton, Edinburgh, London to some extent do. City history dictates these patterns across Europe, it’s just that we have fewer of the latter type than most places

@bjrhfe44 that’s more to do with heavy industry and its legacy than culture. Dortmund, Essen, Charleroi, etc have similar problems.