Auditory processing disorder (APD), rarely known as King-Kopetzky syndrome or auditory disability with normal hearing (ADN), is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting the way the brain processes sounds. Individuals with APD usually have normal structure and function of the outer, middle, and inner ear (peripheral hearing). However, they cannot process the information they hear in the same way as others do, which leads to difficulties in recognizing and interpreting sounds, especially the sounds composing speech. It is thought that these difficulties arise from dysfunction in the central nervous system. This is, in part, essentially a failure of the cocktail party effect found in most people.

The American Academy of Audiology notes that APD is diagnosed by difficulties in one or more auditory processes known to reflect the function of the central auditory nervous system. It can affect both children and adults. Although the actual prevalence is currently unknown, it has been estimated to impact 2–7% in children in US and UK populations. APD can continue into adulthood. It has been reported that males are twice as likely to be affected by the disorder as females.

Neurodevelopmental forms of APD are differentiable from aphasia in that aphasia is by definition caused by acquired brain injury, but acquired epileptic aphasia has been viewed as a form of APD.

Signs and symptoms
Many people experience problems with learning and day-to-day tasks with difficulties over time. Individuals with this disorder may experience the signs and symptoms below;
 talk louder than necessary
 talk softer than necessary
 have trouble remembering a list or sequence
 often need words or sentences repeated
 have poor ability to memorize information learned by listening
 interpret words too literally
 need assistance hearing clearly in noisy environments
 rely on accommodation and modification strategies
 find or request a quiet work space away from others
 request written material when attending oral presentations
 ask for directions to be given one step at a time

Relation to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

It has been discovered that APD and ADHD may present overlapping symptoms. Below is a ranked order of behavioral symptoms that are most frequently observed in each disorder. Professionals evaluated the overlap of symptoms between the two disorders. The order below is of symptoms that are almost always observed. This chart shows that although the symptoms listed are different, it is easy to get confused between many of them.

There is a co-occurrence between ADHD and APD. A systematic review published in 2018 detailed one study that showed 10% of children with APD have confirmed or suspected ADHD. It also stated that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the two, since characteristics and symptoms between APD and ADHD tend to overlap. The systematic review mentioned here described this overlap between APD and other behavioral disorders and whether or not it was easy to distinguish those children that solely had auditory processing disorder.

Relation to specific language impairment and developmental dyslexia

There has been considerable debate over the relationship between APD and specific language impairment (SLI).

SLI is diagnosed when a child has difficulties with understanding or producing spoken language for no obvious cause. The problems cannot be explained in terms of peripheral hearing loss. The child is typically late in starting to talk, and may have problems in producing speech sounds clearly, and in producing or understanding complex sentences. Some theoretical accounts of SLI regard it as the result of auditory processing problems. However, this view of SLI is not universally accepted, and others regard the main difficulties in SLI as stemming from problems with higher-level aspects of language processing. Where a child has both auditory and language problems, it can be difficult to sort out the causality at play.

Similarly with developmental dyslexia, researchers continue to explore the hypothesis that reading problems emerge as a downstream consequence of difficulties in rapid auditory processing. Again, cause and effect can be hard to unravel. This is one reason why some experts have recommended using non-verbal auditory tests to diagnose APD. Specifically regarding neurological factors, dyslexia has been linked to polymicrogyria which causes cell migrational problems. Children that have polymicrogyri almost always present with deficits on APD testing. It has also been suggested that APD may be related to cluttering, a fluency disorder marked by word and phrase repetitions.

It has been found that a higher than expected proportion of individuals diagnosed with SLI and dyslexia on the basis of language and reading tests also perform poorly on tests in which auditory processing skills are tested. APD can be assessed using tests that involve identifying, repeating, or discriminating speech, and a child may do poorly because of primary language problems. In a study comparing children with a diagnosis of dyslexia and those with a diagnosis of APD, they found the two groups could not be distinguished. Analogous results were observed in studies comparing children diagnosed with SLI or APD, the two groups presenting with similar diagnostic criteria. As such, the diagnosis a child receives may depend on which specialist they consult: the same child who might be diagnosed with APD by an audiologist may instead be diagnosed with SLI by a speech-language therapist or with dyslexia by a psychologist.

Causes

Acquired
Acquired APD can be caused by any damage to or dysfunction of the central auditory nervous system and can cause auditory processing problems. For an overview of neurological aspects of APD, see T. D. Griffiths's 2002 article "Central Auditory Pathologies".

Genetics
Some studies have indicated an increased prevalence of a family history of hearing impairment in these patients. The pattern of results is suggestive that auditory processing disorder may be related to conditions of autosomal dominant inheritance. The ability to listen to and comprehend multiple messages at the same time is a trait that is heavily influenced by our genes, say federal researchers. These "short circuits in the wiring" sometimes run in families or result from a difficult birth, just like any learning disability. Auditory processing disorder can be associated with conditions affected by genetic traits, such as various developmental disorders. Inheritance of auditory processing disorder refers to whether the condition is inherited from your parents or "runs" in families.  Central auditory processing disorder may be hereditary neurological traits from the mother or the father.

Developmental
In the majority of cases of developmental APD, the cause is unknown. An exception is acquired epileptic aphasia or Landau-Kleffner syndrome, where a child's development regresses, with language comprehension severely affected. The child is often thought to be deaf, but normal peripheral hearing is found. In other cases, suspected or known causes of APD in children include delay in myelin maturation, ectopic (misplaced) cells in the auditory cortical areas, or genetic predisposition. In a family with autosomal dominant epilepsy, seizures which affected the left temporal lobe seemed to cause problems with auditory processing. In another extended family with a high rate of APD, genetic analysis showed a haplotype in chromosome 12 that fully co-segregated with language impairment.

Hearing begins in utero, but the central auditory system continues to develop for at least the first decade. There is considerable interest in the idea that disruption to hearing during a sensitive period may have long-term consequences for auditory development. One study showed thalamocortical connectivity in vitro was associated with a time sensitive developmental window and required a specific cell adhesion molecule (lcam5) for proper brain plasticity to occur. This points to connectivity between the thalamus and cortex shortly after being able to hear (in vitro) as at least one critical period for auditory processing. Another study showed that rats reared in a single tone environment during critical periods of development had permanently impaired auditory processing. "Bad" auditory experiences, such as temporary deafness by cochlear removal in rats leads to neuron shrinkage. In a study looking at attention in APD patients, children with one ear blocked developed a strong right-ear advantage but were not able to modulate that advantage during directed-attention tasks.

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was considerable interest in the role of chronic otitis media (middle ear disease or "glue ear") in causing APD and related language and literacy problems. Otitis media with effusion is a very common childhood disease that causes a fluctuating conductive hearing loss, and there was concern this may disrupt auditory development if it occurred during a sensitive period. Consistent with this, in a sample of young children with chronic ear infections recruited from a hospital otolaryngology department, increased rates of auditory difficulties were found later in childhood. However, this kind of study will have sampling bias because children with otitis media will be more likely to be referred to hospital departments if they are experiencing developmental difficulties. Compared with hospital studies, epidemiological studies, which assesses a whole population for otitis media and then evaluate outcomes, have found much weaker evidence for long-term impacts of otitis media on language outcomes.

Somatic
It seems that somatic anxiety (that is, physical symptoms of anxiety such as butterflies in the stomach or cotton mouth) and situations of stress may be determinants of speech-hearing disability.

Diagnosis
Questionnaires can be used for the identification of persons with possible auditory processing disorders, as these address common problems of listening. They can help in the decision for pursuing clinical evaluation. One of the most common listening problems is speech recognition in the presence of background noise. According to the respondents who participated in a study by Neijenhuis, de Wit, and Luinge (2017), the following symptoms are characteristic in children with listening difficulties, and they are typically problematic with adolescents and adults. They include:
 Difficulty hearing in noise
 Auditory attention problems
 Better understanding in one on one situations
 Difficulties in noise localization
 Difficulties in remembering oral information

According to the New Zealand Guidelines on Auditory Processing Disorders (2017) a checklist of key symptoms of APD or comorbidities that can be used to identify individuals who should be referred for audiological and APD assessment includes, among others:
 Difficulty following spoken directions unless they are brief and simple
 Difficulty attending to and remembering spoken information
 Slowness in processing spoken information
 Difficulty understanding in the presence of other sounds
 Overwhelmed by complex or "busy" auditory environments e.g. classrooms, shopping malls
 Poor listening skills
 Insensitivity to tone of voice or other nuances of speech
 Acquired brain injury
 History of frequent or persistent middle ear disease (otitis media, "glue ear").
 Difficulty with language, reading, or spelling
 Suspicion or diagnosis of dyslexia
 Suspicion or diagnosis of language disorder or delay

Finally, the New Zealand guidelines state that behavioral checklists and questionnaires should only be used to provide guidance for referrals, for information gathering (for example, prior to assessment or as outcome measures for interventions), and as measures to describe the functional impact of auditory processing disorder.  They are not designed for the purpose of diagnosing auditory processing disorders. The New Zealand guidelines indicate that a number of questionnaires have been developed to identify children who might benefit from evaluation of their problems in listening.  Examples of available questionnaires include the Fisher's Auditory Problems Checklist, the Children's Auditory Performance Scale, the Screening Instrument for Targeting Educational Risk, and the Auditory Processing Domains Questionnaire among others. All of the previous questionnaires were designed for children and none are useful for adolescents and adults.

The University of Cincinnati Auditory Processing Inventory (UCAPI) was designed for use with adolescents and adults seeking  testing for evaluation of problems with listening and/or to be used following diagnosis of an auditory processing disorder to determine the subject's status.  Following a model described by Zoppo et al. (2015) a 34-item questionnaire was developed that investigates auditory processing abilities in each of the six common areas of complaint in APD (listening and concentration, understanding speech, following spoken instructions, attention, and other.)  The final questionnaire was standardized on normally-achieving young adults ranging from 18 to 27 years of age.  Validation data was acquired from subjects with language-learning or auditory processing disorders who were either self-reported or confirmed by diagnostic testing.  A UCAPI  total score is calculated by combining the totals from the six listening conditions and provides an overall value to categorize listening abilities. Additionally, analysis of the scores from the six listening conditions provides an auditory profile for the subject. Each listening condition can then be utilized by the professional in making recommendation for diagnosing problem of learning through listening and treatment decisions.  The UCAPI provides information on listening problems in various populations that can aid examiners in making recommendations for assessment and management.

APD has been defined anatomically in terms of the integrity of the auditory areas of the nervous system. However, children with symptoms of APD typically have no evidence of neurological disease and the diagnosis is made on the basis of performance on behavioral auditory tests. Auditory processing is "what we do with what we hear", and in APD there is a mismatch between peripheral hearing ability (which is typically normal) and ability to interpret or discriminate sounds. Thus in those with no signs of neurological impairment, APD is diagnosed on the basis of auditory tests. There is, however, no consensus as to which tests should be used for diagnosis, as evidenced by the succession of task force reports that have appeared in recent years. The first of these occurred in 1996. This was followed by a conference organized by the American Academy of Audiology.

Experts attempting to define diagnostic criteria have to grapple with the problem that a child may do poorly on an auditory test for reasons other than poor auditory perception: for instance, failure could be due to inattention, difficulty in coping with task demands, or limited language ability. In an attempt to rule out at least some of these factors, the American Academy of Audiology conference explicitly advocated that for APD to be diagnosed, the child must have a modality-specific problem, i.e. affecting auditory but not visual processing. However, a committee of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association subsequently rejected modality-specificity as a defining characteristic of auditory processing disorders.

Definitions
in 2005 The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) published "Central Auditory Processing Disorders" as an update to the 1996 "Central Auditory Processing: Current Status of Research and Implications for Clinical Practice". The American Academy of Audiology has released more current practice guidelines related to the disorder. ASHA formally defines APD as "a difficulty in the efficiency and effectiveness by which the central nervous system (CNS) utilizes auditory information."

In 2018, the British Society of Audiology published a "position statement and practice guidance" on auditory processing disorder (APD) updated its definition of APD. According to the Society, APD refers to the inability to process speech and on-speech sounds.

Auditory processing disorder can be developmental or acquired. It may result from ear infections, head injuries or neurodevelopmental delays that affect processing of auditory information. This can include problems with: "...sound localization and lateralization (see also binaural fusion); auditory discrimination; auditory pattern recognition; temporal aspects of audition, including temporal integration, temporal discrimination (e.g., temporal gap detection), temporal ordering, and temporal masking; auditory performance in competing acoustic signals (including dichotic listening); and auditory performance with degraded acoustic signals".

The Committee of UK Medical Professionals Steering the UK Auditory Processing Disorder Research Program have developed the following working definition of auditory processing disorder: "APD results from impaired neural function and is characterized by poor recognition, discrimination, separation, grouping, localization, or ordering of speech sounds. It does not solely result from a deficit in general attention, language or other cognitive processes."

Types of testing
 The SCAN-C for children and SCAN-A for adolescents and adults are the most common tools for screening and diagnosing APD in the USA.   Both tests are standardized on a large number of subjects and include validation data on subjects with auditory processing disorders. The SCAN test batteries include screening tests: norm-based criterion-referenced scores; diagnostic tests: scaled scores, percentile ranks and ear advantage scores for all tests except the Gap Detection test.  The four tests include four subsets on which the subject scores are derived include: discrimination of monaurally presented single words against background noise (speech in noise), acoustically degraded single words (filtered words), dichotically presented single words and sentences.
 Random Gap Detection Test (RGDT) is also a standardized test. It assesses an individual's gap detection threshold of tones and white noise. The exam includes stimuli at four different frequencies (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz) and white noise clicks of 50 ms duration. It is a useful test because it provides an index of auditory temporal resolution. In children, an overall gap detection threshold greater than 20 ms means they have failed and may have an auditory processing disorder based on abnormal perception of sound in the time domain.
 Gaps in Noise Test (GIN) also measures temporal resolution by testing the patient's gap detection threshold in white noise.
 Pitch Patterns Sequence Test (PPT) and Duration Patterns Sequence Test (DPT) measure auditory pattern identification. The PPS has s series of three tones presented at either of two pitches (high or low). Meanwhile, the DPS has a series of three tones that vary in duration rather than pitch (long or short). Patients are then asked to describe the pattern of pitches presented.
 Masking Level Difference (MLD) at 500 Hz measures overlapping temporal processing, binaural processing, and low-redundancy by measuring the difference in threshold of an auditory stimulus when a masking noise is presented in and out of phase.
 The Staggered Spondaic Word Test (SSW) is one of the oldest tests for APD developed by Jack Katz. Although it has fallen into some disuse by audiologists as it is complicated to score, it is one of the quickest and most sensitive tests to determine APD.

Modality-specificity and controversies
The issue of modality-specificity has led to considerable debate among experts in this field. Cacace and McFarland have argued that APD should be defined as a modality-specific perceptual dysfunction that is not due to peripheral hearing loss. They criticize more inclusive conceptualizations of APD as lacking diagnostic specificity. A requirement for modality-specificity could potentially avoid including children whose poor auditory performance is due to general factors such as poor attention or memory. Others, however, have argued that a modality-specific approach is too narrow, and that it would miss children who had genuine perceptual problems affecting both visual and auditory processing. It is also impractical, as audiologists do not have access to standardized tests that are visual analogs of auditory tests. The debate over this issue remains unresolved between modality-specific researchers such as Cacace, and associations such as the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (among others). It is clear, however, that a modality-specific approach will diagnose fewer children with APD than a modality-general one, and that the latter approach runs a risk of including children who fail auditory tests for reasons other than poor auditory processing. Although modality-specific testing has been advocated for well over a decade, the visual analog of APD testing has met with sustained resistance from the fields of optometry and ophthalmology.

Another controversy concerns the fact that most traditional tests of APD use verbal materials. The British Society of Audiology has embraced Moore's (2006) recommendation that tests for APD should assess processing of non-speech sounds. The concern is that if verbal materials are used to test for APD, then children may fail because of limited language ability. An analogy may be drawn with trying to listen to sounds in a foreign language. It is much harder to distinguish between sounds or to remember a sequence of words in a language you do not know well: the problem is not an auditory one, but rather due to lack of expertise in the language.

In recent years there have been additional criticisms of some popular tests for diagnosis of APD. Tests that use tape-recorded American English have been shown to over-identify APD in speakers of other forms of English. Performance on a battery of non-verbal auditory tests devised by the Medical Research Council's Institute of Hearing Research was found to be heavily influenced by non-sensory task demands, and indices of APD had low reliability when this was controlled for. This research undermines the validity of APD as a distinct entity in its own right and suggests that the use of the term "disorder" itself is unwarranted. In a recent review of such diagnostic issues, it was recommended that children with suspected auditory processing impairments receive a holistic psychometric assessment including general intellectual ability, auditory memory, and attention, phonological processing, language, and literacy. The authors state that "a clearer understanding of the relative contributions of perceptual and non-sensory, unimodal and supramodal factors to performance on psychoacoustic tests may well be the key to unraveling the clinical presentation of these individuals."

Depending on how it is defined, APD may share common symptoms with ADD/ADHD, specific language impairment, and autism spectrum disorders. A review showed substantial evidence for atypical processing of auditory information in children with autism. Dawes and Bishop noted how specialists in audiology and speech-language pathology often adopted different approaches to child assessment, and they concluded their review as follows: "We regard it as crucial that these different professional groups work together in carrying out assessment, treatment and management of children and undertaking cross-disciplinary research." In practice, this seems rare.

To ensure that APD is correctly diagnosed, the examiners must differentiate APD from other disorders with similar symptoms. Factors that should be taken into account during the diagnosis are: attention, auditory neuropathy, fatigue, hearing and sensitivity, intellectual and developmental age, medications, motivation, motor skills, native language and language experience, response strategies and decision-making style, and visual acuity.

It should also be noted that children under the age of seven cannot be evaluated correctly because their language and auditory processes are still developing. In addition, the presence of APD cannot be evaluated when a child's primary language is not English.

Characteristics

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association state that children with (central) auditory processing disorder often:
 have trouble paying attention to and remembering information presented orally, and may cope better with visually acquired information
 have problems carrying out multi-step directions given orally; need to hear only one direction at a time
 have poor listening skills
 need more time to process information
 have difficulty learning a new language
 have difficulty understanding jokes, sarcasm, and learning songs or nursery rhymes
 have language difficulties (e.g., they confuse syllable sequences and have problems developing vocabulary and understanding language)
 have difficulty with reading, comprehension, spelling, and vocabulary

APD can manifest as problems determining the direction of sounds, difficulty perceiving differences between speech sounds and the sequencing of these sounds into meaningful words, confusing similar sounds such as "hat" with "bat", "there" with "where", etc.  Fewer words may be perceived than were actually said, as there can be problems detecting the gaps between words, creating the sense that someone is speaking unfamiliar or nonsense words. In addition, it is common for APD to cause speech errors involving the distortion and substitution of consonant sounds. Those with APD may have problems relating what has been said with its meaning, despite obvious recognition that a word has been said, as well as repetition of the word.  Background noise, such as the sound of a radio, television or a noisy bar can make it difficult to impossible to understand speech, since spoken words may sound distorted either into irrelevant words or words that do not exist, depending on the severity of the auditory processing disorder. Using a telephone can be problematic for someone with auditory processing disorder, in comparison with someone with normal auditory processing, due to low quality audio, poor signal, intermittent sounds, and the chopping of words. Many who have auditory processing disorder subconsciously develop visual coping strategies, such as lip reading, reading body language, and eye contact, to compensate for their auditory deficit, and these coping strategies are not available when using a telephone.

As noted above, the status of APD as a distinct disorder has been queried, especially by speech-language pathologists and psychologists, who note the overlap between clinical profiles of children diagnosed with APD and those with other forms of specific learning disability. Many audiologists, however, would dispute that APD is just an alternative label for dyslexia, SLI, or ADHD, noting that although it often co-occurs with these conditions, it can be found in isolation.

Subcategories

Based on sensitized measures of auditory dysfunction and on psychological assessment, patients can be subdivided into seven subcategories:

 middle ear dysfunction
 mild cochlear pathology
 central/medial olivocochlear efferent system (MOCS) auditory dysfunction
 purely psychological problems
 multiple auditory pathologies
 combined auditory dysfunction and psychological problems
 unknown

Different subgroups may represent different pathogenic and etiological factors. Thus, subcategorization provides further understanding of the basis of auditory processing disorder, and hence may guide the rehabilitative management of these patients. This was suggested by Professor Dafydd Stephens and F Zhao at the Welsh Hearing Institute, Cardiff University.

Treatment

Treatment of APD typically focuses on three primary areas: changing learning environment, developing higher-order skills to compensate for the disorder, and remediation of the auditory deficit itself. However, there is a lack of well-conducted evaluations of intervention using randomized controlled trial methodology. Most evidence for effectiveness adopts weaker standards of evidence, such as showing that performance improves after training. This does not control for possible influences of practice, maturation, or placebo effects. Recent research has shown that practice with basic auditory processing tasks (i.e. auditory training) may improve performance on auditory processing measures and phonemic awareness measures.  Changes after auditory training have also been recorded at the physiological level. Many of these tasks are incorporated into computer-based auditory training programs such as Earobics and Fast ForWord, an adaptive software available at home and in clinics worldwide,  but overall, evidence for effectiveness of these computerized interventions in improving language and literacy is not impressive. One small-scale uncontrolled study reported successful outcomes for children with APD using auditory training software.

Treating additional issues related to APD can result in success. For example, treatment for phonological disorders (difficulty in speech) can result in success in terms of both the phonological disorder as well as APD. In one study, speech therapy improved auditory evoked potentials (a measure of brain activity in the auditory portions of the brain).

While there is evidence that language training is effective for improving APD, there is no current research supporting the following APD treatments:
 Auditory Integration Training typically involves a child attending two 30-minute sessions per day for ten days.
 Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes (particularly, the Visualizing and Verbalizing program)
 Physical activities that require frequent crossing of the midline (e.g., occupational therapy)
 Sound Field Amplification
 Neuro-Sensory Educational Therapy
 Neurofeedback

The use of an individual FM transmitter/receiver system by teachers and students has nevertheless been shown to produce significant improvements with children over time.

History
Samuel J. Kopetzky first described the condition in 1948. P. F. King, first discussed the etiological factors behind it in 1954. Helmer Rudolph Myklebust's 1954 study, "Auditory Disorders in Children". suggested auditory processing disorder was separate from language learning difficulties. His work sparked interest in auditory deficits after acquired brain lesions affecting the temporal lobes  and led to additional work looking at the physiological basis of auditory processing, but it was not until the late seventies and early eighties that research began on APD in depth.

In 1977, the first conference on the topic of APD was organized by Robert W. Keith, Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati.  The proceedings of that conference was published by Grune and Stratton under the title "Central Auditory Dysfunction" (Keith RW Ed.)  That conference started a new series of studies focusing on APD in children. Virtually all tests currently used to diagnose APD originate from this work. These early researchers also invented many of the auditory training approaches, including interhemispheric transfer training and interaural intensity difference training. This period gave us a rough understanding of the causes and possible treatment options for APD.

Much of the work in the late nineties and 2000s has been looking to refining testing, developing more sophisticated treatment options, and looking for genetic risk factors for APD. Scientists have worked on improving behavioral tests of auditory function, neuroimaging, electroacoustic, and electrophysiologic testing. Working with new technology has led to a number of software programs for auditory training. With global awareness of mental disorders and increasing understanding of neuroscience, auditory processing is more in the public and academic consciousness than in years past.

See also
 Amblyaudia
 Auditory verbal agnosia
 Cocktail party effect
 Cortical deafness
 Dafydd Stephens
 Echoic memory
 Hearing loss
 Language processing
 List of eponymous diseases
 Music-specific disorders
 Selective auditory attention
 Selective mutism
 Sensory processing disorders
 Spatial hearing loss

References

External links
 Auditory processing disorder: An overview for the clinician
 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)

Neurological disorders
Audiology
Psychoacoustics
Dyslexia
Hearing
Learning disabilities
Oral communication
Phonology
Speech processing
Special education
Communication disorders
Syndromes

Auditory processing disorder


Marsha Singh (11 October 1954 – 17 July 2012) was a British Labour Party politician, and the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bradford West from 1997 to 2012. Singh stood down due to ill health.

Singh had a degree in Languages, Politics and Economics of Modern Europe from Loughborough University. He was part of the Directorate of Education for Bradford City Council from 1983 to 1990 and worked for the Bradford Community Health Trust from 1990 to 1997.  Singh originally lived in the Manningham Ward of the area, and later moved to Allerton.

At the 2010 general election, Singh managed to increase his majority by 5% with nearly 6,000 votes more than the second placed Zahid Iqbal, despite the Bradford West constituency being a Tory target. Singh managed a 14% majority over the Conservatives, even larger than that he had achieved when first elected in Labour's 1997 landslide election victory.

On 29 February 2012, he announced his intention to retire owing to ill health. He officially vacated his seat by becoming Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds on 2 March 2012. A by-election in the constituency was held on 29 March 2012 and the seat was a gain for George Galloway of the Respect Party, who benefitted from a huge swing against the Labour Party.

Singh was married with two children and four grandchildren. He died four months after resigning, while on holiday in the Dominican Republic.

References

External links
Guardian Unlimited Politics - Ask Aristotle: Marsha Singh MP
TheyWorkForYou.com - Marsha Singh MP
As a contributor for The Guardian

1954 births
2012 deaths
Alumni of Loughborough University
Indian emigrants to the United Kingdom
Labour Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies
People from Punjab, India
Deaths in the Dominican Republic
UK MPs 1997–2001
UK MPs 2001–2005
UK MPs 2005–2010
UK MPs 2010–2015
Members of Parliament for Bradford West
British people of Indian descent
British politicians of Punjabi descent

Marsha Singh


Lewes () is the county town of East Sussex, England. The town is the administrative centre of the wider district of the same name and the location of East Sussex County Council at the county hall.

A traditional market town and centre of communications, in 1264 it was the site of the Battle of Lewes. The town's landmarks include Lewes Castle, Lewes Priory, Bull House (the former home of Thomas Paine), Southover Grange and public gardens, and a 16th-century timber-framed Wealden hall house known as Anne of Cleves House. Other notable features of the area include the Glyndebourne festival, the Lewes Bonfire celebrations and the Lewes Pound.

Etymology
The place-name 'Lewes' is first attested in an Anglo-Saxon charter circa 961 AD, where it appears as Læwe. It appears as Lewes in the Domesday Book of 1086. The addition of the <-s> suffix seems to have been part of a broader trend of Anglo-Norman scribes pluralising Anglo-Saxon place-names (a famous example being their rendering of Lunden as Londres, hence the modern French name for London).

The traditional derivation of Læwe, first posited by the Tudor antiquarian Laurence Nowell, derives it from the Old English language word hlæw, meaning 'hill' or 'barrow', presumably referring to School Hill (on which the historic centre of Lewes stands) or to one of the five ancient burial mounds, all now levelled, in the vicinity of St John sub Castro.

However, this etymology has been challenged by the Swedish philologist Rune Forsberg on the grounds that the loss of the initial  in hlæw would be unlikely phonologically in this context. He suggested that the name Læwe instead derives from the rare Old English word lǣw ('wound, incision'), and reflects the fact that from the top of School Hill Lewes overlooks the narrow, steep-sided 'gash' where the River Ouse cuts through the line of the South Downs. This theory was endorsed in 2011 by A Dictionary of British Place Names.

A third possibility has been advanced by Richard Coates, who has argued that Læwe derives from lexowia, an Old English word meaning 'hillside, slope' (of which there is no shortage in the Lewes area). This unusual word was borrowed into Old English from Old Welsh, the Modern Welsh spelling being llechwedd.

Another possibility, is that the name is connected to Saint Lewina (or Lewinna, Levinna, Lewine, Leofwynn; 7th century) a British virgin and martyr who was put to death by Saxon heathens.

History

Pre-Saxon
Lewes is located at the point where the River Ouse flows through a narrow gap in the east–west line of the South Downs. The immense strategic value of the site, which is able to command traffic between the Channel coast and the Sussex interior, was recognised as early as the Iron Age, when a hill-fort was built on Mount Caburn, the steep-sided hill that overlooks the Ouse (and the modern town of Lewes) from the east.

During the Roman period there was an aristocratic villa at Beddingham, at the foot of Mount Caburn, and there have been several finds of Roman coins and pottery sherds in Lewes itself. The Victorian historian Thomas Walker Horsfield therefore reckoned that there must have been a Roman settlement on the site, and he identified it with the otherwise unlocatable town of Mutuantonis. Another antiquarian, John Elliot, even suggested that central Lewes's distinctive network of twittens was based on the layout of a Roman legionary fortress; however modern historians are rather more cautious about the possibility of a Roman Lewes, as there is as yet no archaeological evidence for a built-up area dating back to the Roman period.

Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman
The earliest phase of Anglo-Saxon settlement in Sussex was concentrated between the Rivers Ouse and Cuckmere, and Anglo-Saxon finds begin to appear in Lewes from the sixth century. The town of Lewes was probably founded around this time, and it may have been one of the most important settlements in the Kingdom of Sussex, along with Chichester and Hastings, though the evidence for this early period is very sketchy.

By the ninth century, the Kingdom of Sussex had been annexed to the Kingdom of Wessex, and in 838 Ecgberht, King of Wessex donated the estate of Malling, on the opposite side of the Ouse from Lewes, to the Archbishop of Canterbury. As a result, the Parish of Malling became a 'peculiar', which means that the parish was directly subject to the Archbishop of Canterbury rather than the Bishop of Chichester like every other parish in Sussex. Malling would retain this anomalous status until as late as 1845.

Information about Lewes becomes much more plentiful from the reign of Alfred the Great onward, as it was one of the towns which he fortified as part of the network of burhs he established in response to the Viking raids. The peace and stability brought by Alfred and his successors evidently stimulated economic activity in the area, for in the late Anglo-Saxon period Lewes seems to have been a thriving boom town – during the reign of Alfred's grandson Æthelstan it was assigned two royal moneyers, more than any other mint in Sussex, and according to Domesday Book it generated £26 of revenue for the Crown in 1065, almost twice the amount of any other town in the county.

After the Norman invasion, William the Conqueror rewarded his retainer William de Warenne by making him Earl of Surrey and granting him the Rape of Lewes, a strip of land stretching along the Ouse valley from the coast to the Surrey boundary. De Warenne constructed Lewes Castle within the walls of the Saxon burh, while his wife Gundreda founded the Priory of St Pancras, a Cluniac monastic house, in about 1081.

Battle of Lewes

During the Second Barons' War, King Henry III was ambushed at Lewes by a force of rebel barons led by Simon de Montfort. Henry marched out to fight de Montfort, leading to a pitched battle on the hills above the town (roughly in the area of modern Landport Bottom). The king's son Prince Edward, commanding the right wing of the royal army, succeeded in driving off some of the baronial forces, but he got carried away with the pursuit, which took him as far as Offham. In Edward's absence the remainder of the royal army was attacked by de Montfort and Gilbert de Clare and decisively defeated. The king's brother Richard of Cornwall was captured, and the king himself was forced to sign the Mise of Lewes, a document which does not survive but was probably aimed at forcing Henry to uphold the Provisions of Oxford. Despite this uncertainty about its consequences, the battle is often seen as an important milestone in the development of English democracy.

Late Mediaeval and Early Modern

The de Warenne family died out with Earl John in 1347, whereupon lordship of the Rape of Lewes passed to his sororal nephew Richard Fitzalan, 4th Earl of Arundel. Fitzalan preferred to reside at Arundel Castle rather than at Lewes, and the town therefore lost the prestige and economic advantages associated with being the seat of an important magnate. This was only the beginning of a series of misfortunes that struck Lewes, for in 1348 the Black Death arrived in England and later on in the century the Hundred Years War led to a series of French and Castilian raids on Sussex, which badly disrupted trade. On one occasion in 1377 the Prior of St Pancras, John de Charlieu, was abducted by the raiders and held to ransom. Furthermore, after the main branch of the Fitzalan family died out in 1439, the Rape of Lewes was subsequently partitioned between the three sororal nephews of the last earl, namely John Mowbray, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, Edward Neville, 3rd Baron Bergavenny, and Edmund Lenthall. As a result of this dismemberment the district became even more neglected by its lords, although feudal politics was starting to become less important anyway due to the centralising reforms of the Yorkist and Tudor kings.

The English Reformation was begun by one of these Tudor monarchs, Henry VIII, and as part of this process the monasteries of England were dissolved; Lewes Priory was consequently demolished in 1538 and its property seized by the Crown. Henry's daughter Mary I reversed the religious policy of England, and during the resulting Marian Persecutions of 1555–1557, Lewes was the site of the execution of seventeen Protestant martyrs, most of them actually from the Weald rather than Lewes itself, who were burned at the stake in front of the Star Inn (now the site of Lewes Town Hall). Commemoration of the martyrs is one of the main purposes of Lewes Bonfire, and a stone memorial to the martyrs was unveiled on Cliffe Hill in 1901.

Lewesian politics was dominated by a strongly Puritan faction in the reign of Charles I, and during the English Civil War it was one of the most important Parliamentarian strongholds in Sussex. As such it became the target of a royalist attack in December 1642, but the royalist army was intercepted and defeated at the Battle of Muster Green by Parliamentarian forces commanded by Herbert Morley, one of the two Members of Parliament (MPs) for Lewes.

Lewes recovered relatively quickly after the Civil War, and prospered during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had always been one of the principal market towns of Sussex, as well as an important port, and by the end of the Georgian era it also had well-developed textiles, iron, brewing, and shipbuilding industries.

Modern
The severe winter of 1836–7 led to a large build-up of snow on Cliffe Hill, whose sheer western face directly overlooks the town. On Tuesday 27 December 1836 this snow cornice collapsed, and the resulting Lewes avalanche was the deadliest ever recorded in Britain. The avalanche struck the cottages on Boulters Row (now part of South Street), burying fifteen people, of whom eight died. A pub in South Street is named The Snowdrop in memory of the event.

In 1846 the town became a railway junction, with lines constructed from the north, south and east to two railway stations. The development of Newhaven ended Lewes's period as a major port. During the Crimean War, some 300 Finns who had served in the Russian army during the Åland War and been captured at Bomarsund were imprisoned in the naval prison at Lewes. Lewes became a borough in 1881. Lewes Town Hall opened in 1893 in premises converted from the former Star Inn and in 1913 Council Offices were added in Arts-and-Crafts style.

Lewes Victoria Hospital opened in 1909 in its current premises, as Victoria Hospital and Infirmary, having previously been on School Hill where it opened as the Lewes Dispensary and Infirmary in 1855.

In October 2000 the town suffered major flooding during an intense period of severe weather throughout the United Kingdom. The commercial centre of the town and many residential areas were devastated. In a government report into the nationwide flooding, Lewes was officially noted the most severely affected location. As a result of the devastation, the Lewes Flood Action group formed, to press for better flood protection measures.

Governance

Local government
There are three tiers of local government covering Lewes, at parish (town), district and county level: Lewes Town Council, Lewes District Council and East Sussex County Council. The town council is based at Lewes Town Hall on the High Street. The county council has its headquarters at County Hall on St Anne's Crescent in the town, which is also used by Lewes District Council as its meeting place.

Lewes was an ancient borough, although the structure of its early government is obscure. For much of the Middle Ages the town was run by a closed aristocratic organisation known as the "Fellowship of the Twelve", which was gradually eclipsed by a body known as the jury in the seventeenth century, presided over by a constable. The limitations of the town's administration were recognised in 1806 when separate improvement commissioners were established to pave, light and repair the streets and provide a watch. When local government in towns was reformed across the country in the 1830s, Lewes was one of the boroughs left unreformed, and so it continued to be run by its jury and improvement commissioners. The situation was finally regularised in 1881 when the town was made a municipal borough. The town was then run by a corporate body formally called the "mayor, aldermen and burgesses of the borough of Lewes", informally known as the corporation or town council. The last constable became the first mayor.

In 1890 the town council acquired the former Star Inn at 189 High Street, parts of which date back to the fourteenth century, and the adjoining corn exchange. The buildings were converted and extended to become the town hall, including a new frontage to High Street, which was completed in 1893. The municipal borough of Lewes was abolished in 1974 when the larger Lewes District was established. A successor parish was created covering the area of the former borough, with the parish council taking the name Lewes Town Council.

Following the 2023 election the composition of the town council was:

The next election is due in 2027.

Since 2010 the town has been included within the South Downs National Park. The National Park Authority has therefore taken over some functions from the local councils, notably relating to town planning.

Constituency
Lewes gives its name to the Lewes parliamentary constituency. The constituency was held by the Conservatives from the 1870s until 1997 when it was won by Liberal Democrat Norman Baker. He held the seat for 18 years until defeated in 2015 by Conservative Maria Caulfield who retained her seat in the 2017 and 2019 general elections.

Geography

Lewes is situated on the Greenwich or Prime Meridian, in a gap in the South Downs, cut through by the River Ouse, and near its confluence with the Winterbourne Stream. It is approximately seven miles north of Newhaven, and an equal distance north-east of Brighton.

The South Downs rise above the river on both banks. The High Street, and earliest settlement, occupies the west bank, climbing steeply up from the bridge taking its ancient route along the ridge; the summit on that side,  distant is known as Mount Harry. On the east bank there is a large chalk cliff, Cliffe Hill that can be seen for many miles, part of the group of hills including Mount Caburn, Malling Down (where there are a few houses in a wooded area on the hillside, in a development known as Cuilfail) and Golf Hill (home to the Lewes Golf Club). The two banks of the river are joined by Willey's Bridge (a footbridge), the Phoenix Causeway (a recent concrete road bridge, named after the old Phoenix Ironworks) and Cliffe Bridge (an 18th-century replacement of the mediaeval crossing, widened in the 1930s and now semi-pedestrianised).

The High Street runs from Eastgate to West-Out, forming the spine of the ancient town. Cliffe Hill gives its name to the one-time village of Cliffe, now part of the town. The southern part of the town, Southover, came into being as a village adjacent to the Priory, south of the Winterbourne Stream. At the north of the town's original wall boundary is the St John's or Pells area, home to several 19th-century streets and the Pells Pond. The Pells Pool, built in 1860, is the oldest freshwater lido in England. The Phoenix Industrial Estate lies along the west bank of the river and contains a number of light industrial and creative industry uses, as well as car parks and a fire station. A potential regeneration project (formerly "The North Street Quarter", renamed "The Phoenix Project" by the Lewes-based eco-development company Human Nature which took on ownership of the land in December 2020) for the area would be the largest in Lewes since the South Malling residential area was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and in the South Downs since it became a National Park.

Malling lies to the east of the river and had 18th- and 19th-century houses and two notable breweries. Road engineering and local planning policy in the 1970s cleared many older buildings here to allow the flow of traffic; the main road route east from the town now goes along Little East Street, across the Phoenix Bridge and through the Cuilfail Tunnel to join the A27.

The town boundaries were enlarged twice (from the original town walls), in 1881 and 1934. They now include the more modern housing estates of Wallands, South Malling (the west part of which is a previously separate village with a church dedicated to St Michael), Nevill, Lansdown and Cranedown on the Kingston Road.

Countryside walks can be taken starting from several points in Lewes. One can walk on Mount Caburn to the village of Glynde starting in Cliffe, traverse the Lewes Brooks (an RSPB reserve) from Southover, walk to Kingston near Lewes also from Southover, head up Landport Bottom to Mount Harry and Black Cap along the edge of the old Lewes Racecourse, or wander up along the Ouse to Hamsey Place from the Pells. The South Downs Way crosses the Ouse just south of Lewes at Southease and hikers often stop off at the town. A new route reaching the town at the Railway Land – the Egrets Way – initially conceived in 2011 by the Ouse Valley Cycle Network, has been designed as a network of walking and cycling paths linking Lewes and Newhaven with the villages in between.

Natural sites

Three Sites of Special Scientific Interest lie within the parish: Lewes Downs, Lewes Brooks and Southerham Works Pit. Lewes Downs is a site of biological interest, an isolated area of the South Downs. Lewes Brooks, also of biological importance, is part of the floodplain of the River Ouse, providing a habitat for many invertebrates such as water beetles and snails. Southerham Works Pit is of geological interest, a disused chalk pit displaying a wide variety of fossilised fish remains. The Railway Land nature reserve is on the east side of the town next to the Ouse, and contains an area of woodland and marshes, which now includes the Heart of Reeds, a sculpted reed bed designed by local land artist Chris Drury. The Winterbourne stream, a tributary of the Ouse, flows through it. This stream flows most winters and dries up in the summer, hence its name. It continues through Lewes going through the Grange Gardens and often travelling underground. The Heart of Reeds is one of the sites in East Sussex and Kent home to the marsh frog, an introduced species. It is popular with pond-dippers and walkers. A centre for the study of environmental change is due to be built at the entrance to the nature reserve.

On 21 August 1864, Lewes experienced an earthquake measuring 3.1 on the Richter magnitude scale.

Climate
Climate in this area has mild differences between highs and lows, and there is adequate rainfall year-round. The Köppen Climate Classification subtype for this climate is "Cfb" (Marine West Coast Climate/Oceanic climate).

Religious buildings

Church of England

St Michael's is located at the top of the High Street and like St Peter's in nearby Southease it has a round tower (with a shingled spire). Its length runs along the street rather than away from it and the cemetery is separated from the High Street by stone walls with iron railings on top. Next to it is a building which is used upstairs as a Sunday school.
Further west is St Anne's, a quiet church surrounded by its graveyard, which gives its name to the street it is on.
St John sub Castro (Latin for St John-under-the-Castle) is the northernmost church in the old town. The surrounding town quarter is called St John's. The church's boundaries are actually protected on one side by the Town Walls, although originally St John's was a small Saxon building. It was destroyed in the 19th century but the main door was kept and used as an east door for the large new church, built in 1839 by George Cheeseman in flint and brick. In the graveyard there is a memorial to the Finnish prisoners kept in the old naval prison in the 19th century. St John's Church Hall is a couple of streets away in Talbot Terrace.
In Cliffe there is St Thomas à Becket's, where the Orthodox Community also worship.
In Southover, St John the Baptist's is located on Southover High Street. The nave incorporates the hospitium of the Priory of St Pancras. Neighbouring it is Church End and down the road at St James Street cul-de-sac, the Church Hall. In its grounds is the Southover War Memorial, which is distinct from the main Lewes War Memorial.
St. Michael, South Malling, dates from 1628.

Deconsecrated

All Saints' is next to the site of a Priory of Grey Friars (Franciscan friars) the only relic of which is an archway at the end of the church boundary wall, which is on the line of the town wall. The medieval tower survives, abutting a later brick nave by Amon Wilds (1806) and 19th-century Gothic-style chancel. This church is now deconsecrated and serves as a community arts space, managed by the Town Council.

Roman Catholic
The Roman Catholic church is dedicated to St. Pancras in memory of the Priory and is a red-brick building over the street from St Anne's.

Non-conformist
The Religious Society of Friends (finished 1784) is a Quaker meeting house next to the former All Saints' Church (now an arts centre) on Friar's Walk.
The Jireh Chapel, off Malling Street, is a Grade I listed building, being a rare survivor of its type dating from 1805. It now houses the Lewes Free Presbyterian Church.
Westgate Chapel is a 16th-century building located built on the original 13th century town wall foundations and a yard at the top of the High Street (Grade 2* listed). So called because of its position at the old West Gate of the town wall, the Chapel was in use during the 17th century and became a licensed place of worship named as Westgate Meeting on 5th November 1700 and recorded as Independent. Its liberal stance allowed it to become a Unitarian led church by 1820 (when the congregation of Southover General Baptist Chapel re-joined) It is now an Independent chapel.
Eastgate Chapel is a very different building; a neo-Norman design of 1843 in dark flint, it originally had a pepper-pot dome but this was removed in favour of a traditional spire in case traffic vibrations below made it fall off. A modern extension has been added to the church.
Christ Church, a modern (1953) building, serves a united congregation of United Reformed Church and Methodist worshippers.
Southover General Baptist Chapel was built in Eastport Lane in 1741. The congregation's views moved towards Unitarianism, and in the 19th century they re-joined Westgate Chapel having earlier split from there. The building has been a house since 1972, but had various religious and secular uses before that.

Demography

In 2001 the service industries were by far the biggest employers in Lewes: over 60% of the population working in that sector. A little over 10% are employed in manufacturing, mostly in the smaller industrial units.

The town is a net daytime exporter of employees with a significant community working in London and Brighton whilst it draws in employees of the numerous local government and public service functions on which its local economy is strongly dependent.

An important part of the town's economy is based on tourism, because of the town's many historic attractions and its location.

As referenced in the governance section, the town is also where three tiers of local government have their headquarters, and the head office of Sussex Police is also in Lewes.

Lewes Bonfire

The town's most important annual event is the Lewes Bonfire celebrations on 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night. In Lewes this event not only marks the date of the uncovering of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, but also commemorates the memory of the seventeen Protestant martyrs burnt at the stake for their faith during the Marian Persecutions. The celebrations, which controversially involve burning an effigy of Pope Paul V, who was pope during the Gunpowder Plot, are the largest and most famous Bonfire Night celebrations in the country.

Economy

The Lewes Chamber of Commerce represents the traders and businesses of the town. The town has been identified as unusually diversified with numerous specialist, independent retailers, counter to national trends toward 'chain' retailers and large corporate retail outlets.

Lewes Farmers' Market, one of the first in the UK, was started in the 1990s by Common Cause Co-operative Ltd and is a popular re-invention of Lewes as a market town. The Farmers' Market takes place in pedestrianised Cliffe High Street on the first and third Saturdays of every month, with local food producers coming to sell their wares under covered market stalls. A weekly food market in the Lewes Market Tower was established in July 2010 by Transition Town Lewes to allow traders to sell local produce. Occasionally French traders from the twin town of Blois attend, vending on Cliffe Bridge.

From 1794 beers, wines and spirits were distributed from Lewes under the Harveys name, and the town is today the site of Harvey & Son's brewery celebrated as one of the finest ale producers in England.

In September 2008, Lewes launched its own currency, the Lewes Pound, in an effort to increase trade within the town. One Lewes Pound is equal to £1. Like the similar local currency in Totnes, the initiative is part of the Transition Towns movement. The Lewes Pound and the Transition Towns movement have received criticism for a failure to address the needs of the wider Lewes population, especially lower socio-economic groups. Such local currency initiatives have been more widely criticised in light of limited success stimulating new spending in local economies and as an unrealistic strategy to reduce carbon emissions. The Lewes Pound can be exchanged for the same amount of pounds sterling in several shops in Lewes and can be spent in a wide range of local businesses. Many of the notes were sold on eBay at a higher amount. Early numbers and sequenced notes fetched very high prices from foreign collectors.

Landmarks

The town is the location of several significant historic buildings, including Lewes Castle, the remains of Lewes Priory, Bull House (the former home of Thomas Paine), Southover Grange and public gardens, and a 16th-century timber-framed Wealden hall house known as Anne of Cleves House because it was given to her as part of her divorce settlement from Henry VIII, though she never lived there. Anne of Cleves House and the castle are owned and maintained by the Sussex Archaeological Society (whose headquarters are in Lewes). The Round House, a secluded former windmill in Pipe Passage, was owned by the writer Virginia Woolf.

The steep and cobbled Keere Street is home to many historic buildings, including a timber framed antiquarian bookshop. The gardens of the buildings on the east side of the street border the old Town Walls. The Prince Regent once drove his carriage down the street, and a sign at the bottom commemorates this event.

The ancient street pattern survives extensively as do a high proportion of the medieval building plots and oak framed houses, albeit often masked with later facades. The 18th-century frontages are notable and include several, like Bartholomew House at the Castle Gate, that are clad in mathematical tiles which mimic fine brick construction. Numerous streets of 18th- and 19th-century cottages have survived cycles of slum clearance as models of attractive town housing.

At the highest point of the old town the Portland stone and Coade stone facade of the Crown Court (1808–12, by John Johnson), the brick Market Tower and florid Lewes War Memorial mark the historic centre, although trade has tended to concentrate on the lower land in modern times. At the lowest part of the town, by the river, Harvey & Son's Brewery, 'The Cathedral of Lewes' is an unspoilt 19th-century tower brewery and is the only one of the town's five original major breweries still in use. Nearby Fitzroy House is a George Gilbert Scott designed building, constructed as a library in memory of Lewes MP Henry FitzRoy in 1862 and now a private residence. The railway station is the other important monument of the industrial era.

Southover Grange is a grade II*listed Tudor manor house built in 1572 with Caen limestone taken from the ruins of Lewes Priory. The house and its gardens were bought by Lewes District Council and opened to the public in 1945. The house is now owned by East Sussex County Council, and it is currently being refurbished into a wedding venue, registry office and community facility. The east wing is leased to an art shop and the Window café (open in spring and summer). The Grange gardens are divided by the Winterbourne stream and contain formal bedding displays, a wildflower area, a knot garden and some notable trees, including a large Magnolia grandiflora, a mulberry tree dating perhaps to the 17th century and a tulip tree planted by Queen Elizabeth II. The gardens are open to the public during daylight hours all year round.

Pelham House dates back to the 16th century and features architecture of all subsequent eras and a private landscaped garden facing the Downs. It now serves as an independent hotel. The Shelleys, also now a hotel, is likewise of some antiquity with a private garden and family associations with Percy Shelley.

The centre of Lewes is notable for a consistently high calibre of regional vernacular architecture and variety of historic construction materials and techniques. A comprehensive survey of all historical plaques was conducted in 2013 by a local civic society, the Friends of Lewes.

A distinctive feature of the centre of Lewes is the network of alleyways or 'twittens' which run north–south on either side of the High Street and date back to Anglo-Saxon times. According to the Dictionary of the Sussex dialect and collection of provincialisms in use in the county of Sussex published in Lewes in 1875. "Twitten is a narrow path between two walls or hedges, especially on hills. For example, small passageways leading between two buildings to courtyards, streets, or open areas behind". Some twittens (e.g. Broomans Lane, Church Twitten, Green Lane, Paine's Twitten) remain flint-wall-lined pedestrian thoroughfares, others (e.g. Watergate Lane, St Andrew's Lane and renamed Station Street (formerly St Mary's Lane)) are now narrow usually one-way roads. The most notable of all Lewes' twittens is Keere Street. A weekly Sunday morning run up and down all the twittens on the south side of the High Street – the so-called Twitten Run – has operated in the town since November 2015.

Public sculpture

Historic

With Eric Gill's move to Ditchling, the artistic community there gave rise to other sculptors in the Lewes district such as his nephew John Skelton and Joseph Cribb. Skelton's studio in Streat has continued as an educational and artist's workshop since his death in 1999. Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein conceived a great scheme for doing some colossal figures together around 1910 for a modern Stonehenge on 6 acres of land at Asheham House, Beddingham, south-east of Lewes. William Rothenstein agreed to buy the lease but the scheme failed.

Edward Perry Warren first saw Lewes House in 1889 and with his partner John Marshall they were prodigious collectors of fine antique sculpture there. Eric Gill was introduced to Warren by Roger Fry and the stone carving Ecstasy purchased, which is now in the Tate Gallery collection. William Rothenstein suggested that Warren might like to acquire Rodin's new sculpture The Kiss and after several visits, in 1904 the Lewes Kiss arrived at Lewes House. In 1906 Rodin requested that Warren lend The Kiss to an important exhibition in Regent Street, London. This made it famous in Britain for the first time. The Kiss was returned to the stables at Lewes House, where it remained until 1914 until offered to Lewes Town Council. It was placed in the Town Hall, at the South End of the Assembly Room on 2 December 1914. Early in 1915, The Kiss was wrapped in canvas and marked off with a guard rail. The Town Council returned the statue, saying only that the room did 'not lend itself to such a noble piece of statuary.' On 26 February 1917, The Kiss was once more taken to the stable block where it was to remain until Warren's death in 1928. After a short period on loan to Cheltenham, The Kiss was purchased in 1953 by public subscription and is now one of the Tate's most popular attractions.

It returned on loan to Lewes in 1999 for the exhibition Rodin in Lewes.

Present day
The Helmet (1964), by Enzo Plazzotta, stands in the grounds of Lewes Priory. The Cuilfail Spiral (1983) by Peter Randall-Page sits on the roundabout at the north end of the Cuilfail Tunnel; made of 7 pieces of Portland limestone. The Magnus Inscription (c. 1200) sits in the East wall of St John Sub Castro on the Junction of Abinger Place and Lancaster Street. The Janus Head (1997) by John Skelton and Lewes Group (2010) by Jon Edgar sit in Southover Grange Gardens. Sculpture to Thomas Paine by Marcus Cornish commissioned as a private donation was unveiled in July 2010 outside the new Lewes Library in Styles Field.

Transport

Lewes, from its inception, has been an important transport hub. Its site as a bridging point was probably originally a ford: today the main routes avoid the town centre. The A27 trunk road taking traffic along the south coast between Eastbourne and Southampton passes to the south of the town. The A26 from Maidstone to Newhaven; and the A275 (the London road) both come in from the north. The Brighton & Hove bus company and Compass Travel serve the town. The bus station was closed for a while but reopened in late 2008.

Lewes railway station was originally the junction for six routes. The town still enjoys hourly fast trains from London. The two erstwhile rural rail routes to the north, linking to East Grinstead and Uckfield respectively, are both now closed, but the East Coastway Line, connecting Brighton with Eastbourne and Hastings, and the branch to Seaford remain.

The Vanguard Way, a long-distance footpath from London to Newhaven, passes through countryside east of the town. The South Downs Way also passes close to Lewes, crossing the Ouse at Southease, some four miles south of the town. The Greenwich Meridian Trail, a long-distance path that follows the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshire passes through the middle of the town. A festival celebrating and encouraging walking and cycling, the Lewes Hike and Bike Festival, was created in 2012 but only ran for three years.  The Eastbourne and Lewes Walking Festival was created in 2018 to promote walking in the local urban and rural South Downs area.

Education

Primary schools

There are many primary schools including:

Morley House (Lewes Old Grammar School's junior department)
St Pancras School
South Malling School
Southover School
Wallands School
Western Road School
Western Road and Southover School, despite being separate schools, are housed in linked buildings. The original Southover buildings are of red brick in the Queen Anne style, dating back to the early 20th century. The additions to it now forming the Western Road buildings date from after 1945. The two schools share a field. Pells Primary School closed in 2017. The alternative independent primary school, Lewes New School, closed in 2018.

Secondary schools

There are two secondary schools in the town and one nearby:

Lewes Old Grammar School, an independent school which also has a sixth form.
Priory School, specialising in the arts, languages and science.
Kings Academy Ringmer, about three and a half miles from Lewes town centre, in a village called Ringmer, is a school for ages 11 to 16.

Further education

East Sussex College, formerly Sussex Downs College, has one of its campuses in Lewes, and provides a range of courses including A Levels, GCSEs, Functional Skills and Access courses and vocational qualifications such as NVQs and BTECs.

Culture

Classical music
Located  outside of Lewes is Glyndebourne opera house. Founded in 1934, the venue draws large audiences for its Summer Festival and has attracted a host of international talent throughout its history. Lewes Operatic Society (founded 1911) and New Sussex Opera are also based in the town of Lewes.

A number of other local classical music series operate in the town, including the Nicholas Yonge Society; and the baroque and early classical Workshop Series. The Musicians of All Saints is a Lewes-based chamber orchestra founded in 1987 who perform both new works and standard repertoire. A new annual music series, the Lewes Chamber Music Festival, was created in summer 2012. The Lewes Festival of Song was created in 2015 and the Lewes BaroqueFest in 2019.  Other local music groups include the Lewes Concert Orchestra founded in 1993; and the Lewes, Glynde & Beddingham Brass Band, founded in 1922.

The East Sussex Bach choir is based in Lewes, as well as a number of other active amateur choirs, including Pro Musica Chamber Choir, the Everyman Ensemble, the Paddock Singers, Lewes Vox and East Sussex Community Choir.

Orlando Gough's opera The Finnish Prisoner is set in Lewes, telling the story of the Finnish prisoners of war held in Lewes after the Crimean War.

Museums and galleries

The principal town museum is Barbican House Museum at Lewes Castle, which hosts the Lewes Town Model as well as four galleries of Sussex archaeology. Anne of Cleves House has various collections relating to the history of Lewes. There are several independent art galleries in the town including the Star Brewery Gallery in a former brewery in Market Street; the artist-run Chalk Gallery in North Street and occasional art exhibitions at the Town Hall. Other galleries are listed in Gallery Guide Lewes and Art Map Lewes.

Theatre and cinema

Lewes Little Theatre was created in 1939 and is based in dedicated premises on Lancaster Street. It puts on half a dozen or more productions each year. Supporters of the creation of the Theatre include John Maynard Keynes.

A new independent three-screen cinema, the Lewes Depot, opened in May 2017 in a multimillion-pound redevelopment of a former Harvey's brewery depot close to Lewes station. The architects were Burrell Foley Fischer and the work was given a Friends of Lewes award, and highly commended in the South Downs National Park design awards. The Lewes Film Club, which also produces short movies (including the recent adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm), and Film at All Saints' (the Film Club in collaboration with Lewes Town Council), show films based in the All Saints' Centre, a former church.

Several scenes in the 1962 film Jigsaw, which was loosely based on the Hillary Waugh novel 'Sleep Long, My Love' and the real-life Brighton trunk murders, were set and filmed in Lewes.

Popular music and clubs

Local dance schools and clubs include Lewes Dance Club, East Sussex Dance and ballet groups. Starfish Youth Music is based at Priory School and the young bands who take part regularly perform in local venues such as the Paddock and the All Saints' Centre.

Popular music gigs take place at a number of venues and pubs across the town including the Lewes Con Club, the Snowdrop Inn, the Volunteer pub, the Lewes Arms, the John Harvey Tavern, the Pelham Arms, and the Lansdown. The Elephant and Castle hosts the Saturday Folk Club. Union Music Store based in Lewes has become a centre for modern folk, country and Americana, both promoting and hosting live gigs, and recording and producing local musicians. A monthly comedy club based at the Con Club was created in 2010. A new organisation to support local music and musicians, Lewes Ripple, was created in 2018 and as well as online platforms is looking to create live concerts in 2021.

A regular local music festival, Lewes Live (previously Rock in the Bog), takes place in the summer. The town of Lewes was also the UK location for the Mumford and Sons' Gentlemen of the Road tour stopover in 2013. A large jazz festival, Love Supreme Festival was founded in 2013 at nearby Glynde Place. Other local festivals include the Brainchild Festival, based just north of Lewes in the grounds of Bentley Wildfowl and Motor Museum

Art, photography, and festivals

Annual arts events include ArtWave and the children's Patina Moving on Parade. An annual Lewes Guitar Festival which started in 1999 has not operated since the late 2000s. The annual Charleston Festival is hosted at nearby Charleston Farmhouse near the village of Firle some 6 miles east of Lewes.

An annual festival of light – Lewes Light – was created in 2015 during the UNESCO Year of Light and has run since then as an annual art installation and environmental awareness project.

The Reeves Studio, which is thought to be the oldest continuously operated photographic studio in the world, has been running from the same premises in Lewes since 1855.

Debate

Lewes has been influenced by its close proximity to the University of Sussex and Brighton University in terms of significant numbers of academics and students living in the town.

The Headstrong Club whose notable members include Thomas Paine was relaunched in 1987 and continues to operate. A branch of the popular Skeptics in the Pub movement was created in 2011 in Lewes, based at the Elephant and Castle.

Literature and history

The Lewes Literary Society (until 2015 the Monday Literary Society) was founded in Lewes in 1948 by authors Barbara Willard and Frances Howell, chaired by Leonard Woolf from 1954 to 1969, and currently by the poets John Agard and Grace Nichols, who live in the town. The Needlewriters is a co-operative of poets and writers which hosts a quarterly evening of poetry and prose at the Needlemakers Cafe, showcasing writers from across Sussex and Kent. The poetry imprint Frogmore Press, founded in Folkestone in 1983, moved to Lewes in 2010. Lewes Live Literature (LLL) was founded 1995 as a promoter of art and literature events, with an autumn festival which ran 2001–2007 bringing together spoken word with performance, music, film and visual art. Since 2007, LLL has concentrated on live literature production work.

Lewes History Group was founded in 2009 and supports an active programme of talks, information and research into the history of the town and surrounding areas. The Lewes Speakers Festival was created in the mid-2010s and brings a range of national speakers to the town each year, on a range of political, literary and historical topics.

Gastronomy

Lewes is home to a number of small craft breweries, alongside the renowned Harvey & Son's brewery in the heart of Lewes. These include Abyss Brewing which started life in the Pelham Arms and opened a new brewing base and taproom in 2021 in Daveys Lane in the middle of Lewes inside the old maltings building previously part of the South Downs Brewery, and Beak Brewery, which began as a so-called "gypsy" or nomad brewery before setting up in the town. The renowned craft brewery Burning Sky is based in nearby Firle.

Local pub culture

Lewes also has a strong tradition of distinctive local pub games, including toad in the hole (a local pub league and international competition are held in the town), Dwyle Flunking (the local spelling of Dwile flonking), and the World Pea Throwing Championships.

Lewes in literature

With a number of authors having lived in or near Lewes, it features, explicitly or disguised, in a number of books.

Possibly the earliest substantial reference in fiction is in The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties, an 1814 novel by Fanny Burney, in which the heroine spends time in Lewes and Brighton.

Eve Garnett lived in Lewes and her The Family from One End Street series of children's stories are set in 'Otwell-on-the-Ouse'. Matthew de Abaitua's dystopian novel If Then is set in a fictionalised Lewes. There are strong parallels with Lewes in the setting of Cliffe House which appears in a story called Bloody Baudelaire, by R. B. Russell.

The Collector by John Fowles is set near Lewes with the characters visiting the town, and the Roy Grace crime series by Peter James (writer) based in Brighton has scenes set in Sussex Police HQ based in Lewes. Graham Greene's first novel The Man Within has scenes set in Lewes at the Lewes assizes.

Three novels by William Nicholson (writer) – The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, All the Hopeful Lovers and Golden Hour – are based in Lewes and surrounding villages. Three Round Towers and Retribution by Beverley Elphick are set in and around Lewes at the end of the 18th century.

Julian Fane wrote a fictionalised version of his experience moving from London to Lewes in the novel Hope Cottage, which is set in a fictional district of Lewes named "Eastover."

Other writers to have set works of fiction in Lewes include Andrew Soutar, Judith Glover, and primatologist Alison Jolly who wrote a series of books for children.

The personal diaries of Lewes-based writer Alice Dudeney who wrote popular fiction in the first half of the 20th century were published in 1998 as A Lewes Diary: 1916–1944 describing her life in Lewes with Henry Dudeney before and during the interwar years.

Lewes also features in a range of works of other non-fiction, but notable examples would include To The River by Olivia Laing which follows her walk along the River Ouse and The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (writer) features walks on the South Downs close to Lewes.

In 2015, American writer Joseph Cannizzo Jr. published a collection of poetry about Lewes entitled When in Lewes, () following a brief stay in the town.

Media
The Sussex Express newspaper (formally the Sussex Express and County Herald) was established in 1837 in Lewes as the Sussex Agricultural Express and merged with the Sussex County Herald in 1938. Now headquartered in Horsham, it serves Lewes and much of East Sussex. It has four editions and includes extensive coverage of the local sports scene. It is part of the Johnston Press network of newspapers.

Viva Lewes was founded as a weekly web magazine in January 2006 and also as a monthly print handbook in October 2006 covering events and activities in and around the Lewes area. It ceased publication in 2020.

In December 2018 a monthly lifestyle publication Town & County Magazine was launched, with coverage of local life, history, and culture, and celebrity interviews, across Lewes district as well as Alfriston & Ditchling.

Local television news programmes are BBC South East Today and ITV Meridian.

The town's local radio stations are BBC Radio Sussex, Heart South, Seahaven FM and More Radio Mid-Sussex.

Lewes has its own RSL radio station, Rocket FM, which broadcasts via FM and the Internet for three weeks in October/November each year, covering the Bonfire period.

Operating since 2012 Radio Lewes is a web based podcasting CIC.  Membership based it was created by the Oyster Project Charity (holders of Queen's Award for Voluntary Service)  Radio Lewes

In November 2012, EE launched a series of advertisements promoting its 4G mobile service. All of the adverts, which featured actor Kevin Bacon, were filmed in Lewes.

Sport
In 1694, accounts of Sir John Pelham record 2s 6d paid for a wager concerning a cricket match at Lewes, one of the sport's earliest references.

Lewes Priory Cricket Club is based at the Stanley Turner Ground, Kingston Road. The club were Sussex League champions in 1986 and 1990 and Division 2 winners in 1999, 2006 and 2008. The club has active senior, junior and social sections

Lewes Rugby Football Club, founded in 1930, runs several rugby teams at various competitive levels, including the senior men's sides, the women's, girls' and junior teams. Lewes RFC's home turf is the Stanley Turner Ground, Kingston Road.

Lewes Hockey Club, based at Southdown Sports Club on Cockshut Road, was founded in 1903 and is one of the oldest and largest hockey clubs in Sussex.

The local football team is Lewes FC The club was founded in 1885 and play at the Dripping Pan. In July 2017, the club became the first in the world to introduce equal pay to the men's and women's teams. The Lewes FC Women's team were appointed to the second tier of the Women's Super League in May 2018.

The town is also home to Lewes Bridge View which has adult teams competing in the Mid Sussex Football League and Lewes and District Sunday League. In 2016 Lewes Bridge View Juniors joined in partnership with Lewes FC to form Lewes FC Juniors – running Under 8s to Under 16s, with boys and girls teams.

Lewes Athletic Club caters for junior and senior athletes. The club trains at the all-weather 400m track at the end of Mountfield Road, and other locations in the area. Lewes Swimming Club was reconstituted in 1975 by Commonwealth gold medal-winning swimmer Christine Parfect (née Gosden) and others. The club has 300+ members and organises swimming sessions at Lewes, Ringmer, Newlands School, Newhaven and Seaford Head pools during term-time. Lewes Wanderers Cycling Club was reconstituted in 1950. The club organises regular time trials throughout the summer.

Lewes Tennis/Hockey Club (Southdown Sports Club) has 16 tennis courts, four squash courts, two netball courts and a floodlit astro/hockey pitch. Lewes Bowls Club situated behind the Mount on Mountfield Road was founded in 1922. It is affiliated to Bowls England and members play in the Meridian League and the Brighton League, as well as in informal games for pleasure. Between April and September members play on a flat lawn green with six rinks and inside the clubhouse on short mat for the winter season. Lewes Golf Club is set on downland above Cliffe Hill on the east-side of Lewes, where the sport has been played since 1896.

The Moyleman, an off-road marathon event over the hills around Lewes, starting and finishing in the town, was created in 2014 and first run in 2015.

Lewes Racecourse, located immediately to the west of the town on the slopes of the Downs, operated for 200 years until it closed in 1964. Racehorse training continued at Lewes until 2020 when the area's last trainer, Suzy Smith, moved her base from Lewes to Angmering.  Race days are held at nearby Plumpton Racecourse.

There are a number of Service Clubs in Lewes, including Lewes Lions Club which is a member of Lions Clubs International. The club runs various events including the Christmas Concert in December each year with the LGB Brass and the annual 'International 'Toad-in-the-Hole' Competition' and holds street collections to raise funds so as to assist people and organisations in and around Lewes. Since the 1960s, the Lewes Rotary Club has hosted its distinctive annual skittles tournament in the gardens of Southover Grange in June each year.

Notable people

Among the many notable former residents of Lewes is Thomas Paine (1737–1809), who was employed as an excise officer in the town for a time from 1768 to 1774 when he emigrated to the American colonies. The Paine association sits at the centre of a radical tradition that is represented today by writers working in the town.

The sciences and natural enquiry are represented by Gideon Mantell who is credited with the first discovery and identification of fossilised dinosaur (iguanodon) teeth. Lewes doctor Richard Russell popularised the resort of Brighton.

Lewes is the birthplace of 16th-century madrigalist Nicholas Yonge. In the 1960s it was home to Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, as it is now to other musicians, including Herbie Flowers, Arthur Brown and Tim Rice-Oxley from Keane.

Daisy Ashford lived from 1889 to 1896 at Southdown House, 44 St Anne's Crescent, where she wrote The Young Visiters. Edward Perry Warren, an eccentric American collector, lived in Lewes House. In 1919 Virginia Woolf briefly owned – but never lived in – the Round House, a windmill in Pipe Passage, before moving to her final home, Monk's House in Rodmell. Diarist John Evelyn spent his boyhood at Southover Grange.

Crime
The town is the police and judicial centre for all of Sussex and is home to Sussex Police, East Sussex Fire & Rescue Service, Lewes Crown Court and HMP Lewes.

The fact that Lewes has a Crown Court, and a prison, is reflected by the fact that many notorious people have been connected with the town. During the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland several prominent figures involved in it were in Lewes Prison, including Éamon de Valera (1882–1975); Thomas Ashe (1885–1917); Frank Lawless (1871–1922); and Harry Boland (1887–1922). Others have included George Witton (1874–1942) involved in shooting prisoners during the Boer War.

Lewes assizes saw many important trials. In 1949 serial killer John George Haigh was sentenced to death. In 1956 suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams had his committal hearing in Lewes before being sent to the Old Bailey, London for trial. He was subsequently tried and convicted in Lewes in 1957 for fraud, lying on cremation forms and obstructing a police search. An early case was that of Percy Lefroy Mapleton (1860–1881) hanged for murder and the subject of the first composite picture on a wanted poster.

Twin towns

  Waldshut-Tiengen, Germany
  Blois, France
Lewes has been twinned with Waldshut-Tiengen since 1974 and with Blois since 1963, although informal links between these two towns began in 1947.

See also

Lewes Speed Trials
The Mise of Lewes, a peace treaty from 1264
The Song of Lewes, a Latin poem about the Battle of Lewes

Notes

References

External links

Lewes
Lewes District Council

Towns in East Sussex
County towns in England
Market towns in East Sussex
Civil parishes in East Sussex
Cricket in Sussex
English cricket in the 14th to 17th centuries

Lewes


Lenore Kandel (January 14, 1932, New York City – October 18, 2009, San Francisco, California) was an American poet, affiliated with the Beat Generation and Hippie counterculture.

Biography

Although Kandel was born in New York, her family lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania during her childhood. Afterward, she moved to Los Angeles to live with her father, screenwriter Aben Kandel. Her brother was future screenwriter Stephen Kandel.

She returned to New York to attend The New School for Social Research on scholarship for three and a half years before she dropped out. She moved to San Francisco in 1960. She began living in the East-West House co-op, where she met Jack Kerouac, who later immortalized her as Romana Swartz, "a big Rumanian monster beauty", in his novel Big Sur (1962). In the novel, she is described as being the girlfriend of Dave Wain, who was based on Lew Welch. "Dave" describes how she walked around the "Zen-East House" (East-West House) wearing only purple panties. Kerouac described her as "intelligent, well read, writes poetry, is a Zen student, knows everything [...]" (Big Sur, p. 75).

Her first works of poetry were the chapbooks An Exquisite Navel, A Passing Dragon, and A Passing Dragon Seen Again, published in 1959. Several of her poems also appeared in Beat and Beatific II in 1959.

Kandel was briefly notorious as the author of a short book of poetry, The Love Book. A small pamphlet consisting of four poems, The Love Book provoked censorship with its three-part poem, "To Fuck with Love." Police seized the work as being in violation of state obscenity codes, from both City Lights Books and "The Psychedelic Shop" in 1966. Subsequently, Kandel gained cause célèbre status. She herself defended her verse as "holy erotica." A jury declared the book obscene and lacking in any redeeming social value in 1967 and sales increased; Kandel thanked the police by giving one percent of all profits to the Police Retirement Association. The decision was overturned on appeal and the book continued to sell well.

In 1964, she participated in The Berkeley Poetry Conference organized by Richard Baker, Program Coordinator, University of California Berkeley, Liberal Arts Extension, along with poets Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Creeley, and many others. Kandel was a speaker at the Human Be-In in the Golden Gate Park polo fields on January 14, 1967. The only woman to speak from the stage, Kandel defiantly read from The Love Book. It was her 35th birthday, and McClure later stated, "The entire crowd of 20,000 or 30,000 people sang 'Happy Birthday' to her."

Kandel published her only full-length book of poems, Word Alchemy, in 1967. She was one of 15 people interviewed in Voices from the Love Generation (Little, Brown and Company, 1968). In 1976, Kandel recited a poem at the iconic concert The Last Waltz performed by The Band (but was not included in the film or soundtrack).

In 1970, Kandel suffered massive spinal injuries in a motorcycle crash with her then-husband Billy "Sweet Wiliam" Fritsch (poet, stevedore, and member of the Diggers (theater) and Hells Angels). Despite having to cope with excruciating pain for the remainder of her life, she continued to write and maintain social ties.

She died at home on October 18, 2009, of complications from lung cancer, with which she had been diagnosed several weeks earlier.

In 2012, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel was published. It features 80 of her poems, many of which had never before been published.

Film and music

Kandel appears in the Digger film Nowsreal (1968), sewing a Hells Angel patch on William Fritsch's jacket.

Kandel appears in the Kenneth Anger film Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), with William Fritsch, smoking a marijuana cigarette contained in a miniature skull.

In the 2013 film Big Sur, Kandel is portrayed by Stana Katic.

Selected works

By Lenore Kandel
 Lenore Kandel, Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel, North Atlantic Books, 2012, ,
 Limited edition of The Love Book published by Joe Pachinko of Superstition Street Press in 2003,
 Lenore Kandel, Word Alchemy, Grove Press, Evergreen trade paperback, 1967,
 Lenore Kandel, The Love Book, Stolen Paper Review, San Francisco, 1966, paperbound, 8 pages
 Lenore Kandel, A Passing Dragon See Again, Three Penny Press, Studio City, 1959.
 Lenore Kandel, An Exquisite Navel, Three Penny Press, Studio City, 1959.
 Lenore Kandel, A Passing Dragon, Three Penny Press, Studio City, 1959?.

Anthologies featuring Kandel's work
 Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation (Conari Press, 1996) contains a biographical portrait of Kandel, as well as three of her poems
 Richard Peabody (ed.), A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (Serpents Tail, 1997), pp 100–103
 Carole Tonkinson (ed.), Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (Riverhead Books, 1995), pp 260–272.
 Anne Waldman (ed.), The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation (Shambhala, 2007)
 Carmela Ciuraru (ed.), Beat Poets (Everyman's Library, 2002)
 David Steinberg (ed.), The Erotic Impulse (Tarcher, 1992) contains "Seven of Velvet," which is not available in other collections
 Alan Kaufman and S.A. Griffin (ed.), The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Basic Books, 1999)
 Jenny Skerl (ed.), Reconstructing the Beats (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Ronna C. Johnson, chapter 6, contains an essay about Kandel and selections from her poems
 Leonard Wolf (ed.), in collaboration with Deborah Wolf, Voices from the Love Generation  (Little, Brown and Company, 1968) hardcover, 283 pages, interviews done in Haight-Ashbury

References

1932 births
2009 deaths
20th-century American Jews
American women poets
Beat Generation writers
Deaths from lung cancer in California
Poets from New York City
Writers from San Francisco
20th-century American poets
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women

Lenore Kandel


Shoulder Arms is Charlie Chaplin's second film for First National Pictures. Released in 1918, it is a silent comedy film set in France during World War I, the first of three films he made on the subject of war. It co-starred Edna Purviance and Sydney Chaplin, Chaplin's elder brother. In this film, Chaplin is never in his Little Tramp outfit.

Plot
Some time during World War I, Doughboy (Charlie Chaplin) begins his service in the war amongst "the awkward squad" a group of American soldiers. He is bow-legged, unbalanced, and uncoordinated during bootcamp in contrast to the other soldiers who all have excellent coordination. He does move on to the front in France though, amongst the shells and trenches, and bunks amongst comrades (Sydney Chaplin). Doughboy is charged with guard duty and begins daydreaming of bars, cities, and home before being dismissed back to his bunk.

News/mail for soldiers is brought out for the soldiers, but there is nothing for Doughboy. Though his fellow soldiers offer him food from their mail he refuses and walks out to find there is a package for him; Limburger cheese and incredibly hard crackers. Due to the pungent smell of the cheese, he decides to throw it over the trench, hitting the Germans, rather than eat it.

Later, Doughboy struggles to sleep in waist high water, with his comrades all sleeping with no particular trouble in the conditions. In the morning, they are given the order to advance over the top. After hyping himself up against a backdrop of exploding artillery, Doughboy somewhat reluctantly goes over and manages to capture the enemy trench and 13 German troops the same as his identification number. Doughboy becomes much more confident after these events, and is no longer frazzled by the artillery or scared to take shots over the trench.

Doughboy volunteers for a secret mission and is advised that he may not return. His mission is to infiltrate enemy lines, disguised as a tree. When one of his comrades is captured spying on the enemy, Doughboy helps him to escape and is chased by a large German soldier (Henry Bergman) into the woods. Losing his tree disguise he is able to escape to a bombed out building wherein he meets a French girl (Edna Purviance) who tends to his wounds. Shortly after meeting, the large German soldier finds them. Both the French girl and Doughboy run, however the French girl is caught and arrested for aiding the Allies.

Before the French girl is assaulted by a German soldier, Doughboy manages to save her. Then the Kaiser shows up and Doughboy, disguised as a German officer, saves his comrade from capture again. All three of them now disguised as German officers chauffeur the Kaiser and his allies towards the Allied front. At the front they are greeted with applause and praise from the Allied troops.

Doughboy then wakes up back at bootcamp, revealing all was his dream.

Credited cast
Charles Chaplin as Charlie, the Doughboy
Edna Purviance as French girl
Sydney Chaplin as The sergeant, Charlie's Comrade / The Kaiser
Jack Wilson as German Crown Prince
Henry Bergman as Fat German sergeant / Field Marshal von Hindenburg / Bartender
Albert Austin as American Officer / Clean Shaven German Soldier / Bearded German Soldier
Tom Wilson as Dumb German Wood-Cutter
John Rand as U.S. soldier
J. Parks Jones as U.S. soldier (credited as Park Jones)
Loyal Underwood as Small German officer
W.J. Allen as Motorcyclist
L.A. Blaisdell as Motorcyclist
Wellington Cross as Motorcyclist
C.L. Dice as Motorcyclist
G.A. Godfrey as Motorcyclist
W. Herron as Motorcyclist

Reception
Shoulder Arms proved to be Chaplin's most popular film, critically and commercially, up to that point. A review in the October 21, 1918 New York Times was typical:
"'The fool's funny,' was the chuckling observation of one of those who saw Charlie Chaplin's new film. Shoulder Arms, at the Strand yesterday—and, apparently, that's the way everybody felt. There have been learned discussions as to whether Chaplin's comedy is low or high, artistic or crude, but no one can deny that when he impersonates a screen fool he is funny. Most of those who go to find fault with him remain to laugh. They may still find fault, but they will keep on laughing."
The film was very revolutionary for its time, introducing a new genre of comedy. Previously, films had treated war as a serious subject. This is believed to be the first comedy film about war.

See also
List of World War I films

References

External links

Shoulder Arms on Amazon Prime Video
Shoulder Arms on Pantaflix
one sheet poster(Ha)

Short films directed by Charlie Chaplin
1918 films
1918 comedy films
American black-and-white films
Silent American comedy films
American silent short films
American World War I films
Military humor in film
Surviving American silent films
Cultural depictions of Wilhelm II
First National Pictures films
1910s American films

Shoulder Arms