Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Tram city

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Malá Strana [Lesser Quarter], Prague, Czech Republic

When I first visited Prague I had a flashback moment in the taxi from the airport.

My antennae twitch when I see tram-tracks, not only because my parents taught me to read (in block capitals) and count (in Gills Sans) by means of the trams running past our house in the late 1940s, but also because whenever we left Sheffield by road or rail our return was always marked by a competition to see who could first see a cream-and-blue Sheffield tram or bus.  And there were, in my early childhood, rather more trams than buses on the streets.

So when I first spotted a red-and-cream Prague tram (or trams – they mostly seem to run as attached pairs), I had a flashback to 1968, when the Crich tramway museum hit the national headlines because an antique Prague tram, with its minders, narrowly escaped the Soviet army arriving to extinguish Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/45777493@N06/6036451806.

Prague is in fact a tram city, rather like Melbourne.  Most major streets have tram-tracks and there are services twenty-four hours a day.  A twenty-four-hour travel pass costs the equivalent of just over £3.

From my hotel near the metro-station I P Pavolva (named after a Russian physiologist), I found the 22 tram invaluable.  It crosses the river, threads its way through the Old Town (passing at one point through a tiny arch you would think twice about driving a bus through) and climbs hairpin bends up Chotkova to the level of the Castle (and returns with suitable caution down the slippery slope).

But I also made a point, as I do still with London buses, of hopping on and off at random simply to see the city unfold before me.

By that means I learnt my way round Prague without a guidebook, and found some remarkable and unexpected places.

Eat your way round Prague

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Vltava River, Charles Bridge, Castle and St Vitus' Cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic

Vltava River, Charles Bridge, Castle and St Vitus’ Cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic

There’s plenty to eat in Prague.

On the night I arrived I ate at the charming and comfortable Restaurant Benada, next door to the Clarion Hotel [http://www.clarionhotelpraguecity.com/restaurant_bar], where I sat on the veranda overlooking the park, dodging the raindrops, to eat veal ossobuco with a glass of representative Czech beer and a cappuccino.

The best lunch I found in the city was round the corner from the Cathedral of St Vitus, the Vikárka Restaurant [http://vikarka.cz/en], which would be extremely cosy on a cold day, and provides a veranda with people-watching opportunities in good weather.  I had a classic beef goulash [guláš] and another glass of generic Czech beer.

Most evocative of all was Café Slavia [http://www.cafeslavia.cz/index.php?id_page=uvod&id_rest=slavia&id_lang=en] opened in 1881, the same year as the National Theatre across the road, remodelled in the 1930s, the regular haunt of the dissident playwright Václav Havel in the years before he became president.

The first dinner I had there was a steak of Norwegian salmon roasted in ham with spinach roll strudel and horseradish aioli.  It was memorable, with a large glass of Budweiser.

The following night I grabbed the very best window seat, looking over the Vltava River to the Castle and St Vitus’ Cathedral as the sunset faded and the lights came up.  I ate beef broth with meat dumplings, pork tenderlion coated with almond breadcrumbs with a potato salad that included a significant proportion of gherkins, accompanied by another large glass of Budweiser.  I treated myself to a blueberry sponge-cake and a cappuccino.

My final eat-your-way-round-Prague experience was the simplest:  a pot of tea in Paul, a patisserie alongside the I P Pavolva metro-station.  (Make what you can of their website:  http://www.paul-international.com/cz/magasins~diaporama.)

 

Great Western Arcade

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Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

Birmingham’s finest shopping arcade, the Great Western Arcade, was built, as its name suggests, on the girders which were installed to cover the open railway cutting leading into Snow Hill Station in 1874.

Designed by the Birmingham architect W H Ward, it lost its top storey, its dome and the original design of the entrance to Colmore Row in the Birmingham blitz.  Sympathetically refurbished by Douglas Hickman of the John Madin Design Group in 1984-5, and further restored in 2009, it remains one of the pleasantest of Birmingham’s shopping experiences.

Even if you dislike shopping and shops, one of the great pleasures of central Birmingham is the Victorian Restaurant [http://www.greatwesternarcade.co.uk/shop-detail.php?ID=15] in the Great Western Arcade – an ideal place for breakfast, lunch or tea, preferably on the first floor, looking out on to the gallery and a glazed roof that could be Victorian, but isn’t.

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

Exploring Sydney: The Rocks

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Cadman's Cottage, The Rocks, Sydney, Australia

Cadman’s Cottage, The Rocks, Sydney, Australia

The historic heart of Sydney is the area between Circular Quay and the Harbour Bridge known as The Rocks, because of the soft sandstone ridge on which it stands.

Standing on the harbour front, it was always a rough, disreputable district, and after an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 the New South Wales Government took steps to flatten the entire area.  The interruptions of two world wars and the disruption of building the approaches to the Harbour Bridge in the 1920s meant that a substantial number of historic structures survived into the 1960s.

An energetic campaign by a residents’ group in the early 1970s secured the conservation of the Rocks area, and now it is a tourist magnet, especially interesting for the overlays of successive historic periods on the oldest colonised site in the whole of Australia.

Among the places to see is Cadman’s Cottage, named after John Cadman, one of the government coxswains, an English publican transported for stealing a horse.  It dates from 1816 and is the third oldest building in Sydney.

The history of The Rocks is well interpreted in The Rocks Discovery Museum [http://www.therocks.com/sydney-Things_To_Do-The_Rocks_Discovery_Museum.htm], set in an 1850s warehouse restored by the National Trust.

What must have been the roughest collection of pubs in Sydney is now a variegated succession of tourist honeypots – the Fortune of War (1828) [http://www.fortuneofwar.com.au], the Lord Nelson (1841) [http://www.lordnelsonbrewery.com], the Orient (1844)[http://www.orienthotel.com.au] and the Russell Hotel & Wine Bar (1887) [http://www.therussellwinebar.com.au] – among many others.

A good way to start a stay in Sydney is to have dinner in the open air at Circular Quay, watching the ferries come and go, and then to take your pick of the watering-holes along George Street towards the Harbour Bridge.

The big city seems far away, though actually it’s just over the hill.

Exploring Sydney: Museum of Sydney

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Museum of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Museum of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

If you arrive in Sydney and want to understand its history, the best place to start is the Museum of Sydney, a modern complex at the base of a high-rise block immediately south of Circular Quay, designed by Richard Johnson of Denton Corker Marshall and opened in 1995.

It stands on the site of the original Government House, built in 1788 for Governor Arthur Phillip and occupied until 1846.  Some of the foundations and the outline of the building are visible, and within there’s a detailed model and a recreation of part of the façade.

On the forecourt of the Museum is a haunting sculpture by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley entitled ‘Edge of Trees’, marking the spot where the Gadigal natives must have observed the arrival of the First Fleet of colonists from England.

The three floors of exhibition space tell the story of the early settlers and their relationship with the indigenous population.  There are models of the eleven ships of the First Fleet, and displays about the nine Governors who resided on the site, other important figures in the early history of the city, and a video montage Eora [“people”], by Aboriginal filmmaker Michael Riley, highlighting the life of Sydney people of indigenous descent back to the time of their dreaming.

Details of visiting times, and an online guidebook, are at http://www.hht.net.au/museums/mos.

 

Midland Hotel, Morecambe

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Midland Hotel, Morecambe, Lancashire

Midland Hotel, Morecambe, Lancashire

The Midland Hotel, Morecambe (1933) – an unlikely building in an unlikely setting – is one of the finest examples of Streamline Moderne (late Art Deco) architecture in Britain.  Its heyday lasted barely six years, until the outbreak of war.  After that, it became progressively difficult to operate, until it was rescued, sumptuously renovated and reopened in June 2008 by the developer Urban Splash.

Its railway-owned predecessor dated back to 1848, to the very beginnings of the resort that became Morecambe, and the Promenade Station was constructed in 1907 specifically to bring trains as close as possible to the hotel’s front door.

By the early 1930s the old hotel was badly out of date, and in January 1932 the directors of the London Midland & Scottish Railway approved plans to replace the 1848 building with “a building of international quality in the modern style”, designed by Oliver Hill (1887-1968) on a budget of slightly less than £72,000.  The new building rose from the lawn of the old hotel, which was subsequently demolished.

Oliver Hill was at the height of his career in the 1930s:  after starting out designing picturesque Arts & Crafts cottages, he embraced the visual potential of the Moderne style, of which his best designs, in addition to the Morecambe Midland Hotel, are the partially-built Frinton Park Estate in Essex (1934-6) and the house Landfall (1938), near Poole in Dorset.

His attributes were an eye for unifying architecture with decoration, and his adventurous use of materials such as concrete, chrome and vitrolite [Pigmented structural glass – Wikipedia].  The result was a building that, in the words of the Architectural Review, “rises from the sea like a great white ship, gracefully curved”.

Hill’s brief for the Midland Hotel enabled him to recruit the best available decorative artists while maintaining full control of the building’s aesthetic programme.

The sculptor and designer Eric Gill (1882-1940) designed and carved for the façade two Portland stone seahorses in the form of the celebrated Morecambe Bay shrimps, a ten-foot Neptune and Triton medallion above the central staircase, a bas-relief, Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa, and a map of North West England, painted in oil by his son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier.

In the circular café were originally murals by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) of the seaside by day and by night.  These quickly deteriorated, and one mural was reconstructed by London Weekend Television set-designers for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 1989.

The floor of the entrance hall was embellished with a mosaic seahorse and circular, wave-patterned hand-knotted rugs by Marion Dorn (1896-1964), who also worked on the Berkeley, Claridges and Savoy Hotels in London and the Cunard liner Queen Mary.

The new hotel opened on Wednesday July 12th 1933, and quickly attracted celebrities in search of luxury and privacy within easy reach of London, performers from the Winter Gardens and other theatres, and Yorkshire businessmen who commuted by railway club carriage to Leeds or Bradford through the summer months.

It’s interesting that the LMS Railway thought it worthwhile to cater for the most affluent members of British society in the north of England.  After the war and nationalisation the British Transport Commission could hardly get rid of it fast enough.

There are images of the Midland Hotel as it stood before Urban Splash took it on at http://www.abandoned-britain.com/PP/midlandhotel/1.htm.

The Midland Hotel is now operated by English Lakes:  http://englishlakes.co.uk/hotels/lancashire-hotels/the-midland-hotel-morecambe.

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.

Chapel on the hill

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Chapel of St John the Baptist, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire

Chapel of St John the Baptist, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire

A few weeks ago I attended the Annual General Meeting of the Friends of Friendless Churches – not something I do every year, but an opportunity to see and photograph the immaculate restoration of the Chapel of St John the Baptist, Matlock Bath, designed by Guy Dawber (1861-1938) for Mrs Louisa Sophia Harris, who lived at The Rocks, on the cliffside above Artists’ Corner in Matlock Dale.

Mrs Harris disliked the liturgical practices of the vicar of St Giles’, Matlock, and objected to his refusal to memorialise her pet dog, so she erected her own private Anglo-Catholic chapel at the end of her garden in 1897.

St John’s Chapel is a delightful architectural composition, its simplicity relieved by the oriel window and bell turret that punctuate its setting on the side of the cliff.

It’s also a gem of Arts & Crafts design, with stained glass by Louis Davis (1860-1941), plasterwork, embellished with painted vines and individually-modelled swallows, by George Bankart (1866-1929) and a painted altarpiece by John Cooke.  The rood screen, and probably the other interior fittings, were designed by Guy Dawber.

After many years of neglect and wanton vandalism, the chapel was vested in the Friends of Friendless Churches in 2002, and they have spent some £300,000 returning it to immaculate condition.

The Friends’ website is at http://www.friendsoffriendlesschurches.org.uk/CMSMS/index.php, which is the portal for gaining access to their properties.  There is an introduction to the Friends by the Secretary, Matthew Saunders, at http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/fiftyyears/friendless_churches.htm.

The AGM took place at Masson Farm [http://www.massonfarm.com/index.html] and included a high-quality afternoon tea with a view to match.

You know you’re at an upscale AGM when someone sends apologies for absence because they’re helping to choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

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

 

End of the line: Fleetwood

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North Euston Hotel, Fleetwood, Lancashire

North Euston Hotel, Fleetwood, Lancashire

We purposely located the 2012 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour at the North Euston Hotel, Fleetwood [http://www.northeustonhotel.com],– not only for its comfort and quietness but because it’s significant in the history of the Lancashire coast.

Its name indicates that it was once the northern terminus of the railway from London’s Euston Station, at a time when George Stephenson proclaimed that no locomotive would ever manage the climb over Shap to the Scottish border.

The town of Fleetwood was planned and named by Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood (1801-1866) as the transhipment point between the Preston & Wyre Railway, which opened in 1840, and the steamer service to Ardrossan which was connected by rail to Glasgow.

This worked fairly well until what we now call the West Coast Main Line opened over Shap in 1847.  By that time Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood had gone bankrupt, and though Fleetwood harbour in time served other purposes, its railway remained forever on a branch line from Preston.

The grandly curving hotel was designed by Decimus Burton as part of Fleetwood’s intended holiday resort.

The hotel’s first manager, a Corsican called Zenon Vantini, was responsible for the first railway-station refreshment-room, at Wolverton, and ran the Euston and Victoria Hotels in London.

Opened in 1841, it was eventually bought by the War Department as a School of Musketry for Officers, and reopened in 1861 as the Euston Barracks.

Vantini took a lead, in conjunction with the first vicar of Fleetwood, Rev Canon St Vincent Beechey (son of the painter William Beechey), in founding the Northern Church of England School in 1844.

This school later took the name Rossall School [http://www.rossall.co.uk] after it leased and then bought the Rossall Hall estate from Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood.

Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood died in such poverty that his estate could not pay for his funeral.

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.

Tornado

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Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

Barrow Hill Roundhouse & Railway Centre, Derbyshire: 60163 Tornado

I’d been looking forward to seeing the new A1 locomotive 60163 Tornado, ever since it took to the rails in 2008.  I caught up with it at the Barrow Hill Roundhouse “Fab Four” event in April 2012 – a well-organised facility for connoisseurs of locomotives to stand and stare at them and, in many cases, take photographs.

I happened to find my way to the trackside at the moment when a large, loudly hissing cloud of steam advanced down the line.  By the time it came alongside, anyone with a camera needed to shield their lens against the fog of cool condensation that completely enveloped us.

The cloud turned out to contain 60019 Bittern, one of the glorious streamlined A4 Pacifics now displayed in garter-blue livery.

The next cloud of steam proved to be 61994 The Great Marquess.  It was a damp, cold morning, and each loco was loudly blowing off surplus steam through its safety valves.

It’s an extraordinary sensation to stand within a few feet of a railway line, amply protected by safety fencing, as a hundred and more tons of locomotive glides past, the steam exhaust utterly deafening, the wheels and motion barely audible.

The final cloud of steam was something else.  60163 Tornado snorts and clanks and blows steam in all directions:  it’s intended to speed down long, straight stretches of main line, and doesn’t take particularly kindly to doing a catwalk turn.

Once this procession had reversed back into exhibition position I took an opportunity to look over Tornado closely.  It’s a strange beast:  it makes weird banging noises while sitting doing apparently nothing.

It is indeed a magnificent piece of engineering, built from scratch to fill the gap in the ranks of preserved main-line locomotives that ran the East Coast route in the days of steam, to the original post-war design by Arthur H Peppercorn, the last Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London & North Eastern Railway.

In order to run on present-day main lines the design is necessarily adapted to present-day railway conditions – slightly lower than the original, fabricated with the advantages of modern engineering, equipped with the data recorders and warning protection that modern trains carry, with riding-lights that look like traditional oil lamps but are in fact LED clusters.

In effect Tornado represents the form that the original A1s would have evolved into if steam had continued in Britain after the 1960s, and it carries the “next in class” running number accordingly.  Its name commemorates the RAF Tornado pilots who flew in the first Gulf War.

The first standard-gauge steam locomotive to be built in the British Isles since 1960, Tornado has all the dignity and elegance of original museum pieces, with the added frisson of being virtually brand new.

The very sight of Tornado brought audible expressions of ecstasy from hardened rail enthusiasts.

This must have been how it felt to see Flying Scotsman, Mallard and the rest when they emerged from the workshops between the wars.  Tornado’s website is at http://www.a1steam.com.

It won’t be the last.  Other new builds of lost locomotive designs are on their way, led by a new LMS ‘Patriot’, which will take the last-in-class number 45551 and the name The Unknown Warrior as a national memorial engine, replacing the long-lost, much rebuilt original 1919 London & North Western Railway memorial locomotive, Patriot:  http://www.lms-patriot.org.uk/overview.html.

 

Marvellous boy

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'The Death of Chatterton' statue, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

‘The Death of Chatterton’ statue, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

On the way from the house to the lavatories at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire there is a disconcerting moment when one comes upon a recumbent marble figure at the base of the garden wall.  It appears that an eighteenth-century gent has fallen from the top of the wall and expired.

In fact, the statue is a reproduction of Henry Wallis’ painting ‘The Death of Chatterton’, which hangs in Tate Britain.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) was the sad, unregarded poet who passed off his work as “The Rowlie Poems”, the rediscovered work of a fifteenth-century monk.

He was found dead of arsenic poisoning in his London attic at the age of seventeen.

Horace Walpole took against what he saw as a literary fraud, but Keats dedicated his ‘Endymion’ to Chatterton’s memory, and Wordsworth thought well enough of his talent to describe him as “the marvellous boy”.

How his statue came to Kedleston – or who sculpted it – remains obscure.  Apparently Lady Ottilie Scarsdale, wife of the second viscount, found it in pieces in the yard of a monumental mason, and bought it.

I admire her wit in positioning it where it startles passers-by.  It’s something to chat about.

For visitor information about Kedleston Hall see http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/kedleston-hall.