warehouses. Most are shipped to India for the final transformation from cleft to bat. Business is booming. The 132-year-old company reported £16.7m in sales in 2024, up by 35% on the year before. Sourcing enough wood is a growing challenge. An English willow takes about 15 years to reach maturity. J.S. Wright plants up to 45,000 saplings a year, but only one in three or four will be usable. “We have to factor in deer damage, squirrel damage, beaver damage, lack of maintenance,” explains Oliver Wright, the fourth generation to manage the family firm. The Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), which controls the rules, wants to increase affordability while preserving the balance of power between batters and bowlers. From October amateurs will be allowed to use bats with blades laminated from up to three pieces of wood. Professionals are still expected to use a single piece of willow. Richard Gray of Gray-Nicolls, an East Sussex batmaker that grows its own willow, welcomes the change: “Lamination will allow us to convert perfectly good but smaller pieces of willow, which until now are wasted.” The MCC is open to the idea of alternative materials, but doesn’t want an equipment arms race as in tennis or golf. “There’s a fairly small performance window,” says Fraser Stewart of the MCC. “If they’re too bad, people won’t use them. And if they’re too good, we won’t allow them.” ■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//britain/2026/05/07/the-surprising-supply-chain-choke- point-for-cricket-bats
Belfast’s murals are an open-air gallery of history and art And the walls are suddenly changing May 7th 2026 For years in Northern Ireland, walls have talked through words and images. Even after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought an end to the three decades of sectarian strife known as the Troubles, what walls said could be deadly. When “Eamon Collins: British Agent 1985-1999” was scrawled on a gable in Newry, the person named, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) man, painted over it, but to no avail. Hours later he was butchered nearby, the anti-British terror group gouging out his face in what police described as “the act of primitive cavemen”. Other wall art lauded sectarian killers, or proclaimed the name of a terror group to mark out its territory. The state’s inability to remove such open homage to illegal organisations made public its weakness. Lots of these murals endure. But their number diminishes with each passing year. Research by four academics—Dylan O’Driscoll, Birte Vogel, Eric Lepp and Dan Morecroft-Rice—found that in the quarter-century since 1998 three-quarters of the most intimidatory murals in the loyalist Shankill area have gone. David Campbell is chairman of the Loyalist Communities Council, an outfit whose complexity reflects that of Northern Ireland: it is legal, but made up of banned paramilitary groups. Mr Campbell, who is not a paramilitary, says of the balaclava-laden imagery: “Some of it artistically is horrible, quite apart from the message it conveys.” He says loyalist commanders broadly support removing militaristic murals as they degrade over time. Newer murals in these areas have commemorated Queen Elizabeth II and King
Charles III. Mr Campbell hopes all of the most offensive murals might go within five years. Not everyone agrees. In 2024 a storm toppled a wall in north Belfast’s Mount Vernon estate, an Ulster Volunteer Force stronghold. The wall had long been host to an infamous gargantuan threat: two balaclava-wearing gunmen aiming rifles along with the slogan “Prepared for peace; Ready for war”. Within months, the wall had been rebuilt and the mural repainted. This can be a negotiating tactic. “Conflict transformation” has become a lucrative industry. Millions of pounds are available from multiple funds. If an area does not seem to be at risk of conflict, it is unlikely to bag as much cash, some of which finds its ways to paramilitaries or their cronies. Newton Emerson, an acerbic writer from Belfast, once referred to a summer riot in east Belfast as “a grant application”. Lonely Planet, a travel guide, recommends the murals as a free attraction in Northern Ireland’s capital. Tourists flock to Belfast’s Troubles wall art, from the slick iconography commemorating the most famous IRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, to the Ulster Defence Association’s stark territorial markers at “Freedom Corner”. Some locals believe removing all Troubles murals would be a mistake. Just as people want to go to see concentration camps or battlefields, macabre history has appeal. Ben Lowry, editor of the News Letter, a Belfast-based daily, says that after the Troubles he showed murals to American visitors, one of whom returned the following year with a friend. They were disappointed to find the murals painted over. While Mr Lowry has no sympathy for paramilitaries, he says: “We need to find a way to preserve the best of them where there is local support for such history.” Murals need not be dark to attract. In recent years Belfast has been bedecked with spectacular non-sectarian ones: artistic images, floral studies and even a poignantly hopeful tribute to Lyra McKee, a journalist murdered by dissident republicans in 2019. To wander around the centre of Belfast is to encounter breathtaking images, from duelling men to animals—so many that there’s an app to guide you. In an annual street-art festival at the start of May more than 50 muralists were let loose on (approved) walls across Belfast.
Some of the most dramatic new murals are the work of Dan Kitchener, an artist from Essex in England. For nearly two decades his full-time job has been turning walls into canvasses. He has worked everywhere from Australia to Kazakhstan but says Belfast has been the most welcoming place to paint. His Belfast work is optimistic and apolitical. One depicts Belfast’s Ormeau Bridge at sunset, full of saturated colours which transform a road bridge into a work of wonder. Mr Kitchener sees this as an open-air gallery for those who would never enter a building filled with watercolours and ornate frames. Standing in front of a blank wall before sketching an outline is daunting even for someone who’s been doing it for years. Mr Kitchener likens it to running a marathon (which he also does). As with marathons, “the mainstream now has embraced it, so there’s more desire for it commercially.” But new beauty can’t entirely hide a past still recent and raw. One glaring omission from Northern Ireland’s tourism offering is a museum of the Troubles, meaning most tourists get far more partisan tellings of the violence by guides, some of whom were themselves paramilitaries. Political disagreement has prevented such a museum. It could be a place where horrific murals conveyed what previous generations lived through, and the barbarism of the Troubles. For the mural-painters of old, however, painting over commemorations of the killers might be a more attractive proposition than facing up to what their heroes did.■ For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//interactive/britain/2026/05/07/belfasts-murals-are-an- open-air-gallery-of-history-and-art
One decade, two Britains From Soho to Purfleet, Britain is a prisoner of the 1990s May 7th 2026 To the Groucho Club! Where else could Tate Britain, an art gallery, announce an upcoming exhibition on “The 90s”? Three decades ago, the Soho haunt was the centre of British cultural life. It is mentioned 42 times in “Faster Than A Cannonball: 1995 and all that”, a luvvies’ history of the era. “I’ve never seen Grouchos in the daytime,” says Edward Enninful, a former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who is curating the exhibition, in front of a big picture of Kate Moss, a 1990s supermodel. The town house at 45 Dean Street is a corner of Soho that is forever 1995. What about those who spent their Saturday nights at home during the 1990s, rather than falling out of the Groucho? A skim through the television listings of the time reveals a different decade. They were dominated by Jim
Davidson, a right-wing comic who specialised in impressions of black people and harmless smut. “Big Break”, a snooker game show Mr Davidson presented, attracted up to 14m viewers. A rebooted “Jim Davidson’s Generation Game” was the BBC’s main Saturday-night offer from 1995. If the 1990s are alive in the Groucho, they are still breathing at the Circus Tavern, a venue next door to a petrol station outside Purfleet, where Mr Davidson takes the stage beneath a disco ball. Mr Davidson warms up the crowd of 440 with a slanderous attack on the state of the women in nearby Canvey Island. “No wonder you’ve not got a great deal of illegal immigrants here. There’s no one to sexually assault!” It is still 1995 here, too. Britain is a prisoner of the 1990s. What that means depends on whether one heads to deepest Soho or deepest Essex. At the Circus Tavern, gay men are “straight off the pink bus”. Jokes are aimed at an audience well-informed enough to know who the secretary of health is, and that he is gay, and ignorant enough to find it inherently funny. But what could be more 1990s? Section 28, which forbade the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, was repealed only in 2003 (at which point, gay marriage was still a decade away). The 1990s were not always a nice place. Back at the Groucho, before an audience consisting predominantly of artsy folk in billowing trousers, Mr Enninful, who is himself gay, cited the “emergence of diversity as a creative force” during the decade. Diversity is a creative force for Mr Davidson, too. Much of the second act is dedicated to a trip to an nhs hospital, where he receives shoddy treatment from staff who struggle to speak English. “I don’t want to be racist, so I’m not going to tell you what colour this black woman was,” he says. “Boogaboooga-dayyy-o,” says Mr Davidson. “Dayyy-o,” respond the crowd. The crowd titter; husbands smirk at wives. Mr Davidson offers transgression in a room where everyone agrees. A safe space for those who hate safe spaces. The 1990s were diffuse, says Mr Enninful in Soho. Their energy came from “communities, practices and places that have not always been equally represented”. If anyone should know this, it is Mr Enninful. Born in Ghana, he became the fashion editor of i-D, an influential magazine, at just 18, in 1991. That same period saw the emergence of another 1990s figure: “Essex Man”, the proverbial aspirational if rather reactionary voter of the decade.