Stourbridge

Stourbridge has never made on to any list of places to see before you die to my knowledge. It's not glamorous, exciting or picturesque. It's just another midlands town. To be honest, I only went there to deliver a model I'd built.

Perhaps there is an appeal for the transport enthusiast. According to Wikipedia (so it must be true) the town sits at the end of the shortest branch line in Europe. With the journey only taking 3 minutes I can well believe this is true. Add to that the easiest and most boring train driving job in the world and it's a real find.

This would be to denigrate an rather nice little town. The shopping centre isn't huge but it is largely free of the larger chain stores. They all live in nearby Merry Hill shopping centre leaving High Street free for the local shops. Quite a mix of them too - how often do you find a Post Office that also sells Indian food ? Sadly this modern innovation leaves the original attractive building one of the few boarded up in the road but I suspect this won't last long.

Indoor Market spotters will be pleased to find a 60's version on the edge of town, just past the entrance to the town hall and library which jut out from the back of the building into a shopping precinct. Sadly there are only 2 business operating in the market - a busy baker and quiet cosmetic shop. The signs are that this is to be renovated, it deserves it.

In the middle of the precinct there is a tall automaton - a clock which on the hour has a rotating display of statues. The "Stourbridge Lion", the first steam engine to be operating in the USA and manufactured locally, is followed by three fey fellows who spin around carrying glasses and flowers. Not sure what they represent buy the Lion is a very fine representation. It's a pity that the audience is limited to a couple of OAPs who are just sitting there waiting for nothing in particular.

Back on the high street and feeling hungry, a local chain baker (Firkins) supplied a contender for the most disgusting (in a good way) cake ever. Imagine the bun from an iced bun, generously covered with yellow icing and filled with lemon curd and cream. "That looks disgusting", I said to the lady behind the counter, "I'll have one". "I know, but they are lovely", she replied with the air of someone letting me in on a secret. She wasn't wrong either. The slightly savoury (OK, not sweet) dough of the bun provides a welcome counterpoint to the sickliness of the topping while the cream softens the tartness of the curd. I think one a day is plenty through...

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Oxford and Headington - In search of Lord Elton

“Take your jacket off”, hissed the lady to her husband as we all sat on the top deck of the bus, “it's warm”.

She was right too. The weather gods finally remembered that it was summer and produced a cracking day with blue sky, fluffy clouds and no rain. Mind you, I suspect that it might have been a sight of a workman wandering around wearing his hi-vis jacket as a belt that made her realise that perhaps winter clothes could be dispensed with as much as the sunshine blazing through the glass.

My trip to Oxford came about because of a book bought in Douglas indoor market. “It Occurs to me” is a compilation of three series of broadcast talks made by Lord Elton in the late 1930's on the radio. I have a thing for books of essays and these are particularly good and very readable. Like all good writers he dwells on the minutiae of life but often refers to his time in the World War 1 where he spent years as a guest of the Turkish army as a prisoner of war. Read today there is a strong, unintended, poignancy to the words as we all know what happened a couple of years after publication.

Born Godfrey Elton, the historian was elevated to become Lord Elton of Headington in 1934 (see his Wikipedia entry for a little more information). Having enjoyed the book I felt the need to have a mooch around Headington itself. Once a separate town to the north of Oxford, the two have largely joined but a thriving centre still exists and I've been through it many times on my way to a rather good model shop just outside the main shopping area.

My objective was to try and track down some more books by Elton, especially his autobiography “Among Others”. A trawl of second hand bookshops would surely turn something up ? Well no - there are no bookshops in Headington. In fact around a third of the shops are run by charities. Still, I'm told by experts in the field charity shops in posh areas are often worth a browse thanks to a better quality of donations. Oxfam seemed to have cornered the market in anything other than trashy paperback and unsurprisingly they didn't have anything – I suppose I need to resort to Amazon's famous long tail after all.

The shopping centre looks to have been largely rebuilt in the 1930's with what must have been some quite attractive buildings. Years of terrible planning and modern alterations haven't done them any favours but the echoes are still there. A modern development for “key workers” (those who work in locksmiths ?) stands out but not in a bad way. Presumably someone had made the architect put some effort in rather than lob up another grey box. The 1960's underpass is probably the brightest thing on the high street, decorated by kids (or painters with very limited artistic skill) showing a dream high street on the pebble-dashed walls. I assume getting “da kiz” to paint the walls officially persuades them no to do it under their own steam at night. How well this will work is debatable. At least one family are doing their best to raise the next generation of delinquents – challenged in a charity shop as to why one of the kids wasn't at school (and running around the shop) they replied, “Well, we er, got started a bit behind this morning”. The Daily Mail (no you don't get a web link, do you think I really want to sully my blog with one) would have had a field day and for once I'm not sure I'd blame them. At one point I thought they were following me as the tribe (2 parents, 1 spawn, 1 in-line double buggy) seemed appear about 20 seconds after I entered any shop.

Oxford will always be home to Inspector Morse for me. It's one of the few TV shows I can actually watch repeatedly, in fact it's the only TV series box-set I own. As an aside, is there a major ecological crisis looming with box sets of Friends and Ali McBeal on VHS ? Every second hand store has at least one and in desperation it usually has a price ticket of 50p on it. And dust. Will processing plants have to be built to deal with this menace ? Perhaps they could be brought together in one place so astronauts have something other than the Great Wall of China to look at...

Anyway, the Oxford to Headington road seemed to be one of the favoured locations in Morse. It's straight, not too busy and green. Ideal conditions for a vintage Jaguar obviously. Just into the city another location pops up and seemed worth a visit – Waterfields Booksellers. The sort of proper shop that sells antiquarian books rather than second hand ones. I'm too scared to go in these sort of place most of the time. My reading tastes tend not to suit their stock nor their prices. This time though my hunt was for a real author. The owner started with a check in Debrets (every home should have a copy) to get Lord Eltons details (I had forgotten his first name) and then checked the history section. Two volumes appeared, both heavy scholarly works which seemed suspiciously late to me as they covered history up to 1968. A quick flick through revealed them to be deadly dull pieces of academe rather than a text for the casual reader so I passed.

From my vantage point on the top deck as we passed into the city I'd spotted a photograph that cried out to be taken of some punts tied up on the river. It was only a couple of minutes stroll back from the shop. The shot was grabbed before some oiks (nice word, sadly out of use) in a posh pedalo entered the frame. From there though a short stroll would bring me to an old model shop that I'd passed on the bus but hadn't intended to visit. There were a couple of interesting things in the window and I could grab a picture to feature on my other blog, and the weather was still nice, and on the way back there would be a chance of an ice cream by the river.

Oxford Models is what I call a proper model shop - open for 35 year and it shows. The window is full of goodies to tempt the passer by. Entering the shop aeroplanes and helicopters hung from the ceiling. Stock sat higgledy piggledy on the shelves. Little sign of organisation was apparent so rooting around like a pig for a truffle was the only option. Magic.

When I entered the shop the owner was chatting to a sales rep. I dug through boxes and shelves for a while then remembered something I needed for a model (don't worry, no technical stuff here, don your anorak and go to the other blog for that) so once they finished I asked since my exploration hadn't unearthed anything useful. Sadly the shop specialised in aircraft rather than boat parts and I was unlucky. Still we got talking.

And talking.

The phone went and after he'd finished we carried on talking.

A French student and his American girlfriend came in carrying tennis equipment. He was interested in building plastic kits of aircraft and the conversation meandered through subjects as diverse as Lockerbie, metal fatigue in Comet airliners and local sports landmarks – the first 4 minute mile was run close by. The French guy, who is learning to fly, tried to buy an altimeter sat on the shelf behind the counter but discovered £15 wasn't a good starting point for negotiations on a WW2 flight instrument. However I learned why you have two of them in a plane so I suppose it was useful. They left without buying anything but this didn't seem to matter.

We chatted more.

Another customer came in for balsa cement and left satisfied having been persuaded that the foreign version is better than that sold in the UK. The later has had all the cellulose removed for safety and consequently doesn't stick or smell properly.

Yet more chat. The shops oldest customer joined us for a while. He wasn't looking for anything, it's the sort of place you can just drop in for a chinwag as I was discovering.
Finally two more guys wandered in looking for serious model helicopters. Rather then push on with the hard sell the conversation started on motorbikes as, unless they both had a leather and helmets fetish, that's how they had arrived. A motorcyclist and owner of several vintage machines our host happily chatted about them. After 20 minutes of this I wandered out again, nearly three hours after I went in. Oh and a steamboat kit better off or over a hundred quid worse off depending on how you view it.

With little of the afternoon left I wandered back into town, eschewing the ice cream I'd planned on, and headed for the covered market. Once upon a time this would have been a real indoor market selling food to the local population. Nowadays the food tends toward the delicatessen, although at Christmas it is the place to go for your giant turkey, goose, deer or ostrich. Most of the shops are aimed fairly and squarely at the tourist market of high class shoppers. As such the whole thing has become a bit too gentrified and is better viewed as a shopping centre with bags of atmosphere. Oh, and it has appeared in a Morse or two as well TV fans.

No sign of Lord Elton though.

More pics in Flickr

Canal Museum

A few moments stroll from Kings Cross Station, just past the McDonalds, there is a sign for the Caledonian Canal. For the student of geography or waterways this will come as a surprise as the canal runs from Inverness to Fort William. In Scotland. And the sign is intended for walkers.

You'd have to be a keen walker - it's 561 miles away.

Of course this is silly. Follow the sign and you'll find roads with nautical names - Crinan Street, The Caledonian Road, Warfdale Road and most importantly, New Warf Road, home of the London Canal Museum.

The museum is housed in a small warehouse. Not a conventional one, but an ice warehouse. It dates from the days when ice was dug out of the Thames when it froze, and stored. Later a more reliable supply was found by importing the stuff from Norway. Below the museum are huge vats where the ice would have been stored and then transported on to the London gentry. Eventually methods to manufacture ice were developed but these were on an industrial scale so the warehouse continued to house the domestically produced product. In an era when ice production is within the capabilities of even the poorest equipped kitchen (although the recipe seems to elude people judging by the amount of ice for sale in supermarkets...) it's difficult to image a world when it wasn't available or so valuable you'd haul it across the sea.

Anyway, I pitched up just before opening time and had to hang a round a few minutes while the attendant opened up. He apologised profusely even though I was the entire queue and we were talking less than five minutes delay. I had to wait longer for the ticket seller on the Eiffel Tower to stop chatting on the phone to her boyfriend a few years ago - and I and the rest of those waiting were merely granted a sneer for our trouble.

So, what do you get for your 3 quid entry fee ?

The ground floor is home to half a barge. It's a proper working, coal carrier type and visitors can explore the living area with it's clever woodwork and amazing use of space. This makes you wonder about the absolutely tiny area a family would exist in. I've read about the cramped conditions but only really understood how cramped by standing in the space. My VW Camper isn't exactly luxurious and it's only intended for short breaks but the volume isn't that much smaller than that available to a family for life.

There are displays covering the history of the building and the ice trade. Also old tools and machines for handling goods are displayed. Of course there is also a souvenir shop. Rather than being full of tat this is really good - a wide range of books on canals including history and navigation. Stuff for kids and stuff for grown-ups. Sensible prices too.

Upstairs there is plenty of reading to do. Lots of boards with canal histories. Each covers a different topic and overall the studious visitor would get a real grounding in waterway history. In one corner a series of films are running. These vary from ancient to modern - many date from the 1950's as far as I could tell and were film makers attempts to document a way of life that was dieing out rapidly.

There are a few cases of models showing the different boats used around the country. It's not often appreciated that canals were not the same everywhere. Midlanders will be familiar with narrowboats intended for a 7ft wide lock but on Norfolk and the North much wider navigation's made for wider boats allowed larger loads to be carried, more like the current European examples.

Out the back there is a wharf with boat moorings. I'll admit to looking at these with a degree of envy. It's a quiet spot considering the central London location, almost tranquil. OK you are overlooked on all sides by warehouses that have been converted to flats but living on a boat I expect you get used to be an object of interest. The museum owns a small Bantam tug which interested me a lot as a potential subject for a model. It's tiny and brightly coloured so appeals to the inner child and is pug ugly which appeal to the industrial artist.

If you know little about the waterways world but want to learn then the Canal Museum is a great place to visit. I reckon most people could go round in a couple of hours and enjoy the trip. Obviously if there is a special event taking place, there are several through the year, then all bets are off and you might be there all day !

Visit the website - full of info but terrible to navigate.

More of my pictures on Flickr.

Borough Market

Proper travellers roam the great cities of the world and always seem to pitch up at just the right time to take part in the local festival. I'm no good at this - the posters are either telling me something great is about to happen, or their remains tell me it was a week ago.

London is full of markets. Many of you reading this will be familiar with them and probably regularly drop into Portobello to pick up some ancient nik-naks or similar. When I go to Portebello all I see is empty stalls and litter - smoked salmon and pommes frites wrappers, that sort of thing.

Anyway, for a change I bumped into Borough Market when it was open. And it is amazing. At first I thought this was a quaint local thing under the railway near the Thames. A few minutes later I realised my mistake - it's bloody enormous. Still takes place under the railway though...

London is a global city and this is it's global fruit and veg market. If you can eat it, then it's probably here. Many of the traders have travelled serious distances to sell organic mushrooms and weird cheese. I suppose the locals are workers in the centre of London and are either minted, or are looking at foods from home. Whatever, they aren't likely to look at the products and ask for directions to the nearest branch of Farm Foods.

Actually, the mix of stalls is odd. Most are selling delli items but a few do the proper piles of veg. Now I can see the point of picking up a few soupcons of cheese or mushroom, maybe a French style bread or Portuguese poncycake but 5 pounds of King Edwards ? There aren't that many people for whom this is the local market are there ?

My money stayed firmly in my pocket as the moment I started spending I knew a backpack full of posh cakes would be the result. Then I'd walk around transferring the weight from my back to my middle. What I did do was try every free sample offered to me, which staved off the hunger pangs for a while. I was a good boy and didn't go round for a second go at the chocolate brownies even though it was tempting.

Borough Market Website.

The Riverside

Good grub in London ? You want some of those jellied eels guv'nor.

No I don't. No really. The day I feel like eating a pot full of iced slime will be many days since I will last had solids. How hungry do you have to be to eat those ? I know eels are cheap and nutritious but I'm thinking roast rat might be tastier.

Fortunatly, neither roast rat or icy slime were on the menu at the Riverside on St Katherines Dock. Instead I plumped for the fish'n'chips. Plumped turned out to be a good description for the feast served up. Not just the fish, and chips but a generous salad as well. Good grief, that makes it a healthy meal !

Normally you can tell how good a London eatery is by the number of fluorescent jackets inside (more=better) but there were none to be seen. A good number of suits were eating with me though so despite the location right in the heart of tourist land, a few minutes walk from Tower Bridge, this was a proper cafe doing real food for real people. I hesitate to go on an "eat where the locals eat" riff but it's not a bad idea sometimes.

The guys on the next table were engaged in an earnest and loud discussion about computer networking. The merits of different types of security protocols and the idiots who decide what is appropriate were considered at length. One also decided he wanted to whinge about the tea (white floaty milk bits) and chips (to many. Not "right" - he was an idiot, they were lovely). If it hadn't been raining I'd have left as soon as I'd eaten rather than listen to the ins and outs of connection speeds.

The rain was coming down - there was more water in the sky than in the dock - so I felt forced to stop for desert. My waiter said the chocolate fudge cake could be made to come with cream at my request and it did. The art created with a squirty cream can rivalled that seen in the better galleries. It tasted good too.

All this (fish, chips, salad, tea, can of coke, pudding) for 11 quid. In London, according to Lonely Planet, that is as budget as you get. Bargain.

Foyles food

Foyles food
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker

There I was, innocently wandering along a London thoroughfare when an A-board offers the tempting prospect of a cafe with free jazz. A moments weakness and I climbed the stairs of the worlds biggest bookshop to get some refreshment.

The cafes not huge and has excessively olde worlde seating more suited to a country barn (a smart one mind) and CD racks. We are in the corner of the music department.

The drink selection will be familiar to anyone who's been in a modern coffee house. I went for the hot chocolate. It's served in a proper mug not some fancy shaped cup, beaker or chalice. It tasted nice too and was just the right temperature.

Cakes are as right -on as you can get. Nothing containing dead animal is available so I settled for vegan (yes vegan) ginger cake. All I can say is that vegans either aren't as fey as they are made out to be, or the strength of the flavour will blow their heads off. I'm a proper red-blooded carnivore and I found it strong. Nice though.

And the jazz ? Well it was experimental. Or crap depending on how accurate you want to be. Blowing randomly on a flute does not count as music. If it's no better than I can do then shut up 'cos I'm rubbish at tuney things and if you don't, I have a ukulele and don't know how to use it...

Tower Bridge

If ever there was a landmark to represent the south of England, this is it. An iconic image, known around the world, and a bit fake 'cos it's covered with stone cladding.

Let me explain. Tower bridge exists in its current form for a simple reason. At the time it was built, any river crossing on the Thames needed to provide for sailing ships to access wharfs upstream. Hence, the bridge either had to be very tall or open to clear the masts.

The way it does this is very clever. A pair of steam engines pressurise a pair of accumulators (a water reservoir with heavy weights sitting on top). When the bridge has to open, the accumulators power engines that open the road way (bascules for techies). The complicated system is needed because the steam engines couldn't open the bridge fast enough on their own but they can store enough energy to do the job. The building is really a big machine - a bit like the Laxey wheel - with decoration. It's internal structure is steel and to make it look prettier the who thing is covered with stone embellishments, much like many houses around the country...

Anyway, all this stuff is explained if you visit the exhibition in the tower, it just takes a bit of time to get there. The entrance is at the base of one tower where a badly designed foyer slows you down. 6 quid gets you in once you've been frisked and had your bags x-rayed. Then a photographer takes your photo, "just for fun" - he wasn't impressed that I refused. Once the lift is full, visitors are conveyed to the top of the tower.

A short film with (surprisingly) some of the cream acting talent in covers a bit of history and most people sat through this politely. The real reason most make the trip is the view from the walkways. Originally conceived as a way for foot passengers to cross the river when the bridge was open they are now glazed (hooray, it was raining when I went) and have a slight duff display explaining what the Victorians did for us. Why anyone cares when farm laborers got the vote when they are in a great example of the engineering of the age I don't know but the British way is to pretend that the technical stuff is too difficult. There were some nice pictures of the construction but the multi-lingual captions were never more than 2 lines long.

The view is worth the trip though. From one side you can see the City - if the clouds aren't blotting it out. From the other, city hall, HMS Belfast etc. A nice touch are the sliding hatches for cameras to be poked out of - there are even ramps to help the shorter tourist up to some of these.

Less clever is the stand from the photographer who took the pictures in the entrance. Your image is superimposed on a background of the bridge - and you can buy a copy ! Woo and Hoo I say. It's not like anyone visiting London owns a camera and couldn't just take a picture themselves by, ermmm, standing in front of the bridge and pressing the shutter.

Once you've been down the send tower, a further delight awaits. Included in the admission prices is a visit to "The Engine Room" - just follow the blue line painted on the pavement down under the approach road and you get some proper engineering. One of the steam engines is on show with numbers to explain what the various bits are (good) the other is rotated by a motor and lit by infuriating flashing coloured lights for no good reason (bad). Further on the accumulators and various other bits are displayed for marvelling at by the tourist. I liked this stuff but then I love heavy mechanical things and seeing how machines work. The explanations were pretty good with excellent diagrams to cover a fairly complex system.

At the end, obviously, there is a souvenir shop. It's not very good although you can buy two "Make your own Tower Bridge" kits and no end of books explaining what the Victorians did. To be honest though, the tat was the same stuff available anywhere in London. Am I alone in wanting nice location specific junk ? At least that way you have to actually visit the place rather than just raiding the shop in the duty-free on the way through the airport.

The pavements of London are hard. I mention this only because I decided to sit down and read the paper for a while after leaving the Tower exhibition. A few clues into the crossword there were some boats horns blaring - I looked up and the bridge was opening to allow a replica Las Vegas showboat to pass which finished the visit very nicely.

My London pictures on Flickr

Tower Bridge on Wikipedia