Grey rainy day walk with the kids in the Arboretum of Nottingham, the city’s first park set out mid 19th Century. The park contains a monument to the thefts of the British in China and Russia. A stylised pagoda contains a replica bell (the original is stashed in a regimental hq in Preston) that was taken from a temple near Canton in the second war for drugs (1856-1860).
“designed in 1857 by Marriott Ogle Tarbotton as a war memorial and built in 1862” .
“Two of the cannon were captured at Sebastopol in 1854-55, during the Crimean war, the other 2 are replicas”
As we can see from the historical England archive photo (from which source the quotes were also found) there once used to be cannon balls in the park. These have gone now, as has the original bell, along with memory of the sorry English drug dealing past where the British state happily went to war on the other side of the planet to protect English rights to profit from the addictions it developed as commodity demand in the then ‘China trade’.
Trinketization 