Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Nottingham’s underground 1

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Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham

Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham

Tony Waltham begins his invaluable study of underground Nottingham, Sandstone Caves of Nottingham (East Midlands Geological Society, 2nd edn, 1996), by saying that there are no caves in Nottingham:  all the cavities which honeycomb the historic centre are man-made.

The Sherwood Sandstone strata on which the city stands is so soft that it’s possible to dig a well by hand faster than the aquifer can fill it.  Indeed, the cavities beneath Nottingham have been used as cellars, dwellings, wells and cisterns, access passages, malt kilns and in one possibly unique case a tannery.  Wealthy householders sometimes dug ornamental garden features out of the rock, and from the late eighteenth-century at least sand was mined as an industrial abrasive.

Some of the existing underground sites date as far back as the twelfth century, and centuries before that a Welsh chronicler refers to a locality called ‘Tiggua Cobaucc’ – the place of the caves.

I’m indebted to my friend Stewart for tipping me off about the Nottingham Caves Survey [http://nottinghamcavessurvey.org.uk], which seeks to map all the surviving underground spaces in and around central Nottingham.  The survey uses laser-scanner technology to produce accurate three-dimensional representations for record, and to create fascinating fly-through videos.  The team continues to make new discoveries:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-26816897.

If you’re in Nottingham, of course, some of these fascinating spaces are physically accessible, in some cases for the price of a drink.

The most famous of all, perhaps is the Trip to Jerusalem, a pub which claims a history back to 1189AD, though the buildings are clearly seventeenth-century or later:  http://www.triptojerusalem.com.  Its history is certainly much older than the buildings, because it stands at the foot of the Castle Rock, next to the castle’s Brewhouse Yard.

Drinkers have been calling at the Trip, so it seems, ever since the Crusaders set off to the Holy Land.

 

Exploring New South Wales: Holbrook Submarine Museum

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Submarine Museum, Holbrook, New South Wales, Australia

Submarine Museum, Holbrook, New South Wales, Australia

When I lectured to the Murray River Decorative & Fine Arts Society at Albury-Wodonga on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, I was told over dinner about a town with a submarine, up in the Riverina hills.

I was intrigued, and asked my host Barb Ross to take me to the place where she grew up, Holbrook, which was originally called Ten Mile Creek and then Germanton.

Many Australian-German place-names fell out of favour during the First World War, and the inhabitants of Germanton chose to rename their town in tribute to a naval hero, Lt (latterly Commander) Norman Douglas Holbrook, VC (1888-1976), who took an obsolete British submarine under a minefield to torpedo a Turkish battleship in the Dardanelles in 1915.  He was the first submariner to be awarded the Victoria Cross, and the first recipient of the medal in the First World War.

Commander Holbrook took a personal interest in the little town that had taken his name, and after his death his widow, Mrs Gundula Holbrook, presented the council with his Victoria Cross medal.

In tribute to Commander Holbrook the town council raised funds to purchase a decommissioned Oberon-class Australian submarine, HMAS Otway, in 1995.  Mrs Holbrook contributed A$100,000 to bring the outer shell of the vessel above the waterline to the town, and to establish a small park and the Holbrook Submarine Museum [http://www.holbrooksubmarinemuseum.com] alongside.

This spectacle has surprised at least one driver of a huge Australian road-train, hammering through the foggy night until his headlights picked out the unmistakable shape of a submarine’s bows, four hundred miles from the ocean.

Maybe this disconcerting moment saved him from jumping the only set of traffic lights on the 847km road between Sydney and Melbourne.

There is a further display about Norman Holbrook at the Woolpack Museum:  http://www.woolpackinn.com.au.

 

Another Place

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Antony Gormley's 'Another Place', Crosby Beach, Lancashire

Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’, Crosby Beach, Lancashire

Why is it that local councils want to look a gift horse in the mouth when they’re presented with an opportunity to adopt a tourist attraction of international importance?

Bristol City Council was initially dubious about having the SS Great Britain sitting in the otherwise useless harbour in the 1970s.

Bradford failed to support Jonathan Silver’s attempt to bring the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia collection to the derelict Lister Mill in Manningham.

Sefton Council in Merseyside wasn’t at all keen on Antony Gormley’s haunting collection of cast-iron figures, Another Place, staying very long on Crosby Beach.

Another Place originated in 1997, and Gormley’s figures had previously gazed out to sea in Germany, Norway and Belgium before they were brought to the Mersey estuary as a component of the 4th Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the European Capital of Culture event (2008).

They were intended, when the temporary planning permission for their installation ran out, to be taken to New York, but Sefton Council relented and they are now to remain.

They’re by no means universally popular.  They’re considered a hazard to watersports.  Wildlife authorities worry about the effect of visitors on feeding birds, though biologists study with interest the colonisation of the figures by barnacles.

Some people regard them as pornographic, because each has a “simplified” penis.  Whether the objection is to the penis or the simplification is unclear.

The plethora of brown tourist signs directing motorists to Another Place is stark evidence that this mysterious installation has put Sefton on the map.

When all’s said and done, why else would people traipse down to Burbo Bank, but to gaze on Gormley’s iron men?

Nicholas Wroe’s 2005 profile of Antony Gormley is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/jun/25/art.

 

Island of Tears

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Ellis Island ferry-boat, New York City (1981)

Ellis Island ferry-boat, New York City (1981)

When I first visited New York City in 1981 my host, my school contemporary Malcolm, insisted there were two places I must visit – the Cloisters and Ellis Island.

Ellis Island was the major immigration reception station for the United States, handling 90% of arrivals from the Old World, from whom 40% of the present-day population are descended, between 1892 and 1954. 

Here the “tired…huddled masses” first set foot in the New World, and the stringent examinations they underwent determined whether they would be allowed to remain.

The “island of tears”, out in the bleak expanse of New York Harbour, has a powerful emotional pull on American consciousness.

When I first visited Ellis Island the facilities were much as they’d been left after the station finally closed on November 29th 1954.  The minimal security team had had little success in preventing pilfering on the otherwise deserted island.  Water in the central-heating system froze during the winter, and the buildings deteriorated inexorably as the vegetation took over the grounds.  The ferry Ellis Island was left at its moorings, where ultimately it sank.

Since then, Ellis Island has been transformed into an immaculate museum by the National Parks Authority, commemorating the contribution that immigrants have made to American life.  Inevitably, it has lost the patina of decay which badly needed arresting.  I’m glad I saw it in its unrestored state:  it was a powerfully evocative place back then.

The modern visitor can still see the baggage-handling facilities, the scene of much overcrowding and of notorious “losses” of immigrants’ possessions, the staircase which formed part of the “six-second medical”, in which signs of undue exertion were regarded as diagnostic evidence, and the great Registry Room, in which inspectors had to decide, by interview using interpreters in any of up to thirty languages apart from English, whether an immigrant was “clearly and beyond a doubt” eligible to land.

The history of European colonisation is a complex and controversial aspect of international history.  Malcolm was right in urging me to fit in one of the building blocks of my understanding of the USA by visiting Ellis Island while I was in New York.

Admission to Ellis Island is free, but it is – obviously – only accessible by boat.  The public ferry from the southern tip of Manhattan is bookable at http://www.statuecruises.com.  Details of the facilities on the island are at the voluminous website http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ellis_island.asp.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

 

Terra-cotta city: Ikon Gallery

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Former Oozells Street School, now the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Former Oozells Street School, now the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery [http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/about/introduction] in the middle of Brindleyplace was formerly the Oozells Street School (Martin & Chamberlain 1877), one of the forty-one designs for the Birmingham School Board produced by Martin & Chamberlain between 1873 and 1898, in this case built to three storeys to make best use of a cramped site.

From 1906 it was the Pupil Teachers’ Centre for Girls, later the Commercial College Day Department and latterly the College of Food and Domestic Arts until 1967.

After years of neglect in the blighted Broad Street area, it was redeveloped for gallery use and its saddle-back ventilation tower rebuilt by Levitt Bernstein Associates (1997).

It’s a superb conversion, for the most part using the original classroom spaces, with modern access needs, including a glass-sided lift, carefully inserted.

Its excellent Café Ikon [http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/about/visiting/cafe_opus] is open to visitors without entering the gallery itself, and is a particularly pleasant place to sit on warm days.  It’s a good idea to beware of the teapots, though:  they’re good to look at but come adrift in the act of pouring.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Elizabethan skyscraper: Burton Agnes Hall

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Burton Agnes Hall, East Yorkshire

Burton Agnes Hall, East Yorkshire

I never tire of visiting Burton Agnes Hall in North Yorkshire.  It has so much to offer the visitor.

It’s one of the most beautiful of Jacobean country houses, in warm brick with distinctive round “compass bays”, with extraordinarily fine wood panelling, fireplaces and a magnificent staircase.

The history of the place goes back a long way.

In the grounds, behind a seventeenth-century façade, are the standing remains of the original Norman manor house.

The Jacobean house was built by Sir Henry Boynton after he was appointed to the Council of the North in 1599.

His daughter Anne was attacked nearby and subsequently died of her injuries.  She asked her sisters to make sure that after her death her skull should kept within the house saying that “if my desire be not fulfilled, my spirit shall, if it be permitted, render the house uninhabitable for human beings”.

Initially, her corpse was buried intact in the churchyard, but the supernatural ructions were such that, in consultation with the vicar, the sisters had the grave reopened and the skull brought within, upon which peace was restored.

Subsequent attempts to remove the skull from the premises – in one instance by burying it in the garden – always led to terrifying consequences until eventually the skull was interred within the walls.  Anne, and Burton Agnes, now rest in peace.

Marcus Wickham-Boynton, who owed Burton Agnes Hall between 1947 and 1989, resolved when he inherited to live “quietly, but not too quietly”, and spent his life modernising and beautifying the house and its gardens.

With the Yorkshire architect, Francis Johnson, he brought in panelling and fireplaces from neglected and unwanted houses and restored the long gallery, which had been divided into bedrooms and a store.

Marcus Wickham-Boynton was an astute art collector, bringing to Burton Agnes an impressive array of English and French paintings by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gaugin, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Edward Lear, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Walter Sickert and Maurice Utrillo, alongside two impressive bronze busts by Sir Jacob Epstein.

His heir has added further items that are displayed in the Long Gallery, such as a tapestry by Kaffe Fassett and furniture by John Makepeace including the Millennium collection, ‘Tuscan Obelisk’, ‘Spiral’ and ‘Coppice’.

Visitor information for Burton Agnes Hall is at http://www.burtonagnes.com/Home.html.

The 40-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Country Houses of North-East Yorkshire tour, with text, photographs, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Pleasure Beach

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Casino, Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, Lancashire

Casino, Pleasure Beach, Blackpool, Lancashire

Apart from being great fun, the Pleasure Beach has a long, proud history as part of Blackpool’s entertainment culture and as a hugely successful business dedicated, in the words of its former director, Leonard Thomson, to “separating the public from their money as painlessly and pleasurably as possible”.

Leonard Thomson was the son-in-law of one of the co-founders of the Pleasure Beach, William George Bean, who brought an American Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway to Blackpool’s South Shore in 1895 and collaborated with a Yorkshire meat-trader, John W Outhwaite, to import other rides from Coney Island to set up a permanent fairground on what had previously been a gypsy encampment.

Their ambition was to create, in the words of W G Bean, “…an American Style Amusement Park, the fundamental principle of which is to make adults feel like children again and to inspire gaiety of a primarily innocent character”.

In 1906 they contracted for an electricity supply from the Tramways Department, which meant that the rides could operate into the evening, which in turn increased the traffic on the tramway.

When the Corporation widened the Promenade across the site in 1913, Bean and Outhwaite secured an advantageous agreement that no amusement facilities or tram services would be permitted further south for fifteen years.

Their price for varying this agreement when the trams were extended to Starr Gate in 1926 was that all trams made a compulsory stop at the Pleasure Beach, and those trams terminating there showed the destination “Pleasure Beach” rather than “South Shore” – providing free advertising that continues to this day.

When Leonard Thompson died in 1976 his widow Doris became Chairman and their son, Geoffrey Thompson, Managing Director.  Mrs Thompson made a point of testing each new ride as recently as 2002 when, aged 99, she rode the Spin Doctor.

Geoffrey Thompson ran the company until his death at the age of 67 in June 2004:  his mother died, aged 101, shortly after her son’s funeral.

The company is now operated by Geoffrey’s children, Amanda and Nicholas Thompson.

The Pleasure Beach website is at Blackpool Pleasure Beach: UK’s Most ICONic Theme Park.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Eat your way round Chester

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Chester Cathedral Refectory

Chester Cathedral Refectory

It’s hard work being a tourist.  You need to eat and drink.

When my mate Richard and I explored Chester recently, we had reasonable coffee in splendid surroundings at the Queen Hotel, directly opposite the railway station:  http://www.feathers.uk.com/premier-queen-hotel.

At lunchtime we had a pit-stop at a branch of Patisserie Valerie on Bridge Street:  http://www.patisserie-valerie.co.uk/chester-cafe.aspx.  This is a dependable food-chain experience, very French – so French, in fact, that I felt compelled to text my Francophone friend John to find out that ‘framboises’ means ‘raspberries’.  It’s a male thing, not liking to ask.

By teatime we’d reached Chester Cathedral.  We both take exception on principle to having to pay admission to a place of worship, but we’re more than happy to pay good money for superb cakes, tea and coffee in the Refectory Café:  http://www.chestercathedral.com/chester-cathedral-refectory-cafe-opening-hours.htm.

Richard is adept at real-beer research, so by 5pm opening-time we were at the door of The Albion [http://www.albioninnchester.co.uk], where we put away a couple of pints of a beer called Flying Scotsman (“hints of raisiny spiciness and toasty dryness. Fresh, slightly citrus tang with a rich rounded finish” – http://www.caledonianbeer.com/flyingscotsman.htm) while gazing at evocative enamelled advertisements for Colman’s Starch “sold in cardboard boxes”, the Public Benefit Boot Co [http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~publicbenefit] and one with the reassuring strapline that “Craven ‘A’ will not affect your throat”.

For our evening meal we hiked back towards the station to the canal-side Old Harkers Arms [http://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/harkers], named after the chandler whose warehouse became a pub in the late 1980s.  Here we drank Great Orme Celtica (“full of citrus taste and aroma – http://www.greatormebrewery.co.uk/cask_cd.htm) and I ate an excellent steak-and-ale suet pudding.

We saw some buildings too.

The 48-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic Chester tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Sleeping cars

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Railway Square YHA, Central Station, Sydney, Australia

Railway Square YHA, Central Station, Sydney, Australia

On one of my rail trips out of Sydney Central Station during my lecture-tour for the Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, I gazed across the platforms and noticed a group of obviously ancient passenger carriages.  I couldn’t tell from my viewpoint whether they were parked at a couple of platforms or grounded.

They belong to the Railway Square YHA, one of many Sydney bases for backpackers and people visiting a city on a budget.

Its website http://www3.yha.com.au/Hostels/NSW/Sydney-Surrounds/Railway-Square invites prospective guests to “stay in one of the funky railway carriages on the former Platform Zero or one of the comfy rooms in the historic 1904 main building, now converted into contemporary accommodation.”

It’s apparent from the reviews that it’s a noisy night’s stay – if the other guests don’t disturb you with lively conversation, the trains on the adjacent platforms will.

That said, there are far, far worse places to rest your head in Sydney.

 

Christmas in a T-shirt: Cuba

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Palacio de Valle, Cienfuegos, Cuba

Palacio de Valle, Cienfuegos, Cuba

When I spent Christmas in Cuba in 2001, the most eccentric building I visited was the Palacio de Valle in Cienfuegos on the south coast:  http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2009/03/14/16253/palacio_de_valle_monument_cienfuegos_cuba.html.

Built for a wealthy sugar merchant Oclico or Acisclo del Valle y Blanco as a wedding-gift from his father-in-law, it was designed by an unnamed local architect, possibly Pablo Carbonell Donato, and constructed by Alfredo Colli Fanconetti, an Italian civil engineer.  Begun in 1913, it was completed in 1917 at a cost of 1½ million pesos.

It’s an astonishing mixture of materials  and styles– marble, alabaster, brass, glass and faience.  The dining room is in the Mudéjar (Andalucian) style, based on the Patio of the Lions in the Alhambra.  The music room is Louis XV.  The three rooftop turrets are respectively gothic, Indian and Moorish, respectively symbolising war, love and religion.

Del Valle died in 1920, and his widow and children left the place a couple of years later.  After passing through a succession of ownerships it was converted by Panchin Batista, brother of the dictator, to a casino in 1950.

After the Revolution it became an art school and is now a restaurant.  When I visited, some years ago, a lady whom our guide described as a “character” played a grand piano very loudly all through the meal.

There’s so much to see and enjoy in Cuba, but in the time I spent there I saw nowhere more memorably unusual than the Palacio de Valle.