Johnston Press relaunches: the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald, postscript

I've revisited the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald this week and remain impressed. The teething troubles of the 'Tiser in week one of the relaunch have been overcome, with an improved balance between copy and image on the front page - with a story as close to readers' hearts and wallets as the potential dualling of the A1, this demanded to be the front page lead - and an excellent selection of photographs from a Berwick Operatic Society (accompanying this review, though most of the pictures haven't made it to the website) production which emphasises local faces and local creativity. The local press is both journal of record and journal of recognition, with each local face potentially adding sales.

The Herald continues with a range of stories from throughout its coverage area; a reduced letters page, thanks to the number of would-be councillors among correspondents and the incoming electoral purdah; and the Leisure section now has its own heading. Colour reproduction could be better, but this was an issue before Trinity Mirror took over printing too, and is perhaps the occupational hazard of being a small weekly fitting in amongst larger runs. Chief reporter Anna Smith's centrespread concerns the commemorations of the centenary of Emily Davison's death included in this weekend's Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering and beyond.

Johnston Press relaunches: the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald, part two

Critics of the decision by Johnston Press to impose a limited set of templates upon their series of weekly newspapers could claim some justification from the early stages of the roll-out. Some readers complained that their paper had adopted an inappropriate design. From the limited sample I took last year, the temptation to litter pages with faddish QR codes was very noticeable.

One year on, the evidence of the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald is that while there are still pitfalls presented by the new templates, different titles are now able to implement them with more flexibility. In the late 1980s both were designed by the Tweeddale Press staff in Berwick, with Times New Roman predominating for body text and occasional use of Univers, with a variety of headline fonts, often sans serif, giving way as the decade progressed to a more systematic use of Times New Roman bold. Both only gave up Times New Roman in recent years, the Herald switching to Nimrod or something close to it, while the Berwick Advertiser adopted a text design reminiscent of its Johnston sister The Scotsman. The Berwick Advertiser's Bodoniesque headlines in particular seemed suited to the paper's role in a small town which remains a retail, business and cultural centre for a substantial catchment area in England and Scotland, while the Morpeth Herald was folksier and more intimate.

With this in mind, it's not surprising that the Berwick Advertiser's redesign seemed the bolder of the two. It shares the same template as The Bucks Herald in Aylesbury and the Northumberland Gazette in Alnwick, complete with grey bar in the masthead for date and price and weblinks and a Bodoni-like headline face which resembles, but is not the same as, that previously used in Berwick. Editor Phil Johnson had a major news story with which to splash and chose to show how the compact format can maximise the use of a striking image, the stranded cargo ship the MV Danio which ran aground on the Farne Islands. All the items on the front page demanded the reader turn to a later page to read the full stories, in the case of the picture story pages 8 and 9 for a fuller report from Ian Smith, though the asides on Farne rangers and memories of Grace Darling deserved more tailored treatment than a News in Brief heading. Paper stock aside, only the page-wide advertisement at the foot of the page for Yummleys bistro and coffee shop in Eyemouth prevents the 'Tiser looking more news magazine than newspaper. Features familiar from other Johnston papers such as the index, contacts, weather and Photo of the week on page 2 are present.

There are some errors which are presumably production teething ones: some house ads refer to the paper as The Berwickshire News, its sister also edited by Phil Johnson from 90 Marygate in Berwick which went tabloid on the same day, and it's The Berwickshire's e-mail address to which readers are invited to write on the letters spread. The decision to have the running header read 'Berwick Advertiser and Berwickshire News' is probably one of practicality, given that many pages in the broadsheet carried this anyway reflecting the amount of shared content. Despite the very good to reasonable reproduction of colour pictures, black and white images tend towards the murky, such as the picture of the visit of the Berwick Young Farmers to the old Tweeddale Press Group printworks in June 1985, printed on page 45. This forms part of the 'Meet the Team' supplement; the update on plans for paper and profiles of the staff are welcome even if the copy:advertising ratio in the supplement makes it reminiscent of a freesheet.

News layout seems to prioritise human interest and 'good news' on the right of a spread with downbeat stories, where they exist on the left. This page four sees an account of retail woes as the Berwick branch of jeweller H. Samuel closes, and another of the rusting state of the electricity and water control cabinet at Spittal splash park. Opposite is the tale of a nine-year-old at Berwick Middle School who can recite Pi to 130 places. Court stories and council business tend to be dealt with as Nes in Brief. One-month old Lily Rose Mavin, delivered by her mother Yvonne of Tweedmouth, is an appealing hook for a serious story, the third baby in four months from the Berwick area born in an ambulance because since Berwick Maternity Unit's closure it's been difficult for expectant mothers to reach any of the alternatives. The campaign for the reopening of the unit is one seemingly covered closely by the paper, but campaigners "have done all they can for now" as they await a decision from the new clinical commissioning group. Another story appropriate for the relaunch featured on the front page is covered in full on page 6, telling of artist and printer Jonathan Lloyd's use of a nineteenth-century Improved Albion Press to print two-colour posters defending Wooler Middle School against closure.

Both the Berwick Advertiser and The Berwickshire News have simplified their titles. The 'Tiser's badge is redrawn with tints of colour, retaining the 'Established 1808' motto and a bear by a tree (until the first decade of this century there were two bears, facing in different directions) between the two words of the title, now without a definite article for the first time. The subtitle carried since 1957 (though did it appear in the years 1983-84, when the paper was published as The Berwickshire and Berwick Advertiser, I wonder?) 'Incorporating the Berwick Journal and Northumberland News, published 1855-1957' is dropped. Likewise The Berwickshire News seems to have lost and East Lothian Herald from its full title, though this was I think not an absorbed title but a pitch for a circulation area stretching up to the Forth (indeed, in an earlier form the title read and East Lothian Advertiser). Its subtitle from the 1957 consolidation, 'Incorporating the Berwickshire Advertiser, published 1885-1957' has also been lost. The Berwickshire has long since lost its Dunbar office, and its Duns and Coldstream ones too for that matter. The supplement has profiles of the communities on which the papers concentrate: Berwick, Coldstream, Duns and Chirnside, Eyemouth, Seahouses and Belford and Wooler.

In the first of my series of posts on the Ponteland Observer last year, I anticipated that the redesigned Morpeth Herald, when it came, would drop the words 'Incorporating the Ponteland Observer' from its masthead. I am happy to say that I was wrong. In contrast with its Tweeddale Press siblings, Northeast Press have chosen to retain a great deal of the look of the broadsheet Herald in the compact title. Changes to the typefaces are minimal, with the nearest matches having been found within the new package. There is subtly increased use of colour in the subheadings. Remarkably, Births, Marriages and Deaths remain on page two, where in other Johnston titles which I've seen they have been moved well inside the paper. The masthead retains the recent blacked-in version of the Gothic heading which the paper has used, with occasional additions and amputations, since former owners J. and J.S. Mackay installed their rotary press in 1907. Facebook and Twitter links are proclaimed prominently, perhaps a clue that the paper guesses it has an older, less tech-savvy readership than Johnston Press's senior management might hope for.

The Herald has statistics on its side: it's one of the minority of newspapers in the UK to be building its circulation. The subtle alterations made to its layout and typography to accommodate its new size are calculated not to alienate a loyal and growing readership. Where Phil Johnson at the 'Tiser went for a large picture story, the front page of the Herald is led by a text-only story, but also an environmental one: the battle to prevent a windfarm being built at Fenrother a few miles north-west of Morpeth. A smiling nine-year-old brandishing her letter from the Queen is a suitably forward-looking but traditional image for the first front page of a new era.

The Herald is a smaller paper than the 'Tiser, with 52 pages in its book to the 'Tiser's 96. Motor and property advertising is harder to come by in Morpeth, with the two dailies of Newcastle (both owned by Trinity Mirror) so close. With the Northumberland Gazette, the Herald makes up for this with occasional specialist advertising supplements, but display advertising in the paper appears healthy. Its page 3 leads on overwhelming support for a local campaign against the gridlock-inducing traffic lights introduced to Morpeth last year, with a flock of activists and petition signatories pictured on Morpeth's Bridge Street. Retail worries also lead page five, with a campaign for a reduction in business rates on Newgate Street. Other local campaigns covered are those for the maintenance of a bus service from coastal villages to Morpeth and for funds to keep Longhorsley Village Playgroup in operation. The Herald seems to cover more local businesses than the 'Tiser, though the latter has more stories about facilities for tourists and a dedicated farming section with contributions from local agricultural firms. There is good and frequent use of pictures of participants in World Book Day and Comic Relief, mainly in schools and shops.

There's a domestic scale to the Herald which makes some of it look superficially like something a community group has put together on DTP, but it's all highly professional and resisting overdesign. The comment and letters section segues gently into the leisure pages, put together by senior reporter Andrew Coulson; there is no barrier of adverts and headings to isolate the section as in some other titles. Stories of ongoing interest include the centenary of the death of Emily Davison, followed in more detail in the preceding and subsequent editions. The centre pages see another history supplement as a pullout, leading into an introduction to the advertising team; its only problem is that it possibly diminishes chief reporter Anna Smith's two page special feature on the regeneration of the Stobhill area of Morpeth. Relations with clubs and societies throughout the circulation area seem well-maintained, though one suspects resources are not available to help the hard-worked dedicated reporting staff of two (the remainder, including the editor and deputy editor, being shared with the Northumberland Gazette) more proactive in soliciting content from the full catchment area.

Colour registration can be patchy in the Herald, but the 21 March issue was reasonably good and avoided some of the washed out or misaligned images in some other recent editions I've seen. A slightly heavier paper stock might flatter the colour inks better, perhaps, and the Berwick Advertiser seems marginally better in both regards. Neither title is printed in-house by Johnston Press; since the closure of their Sunderland printworks late last year the Berwick Advertiser has been printed under contract by Newsquest, presumably in Glasgow, and the Morpeth Herald by Trinity Mirror in Newcastle. Both were restrained with the QR codes and the Herald avoided the trendy web-pointing but uncommunicative graphics bars many of the other Johnston titles have embraced.

Promotions for the relaunches were stronger than some of last year's sausage rolls and pub meals. Both the 'Tiser and the Herald offered a competition with DFDS Seaways to win a break or mini-cruise to Amsterdam as well as another to win a Mini, while the 'Tiser offered a chance to win a meal for four at the Lindisfarne Inn at Beal. The Morpeth Herald countered with a voucher for a cookie from the Morpeth branch of Subway.

Reviewing single issues of newspapers as individual works of craft is a dangerous exercise, risking undervaluing commercial realities and that a newspaper is a continuum of news provision, even more so in the digital age now that websites sit alongside print. Both relaunch issues were put together well, though the Herald felt closer to its readers and better-provided with copy. Its letters pages seemed also the more thriving of the two. Approval here for the Herald's daring to be different within the confines of the Cases i Associats templates, but the Advertiser knows how to present news dramatically and made very good use of the more polished if slightly impersonal stylesheet. The Herald (perhaps through familiarity and remote and long-past personal connection, as well as my regard for tradition) just has the edge as the most impressive of the two, but it is a close-run thing.

An afterword, revisiting the papers two weeks on.

The Berwick Advertiser can be found online at www.berwick-advertiser.co.uk, and the Morpeth Herald at www.morpethherald.co.uk . On Twitter they are @BAdvertiser and @Morpeth_Herald, and both the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald are extending their Facebook presences.

Johnston Press relaunches: the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald, part one

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts surveying the metamorphosis of three titles in the first wave of relaunches imposed by Johnston Press across their local newspapers in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. My admiration (albeit biased by local association) for the Northumberland Gazette was shared by decision-makers in the company, as it won the in-house award for the most successful transition to the new compact, templated format. The plan has returned to Northumberland, with both the Berwick Advertiser and the Morpeth Herald making the move from broadsheet to redesigned tabloid on 21 March this year.

I first became aware of both Advertiser and Herald in the 1980s, when both were published by the Tweeddale Press and printed by them in Berwick; they used the same typography and shared advertising. Since 1992, they have gone their different ways, the Herald being acquired in that year by Portsmouth and Sunderland Newspapers' Northeast Press division. Though both firms were acquired by Johnston Press in 1999, their titles retained distinct editorial identities.

The Berwick Advertiser (determinedly asserting its identity with the definite article until its last broadsheet issue) and the Morpeth Herald (definite article dropped in the first half of the twentieth century) are both long-established, the Advertiser first appearing in 1808 and the Herald in 1854. Both bade farewell to their broadsheet editions on 14 March with retrospective features. The Advertiser sought the personal angle, with a page of memoir by its former editor Tony Langmack. Rich in the weight of experience, the article was let down only by the absence of sub-editing at crucial points and the sense that it had been compressed from a much longer and more valuable work. If Tony Langmack has a memoir to publish of his sixty-eight (and counting) years in local journalism, I hope we see it. Langmack's reminiscence was followed by three pages of reproductions of old Advertiser pages, including the first front page from 1808, when it was The British Gazette and Berwick Advertiser, the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the fates of Berwick prisoners of war at the end of World War Two, the devastating floods of 1948, the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1956, Berwick Rangers' defeat of Glasgow Rangers in the Scottish Cup in 1967, Lord Lambton's resignation in 1972, the end of the old Berwick Borough Council in 1974 and the launch of the larger district authority, and two front-page photographs from the last decade which demonstrate the power of the broadsheet page for photojournalism. Most of the images confirm the personality of the Tweeddale Press of the twentieth century - socially and politically conservative, but proudly localist and where necessary aggressively so.

The Morpeth Herald, rooted in the south-east Northumberland coalfield, had a different outlook to the Advertiser and its retrospective reflects this. Discontinuity is evident in editorial: the Herald has no equivalent to Tony Langmack and its columnist Roger Hawkins and chief reporter Anna Smith rely instead on good relations with the Mackay family, previous owners of the paper, and their collection of back issues and related material dating from 1854 to the sale of the paper in 1983. The decision to lay the supplement out as a special edition of the Herald in its own right leads to the narrative being somewhat fragmented, but the efforts of the Mackays to build up the paper are well-illustrated with extracts from old papers and photographs of once-mighty presses in action. The expansion of the Herald to cover most of east Northumberland is addressed, as is the establishment of a core readership in the colliery villages to the south and east of Morpeth as far south as Dinnington and Forest Hall. Roger Hawkins remarks that this coverage area is unknown to family historians, with births, marriages and deaths from Blyth Valley and North Tyneside an unappreciated resource. (There is, alas, no mention of the growing number of Heralds at the online British Newspaper Archive.)

The Herald's circulation shrank as the smaller collieries closed and the villages themselves either died or were absorbed into Newcastle. The independent Herald was unable to adapt; the paper the Mackays closed in 1983 before selling the title to the Tweeddale Press Group was, it's observed, much the same as it had been seventy years before. The reorientation of the Herald under the Tweeddale Press to serve the post-1974 local authority of Castle Morpeth, helped by the merger with the Ponteland Observer ('a small independent absorbed in stages between 1984 and 1986') is touched upon.

The tone of both supplements, unsurprisingly, is to present the paper as essential to the enduring well-being of the area it serves: 'Our heritage captured in print', proclaims the second page of the Herald history. There's a stronger note of continuity in the Herald's coverage of its own relaunch than in the Advertiser's. The Herald's relaunch is presented as evolution rather than revolution, indeed as a return to first principles as the paper's original size in 1854 was closer to modern tabloid size than the broadsheet the Herald is leaving behind. The Advertiser doesn't mention the Richardson family who founded the paper, though Tony Langmack does pay tribute to their descendants the Smails, who sold the Tweeddale Press to Johnston Press in 1999. The Mackays figure prominently in the Herald, while the Advertiser is presented as a team effort with the paper itself and its role in local people's lives enjoying a long history. Though both supplements have advertising alongside them, it's the Advertiser which exploits this, solicitors Tait Farrier Graham asking 'Your local newspaper is shrinking! Isn't it time your legal bills did?'

The end of the broadsheet format was prominent on both papers' front pages, but didn't dominate. The top half of the last Berwick Advertiser led on the news that Berwick Visual Arts were finally to reopen the Gymnasium Gallery on the Town Wall by the Barracks, a deal having been reached with landlords English Heritage; while local schoolchildren dressed as Wally from Where's Wally? for World Book Day provided the lead picture. The Herald was more varied, with pictures of women's suffragist re-enactors commemorating the centenary of the death of Emily Wilding Davison, and the unveiling of a bust of Lord Collingwood, above the arrest of five men for conspiracy to rob and, as the main story, surely a quintessentially local headline, 'It's bedlam at the bus station'.

More on the new compacts themselves in part two.

Not forgotten

I'm still here, but very busy, hence the failure for more than one post to appear this year. There is a television review in draft, but it needs editing and the adding of references and I've been both too tired and very conscious of other commitments. Envisage me sitting in libraries, making notes on business meetings two centuries ago and accounts of income and expenditure, and measuring the pages of books.

Hopefully I will make time to finish that post in the next few weeks. In the meantime, do consider buying Doctor Who - The Aztecs: Special Edition on DVD, for which I contributed the production subtitles.

The Lost Prince: The Life & Death of Henry Stuart

Since at least the publication of Roy Strong's Henry, Prince of Wales and England's Lost Renaissance in 1986, scholarly work on Henry Frederick (1594-1612) has had to counter the presumption that any study of the eldest son of James VI and I would be conditioned by counterfactualism. Like the National Portrait Gallery exhibition which it catalogues, The Lost Prince: The Life & Death of Henry Stuart brings together several voices to recontextualise the life of Prince Henry in the hope of disentangling the youth himself from the constructions of dynastic propaganda. They are led by the NPG's seventeenth-century curator Catharine Macleod and include Malcolm Smuts, who contributes an astute essay on Henry's life and environment.

Henry occupied a position with few wholly appropriate historical precedents: he was the first heir apparent to the throne of 'Great Britain', a diplomatic and courtly reality though constitutionally intangible despite the wishes of his father the would-be British Caesar. Not only does the art which surrounded Henry illustrate this problem, it attempts to resolve it.

Through paintings and engravings, artists working for James VI and I and his courtiers appropriated swathes of iconography for Henry as they sought to project the prince as the convergence of a series of princely models. The first item in the catalogue, an unidentified artist's portrait of 'Fredericus Henricus D G Princeps Scotorum' in 1596, may be of a "flattened, decorative nature," but the two-year-old prince's elaborate velvet and gold cap and loose-fitting jacket positioned precariously over his elaborately embroidered and quilted shirt convey an impression of a caterpillar-like toddler who exudes more kingly potential with each instar, clutching an unclear object in his left hand like a sceptre. Seven years later, newly transported to England and installed as a knight of the Garter, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger's portrait shows Henry in red Garter robes. For comparison, the editors of his book inset a smaller reproduction of another Gheeraerts Garter portrait, of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, from 1597. Once Elizabeth I's favourite, a series of disastrous political miscalculations had led to Essex's execution for treason in 1601. Drawing attention to a similar portrait depicting Sir Henry Lee, Elizabeth I's champion and consistently loyal to the monarchy, squashed my premature wish to interpret this picture as an early embodiment of Henry as an opposition figure.

The appropriation for or by Henry of images which had been associated with opposition to the crown is one of the subjects addressed in Timothy Wilks's Introduction (p. 14) and Catharine Macleod's essay 'Portraits of a most hopeful prince' (pp. 40-41). James VI and I was happy for Henry to develop and profess the martial virtues which the king himself lacked. Henry could also act as an emblem of idealised protestant kingship behind which anti-Catholic forces, sceptical of James's conciliatory policy, could rally. Ambassadors of foreign powers reported on Henry as potentially sympathetic to their causes when the king was not. Henry died on the verge of applying his symbolic role to the practicalities of European politics: the exhibition includes The Embarkation of the Elector Palatine in the Prince Royal from Margate, 25 April 1613, the Prince Royal being a ship intended for Prince Henry's use and depicted here making a voyage in which Henry would have participated as escort to his sister and her new husband before meeting Britain's ally in the Netherlands, Maurice of Nassau (pp. 146-7). Christine Gerrard's The Patriot Opposition to Walpole is justifiably referenced as a source for later centuries' misunderstanding of Henry's apparent factionalism, though the consistent oppositionism of the Hanoverian heirs can be exaggerated and Henry's death at eighteen left his political direction forever open to creative reconstruction.

There are many highlights in this book, but the prominence of Inigo Jones's set and costume designs for Prince Henry's Barriers and Oberon both impress in their own right and emphasise how self-conscious the performance of monarchy was. Henry might have played and been seen to play at Arthurian chivalry, but a clear distinction was drawn between the world of the imaginary past and the practical world of government. Paintings which might be taken as striving for naturalism in this view are deliberately artificial, illustrating Henry's willing conformity to the demands of a princely education, setting him in controlled environments recognisable to the audience. Occasionally fantastical elements would intrude into the realistic, such as Father Time being led by the forelock as Henry rides into the lists on Robert Peake the Elder's Prince Henry on Horseback. The inclusion of such details probably depended on the taste of the patron who commissioned the work.

The original nature of the latter painting was only discovered in 1985-6 when overpainting from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century was removed. The existence of alterations points towards the continued attraction of Henry's image, though in this case its context was brutally adapted to suit later ideological trends, adapting the horse to resemble the work of Van Dyck and painting a dark woodland scene over the background wall and Father Time. Both book and exhibition are beacons for the discoveries of the last quarter-century. The portrait by John de Critz of Henry's mother Anna/Anne of Denmark included was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery from the princely house of Schaumburg-Lippe in 2010. A companion to a better-known portrait of her husband James VI and I, it reveals the strong features of a woman who had had to assert herself to disrupt Scottish court discipline to regain a say in her children's upbinging, and whose embrace of Roman Catholicism was both a rebellion against her husband's dynastic policy and an expression of his court's controversial and contested religious pluralism.

Henry emerges from The Lost Prince as interested in and exposed to a wide selection of practical arts appropriate to a maritime power establishing commercial and territorial footholds beyond Europe. Though more difficult to illustrate than hunting or chivalric fantasy, attention is paid to his scientific library at Richmond Palace, curated by Edward Wright. As well as being Henry's tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy, Wright had developed a practical methodology for the Mercator projection; the title page and dedication to the prince of the second edition of his Certaine Errors in Navigation (1610) are included, as are maps and an astrolabe. Henry was also taught perspective and the science of vision by Salomon de Caus and at least exposed to complex mathematical exercises. While beneficial to appreciation of the fine arts, it was also a technical education suitable for a prince who might be called on to command armies in the field, anticipating the detailed instruction in military science imposed upon his eighteenth-century great-great-great-nephew William, duke of Cumberland. Not for nothing did Isaac Oliver's drawing of Henry wielding a pike become the most reproduced image of the prince.

Nothing specific can be claimed about how Henry might have managed the problems which fell to his more bookish and pious brother Charles I to resolve, nor how the art which surrounded him as heir apparent might have developed into a school of patronage. The emphasis, convincingly, is on how the older men around Henry sought to present him as the fulfilment of their political and dynastic hopes and how the prince came to participate in this process. The fashioning of this first Stuart heir to the united crowns was so thorough and had involved so many, that his death could hardly appear less than the opening of a vacuum in state, church and high cultural life.

Henry's brother Charles - soon seeking to rebuild his own image at court - and also his sister Elizabeth were available to act as new and viable foci for an assertive Stuart British monarchy, but it is easy to see why the bereavement of those around him might overwhelm the wider context in earlier studies of Henry's career. While the legacy of Henry Stuart can never escape speculation about what was not and what might have been, Catharine Macleod and her colleagues convincingly demonstrate that from Henry's cultural life much can be learned about how early seventeenth-century British high politics projected itself and how the court of the combined kingdoms sought to understand and define the roles of heir apparent and king.


The Lost Prince: The Life & Death of Henry Stuart runs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 13 January 2013.

London Falling, by Paul Cornell

Opening London Falling reminded me of how out of practice I am at reading fiction; it took a while to reaccustom myself to looking for indications of character and absorbing detail. Befitting a police procedural, there is a lot to take in and a lot which is unfamiliar to the uninitiated. The same is true of the fantasy-horror genre to which London Falling also belongs. Its protagonists - DI Jimmy Quill, intelligence analyst Lisa Ross and undercover constables Sefton and Costain - are also on a learning curve, and most of their first investigation consists of them finding their depth in the sea of magic which underpins the novel's London. Paul Cornell's worldbuilding is as dependent upon London mythology - specifically that of West Ham United Football Club - as it is on the culture of the Metropolitan Police, and it's an author's right and perhaps also obligation to refashion and add to both as necessary. If footballers start exploding, be afraid.

London Falling features concerns familiar from Paul's earlier work, but demonstrates a more mature understanding. There's a stronger grasp of how the historical process shapes mythology; the reader is (gently and then pointedly) asked to consider what this does to the identity of a person who lives for a very long time, feeding from an ever-changing society from the margins. Concepts less than half a century old, such as the Hammersmith and City Line and a Greater London of thirty-three boroughs, are ritually invoked in the name of tradition. His police protagonists ask questions about their own understanding of themselves as well as the organised crime case which brings the Sight (second and more) to them, but they are rationalists throughout, two characters in particular laying emphasis in different ways on the application of the scientific method to the supposedly irrational. There are preoccupations about intimidation, particularly school bullying and 'discipline' among criminals, but also how accent expresses not only locality and social class but also tribalism and individual or collective self-respect and self-loathing.

This is self-consciously the first novel in a series. Several important threads belong to a wider arc. The conclusion to the main plot, though satisfying, horrific but true to the characters concerned, reveals a larger mystery; and the epilogue opens a long barrow of backstory. The origins of what the back cover blurb calls the Shadow Police novels are traced in the author's afterword to a television series proposal put together under the auspices of Steven Moffat and Sue and Beryl Vertue, and there are times when one really wants to see what actors would make of the protagonists. There's a viscerality to this magical underworld which leaves the mind's camera foaming with blood and dollying precariously over bridges of soil. Watch out, also, for a very personable cat.

London Falling is a confident book, one of those adventure stories with some thought. There's a conjuring trick underway for most of the book hidden in plain sight which is achieved with some force. Only occasionally is there anxiety that characterisation has been compromised by the need to make authorial preoccupations too concrete. Resolution is achieved, but not closure; there are boxes still to open, darknesses to be charted, and diminutive entities to be punched against the wall of the Rotherhithe Tunnel. Quill, Ross, Sefton and Costain deserve their chance.

London Falling by Paul Cornell is published in the UK by Tor at a RRP of £12.99.

Children of the Stones

I missed Children of the Stones when it was first broadcast, and only caught up with it about twelve years ago. That occasion was enabled by a domestic television in a medium-sized university lecture room, the province of a cult television society who cheered at every appearance of the HTV West animation. This one was served by a projection screen in the back room of a terraced house, which made the viewing much more immersive and played to the serial's claustrophobic nature.

As most British television enthusiasts of a certain vintage could recount, whether or not they had actually seen Children of the Stones, the serial recognises the stipulation that ITV franchise holders had to make programmes which reflected or represented their region. Executive producer Peter Graham Scott and producer-director Patrick Dromgoole pursued it to limits probably undreamed of by the Independent Broadcasting Authority. For seven weeks at the start of 1977, viewers of ITV children's television were given a fictionalised tour of the Wiltshire village of Avebury - here reinvented as Milbury - its stone circle and the mythology surrounding them. Woven in with the factual material, including several historical instances relating to the stones and authentic archaeological detail, were a plot inspired by contemporary speculations about astral science known to prehistoric humanity and lost to recorded history, and drawing on astronomy and astrophysics.

The plot advances slowly, but inevitably, as if a wheel is being turned tightening a snare. Young Matthew (Matt) Brake (played by Peter Demin) accompanies his father, Professor Adam Brake (Gareth Thomas, a year before Blake's 7), to Milbury, where Professor Brake intends to complete his research into magnetic fields associated with Milbury's stone circle. Almost immediately apparent is the division of the population into recent arrivals and longer-established 'Happy Ones', who hail each other with the words 'Happy Day'. As described in dialogue, it's more like a password than a greeting. Adam Brake, who is widowed, is attracted to another recent arrival, Margaret Smythe (Veronica Strong), who runs the archaeological museum. Matt finds a near soulmate in her daughter Sandra (Katharine Levy). A looming and ambivalent presence is the lord of the manor, retired astrophysicist Raphael Hendrick (Ian Cuthbertson); his counterpart, skulking on the fringe of the village, is Welsh poacher Dai (Freddie Jones).

The serial's imagery establishes early on that Milbury is a trap. Matt first meets Dai while riding a bicycle which is actually Hendrick's property; he crashes and damages the bicycle's front wheel. Later, Matt rescues a rabbit from Dai's snare (itself positioned by a stone) and replaces it with a drawing of the broken bike, both a message and a symbol of the predicament Matt is only beginning to recognise. Once Matt has established the correspondences between the network of ley lines converging on the village through the stones, his father's magnetic fields and the astronomical feature at which the stones appear to be pointing, then characters and viewer feel bound within a psychically electrified net.

In their different ways both Adam and Matthew are sensitive to the powers concentrated in the stones. On touching the stones, both experience visions before being rendered unconscious, but Matt also manifests telepathic powers associated with items of clothing, adding useful insight into what happens when newcomers to the village are invited to dinner at Hendrick's house. Neither of the Brakes succumb to irrationality. Even when captured through apparently paranormal means in episode six, Adam Brake calmly lays before Hendrick his hypotheses about having missed a "time turning" which would return Adam and Matt to "our present" before Hendrick as a fellow man of science. He leaves Hendrick to condemn himself by admitting that he exercises powers which he does not fully understand. Adam and Matt both strive to comprehend their situation before they act.

Like most other television fiction of the day, exterior scenes were shot on location, on film, while interiors were recorded in studio on videotape. Children of the Stones's location filming took place in the hot summer of 1976, and in some scenes the grass on the fields of Avebury is noticeably yellow. This is turned to advantage by the cinematography, especially in the scene at the end of episode three where Jimmo Browning, classmate of Matt and Sandra, unexpectedly takes a prominent role in a morris dance. There is something barren about the rural rituals upon which Hendrick smiles with appropriated patriarchal feeling. Though the integration of sound and image is of a high standard throughout, it's particularly powerful during the filmed sequences, which include those of the villagers standing in a circle singing the tonal hymn (the pervasively characteristic element of Sidney Sager's precise and haunting score) which provides incidental music even when it seems not to be part of the linear narrative. The line between diegesis and extradiegetic commentary is pointedly blurred.

Several important scenes early in the serial are set in the village school, a one-classroom affair of wood-panelled walls where children of all ages are taught advanced mathematics by tweed-skirted Miss Clegg (sometime Forsyte Saga heroine June Barrie). Those who perform the calculations with ease sit together on the High Table, implicitly working as a collective. Those who do not sit as individuals, like dunces, struggling to understand the equations Miss Clegg chalks out on her blackboard. At this viewing, the mathematician in the room described one equation, which served to show the transformation of Jimmo from slow learner to mathematical genius, as gibberish; but as this equation was inscribed by the actor playing Jimmo, one hopes that scientific adviser Peter Williams provided astrophysical in-jokes at least for the others.

Theme and execution have brought comments over the years that Children of the Stones is too disturbing for children's viewing. This was supposedly the view of an executive at HTV when the serial's concept was first pitched. However, its central premise is one familiar to many children, the unease which new children feel at school when facing a different set of cultural norms to those which they are accustomed. Making friends with other recent arrivals is an obvious strategy, but as they are assimilated one by one, picking up the incomprehensible local mannerisms and jargon, what happens when only you are left? The pressure to conform to the rules of the herd manifests itself as the beam of light which the viewers see burn negativity and autonomy away from Margaret and Sandra, just as a schoolchild might feel their attitudes and personality changed by interactions with new people in a new setting. Though Matt feels his psychic connection with Sandra broken as she becomes a 'Happy One', Sandra and Margaret do not become strangers to the viewers, who see them discussing the effects of the change on their mood and abilities, Sandra thereafter finding the calculations performed at school easy. In an unnerving exchange Katharine Levy's performance becomes much more mature and self-possessed, Sandra appearing preternaturally knowing in front of the now isolated Matt. Seeing Sandra and Margaret bask in their transformations is more chilling than making their changed personalities unknowable: one can believe, as Sandra says to Matt, that the villagers "will see you soon" and that there will be no escape.

The serial's atmosphere is reinforced by its reluctance to provide anything except a working hypothesis as an answer to its questions, underlined by the viewer being left with more information than its rationalist protagonists. The Roadline lorry which disappears as it turns a corner to enter the village in episode one is never seen again, perhaps the clearest indication - but only an indication - that there is a 'linear time' Milbury which luckier travellers might enter. The most enigmatic character is not Raphael Hendrick, but John Woodnutt as Link. He only appears in the final three episodes and to the Brakes appears only to be Hendrick's butler; but while a subordinate in the household, he is at least a partner in Hendrick's scheme, and possibly even the puppetmaster, disappearing into a control cubicle to operate astronomical technology while Hendrick plays the part of High Priest as part of his recruitment ritual. At the conclusion, as the time cycle restarts and Sir Joshua Lytton arrives to take possession of the house that had and had not been Hendrick's, Link appears again, but with dark hair and a moustache and in the character of an estate or land agent.

Children of the Stones advertises its sources. Entirely fictional finds are combined in Milbury's museum with those drawn from the archaeological digs of Alexander Keiller and others at Avebury. Though the production team added many of their own polystyrene 'stones' to the circle, the title sequence advertises in word and image that Milbury-Avebury is a real and dramatic part of the Wiltshire landscape. Some details are conflated - the Sanctuary of Children of the Stones is (as far as its exterior is concerned) West Kennett Long Barrow, not the real Sanctuary of the Avebury complex, south of the village by the A4 - but this does not compromise the story's imaginative response to a landscape of lost ritual. It also draws from the countercultural currents of the period, when speculation that the 'lost' knowledge of ancient civilizations might be rediscovered was rife, when extrasensory perception was a well-publicised subject of scientific study, and the ancient stone circles of the British Isles were adopted as places of worship by the emerging New Age movement. The association of the stone circle with cyclical time united both interest in the possibility that stone circles were observatories or astronomical timepieces (one drawn on explicitly by the script) and western fascination with the Buddhist bhavacakra.

The row of books in the Brakes' cottage includes at least one contemporary magical text, Elizabeth St George's The Casebook of a Working Occultist (Rigel Press, London, 1973). St George - otherwise Sandra West - was an active magical practitioner in the late twentieth century who died in 2007. Her semi-fictionalised, quasi-Sherlockian account of past projects includes an overlap with the world of fantasy television when she summons the 'thought-form' of Star Trek's Mr Spock to aid the rescue of Apollo 13 in 1970, having earlier rejected Doctor Who - 'an old man in a frock coat' - as inappropriate. If the book has any more significance than someone's idea of witty set-dressing, it's the last chapter which has relevance for Children of the Stones. There, the narrator confronts the guardian spirit of a long barrow. It's possible that this figure provided some inspiration for Dai in his role as guardian of the Sanctuary against Hendrick and the Happy Ones and against the time cycle, though ultimately it is the barrow itself, rather than Dai, which offers protection.

The conflation of archaeology, magic and knowledge of ancient or non-western civilizations marks Children of the Stones out as a late-postwar British work. Hendrick's wish to bring together the fifty-three villagers as one happy family, with himself as patriarch, can be read in terms of both imperialist and social democratic ideals, if one is so minded. Stewart Lee, in BBC Radio 4's Happy Days: Children of the Stones, has commented that revisiting the series as an adult makes him much more sympathetic to Hendrick's world view in that Hendrick wishes to take away the suffering of others by making a sacrifice of himself. However, the society which results is one where there is only one imagination left and only its posessor has any real capacity to learn. The era of the Happy Ones might seem to be that of the ultimate welfare state - the extraction of 'negative energy' has removed even ill health, as the unprocessed Dr Lyle comments - but this social security rests on disempowerment rather than democracy. To be a little more tendentious, it's tempting to imagine that for the career freelancers who wrote Children of the Stones, actor-writers Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray, the overthrow of Hendrick by the Brakes might have symbolised a rebellion against corporate culture in government and business with which they identified. The Brakes' inability to save Margaret and Sandra from being turned to stone demonstrates both the limits of the gesture and attempts at a less general reading.

Children of the Stones is carved from stratum upon stratum of apprehension, a psychogeology of fears. So much of the drama takes place in blazing sunshine or under the open sky of a summer night, or in well-lit sets which stress mundanity over mystery, but this only emphasises how in Milbury the strange permeates every person, every stone (almost a tautology). The story is told deliberately between visual images which haunt and arrest, sometimes marrying film and video techniques in a fashion which is a reminder of how common a union this was in the 1970s. The viewer is left considerably less sanguine about the naturalism of television storytelling. Just as Adam and Matt Brake leave Milbury desperate for the tangible reality of the sandwich after their experiences with the uncanny, Children of the Stones itself encourages doubts about its reliability as a witness. The production's voice is closer to Hendrick's than to that of the Brakes, because it feigns not to understand itself and leaves the viewer to answer questions. Children of the Stones continues to preoccupy viewers long after most of the fare which surrounded it has been forgotten, as demonstrated by its internet following, the recent radio documentary, and the series' continued presence on Network DVD's catalogue and its role as a gateway (through a bonus disc) into HTV's other ventures into the fantastic from the period.