Only Connect

The oldest building in St Helens town centre. So old it predates the town, which was a creation of the industrial revolution. George Shaw, a maker of horse collars and a Quaker bought it for the local Quakers to use in 1679. It is the oldest Friends Meeting House still in use in the old county of Lancashire. When it was bought Quaker meetings were banned, something that only changed with the Act of Toleration of 1689.

My link (or connection) to today’s mono theme is tenuous. The extra is a photo I took in St Nicholas’s churchyard on Wednesday morning. It is a sculpture celebrating EM Forster, who spent his childhood at a nearby house “Rooks Nest”, also known as “Howard’s” at the time. He was friendly with the later occupant Elisabeth Postern, the composer, and often visited. The house features in his novel “Howard’s End”. And one of the principal characters, Ruth Wilcocks, is a Quaker. “Only Connect” is the title of the epigraph to the novel.

Yes. Tenuous.