A tale of two cities

Posted by Barbara on January 30, 2023 in Blog, Brexit, Europe, Leisure activities, Music | 2 comments

We decided to celebrate my significant other’s birthday by going to a concert at the Royal Festival Hall.  The main piece was Elgar’s Symphony no. 2, which was truly spectacular –i nvolving a huge orchestra with eight double basses and two harps.

But it was the preceding piece that caught my attention, for reasons other than the virtuoso musical performance. It was Schumann’s piano concerto, with the brilliant Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson leading the orchestra.   At the end of the performance, after countless ‘curtain calls’ and rounds of applause, Ólafsson was presented with a Nordic ‘achievement of the year award’. This is an honour bestowed on a citizen of one of the Nordic countries to acknowledge their links with the UK. It is not confined to the music profession; previous recipients have been from a variety of sectors.

Ties between countries and people develop for a variety of reasons, and in my work with the European Movement we are exploring twinning possibilities between the London borough of Wandsworth, where I live, and similar areas in Europe. You could see this as a ‘soft’ attempt to restore some of the relationships that have been affected by Brexit.

What is interesting is that when we started researching the possibilities, we discovered that Wandsworth had been twinned in the past with Schiedam, although this relationship has been left untended for several years.

Schiedam is part of the metropolitan area of Rotterdam and lies where the river Schie enters the river Rhine. The town is known for its historic town centre, trade and gin industry. There are possible similarities to that part of Wandsworth where the Wandle, our local river, enters the Thames. Schiedam also shares a similar history to Wandsworth, in that it had an industrial base linked to the rivers and waterways, and has now become gentrified as the heavy industry has been replaced by a more service- based urban economy.

Looking back at records it appears that the twinning was set up in the late 1940s as a post-WW2 initiative, perhaps to reflect cooperation that had taken place during wartime.  At the time of writing it is not clear whether reviving these links will be of interest to Wandsworth Council or the burghers of Schiedam. Fortunately, one of our committee is Dutch so has been tasked with communicating with the local council there to gauge whether this is something worth pursuing.

Our research then revealed another semi-lapsed twinning; Villers-Plouich in northern France is informally twinned with Wandsworth. This association dates back to World War I, following the involvement of the Wandsworth Battalion in the liberation of Villers-Plouich in 1917, and again, following recapture, in 1918. Writing in the Wandsworth Borough News in 1920, Robert H Harker, a lieutenant in the battalion, described the cemetery in the village as ‘an inseparable link between our great Borough and that village of Villers-Plouich, near the Somme’.

It is interesting that at least one of these two twinning arrangements is an acknowledgement of wartime engagement or cooperation.  In our, as yet extremely informal, discussions with various members of Wandsworth Council they have indicated that when the time is right they would like to develop a twinning arrangement with an equivalent district of Kyiv in the Ukraine. We just hope this will be sooner rather than later.