Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Eight wonder of the world

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Empire State Building, New York City

Empire State Building, New York City

The Empire State Building, described when it opened in 1931 as “the eighth wonder of the world”, epitomises Manhattan. Perhaps the most elegant of all the New York skyscrapers, faced in Indiana limestone and granite, with stainless steel mullions running from the six-storey base to the Art Deco pinnacle, its setbacks make light of its vast bulk.

Nowadays it wouldn’t get built, because it occupies the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waldorf-Astoria_1904-1908b.jpg. This grand Victorian pile, originally two hotels of 1893 and 1897, was pulled down in 1930 and the business transferred to its current address at 301 Park Avenue.

The Empire State Building was extended during construction from its planned 86 storeys to 102 storeys to be sure of the accolade of the World’s Tallest Building. It was completed in advance of schedule and below budget, yet initial rentals were so few that it was dubbed the “Empty State Building”. Once again the tallest building in New York City after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, its height to the top of the TV mast is 1,454 feet.

There are comfortable open promenades as well as a glass-enclosed viewing-area at the 86th floor. The view from the 102nd-floor observatory stretches up to eighty miles, reaching into the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The mast was originally intended as a mooring for dirigibles, but only one landing was ever attempted. This hair-raising procedure failed because it was impossible to stabilise the end of the airship that wasn’t anchored to the tower.

In 1946 a B-25 bomber collided with the 79th floor in thick fog, killing fourteen and causing only localised damage.

The Empire State lives in New York legend. It starred notably in the film King Kong (1933) where the giant gorilla ends its life clinging to the top of the building.

When the film director Peter Jackson consulted primatologists while planning his 2005 version of King Kong, he was told that a real giant ape would fling excreta at the attacking aircraft, and offer what was discreetly described as a “display-challenge” [John Harlow, ‘Hollywood agenda,’ The Sunday Times, November 2nd 2003].

The Empire State Building is open to the public until midnight, which makes it an admirable and popular place from which to watch the city lights, carpeting the view in all directions.

The official website is http://www.esbnyc.com, and the smart tourist information is at http://www.nycinsiderguide.com/Empire-State-Building.html#axzz1ilC4n9Jg.

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

 

Gorton renaissance

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Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, Manchester (2009)

In November 1861 four Franciscan friars arrived in Manchester to set up the Monastery of St Francis, Gorton, serving the working-class community that grew up round the nearby railway works.

Their buildings were designed by Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75), who possessed much of the vigour of his father, A W N Pugin, and were constructed largely by the physical labour of the brothers and their parishioners.

The first stone was laid on May 24th 1862, and the three wings of the original monastery were complete by 1867.  To raise funds for the Infant School in 1867 Father Francis hired the Free Trade Hall for a bazaar which raised £1,000.

E W Pugin’s magnificent church, 184ft long, 98ft wide and 100ft high, dominates the streets of Gorton and is clearly visible from central Manchester.

By 1900 the Catholic population of Gorton had increased from 300 to over 6,000.  The fathers saw the parish change from a poor village community, initially dependent on cotton (and badly hit by the effects of the American Civil War), into an industrial inner-city suburb.

For almost a century they provided spiritual and pastoral support to the people of Gorton, and – because many of those people were drawn from Wexford, Waterford and Cork – Gaelic classes, lantern lectures on Irish history and St Patrick’s Day celebrations.  They also exported missionaries to China, Peru and elsewhere.

The surrounding nineteenth-century housing was cleared in the early 1970s, and the Monastery became unsustainable.  Eventually, the Franciscans sold the site for £75,000 to a developer who planned to divide the church into a seven-storey apartment-block but instead went bankrupt.

The abandoned buildings were quickly and badly vandalised.  Lead and slates were removed, and there were repeated arson attacks.  Virtually all the decorative features of interest or value were removed or smashed.

In 1997 the Monastery of St Francis and Gorton Trust bought the Monastery for £1 and began the formidable task of bringing the place back into use.  Cornering funds was not the least of their labours:  the Architectural Heritage Fund, English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund, New East Manchester (NEM) and the North West Development Agency (NWDA) between them chipped in millions.

Fixtures that had disappeared in the dark days of dereliction have returned.  A complete set of twelve statues, stolen from the lofty nave arcades, famously appeared as garden ornaments at Sotheby’s:  Manchester City Council bought them for £25,000 and stored them until September 2011 when they returned to the site for restoration.

The art-dealer Patricia Wengraft [http://www.patwengraf.com/Patricia-Wengraf-Fine-European-Sculpture-and-Works-Art-Intro-DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=1] secured the return of the huge crucifix:  http://www.manchester.gov.uk/news/article/1954/monasterys_giant_crucifix_is_hoisted_back_into_place.  The chains to support it had been handed in mysteriously some time before.

I remember the first public opening in September 2005:  people queued down the street, showing immediately how much St Francis’ Monastery meant to local people who’d grown up, been baptised or married here, and had been uprooted.

The Monastery reopened fully as a community, conference and events centre in 2007.  It’s open to the public most Sundays:  see what’s on offer at http://www.themonastery.co.uk/Whats-on.html.

I would have liked to see something similar happen to St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield.

Just because a place of worship is no longer needed for worship doesn’t prevent it having enormous value to people.

But making the transition requires enormous energy, imagination, devotion, acumen – and the creative support of people in power.

Shiregreen waits…

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

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

Matthew 12:12

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Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

Pah Homestead, Hillsborough, Auckland, New Zealand

When I visited the Auckland Decorative & Fine Arts Society to give a lecture, my hostess Anne Gambrill picked me up at the airport and swept me off for lunch to the Pah Homestead, which is – as the old V&A advert might have said – a very fine café with an art gallery attached [http://www.pahcafe.co.nz/index.cfm].

The homestead was built for a businessman, James Williamson, in 1877-9, to designs by the father-and-son team Edward (c1824-1895) and Thomas (1855–1923) Mahoney, who also built St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Auckland.

It ceased to be a home as early as 1888, after Williamson’s death, and has been successively used by the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches.  Fortunately, although not a stick of furniture remains, the building itself is remarkably intact and rich in plasterwork, joinery, parquet flooring and marble fireplaces.

Auckland City Council purchased it in 2002 to develop it and the surrounding park as an amenity.  As the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, the Pah Homestead opened to the public in August 2010.

It is now the home of the James Wallace Art Trust, which collects and displays contemporary New Zealand art.  Sir James Wallace, who has been collecting since the early 1960s, admitted, “I learned enough trying to paint to know that I was no good at it.”  Instead, he invested massively in young artists:  the result is a “diary collection”, from which nothing has been sold.  There is an entertaining attempt to interview Sir James at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts/news/article.cfm?c_id=544&objectid=10746252.

Of all that was on offer when I visited the Pah, I most enjoyed Matthew 12/12 by Gregor Kregar (b 1972) – seventy-two ceramic sheep, all in woolly jumpers, crowded into one corner of the room by a ceramic sheepdog:  http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O5.html.  You could say it’s a fresh interpretation of New Zealand lamb.

In addition to live sheep [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O2.html, http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O3.html and http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O4.html] Gregor Kregar, who is based in Auckland, also does ceramic pigs [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O7.html] and mongrels [http://www.gregorkregar.com/Gallery/O6.html].  Perhaps live pigs and mongrels are less biddable than sheep.
 
You can take a virtual tour of the current exhibition at the Pah Homestead at http://wallaceartstrust.org.nz/wallace-art-awards/virtual-gallery.  Indeed, you can change the colour of the walls if you like.

 

Christmas in a T-shirt: Egypt

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Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

Temple of Ramesses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

For many years, my summer work in England obliged me to holiday abroad – if at all – at Christmas, and I’ve got used to heading off to exotic locations around the winter solstice.

The first time I chose Egypt I was so beguiled I went back for a second helping.

Egyptology is studied and researched entirely in English, so the local guides are astonishingly fluent, to the extent that on my second tour they invariably addressed our tour-manager, a lady from Essex, as “Na’alie”.

Tourist tours to Egypt tend to follow a pattern:  in Cairo the Pyramids and the Sphinx, together with the Egyptian Museum, are virtually compulsory.  You could hardly not visit them, though not everyone would enjoy the interior of the Great Pyramid, which is rather like Holborn underground with emergency lighting, no ventilation and no escalator.

The Sphinx was smaller than I expected, about half the length of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I was surprised to find it has a tail.  When you stand level with its paws you notice it’s gazing straight at a Pizza Hut and a Kentucky Fried Chicken operation.

The Egyptian Museum is astonishing, especially if you’ve already seen Tutankhamûn’s modest tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor:  the treasure – case after incredible case of thrones and shrines and beds and a chariot and the mask and two equally rich coffins in gold, lapis lazuli and turquoise – fills half a floor of a building the size of the National Gallery.  There’s no understanding Ancient Egypt, but it’s possible to gain a sense of wonder.

Luxor town made me think of Mabelthorpe with minarets.  Here again, there’s a tourist track – Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the Temple of Queen Hapshepsut, the Colossi at Memnon and a disconcerting coach-ride to Dendera, which in the 1990s involved an armed convoy of tour-buses high-tailing across the fields and through sleepy villages for an hour:  a tourist bus was blown up some years previously, after which the locals’ sales-opportunities became extremely limited.

Best of all, though, is the Nile cruise – temples at Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo and Aswan, the location of the First Cataract.

The town of Aswan is dominated by the astonishing Aswan High Dam, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s great legacy, holding back 111 cubic kilometres of water to irrigate the lands downstream and provide up to half of the country’s electricity.

The highlight of my Egyptian travels was a before-dawn plane-journey from Aswan to Abu Simbel for the awesome experience of being inside the great temple of Ramesses II at the moment of sunrise.

What has always been a great archaeological miracle is now an engineering marvel, for the entire rock-hewn temple was dismantled in 1964-8, moved 200 metres and raised 65 metres away from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam.

I’ve never before or since paid over £100 for a half-day excursion, and I don’t regret a penny of my early-morning odyssey to Abu Simbel.

For the moment Egypt is an uncertain destination for holidaymaking but not completely out of bounds.  The warm and friendly Egyptian people continue, in the manner to which they are accustomed, to welcome visitors to their breathtaking land.

UK Foreign Office advice about travel to Egypt is at http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/middle-east-north-africa/egypt.

 

Edgwarebury

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Edgwarebury, Hertfordshire

Edgwarebury, Hertfordshire

Branching off Station Road, in the middle of the North London suburb of Edgware, is Edgwarebury Lane, lined with elegant thirties houses.

It crosses the busy A41 Edgware Way, otherwise the Watford by-pass, where pedestrians are provided with a very grand footbridge.

North of the A41 the houses eventually give way to tennis courts and a cemetery, and the road diminishes into a bridleway, though the bridge over the M1 motorway is built to main-road dimensions.

Edgwarebury Lane then climbs steeply past the Dower House, and eventually reaches the former Edgwarebury Hotel, now the Laura Ashley The Manor Hotel:  https://www.lauraashleyhotels.com/en/themanorelstree/thehotel.html.

The name, and the persistence of the route against the grain of the modern road-system, suggest that Edgwarebury must have been at least as important as the once-rural village of Edgware.

This is, of course, not a sensible or practical way of reaching the Edgwarebury Hotel.  It’s reached via Barnet Lane and the last few hundred yards of the old lane.

The hotel was originally Edgwarebury House, the residence of Sir Trevor Dawson (1866-1931), managing director of the armaments company Vickers Ltd.

As an essay in Victorian or Edwardian black-and-white revival, it has one attractive show front, looking south across a gently-sloping garden surrounded by trees and looking across to distant views of London.

Within, the major rooms are embellished with antique carved timber and stained glass.  It has all the hallmarks of a late nineteenth-century interest in collecting architectural antiques.

It served as a location for the Hammer horror film The Devil Rides Out (1968), the rather more cheerful Stardust (1974) and much else.

It’s my favourite place to stay in the London area, whenever its special deals are cheaper than Premier Inn.

I like to walk down Barnet Lane, where the local motorists often drive at absurd speeds, to the crossroads and eat at the Eastern Brasserie [0208-207-6212], which serves the sort of Indian meals where you savour every mouthful, from the popadoms at the start to the slices of orange at the finish.

It’s always been one of my favourite start-of-the-weekend-in-London experiences.

There is an informative article about Edgewarebury Lane at http://hidden-london.com/gazetteer/edgwarebury.

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

Water pump

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Claverton Pumping Station, Kennet & Avon Canal, Somerset

Claverton Pumping Station, Kennet & Avon Canal, Somerset

There’s something strangely miraculous about using water to lift water.

It’s not by any means unusual.  Even before the Industrial Revolution, in mines particularly, waterwheels were used to harness the power to lift water vertically, using Heath Robinson contrivances called “rag and chain” pumps.

The engineer George Sorocold (c1668-c1738) used waterwheels to provide mains water to houses, first in Derby, and then elsewhere including the area around London Bridge.

Just about the only surviving example, however, is at the Claverton Pumping Station on the Kennet & Avon Canal, a few miles outside Bath.

The Kennet & Avon notoriously suffered water-supply problems, primarily because its summit level was so short, but also because the stretch along the Avon valley around Limpley Stoke was continually drained by the Bath locks and also leaked like a sieve.

The Claverton pump uses two adjacent breastshot waterwheels, each seventeen feet in diameter, to lift water fifty gallons at a time 48 feet from the River Avon into the canal.

It’s an oddly peaceful piece of machinery.  The wheelhouse has all the illusory ease of water-power.  It’s easy to forget the amount of energy concealed in the tranquil water and the idle splashing of the wheel paddles.

The water drives what is in effect a beam engine, very like the more familiar stationary steam engine, but at Claverton there’s no heat, no sense of simmering energy.  It’s extraordinarily restful to watch the beam rise and fall without apparent effort.

The pump started work in 1813, and stopped finally when an obstruction stripped many of the oak teeth from the main spur wheel in 1952.  The canal was no longer navigable by that time and the British Transport Commission chose to replace it with a diesel pump simply to fulfill their legal obligation to maintain a level of water.

Fortunately, industrial archaeologists were alert to the significance of the place, and the Kennet & Avon Canal Trust, assisted by the then Bath University of Technology and apprentices from the British Aircraft Corporation at Filton, Bristol, painstakingly restored it.

The water was heaved from the river into the canal once more in 1976.

Now it’s possible to enjoy the sights and sounds of eighteenth-century engineering on regular opening days.  The team-members at Claverton are very welcoming:  they have an excellent coffee machine and an executive loo.

The best access is by walking along the towpath.  Arriving by car involves dodgy parking and an unnerving crossing of the Wessex Main Line railway.

Details of opening times and operating days for the Claverton Pump are at http://www.claverton.org.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn 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.

Train through Middle Earth

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KiwiRail Overlander train at National Park, North Island, New Zealand (2011)

KiwiRail Overlander train at National Park, North Island, New Zealand (2011)

When I did a lecture-tour for the New Zealand Decorative & Fine Arts Societies [http://www.nadfas.org.uk/default.asp?section=209&page=1179] their travel co-ordinator Jenny offered me the option of travelling from Hamilton to Wellington (that is, much of the length of the North Island) by air or by rail.

For me that’s a no-brainer.  There’s no finer way to see a land than through the window of a railway carriage.

Until 2012 [see below] the Overlander took twelve hours for the full journey from Auckland to Wellington, 9½ hours from Hamilton southwards.  It’s a comfortable, leisurely trip, at the time using rolling stock very similar to the TranzAlpine.

Mark Smith, the Man in Seat 61, points out that this is the journey that inspired the film producer Peter Jackson, who first read J R R Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings on a train on the North Island Main Trunk Railway and returned to the region to shoot his film trilogy Lord of the Rings (2001-3).

The journey is an unmissable opportunity to sense the scale of the North Island.  The line climbs into the volcanic centre of the island, and then drops into the precipitous Rangitikei gorge.  Towards evening it finds its way to the west coast, where on fine summer evenings there’s a grandstand view of the sunset.

Driving a railway through the heart of the island took nearly a quarter of a century:  construction started in 1885 and the last spike was driven in 1908.

The engineering is spectacular.  The most memorable feature of all is the Raurimu Spiral, which lifts the line 132 metres within a distance of two kilometres, by twists and a spiral over 6.8 kilometres of track.  It’s one of those stretches of railway where the train nearly meets itself coming back:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raurimu_Spiral.

Some of the viaducts on the final 1908 section are as impressive as those on the TranzAlpine line.  The Makatote Viaduct [http://trains.wellington.net.nz/misc2/makatote_1983.jpg] is an original steel structure, 258 feet above the river-bed;  the curved Hapuawhenua Viaduct is a modern concrete replacement, 167 feet high, built on a diversion from which the earlier steel viaduct is visible to the east of the line – http://www.ohakunecoachroad.co.nz/pages/hapuawhenua-viaduct.html and http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=-43.221299,171.928037&sspn=0.002533,0.004967&ie=UTF8&ll=-39.385256,175.399566&spn=0.002687,0.004967&t=h&z=18.

The most endearing and surprising landmark on the journey south is at Mangaweka, where a DC3 aircraft rests beside the Hub Café:  http://www.mangaweka.co.nz/dc3-aeroplane.html

New Zealanders customarily disparage their railways, which were built with difficulty and have been managed half-heartedly over the years.  It’s as if the nation can’t decide whether rail is essential or superfluous to the task of transportation across the two mountainous land-masses.

The North Island Main Trunk Railway has been improved over the years by building deviations before and after the Second World War, and by a piecemeal electrification.  The Wellington-Paekakariki section was electrified at 1,500V DC in 1940, and 255 miles between Palmerston North and Hamilton were electrified to 25 kV 50 Hz AC in the 1980s.

This means that the Overlander leaves Auckland behind a diesel locomotive, changes to electric power at Hamilton and back to diesel haulage at Palmerston North, running under electric wires it does not use from Waikanae through the Wellington suburbs to its terminus:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northisland_NZ_NIMT.png.

In 2006 there was a strong likelihood that the Overlander, the only remaining train between the North Island’s two biggest cities, would close completely:  the service was reprieved three days before the closing date, and both the line and the rolling-stock were refurbished.  As a result, passenger numbers rose significantly, and the length of the trains and the number of days’ service have repeatedly increased.

If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Update:  In June 2012 the Overlander was rebranded, speeded up but reduced in frequency as the Northern Explorer:  http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/7164511/Dash-to-catch-the-last-train.  The route and the scenery are just the same but the rolling stock is improved.

An excellent description and a practical guide to booking trips on the Northern Explorer is at http://www.seat61.com/Overlander.htm.

 

Trouser town

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Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

The steep downhill walk from Heptonstall into the Calder valley gives spectacular views of the town of Hebden Bridge which stands at the confluence of the River Calder and the Hebden Water.   Glaciers formed these valleys, so they have hanging tributaries which maximise the head of water available to mill engineers.

As the textile industry became mechanised from the late eighteenth century onwards, the old domestic industry of gave way to the first generation of water mills.  Then, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, steam-powered mills, no longer dependent on a rapid flow of water, moved out into the flatter land of the valley-floor.

Transport became industrialised too.   The packhorse system was replaced by turnpikes from 1771-2, the Rochdale Canal, built 1794-8, and the railway (1840-1).

Often known as “Trouser Town”, Hebden Bridge prospered until the post-war period, and then its economy crashed.

Between 1955 and 1965 thirty-three mills closed around Hebden Bridge, and 60% of the local shops went out of business.  The Hebden Bridge Co-operative Society went bankrupt when one of its officials defaulted with its reserves.  Cottages changed hands for as little as a penny, and the local planning authorities initially despaired of attracting new industry to the district.

Within a few years, however, the cheap housing, attractive surroundings and easy rail links to Manchester and Leeds brought a variety of incomers – dormitory commuters, home-workers such as writers and artists and a well-assimilated lesbian community [see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16962898].

Houses that couldn’t be given away in the early sixties traded for £300 in 1975 and twenty-five years later were worth £65,000.  Even in the current static market, you can’t find two-bedroomed accommodation in the town for much less than £120,000.

Hebden Bridge now boasts nearly two hundred retailers, including a wide range of antique-dealers, booksellers and music-stores.  It’s also a minor capital of culture.

From the early 1970s it was the one of the homes of the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), who was born down the valley at Mytholmroyd.  His house at Lumb Bank is now one of the writing centres of the Arvon Foundation [http://www.arvonfoundation.org/course.php?genre=&tutor=&month=&centre=2], founded by two of Hughes’ friends, John Fairfax and John Moat.

The Blackburn-born sculptor Edward Cronshaw (born 1959), best known for his statue ‘The Great Escape’, a popular Liverpool meeting-place often referred to as “The Horse’s Balls” [http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk/equestrian/great01.html], lived in Hebden Bridge until he moved up the valley to Todmorden.

And Margaret Thatcher’s famed press secretary, Bernard Ingham, began his career on the Hebden Bridge Times.

Take a look at what’s on in Hebden Bridge – http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/events/index.html:  it’s a hive of activity.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Gothic New York: The Cloisters

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The Cloisters, New York City

The Cloisters, New York City

Catch a Madison Avenue bus from lower Manhattan uptown.  As you pass through midtown, fashionable ladies with designer handbags and designer dogs trip on and off.  When you reach Harlem, more substantial ladies get on with bags of shopping.  Eventually, you reach a turning-circle, and the driver expects you to leave the vehicle.

You walk through an archway to a turnstile, and after the customary museum formalities you’re in The Cloisters, an American version of the Middle Ages – complete with Gregorian chant on the PA system.

At a time when European scholars lagged far behind their American counterparts in appreciating the value and significance of early medieval art, John D Rockefeller Jnr (1874-1960) and the sculptor George Grey Barnard (1863-1938) took the opportunity to dismantle and transport across the Atlantic a wealth of artefacts and works of art, including four complete cloisters which are reconstructed in Fort Tryon Park near the northern tip of Manhattan.

Somehow, this strange collection casts a spell over its visitors.  Put together in 1938 with a reproduction tower based on a twelfth-century French original, it is a most beguiling place.

As well as the four cloisters, the exhibits include the complete apse of the chapel of San Martin de Fuentiduevña from Segovia, the chapter house of the abbey at Pontaut in Gascony and a wealth of tapestries, manuscripts, reliquaries and glass.

The Cloisters is administered as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  See http://www.metmuseum.org/cloisters.

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

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

 

The last Straw

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Mr Straw's House, Worksop, Nottinghamshire

Mr Straw’s House, Worksop, Nottinghamshire

One day in 1991 a Worksop solicitor telephoned the National Trust East Midlands office at Clumber Park to say that the Trust was to receive a significant bequest.  The official who received the call was told, “I think you’d better have a look.”

Indeed, the £1 million value of the estate was not the most significant feature.  When National Trust staff stepped over the threshold of 7 Blyth Grove, they immediately realised they were in a time-warp.

Mr William Straw and his brother Walter had lived in the house most of their lives, and since their father died suddenly in 1932, followed by their mother in 1939, hardly anything had changed.

Walter had taken over his father’s grocery business, and invested the profits in Marks & Spencer shares.  William, after mother died, returned from his teaching work in London and kept house for his brother.

They kept to themselves without being reclusive:  they bought the house next door and the plot across the road to avoid intrusion by keeping control of their immediate neighbourhood.  Though he ultimately left the entire estate to the National Trust, William preferred to join the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire because the subscription was cheaper.

The National Trust duly opened the place to the public as a snapshot illustration of bourgeois lifestyle in early-twentieth century England.  Walking round the cramped, cluttered rooms is a powerful experience – intriguing or depressing according to the visitor’s viewpoint.

Like most such time-warp historic sites, it has in fact been carefully renovated.  My friend Jenny observed that the cupboard full of tins and groceries was in fact remarkably clean at the back.

An audio-file in the visitor-centre next door is of one of Walter Jnr’s shop-assistants who admired him for his integrity and describes him as “the most complete man I’ve ever known”.

Perhaps one or both brothers, and possibly one or both of their parents, were, as Dominic Lawson has perceptively remarked of Warren Buffet, affected by high-functioning Asperger’s syndrome.

There is a clip from One Foot in the Past (with spectacularly inappropriate background music) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yes9FztB1E.

Dominic Lawson’s observations about Warren Buffet are in a review of Alice Schroeder, The Snowball:  Warren Buffett and the business of life (Bloomsbury 2008), in The Sunday Times, October 12th 2008.

Visitor-information about Mr Straw’s House is at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-mrstrawshouse.