Tag: pubs

K is for Kendal

Between Lancaster and Carlisle, and thus between my two latest cycle rides across Yorkshire, I stopped for a couple of nights in Kendal, on the edge of the Lake District. This is another place (see my posts on Wensleydale and Suffolk) that was made very wealthy by the wool trade (Kendal Green was almost as big a thing as Robin Hood’s Lincoln Green), and then in the nineteenth century the shoe industry took over. The Somervell brothers were leather dealers until in 1857 the first sewing machines were imported from the USA; in 1862 they produced their first complete shoes and in 1865 introduced the ‘K’ trademark. Howard Somervell went to Everest in K boots as a member of the 1922 and 1924 exhibitions. K Shoes and Clarks Shoes (in Street in Somerset – I remember a school trip to the factory many years ago) dominated the sensible/school shoes market for many years, and the two companies merged in 1981; but foreign imports and recessions shrank the industry until the last shoes were made in Kendal in 2003 (there is still a distribution centre on Natland Road). The factory outlet shops, opened in 1988, were rebranded as K Village but have finally closed and are now being rebuilt as a Travelodge. The kitchenware company Lakeland began in the 1950s selling chickens in Kendal market – in plastic bags, which proved far more interesting to the public. They’ve always been based in Windermere, but there is a distribution centre in Kendal.

 As elsewhere, wealth from wool translated into a church largely rebuilt in the fifteenth century to be much bigger, particularly in the window department. It’s the largest church in Cumbria, with a nave and two aisles on each side. It’s close to Abbot Hall, a Grade-1 listed mansion built in 1759 that houses a surprisingly decent art gallery, largely due to its collection of works by local boy George Romney (1734-1802, one of the many fine portrait painters of the period); it also has drawings and watercolours by Ruskin and a good collection of modern art by painters such as Bomberg, Lowry, Sutherland, Nicholson, Schwitters and Hockney, and sculptors such as Arp, Hepworth and Frink. Unfortunately it’s currently closed, not because of Storm Desmond in 2015 and now Covid-19 but to improve access, security and exhibition conditions; it should reopen in 2022. Alongside is the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry, which covers the region’s social history with some excellent preserved shops and rooms, but it’s also closed for refurbishment.

 On the other side of the town centre (near the station), the Kendal Museum reopened fairly early after the lockdown and has a remarkable range of displays – on the history side it starts with pieces from Ancient Egypt, Mesolithic and Neolithic stone tools, a dugout Viking boat, and coverage of Katherine Parr (Henry VIII’s last wife and a London girl, although her family held Kendal Castle for centuries) and Adam Sedgwick, father of modern geology, who was born in Dent in 1785. There are also displays on local geology and natural history, including birds, beetles and butterflies, a moose head, and a stuffed lion, elephant and polar bear. And in an awkward bit of corridor there is of course a display on Alfred Wainwright, who was Kendal’s Borough Treasurer (1948-67) and Honorary Clerk to Kendal Museum (1942-85) – he also wrote the definitive illustrated guides to hiking in the Lakes and the Coast to Coast Walk. The Coast to Coast doesn’t pass through Kendal, but I still come to see friends every couple of years.

 Kendal has other mountaineering links – there’s the horribly sweet Kendal Mint Cake, which also went on expeditions to Everest (thankfully healthier sources of energy are now available) and the excellent Kendal Mountain Festival, founded in 1980, with lots of talks and films, the presentation of the highly prestigious Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and other events.

 Reopening in September, the Brewery Arts Centre opened in 1972 on the site of a brewery opened in 1853; in addition to live performances, there’s a good arty cinema, decent food and drink, and a youth hostel, opened by the YHA in 1971 and sold off in 2011 – it’s doing just fine as an independent (Covid-19 apart) so once again I’m left wondering about the YHA’s management. The Brewery garden is one of the last remnants of the burgage plots that sat behind the houses along the main north-south street, reached by about 150 yards (ie alleys), most of which survive. The town’s newest art gallery is at Cross Lane Projects, in a converted garage just south of the centre – I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had folded since I was last in Kendal, but they’ve come though the lockdown to reopen with interesting new sculpture exhibitions.

 Due to the pandemic, I wasn’t interested in the town-centre pubs, acceptable as they are, but had a couple of pleasant outdoor pints at Castle Mills, across the river (the Kent) from the town centre. The Factory Tap claims to stock ‘the most rewarding new hand-crafted beers around’, while the Barrel House is the brewery tap of Bowness Bay Brewing; also here is Joey’s Café, for excellent coffee, salads and pizza.

Around Kendal

 The first village north of Kendal (along National Cycle Route 6) is Staveley, home to the Hawkshead Brewery and its Beer Hall, opposite Wilf’s Café and Wheelbase, which claims to be the largest bike shop in the UK (the Eagle and Child has been recommended too, as a good place to stay and eat). And in the next village north, Ings, the Watermill Inn also has good food and beds and is home to the Windermere Brewery.

 Just south of town is Lower Sizergh Barn, a superb farm shop and café which also has windows over the milking parlour so you can watch the action daily (3.30pm) and also buy raw milk from a vending machine outside. It’s on the edge of the National Trust’s Sizergh estate – the tower house (c1350, transformed in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries) has not yet reopened, but I have enjoyed its panelled rooms and paintings by Romney, Opie, and ‘after Kneller’. In any case the gardens are lovely. As a travel writer, I was interested to learn that Thomas West, a Jesuit priest and antiquarian, wrote A Guide to the Lakes (1778) here – the first guide to the Lake District.

 About a dozen miles further southwest from Sizergh is Cartmel, a small village known for its Priory, founded in 1189 by William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, which has a superb east window and a unique bell tower set at 45 degrees on top of the original tower, and more recently for Simon Rogan’s gastronomic ventures – having begun with L’Enclume in 2002, which now has two Michelin stars, he established his own farm in 2009, with a produce shop in the village, and in 2018 the more casual Rogan & Co neighbourhood restaurant, which has also acquired a Michelin star but remains relaxed and affordable. Also on the village square is Unsworth’s Yard, with brewery and bar, bakery, a wine shop and a wonderful cheese shop where you’ll find the products of Martin Gott and Nicola Robinson of nearby Holker Farm – their sheeps’ and goats’ cheeses are at the forefront of the revival of British raw cheese-making. The Cavendish Arms seems to be a pretty decent pub too.

 We also passed through Grange-over-Sands, just south on Morecambe Bay, where £2m has been found to stop the Lido (built in 1932) from collapsing – being familiar with the success of the spectacular Deco lido in Penzance, I hope they can manage something similar. I was also reminded of the salt marshes of the Baie de Mont-Saint-Michel, and the similar tradition of guided walks (at low tide) across the bay.

Lancaster and Carlisle

 

Lancaster Castle
Rather Scottish? – the Judges’ Lodgings

Between the two parts of my cycling trip in Yorkshire I spent time in Lancaster and Cumbria, though not exactly the Lake District. Lancaster is a city I’ve always liked, though it’s a shame the university is out of the centre and so self-contained, though it does give the place a bit of a cultural lift. It’s pretty lively on a Saturday night but not as bad as Carlisle. There’s something about the colour of the stone that reminds me of Edinburgh – I always wonder if people live in tenements here. I was struck by the Baronial architecture of what is now the White Cross Business Park, opposite the Royal Lancaster Infirmary – it turns out to have been Storey’s Mill, built as a cotton mill in 1854-80 and restored in 1987, rather than a misplaced Highland chieftain’s castle. Clearly it shares some history with The Storey, built in 1887-91 as the Storey Institute and now a centre for the creative industries, with office space, a performing arts venue, ‘contemporary eatery’ the Printroom Cafe & Bar, and a tourist information centre. It was all closed when I was there but has since re-opened.

 In the absence of the Printroom, I ate at Aquila, where a wood-fired oven pumps out authentically Neapolitan pizza, mostly vegetarian and using carefully sourced ingredients such as San Marzano tomatoes, n’duja, walnut and gorgonzola. It’s a real barebones place, essentially a takeaway with a few stools. I also liked the look (in very different ways) of The Borough, a bar and restaurant with rooms on Dalton Square, and Single Step, a wholefoods co-op. For breakfast, Filbert’s Bakery is on King Street, next to the attractive Holm Coffee, with scandi-style open sandwiches and pastries.

Lancaster is lucky to have both an attractive canalside area and a riverfront with a lot of potential – the Maritime Museum is down there in the former Custom House (1764) on St George’s Quay, flanked by largely disused warehouses that are ideal for conversion to loft apartments or indeed a hostel. All the city’s museums are currently closed due to Covid-19, which is a bit of a double whammy as the county of Lancashire was so badly hit by austerity cuts in 2016 that it had to mothball five museums including the Museum of Lancashire in Preston and the Judges’ Lodgings in Lancaster.

 From Lancaster it’s a very easy cycle ride north along the Lancaster Canal towpath (dead level, with no locks) to Carnforth, once a major railway junction that no longer has platforms on the West Coast Main Line to Glasgow, so that it is served only by regional trains from Manchester and Lancaster to Barrow-in-Furness and from Leeds to Morecambe. But of course it’s really famous as the location of the greatest railway film, David Lean’s Brief Encounter – this was based on a short play by Noël Coward, Still Life, and I was the production manager of the play on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the early 1980s, with Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs. The excellent Heritage Centre on the southbound platform has the film showing on a continuous loop, a David Lean exhibition, lots of railway material including a 1940s ticket office, and above all the Refreshment Room where Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson had their desperately repressed cups of tea – the Heritage Centre is now partly open, but the Refreshment Room remains closed. But despair not, the northwest’s first micropub, The Snug is in the main station building (built by Sir William Tite in 1846).

 From Carnforth I continued north on quiet lanes to Kendal – the Lancaster Canal used to continue all the way to Kendal but has been severed by road-building in various places; nevertheless parts of it remain as a footpath, with the original bridges in place, and the final couple of miles into Kendal are now a useful cycleway. I spent a couple of nights in Kendal (which I’ve written about separately), and then took a train up to Carlisle, which strikes me as a blunt northern city, with a strong military tradition and not many students to dilute the bluntness. My previous visit was on a Saturday night, which was lively… and this time my hotel was on the same street as not one but two Wetherspoons pubs, a Brewdog and a Walkabout (as well as Timmy’s Always Vegan!). They like to go out for a drink – and there are also lots of Italian restaurants, which were heaving on a Tuesday night thanks to the Eat Out to Help Out post-lockdown promotion. And there are lots of barbers too, presumably a preliminary to going out drinking.

 But this was also the only place on my recent trip where the museum was open as usual (without pre-booking, although with limited hours), and I was also happy to visit the castle even if I did have to book online. The Tullie House Museum covers local history from 450 million years ago (when Cumbria was part of the continent of Avalonia and the neighbouring bit of Scotland was in Laurentia) but really goes to town on the Romans, who arrived in AD 72. Hadrian came here in 122 and built his wall by 128; at the time 10% of the Roman army was stationed in Britain (just 4% of the empire’s area). In 208 Septimius Severus also came here and repaired the wall, and made Carlisle a civitas (as opposed to a military base) before dying in York in 211. As author of various guides to Romania, I’ve long been aware that it was Dacian (ie Romanian) auxiliaries who garrisoned forts such as Birdoswald – one always wonders how they coped with the weather.

 Later history was largely concerned with the border with Scotland, agreed in 1222 and formally fixed by the Treaty of York in 1237; however there were plenty of battles between England and Scotland, including Robert the Bruce being driven back from Carlisle in 1315. However I hadn’t realised that the Reivers, who rampaged around the lawless border area from the late thirteenth to the early seventeenth century, mainly stealing cattle, were totally indiscriminate in terms of national allegiances – anyone was fair game. Still, it was the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603 that finally led to the imposition of law and order in the borderlands.

 Industrial history focusses mainly on the railways, with no fewer than seven independent routes meeting here (surprisingly six are still open, with only the Waverley line to Edinburgh having closed); from 1876 they all used Citadel station, designed by Sir William Tite, who claimed this was the first Gothic Revival station, being designed to sit alongside the Citadel, built by Henry VIII in 1541 and modified in 1810 to house law courts. The citadel, at the south end of the old city centre, is not to be confused with the castle, at the north end (in between there’s the cathedral and just a few attractive old buildings on the north side of the main square or, strictly speaking, triangle). Night Mail (the documentary film of an Auden poem, with music by Britten) plays on a loop at Tullie House – however, it starts when the train is already north of Carlisle (This is the night mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order), and they miss a trick by not mentioning TS Eliot’s Skimbleshanks (from Practical Cats), who was also on the Night Mail (You were sleeping all the while he was busy at Carlisle). Living in Cambridge, I was interested to learn (from Wikipedia, not Tullie House) that Night Mail was premiered at the opening of the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 1936.

 Carlisle Castle, founded by William Rufus in 1092, claims to be the most besieged place in the British Isles, notably enduring a nine-month siege in 1644-5, when it was more or less the only Royalist stronghold in northern England after the battle of Marston Moor. It was the base of the Border Regiment, formed in 1881 by the merger of the 34th Cumberland and 55th Westmoreland Regiments (dating from 1702 and 1755 respectively); in 1959 they merged with the King’s Own Royal Regiment and became the King’s Own Border Regiment, and the army finally vacated the castle. It’s open to visitors, but there’s not a lot to see at the moment apart from Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life, ie the Border Regiment museum, which does a good job of condensing a lot of history into a manageable form. My grandmother’s brother, killed at Ypres in October 1914, was in the Border Regiment for some reason – the other branches of my family have gravitated to the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the Royal Marines and the Royal Navy.

[I’ve now discovered that his younger brother (who I met) was also in the Border Regiment, survived the Somme, and was in charge of training troops here at Carlisle Castle in World War II.]

I found the cathedral relatively plain, but with some very attractive features, notably the East Window, completed by 1350 in the Flowing Decorated Gothic style –  it’s the largest and most complex example in England. There are also fine misericords and wooden screens, and four sets of unusual painted panels on the rear of the choir stalls, dating from 1485–90.

For those interested in beer and the history of the English pub, Carlisle is of interest because its pubs and brewery were nationalised in 1916, to prevent workers in the huge ammunition factories just north at Gretna from going to work drunk or hungover, by banning ‘treating’ or buying rounds of drinks (until 1919) and by paying managers a set wage to remove the incentive to sell more drinks. Astonishingly, they were not returned to the private sector until 1973!

More thoughts on travel and Covid-19

Across the world countries are moving towards ending their lockdowns and returning to something closer to normal life – even the UK, which is in no fit state, is inching in that direction. Although international travel remains virtually impossible for at least another month, the ways in which countries are beginning to open up for their citizens and residents do give some clues to what the new normal will look like.

 Museums and art galleries are reopening in cities like Berlin, Zurich and Antwerp, but it’s clear that the experience will be very constrained and lacking the freedom that we have taken for granted. After booking online (or possibly making a contactless payment, which is of course key to the new normal), you’ll have a timed entry slot before using hand sanitiser and donning a face mask, then following a one-way system, with the doors jammed open so no-one has to touch them, and you won’t be allowed to linger in front of works that especially speak to you. All at a distance of at least 1.5m metres from other people – in Britain we seem to be specifying two metres, which is probably wiser but may be even less practicable than the rest of the farrago. There’ll be no maps or leaflets, no audio guides, and no groups of school kids or tourists (at last, a positive!).

 China is leading the way in developing more sophisticated new systems, but only for those already resident in the country – you apparently now walk through temperature scanners all the time, to enter the metro or shopping centres, and barely notice them, much like metal detectors. People also have a ‘health pass’ on their mobile phones with a QR code that links to their name and ID number and gives a red or green reading depending on whether they’ve been in proximity with an infected person; if it’s red, they can’t go into shops and restaurants for 14 days. If you do get into a restaurant, there’s mass sanitising, and widely spaced tables, of course, with no more than three people (oddly) at each. So some kind of going out is possible – but as you may know, I have an interest (both emotional and financial) in British pubs, and their future looks far more complicated, until we have effective widespread vaccination. With restricted numbers and table service only, it’s hard to see how they can either be much fun or indeed survive financially.

 The most difficult aspect of travel, and the last to resume, will be long-haul intercontinental flying – quite apart from needing to allow four hours to check in and get through the airport, what with all the social distancing, facial recognition and contactless temperature checking and sanitation (of passengers and luggage) that will be required (and probably no lounges, no carry-on luggage, no inflight mags and no in-flight catering either) there will also need to be a system of immunity passports, perhaps requiring blood tests at the airport itself. Even then if you arrive with a raised temperature you risk being sent back, or at best quarantined for two weeks – just in time for your flight home. And the air fares will have to be higher, to cope with extra sanitation requirements (and the increased time needed to clean planes between flights) and the lower seating densities. But airlines have billions of [insert unit of currency] worth of planes doing nothing, so are desperate to start flying one way or another.

 Travel within a continent or region should be a bit less complicated, probably with less onerous health requirements – free travel zones are planned between Australia and New Zealand; Vietnam and Thailand; and between the three Baltic states, and new quarantine laws won’t apply to travel between Britain and France, or Britain and Ireland. One might expect the same to apply eventually between the United States and Canada (but not Mexico, I fear).

 However the easiest option for most of us and for quite a while will be domestic travel – even without the hassle of airports, visas and test certificates, I won’t want to be getting on a plane any time soon, as someone who picks up a bug whenever he flies anyway. Trains are also confined spaces with dry air which helps the transmission of viruses, but you’re less likely to find them fully occupied, apart from peak-hour commuter services into major cities. Really, the most stress-free option will be cycling and camping, but by and large that will require a train journey to get to the starting point.

 Cities across Europe (which currently doesn’t include British cities, apart from one seafront road in Brighton) are creating ‘pop-up’ cycle lanes with cones and paint – Paris, Berlin and Milan are leading the way, with hundreds of kilometres of safe new routes. This is to deal with two issues – first, that people don’t want to be on buses and trains at the moment and so are likely to use cars when they go back to work, unless they can be persuaded to cycle, and secondly that people are trying to walk but there just isn’t space to keep a safe distance from other people on the pavements (what with the queues outside shops as well) so there needs to be space to step into the carriageway. Shared-use paths, where cyclists are encouraged to use the footways too, make things far worse, so the more that cyclists can be persuaded to use the carriageway the better. Here in Cambridge cyclists are tending to use the carriageway and leave the off-road cycleways and shared-use paths for pedestrians, but that may change as cars return. E-bikes are going to be part of the solution, although the supply chain may dry up for a while – get your orders in now. Electric skateboards and similar monstrosities are also bound to grow in number and will have to be catered for.

Georgia leads the way

Georgia, which has done a great job so far in keeping Covid-19 to a minimum, is now racing to be the first country to open up to international tourism again. I have an interest in Georgia, of course, and my colleague Claire is planning to be there this summer to research a new edition. That will be an interesting experience, to say the least!

 Domestic tourism is to be permitted again from 15 June and international tourism from 1 July, dependent on creating ‘safe corridors’ at the borders and presumably on specific air links, though I don’t know what that will involve. In addition to the mere 10 deaths thus far from Covid-19, the government is also touting its ‘enormous experience’ in quarantining over 19,000 people (in 83 hotels).

 In fact Greece also hopes to open up for tourism on 1 July, although  it’s not at all sure that bars and restaurants will be open – so inclusive resorts, yachts and agrotourism will be fine, but other holidays may be frustrating. Other countries are also beginning to open up, one way or another – mostly for internal travel, with quarantine (14 days, not the full 40 as in Venice when the term was first coined) as a rule for international arrivals. But Austria, for instance, offers two alternatives, allowing visitors to either show a certificate of a negative coronavirus test within the last four days, or pay €190 for an on-the-spot test. Hong Kong Airport has introduced full-body disinfectation booths (nasty chemicals in a confined space? I’m not keen). London’s Heathrow Airport is talking of contactless procedures such as ultraviolet sanitation and thermal screening, which is fact fits perfectly with the British government’s hands-off approach thus far – they are now talking of quarantining arriving passengers, roughly three months too late, while about 18 million people have apparently entered the UK without any form of check. Just one of the reasons why Covid-19 is cutting such a swathe through the British population.

We need to talk about testing

The only solution to this crisis, the only way to get back to anything like a normal life, is the development of a vaccine and its global deployment. It’s not 100% certain that will happen as all, and until it does there will be new outbreaks and new lockdowns, and happy relaxed travel is going to be difficult to achieve. We also need much better antiviral treatments for those infected with the new coronavirus, but that alone won’t solve the problem.

 In the meantime, we have two types of tests. A PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test looks for genetic traces of the virus and is fairly reliable but only detects a current infection; it’s a robotic process which is already carried out on a huge scale by drug discovery companies, so it’s been easy to ramp up for the new coronavirus. On the other hand, antibody or serological tests pick up evidence of someone having been previously exposed to the virus as well, but produce a lot of both false negatives and false positives (due to similarities to other coronaviruses such as the common cold). There’s a huge number of new testing kits being produced for this new virus, and testing the test kits is in itself a huge challenge. The British government went ahead and bought four million fingerprick testing kits from China, at a cost of £16 million, before finding they weren’t good enough. The best options at the moment will require a blood sample and lab analysis, which will be much slower and more expensive. One great unknown is whether having been infected gives some kind of immunity, and for how long, which might allow governments to issue, and accept, ‘immunity passports’. It’s possible that you need to be seriously affected to achieve any kind of immunity while those who’ve been slightly unwell or indeed asymptomatic will not ‘benefit’ at all. In any case, don’t expect immunity passports any time soon, so quarantine is going to be required for travel to many countries.

 Just to be clear, this is not a disease that you want to risk catching. It’s becoming clear that the virus can affect not only the lungs but pretty much any of our organs, including the nervous system; many people who survive it will be left with chronic kidney and heart problems and never return to normal lives. It’s possible to die from a cytokine storm, when the immune system doesn’t recognise what it’s fighting and goes into overdrive. What’s more, the virus can disappear while the system goes on struggling for a month or more, so that some people need hospitalisation even though they test negative for the virus. Stay home, stay safe remains the best advice.

Return to Oxford

I’m in lock-down in Cambridge at the moment, but a few months ago I did make a flying visit to the other place, Oxford, where I studied many years ago.

 From the cultural tourism point of view, the most notable developments in Oxford recently have been the reopening of the Ashmolean Museum (in 2009) and of the Weston Library (in 2015). The Ashmolean, of course, is Britain’s oldest museum, founded in 1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities given to the University of Oxford in 1677 by Elias Ashmole, treasures acquired by him from the gardeners, travellers, and collectors John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger. It’s housed in the Cockerell Building (opened in 1845), one wing of which is occupied by the Taylor Institution, the university’s modern languages faculty, where I spent a certain amount of time as a student (as an undergraduate and in my glorious two-term research career). The £61 million revamp by Rick Mather dropped a huge concrete-and-glass box into the courtyard behind the original museum, creating a spectacular lightwell/staircase that provides easy connections to every floor and gallery, plus of course a new rooftop restaurant. The display space has also been doubled in size, allowing bigger and better temporary exhibitions – I’m very keen to see the current Young Rembrandt show, but of course it’s closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

  I didn’t spend much time in the New Bodleian Library as a student, and just saw it as a drab pile that I had to pass frequently – built in 1937-40 by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, Wikipedia sniffily notes that it’s ‘not generally considered his finest work’, although it is listed as a Grade II historic building. It too has been hollowed out behind the original façade in an £80 million pound project to provide improved storage facilities for rare and fragile material and better facilities for readers, including a digital media centre and 2.5km of open-access bookshelves. It also welcomes outside visitors for the first time; a new entrance from Broad St leads to a shop and café and spaces for free temporary exhibitions, which I strongly recommend. Journalists crowed that ‘the dreary old New Bod has become the Mod Bod’, but it is in fact now called the Weston Library.

 I’ve just seen that the University Museum of Natural History is next in line for a major revamp; in 2014-6 it was closed to fix its leaking roof (comprising over 2,500 Victorian glass tiles), and in 2020 the displays in the main court are being moved out in shifts (allowing the museum to stay open throughout) and reinstalled in new high-tech conservation cabinets. The new displays will, they say, ’address the importance and fragility of biodiversity and human impact on the environment’.

 Not all of Oxford’s museums are doing so well – just last month three paintings by Anthony Van Dyck, Annibale Carracci and Salvator Rosa were stolen from the Christ Church Picture Gallery. Christ Church itself had recently been in the news because cases of fine Burgundy and Pouilly Fumé had been disappearing from the cellar. Hmmmm, I wonder if there could be a connection.

 Architecture old and new

In fact though, every time one returns to Oxford after a few years away, there are plenty of new and converted buildings to catch the attention. At my alma mater, New College, the stylish new Clore Music Studios were completed in January 2019 and the Kimbel Wing (fantastic accommodation for the disabled in the original Morris Garage, where the first Bullnose Morris cars were assembled in 1912) was opened in March 2019 (I’d love to see my nephew living there one day, but that’s another story). More recently, the plans for the new Gradel Quadrangles, which received planning permission in June 2018, were greeted with general approval and even excitement – crammed in behind Savile House, where I lived in my final year, they’ll allow New College to provide rooms for all its students.

 In the future I’d like to wander north of the centre, where there’s all sorts of interesting new architecture, starting with the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, in and around the old Radcliffe Infirmary between the Woodstock Road and Walton Street. The Observatory itself is now the focal point of Green Templeton College, a new graduate college founded in 2008. The former St Luke’s Chapel (built in 1865) is a venue for events, and not to be confused with the Freud café in the former St Paul’s Church on Walton St, built in 1836. There’s new accommodation for Somerville College here, and the Jericho Health Centre and the University’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, the Mathematical Institute and the Blavatnik School of Government (by Herzog & de Meuron) have also opened; the new Humanities Building was granted planning permission in 2010 but has been delayed by funding issues, with construction now expected to begin in 2021 (leaving aside any Covid-19-related complications). I love good modern architecture (and thankfully Oxford and Cambridge can both afford to pay for it), and I especially enjoy projects that fit in new buildings among historic sites like this. A little further north, colleges such as St Anne’s also have similarly striking new buildings to be examined.

 Other small projects caught my eye too, for instance the McCall MacBain Graduate Centre (part of Wadham College), opened in 2012 in the former Blackwell’s Music Shop at the rear of the King’s Arms (I’ll get to pubs later, don’t worry, but the KA is also owned by Wadham). I have no idea what the Oxford Ice Factory building was when I was a student (1978-82) but it now houses the Oxford Foundry, an entrepreneurship centre opened in 2017 by the Saïd Business School, aiming to build a new generation of ethical entrepreneurs to leave society and the planet in a better state. It too has a nice café, naturally. And just a couple of blocks west, at the corner of Hollybush Row and the new Frideswide Square, the Jam Factory, opened in 2006, is a restaurant-bar-arts centre in the building where the famous ‘Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade was produced from 1903 to 1958. Immediately to the east. ie slightly nearer the city centre, I wandered around what used to be an area of breweries and other industries straddling various side-channels of the Isis (Thames) – not an area I’d ever known before, but there are still traces of the former Lion (Morrell’s) and Eagle Steam Breweries, now incorporated in fairly pricey residential developments. Immediately to the east again, Oxford Castle and the old prison are well known as a fairly upmarket regeneration area, with posh hotels and restaurants.

 Just a few pubs

And so to the pubs – I headed first to the Turf Tavern, which was my local for some years. It’s expanded, now stretching almost all the way back to New College tower, and has got more touristy, with more emphasis on food. It’s still hard to find and still has skull-bashingly low beams though. They claim that both Bob Hawke’s Guinness World Record for consuming a yard glass of ale in 11 seconds and Bill Clinton’s ‘not inhaling’ marijuana both took place here in the 1960s; they may be right about Bob Hawke (he was later Australia’s most charismatic prime minister ever), but I’ve met people who knew Clinton at Oxford and the ‘not inhaling’ seemed to take place at private parties. They also make much of the fact that the Harry Potter crew hung out here after filming, which is probably true – some scenes were shot in New College and, for what it’s worth, Emma Watson’s father was a student there with me.

New College cloister – as in some Harry Potter film or other

 

 

 

 

New College Great Quad – as in some Harry Potter film or other

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The KA (see above) is largely unchanged except for the addition of an attractive room with leather sofas next to the back bar (which lost its male-only status just five years before I came up); I found that it’s been a Youngs pub since 1991 – I have no idea what it was in my student days but would be happy to hear any ideas. The White Horse was closed for a mini-refurb over New Year but is probably not greatly changed (there’s not room to do anything much with it); and the Welsh Pony (famously basic when I was there, with amazingly cheap fry-ups) closed as a pub about twenty years ago and is now a generic seedy bar. The Bird and Baby (Eagle and Child) and Flamb and Lag (Lamb and Flag) are still there but both indelibly linked to Tolkien and CS Lewis and thus of no interest to me.

 I was intrigued to see that the local Wetherspoons (I wouldn’t drink there either, due to the founder Tim Martin being a berserk Brexiteer who made himself even more unpopular by his reaction to the new coronavirus) is called  The Four Candles – I wasn’t sure why, until someone told me that Ronnie Barker was a pupil at the Oxford High School for Boys, and the pub is now in that building (which was the History Faculty in my day). Or is it the Fork Handles…? If you don’t know the sketch you should look it up at once.

 I didn’t get there, but I was delighted to learn that the Gardener’s Arms on Plantation Road, which was my own secret pub in my final year, is now fully vegetarian – no idea what the beer is like, but I look forward to visiting as soon as possible. And we used to love going out to rural pubs such as the Plough in Noke (now closed, I believe), the Boat by the canal in Thrupp (great for bar billiards) and the Abingdon Arms in Beckley, which a friend visited fairly recently – it’s now community-owned, with good local beers, good-value meals, and a plaque stating that Evelyn Waugh ‘wrote, drank and loved here’  – which I hadn’t known. Apparently Waugh stayed here regularly with a male lover, and then honeymooned there with his first wife (who was also called Evelyn, confusingly; she left him for another man, and I can’t blame her), before spending time here to write books including Vile Bodies.

 From Oxford to Adlestrop

And finally – I’ve just read Oxford by Edward Thomas (of Adlestrop fame), which I can’t particularly recommend, it’s stuffed full of quotations and allusions to show how well educated he was (Hertford College, don’t you know) and the footnotes (in the 2005 Signal edition) don’t explain them all. The introduction stresses his Welshness, even though he’s known as a writer specifically about English countryside and nature, which is of some interest as I’m updating the Rough Guide to Wales at the moment. In fact he writes about a visit by Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis, now remembered mainly as a train), who ‘for three days read aloud his glorious book to large audiences’. My last blog post was largely about Jan Morris, whose Oxford is a definitive account and a  wonderful read. Thomas does mention pubs and taverns quite a lot, and cycling, and also bonfires, which were very common in the college quads in his day but must have been extinguished quite soon after. In his opinion, the major change in his day from historic times was the advent of organised sport (especially rowing) – fives was the exception, which had been popular but had died out by his time – but it has now been revived, of course. Long country walks, not necessarily to pubs in Noke and Beckley, were also popular.

 Adlestrop, incidentally, where his train stopped unexpectedly on an Edwardian summer’s day, is north of Oxford near Stow-on-the-Wold (which I visit from time to time), in a location now best known for the Daylesford Organic Farm. But my next objective is to finally read Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (published in 1911), another classic Oxford tale which I think will be more fun than Edward Thomas.

Dundee, Perth and around

 

Although there’s plenty of culture and so on in Dundee (but see below for an update), we were actually there to cycle. First stop was Perth, which might have made a better base if only it had a backpacker’s hostel (there’s a hostel at Perth College which is only open from mid-June until the end of August). It seems a sort of Scottish Truro, with an old-money feel to it and a high-brow cultural profile – in particular at the Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre. I was especially struck by the line-up of performers in the Perth Piano Sundays series – the likes of Peter Donohoe, Jeremy Denk, Viktoria Postnikova – nae bad! Just a few days after getting home, a Radio 3 announcer praised the wood-panelled Perth Concert Hall as one of the great spaces for chamber music in the UK. Neither Perth nor Truro is forced by the presence of a university to be cool and relevant. You could argue that Dundee is to Perth as Glasgow is to Edinburgh – a brasher younger sibling that’s trying to cast off an industrial past and become a cultural hub, largely through riverside regeneration – and it’s doing fine, of course, but with a more street/youth profile.

The Perth Museum is fairly small but well presented, covering geology, natural history, prehistory and actual history. Perthshire has a rich store of prehistoric remains, with about 70 stone circles and later henges and hillforts. There’s also the Carpow longboat, about 3000 years old, so not as ancient as the Ferriby Boats. I had no idea that the Romans had made it up here and even started building Rome’s earliest frontier system (before the Antonine and Hadrian’s Walls further south in Scotland, and also the Limes Danubianus past Bratislava) along the Gask Ridge southwest from Perth – I must try to retrace it some time.

Nor did I know that William the Conqueror (Billy the Conk, as he’s known on The History of England podcast) came to Forteviot, near Perth, in 1072, when King Malcolm accepted him as his overlord – but he must have had his fingers crossed, because within a decade he was raiding England again. Perth became known as ‘a capital’ of Scotland, due to the royal court frequently staying here and the presence of Scone Abbey, where the King of Scots was crowned, just across the river; like Dundee, it became a Royal Burgh in the early 12th century. After this local history went a bit quiet until the nineteenth century, when the railway arrived and hotels started serving local drinks – Arthur Bell, John Dewar, and Matthew Gloag became known for their whiskies, and Sandemans imported port. In 1819 there were 44 distilleries here, the last closing in 2016. General Accident was founded here in 1885 and had its headquarters here for 113 years – it evolved into Aviva, which is based, inevitably, in London, but reintroduced the General Accident brand in 2013.

There’s also a bit of art here, notably two sculpture rotundas and two big Lawrence portraits and a Raeburn of the fiddler Niel Gow. There was also a temporary show about Margaret Morris (1891-1980), who created modern dance (a la Isadora Duncan) in Britain – she married the Scottish Colourist painter John Duncan Fergusson, whose parents were from Perthshire and who regarded the Perthshire Highlands as his spiritual home – many of his works and also her archive are held at the Fergusson Gallery, a former watertower nearby at the corner of Tay St and Marshall Place – this apparently sees few visitors, so there’s talk of relocating the collection.

Incidentally, we did have a scone in Scone, and a cuppa in Cupar.

Saint Andrews

I’ve been to St Andrews a couple of times before and didn’t linger this time – but I couldn’t help noticing that there are a lot of ruined churches, that the golf obsession is under control and largely confined to the west side of town near the Royal & Ancient, and that even though there are plenty of visitors there are quite a lot of cafés (and all the bike shops) which don’t open on a Sunday. It has more museums than I remembered, but the nicely named MUSA (Museum of the University of St Andrews) is closed for a refurb. There also seemed to be rather a lot of visible lesbians around this time, which was definitely not the case in Dundee or Perth (and was news to my friends who studied there a couple of decades ago).

Broughty Ferry

There’s a pleasant cycle route up the coast northeast from Dundee (now that they’ve sorted out the section past the docks) to Broughty Ferry and on (between railway and golf links) to Carnoustie, where I stayed on my last visit. Broughty Ferry is a more salubrious suburb of Dundee, with decent pubs (see below) and cafés, including (since 1897) the excellent Goodfellow & Steven bakery and tea rooms. Broughty Ferry castle was closed for toilet refurbishment when we passed through, but houses a free museum; guarding the mouth of the Tay since 1496, it sticks out like a rotten tooth from far away.

Problematic pubs

A really good pub takes a bit of finding in Dundee, I’m sorry to say. The Dundonians do like a drink, and there are plenty of pubs in the centre that are always full and noisy, but the main problem is that they’re not interested in live (real) ale – there are rows of gas-pressure dispensers promising IPAs and so on, as well as regular lagers, and frankly they taste much the same – pretty flat. The range of malt whiskies was fairly generic, too. Early in 2018 a real ale pub, the Copper Still, opened in the centre, but by the end of the year it had closed. As you’d expect, the university area, just west of the centre, has some more interesting options, notably the Speedwell, known mainly for its fabulous 1903 interior (there’s an interesting partition with a swinging door between two bar areas) – it has just three well-hidden real ales among a forest of gas dispensers, but the Deuchars was fine and the company was cheery.

Tickety Boo’s, at 51 Commercial St, has a fine interior too, with original stained glass, and is one of the nicest options in the centre, although it’s a bit small and short of seating. Even more than elsewhere, many of the pubs in the centre of Dundee are former banks – there’s the Bank Bar, a former TSB branch at 7 Union St (which usually has four real ales on tap as well as gins and food), not to be confused with the Old Bank Bar at 34 Reform St, The Trades House at 40 Nethergate (with wonderful stained glass and an engraved mirror) or The Counting House at 67 Reform St (once a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, opened in 1856). The last is a Wetherspoons, run by a Europhobic nutter, but it’s attractively restored and has decent enough (and cheap) beers, notably from Stewart’s in Edinburgh. Wetherspoons also run Jolly’s Hotel in Broughty Ferry and the Capital Asset in Perth (neither of which we sampled).

The best option in Broughty Ferry is the Fisherman’s Tavern, which has been in the Good Beer Guide since 1975 (except for 2013, whoops) – like The Trades House, it’s owned by Belhaven, which generally means a better than average pub.

In Perth, the Green Room (good for live music too), the Greyfriars Bar and the Kirkside Bar are the best real ale pubs, but actually the ideal would be to go a little way north to Moulin, a suburb of Pitlochry, where the Moulin Brewery has been building a great reputation since 1995 (Inveralmond isn’t bad either, but they’ve only been going since 1997, so what would they know?). The multinational craft beer monster that is Brewdog (founded in Aberdeen) also has pubs (or ‘bars’) in Dundee and Perth, if that’s your thing. I just noticed yesterday that Brewdog will be opening a pub here in Cambridge soon – good news, if you take the view that any new pub expands the market for real ale and good beer.

Update

As promised at the start – an update on Dundee’s cultural offering – the West Ward Works on Guthrie Street, where the Beano and Dandy annuals were printed, is to be redeveloped into a hub for designers, artists and other creative workers and companies, and will house a comic museum and spaces for live performances and exhibitions.
And it seems that an e-bike sharing scheme will open in July (2019) – presumably using charging stations rather than the dockless model that has become so popular recently for non-electric bike-sharing schemes.

Art in West Yorkshire – it’s all about sculpture – and triangles

Historically, Wakefield was known as the key corner of the Rhubarb Triangle (Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb was awarded Protected Designation of Origin status by the EU in 2010), but nowadays it is also being marketed as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle, as two of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century sculptors were born in the area, Henry Moore in Castleford (in the rhubarb triangle) in 1898 and Barbara Hepworth in Wakefield itself in 1903. I recently visited all three corners, the others being at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (just outside Wakefield) and at Leeds Art Gallery (incorporating the Henry Moore Institute). In Wakefield, the city’s art gallery (originally founded in 1923) moved in 2011 to new premises and now calls itself The Hepworth – it achieved a huge impact and was Museum of the Year in 2017.  Rising out of the River Calder by an unimpressive weir, and looking across at the less attractive environs of Wakefield Kirkgate station, the museum, designed by David Chipperfield (whose fine work I’ve come across across the world, from Berlin and Essen to Anchorage), has a fairly anonymous exterior but good exhibition spaces. The collection features a good range of early-twentieth-century English artists such as Spencer Gore, Roger Fry, Ben Nicholson and William Scott. There’s a room dedicated to Moore (including the intriguingly Hepworth-like Stringed Figure and Bird Basket (both dating from 1939) and several rooms on Hepworth, with plenty of background on her working techniques. Of course, she moved to St Ives (Cornwall) in 1939 (with Ben Nicholson), where her studio, now managed by the Tate, is a popular attraction.

From medieval times Wakefield was a prosperous centre of the wool trade, establishing itself as a inland port on the Calder, and from the nineteenth coal mining was important too; Wakefield gained a cathedral in 1888, and was capital of the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1889 until 1986. However the coal pits closed and the city was increasingly overshadowed by Leeds, now firmly established as the regional capital, and the diocese of Wakefield was dissolved in 2014, to put the final stamp on the process of decline. Even so, I was pleasantly surprised by the cathedral, in reality a parish church that gained cathedral status in 1888 but seems not to have lost it when the diocese was dissolved. An extension was added in 1905 by John Loughborough Pearson, who also built Truro cathedral, and the high altar was added by his son Frank.

Another medieval highlight is Wakefield Bridge, near the Hepworth, with its Chantry Chapel, both built between 1342 and 1356 – the chapel is now one of just four surviving bridge chapels in England, and oddly enough I cycled past one of the others, in St Ives (Cambridgeshire) just a month or two back. This is close to the rather optimistic Wakefield Waterfront, a few warehouses being revitalised near The Hepworth, where a Riverside Garden is also being developed.

Near Westgate station, a rather more dynamic area than that around Kirkgate, a modern library opened in 2012, and The Art House took over the old library on Drury Lane, offering fully accessible studio space and an exhibition hall; however The Orangery, right by the station, has closed.

Although it’s busier than Beverley, which I visited a few days later, the area still bears the scars of the pit closures – but I’ve seen some great stories about the fight against obesity here, in children and others, and schools are busy setting up wild gardens, along the lines of those I saw in Todmorden (and in Liège).

I don’t want to say much about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – it’s wonderful, with lots of sculptures (what else) by all the big names (Moore above all) dotted around some lovely parkland, as well as a few temporary indoor exhibitions, and it seems to me that it’s best to call in from time to time and see a bit of it, rather than trying to see everything in one go.

In the big city, the Leeds Art Gallery also specialises (after the Rodin and the Calder by the entry) in twentieth-century British art, including Auerbach, Bomberg, Matthew Smith (two rather good paintings), William Roberts, Wyndham-Lewis, Gertler, Lowry, Brangwyn, Sutherland, Clausen, Orpen, Lavery, Sickert, Wadsworth, Paul Nash, Leon Kossoff, Paula Rego, Bacon, Blake, and Lubaina Hamid (who is suddenly everywhere after winning the 2017 Turner Prize). There are also a couple of artists that I’m more familiar with through their Cornish connections, Atkinson Grimshaw and W Scott Tuke (born in York in 1858, and the founder of the Newlyn School – though most of his paintings are of Falmouth Harbour). There are also half a dozen paintings by Jacob Kramer (1892-1962), born in Russia but regarded as a key figure in the Leeds collection – although I don’t think he really cuts it on the broader stage. Some foreign artists are represented, such as Vuillard, Derain, Gaudier-Breszka, Diego Rivera and Naum Gabo, as well as four paintings by Jack Yeats (brother of the more famous William Butler) – he was really very talented, but these are not his best.

But of course, the sculpture is the important thing here, and the LAG and the next-door Henry Moore Institute (you can walk through from one to the other) have built up one of the world’s strongest collections of sculpture, covering the last two centuries but especially strong between the years 1945 and 1965. Sculpture’s not altogether my thing, but I noted the pieces by Epstein (Maternity, created in 1910 for the British Medical Association building), Hepworth, Canova (his last version of Venus, 1817-20), Lynn Chadwick, Pasmore, Paolozzi, Mary Martin and Richard Long.

Terracotta students?

The LAG’s former sculpture court (originally the city library’s main reading room) was renovated in 2007 and is now the Tiled Hall Café, of note both for the lovely décor (yes, tiles do feature) and for its food.

I do still plan to write about York at some point, but I should say here that what sculpture is to West Yorkshire, ceramics are to York – well, there’s no triangle, but the Centre of Ceramic Art at the York Art Gallery is a real centre of excellence.

It never produced the greatest beer, but the Tetley Brewery has been a Leeds icon for two hundred years – when they finished brewing just south of the city centre, their grand Deco headquarters block was reopened with great fanfare as a cultural centre, The Tetley – there’s not actually a lot happening there as yet, but it has a pleasant bar and restaurant, serving pub grub such as Tetley’s ale and beef stew, what else. There are some far funkier community-driven arts spaces here, such as Seven Arts in Chapel Allerton, the Brudenell Social Club and Hyde Park Book Club) (yes, really), both to the northwest of the centre and putting on a lot of live bands as well as other events.

There are some other good museums here, such as the Thackray Medical Museum (far more fun than you might think) and the Leeds City Museum, which gives a great overview of its development from near-total obscurity (Leeds may be on the site of the Roman settlement of Campodinum, later a minor residence of King Edwin of Northumbria) to developing as a town in the seventeenth century followed by mass industrialisation in the nineteenth century. It was the monks of Kirkstall Abbey, established just three miles to the west in 1152-82, who created the local textile industry, but the wool was processed in rural homes until around 1800, when factories began to take over. Leeds had been connected to Hull and Europe by the Aire & Calder Navigation since 1700, but in 1818 the Leeds and Liverpool Canal connected it to the Atlantic and the rest of world. The Middleton Railway, opened as a horse waggonway bringing coal in to Leeds, became in 1812 the world’s first railway to use commercially successful steam locomotives (it’s now a volunteer-run heritage railway), and the Railway Foundry, opened in Hunslet in 1838, was the first to produce a standard range of steam engines (notably the Jenny Lind class), rather than each railway building its own. A prosperous manufacturing centre, Leeds also became known for its grand shopping arcades (still pulling them in), and as the birthplace of Marks and Spencer (as the ‘Penny Bazaar’ stall in Kirkgate Market) in 1884. The museum also galleries dealing with Life on Earth and Ancient Worlds (Egyptian, Greek and Roman), as well as one of the Leeds Clocks made by John Harrison (born in Foulby near Wakefield in 1693).

The ruins of Kirkstall Abbey are worth a visit (and have a new railway station), as is Temple Newsam House. I also like the look of Thwaite Mills, on an island in the Aire & Calder Navigation; less than three miles east, where there are two waterwheels over two hundred years old and the Georgian Thwaite House, restored to its 1940s condition – opening hours are fairly limited outside local school holidays, but I hope the place will gather momentum.

A few foody places

The area between the Aire and Calder Navigation and the new south entrance to the station is a lively regeneration area, with canalside cafés and hipster bars under the railway arches – the most striking way to reach it is by the virtually traffic-free roads under the railway that cross the long-hidden river, its arches and tunnels artfully lit in changing colours. The Kirkgate area is more genuinely hip, with places like Crowd of Favours (a food-focussed pub, but it serves food only to 19.00 on Sundays, by which time they’re worn out after serving Sunday ‘lunch’ all day – a trend I don’t really agree with) and Wapentake, a rather amazing combo of café, bar and artisan bakery, with lots of vegetarian/vegan options (they serve brunch from 07.30 (10.00 at weekends) to 16.00 and the main menu from noon to 21.00 (19.00 Sun/Mon), which works a bit better for me). I also like the look of Knave’s Kitchen, a vegan junk food stall (lots of seitan and tofu) near the Corn Exchange (built in 1861-3, an amazing space with a very striking roof that now houses speciality shops). Of course there are hundreds more eating and drinking options in Leeds, especially in the student areas north of the centre.

Transport (briefly)

Leeds station is now amazingly busy, and can be quite a bottleneck. The TransPennine rail axis is one of Britain’s busiest commuting and leisure routes, and has not been well served by a policy of cramming in lots of three-car trains (between Liverpool, Manchester, Huddersfield, Leeds and York) rather than accepting the need to just double the length of the trains (and the platforms). Electrification has been cancelled, but a few longer bi-mode and diesel locomotive-hauled trains are to be introduced from 2019.

Beverley and around – minsters, priories, pubs and three Saint Johns

I do like Beverley – it’s your classic East Yorkshire market town, not as posh as Malton in the foodie stakes but with some lovely cafés and restaurants and particularly characterful pubs. The town’s Great Charter was granted in 1359, when it was perhaps the tenth-largest town in England (or at least one of the twelve largest, depending on your source), due to the wool trade, what else – it had a complicated system of self-government, with two Keepers or aldermen chosen each year from a court of eighteen, but reverted in 1573 to a more normal mayor and corporation system. It also boasts not one but two fine churches that would be larger and grander than many towns’ parish churches.

There’s the Minster, of course, almost a mini-cathedral built between 1220 and 1425, which has no fewer than three chapels dedicated to the fallen members of the East Yorkshire Regiment as well as plenty of other military memorials dotted around the church. There are also fine fourteenth-century stone carvings of musicians in the north aisle and 68 misericord seats in the choir (more than any other church in England, and some very amusing), dating from 1520; near the altar is a rough stone seat dating from the eighth century, which might have been a bishop’s throne.

At the other end of the town centre is the equally striking St Mary’s church, which was built in no fewer than fifteen phases between 1120 and about 1524 (although flying buttresses had to be added by Augustus Pugin and his son in 1853 to keep the south porch in place). In the northeastern corner is St Michael’s chapel, a Gothic masterpiece dating from 1325-45 (with priest’s rooms above), where you’ll see a carving of a rabbit dressed as a pilgrim which is said to be the origin of Tenniel’s White Rabbit illustration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The great west window, dating from the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century, is supposedly reminiscent of that of King’s College, Cambridge, where of course I occasionally go to concerts or evensong – but it’s a little-known fact that the west window of King’s actually dates only from 1879.

Interestingly, in 1188 the town and the Minster were hit by a disastrous fire, and sometime soon after 1213 the Minster’s central tower collapsed (and was rebuilt by 1270); likewise in 1520 the central tower of St Mary’s collapsed (and was rebuilt by 1530).

The town’s other historical building that’s worth a visit is the Guildhall, now the local history museum – bought by the town in 1501, it was rebuilt in 1762 to create a courtroom with a lovely stucco ceiling by Giuseppe Cortese, and the present facade was added in 1832 – medieval timbers were revealed at one end of the courtroom when it was refurbished in the 1980s. You should also find your way to The Treasure House, a modern combined  library and museum incorporating a bit of tourist information, a tower with views over the town, and a bridge to the Art Gallery, which proudly displays paintings by Fred Elwell (1870-1958), a well-loved Beverley artist whose depictions of local scenes are definitely worth a look.

This area has lots of other fine large churches, due to the wealth of wool produced here in medieval times – by chance, cycling towards the Roman road out of the seaside resort of Bridlington, I came across Bridlington Priory, which used to be absolutely immense and is still huge, even with only its west end standing. Founded in 1113, it was dissolved in 1537 and stripped of its treasures for the king; the central tower transepts and chancel were demolished (with some of the stone used to repair the town’s harbour) – the west towers were added only in 1874 to give the church its present more balanced appearance. The much-loved Prior John died of the plague in 1379 and was canonised in 1401 as St John of Bridlington – he is easily confused with the more famous St John of Beverley, Bishop of York, who retired to a small hermitage near his birthplace and died there in 721. To add to the confusion, there’s also St John Fisher, born in Beverley in 1469 and executed by Henry VIII in 1535 for upholding the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy and refusing to accept the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England.

Hull Minster

From Beverley it’s an easy hour’s cycle ride down to Hull, which I wrote about in the run-up to its stint as Britain’s City of Culture – that went very well, and delivered many good results for the city. The Ferens Gallery is looking great, and although they insist it was nothing to do with the City of Culture, Holy Trinity Church (built c.1300) has had a thorough refurb and was promoted to Minster status in May 2017 – happily, it can still claim to be the largest parish church by area in Britain. Thanks to regeneration funding, it now has mod cons such as underfloor heating, so events such as beer festivals are being held in this rather amazing space! I also cycled past Selby Abbey but couldn’t get in due to a wedding – oddly enough, its central tower also collapsed, in 1690, and was rebuilt. And of course there’s the amazing York Minster, the grandest cathedral in northern England, where my ‘god-brother’ (my mother’s godson) sings in the choir – I’ve briefly mentioned York before but will try to get around to a full post at some point.

It’s also worth mentioning, especially for those of you with kids, that most of these churches house oak furniture by Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson (1876–1955), who developed a trademark of carving a small mouse (obviously) on most of his work.

 Pubs in Beverley

Beverley’s pubs should really be listed above with the town’s historic buildings – no fewer than 17 of them are Grade II-listed, and the White Horse (universally known as Nellie’s) is a wonderful period piece with its gas lighting and wonky floors (no, you’re not that drunk) – a seventeenth-century coaching inn, it was enlarged in the mid-nineteenth century, and owned by Samuel Smiths since 1976, so of course their standard bitter costs just £2 a pint! From a beer-drinker’s perspective, the most interesting are The Chequers, Yorkshire’s first micropub (so no lager, no spirits, just interesting beers from small mainly local brewers) and the Monk’s Walk, another seventeenth-century inn that stresses its old-fashioned no-TV-no-canned-music credentials, but there are plenty of others – the Sun Inn claims to be the oldest in town, closely followed by the Lord Nelson, while the Cornerhouse is worth a visit as a Black Sheep pub. At the upper end of the scale, the Beverley Arms Hotel has been bought by the Daniel Thwaites brewery and refurbished, and reopened in July 2018 – in the 1770s Mary Wollstonecraft was taught in a house on this site, and in 1868 Anthony Trollope based himself here for a parliamentary election in 1868 (annulled due to corruption, as expected – in this notoriously corrupt constituency, all the Liberals could hope for was to push the Conservatives to more outrageous bribery than usual and then expose this, but in this case the borough was actually disenfranchised) – his novel Ralph the Heir was based on his unhappy experience here.

Trains and beds

On the transport front, I was impressed by the rail service – there are generally two trains a hour from Hull to Bridlington (via Beverley), some to/from places such as Sheffield. However there’s a thinner service on from Bridlington to Scarborough – with the development of an hourly TransPennine axis from Liverpool to Scarborough (via Manchester, Leeds and York), the line south from Scarborough has become something of a poor relation. There’s also a daily train from Beverley to London and back.

Finally, I’ve posted before about the disfunctional Youth Hostels Association – I stayed at the delightful Beverley Friary hostel, where the notice below was posted outside the front door. It was totally false, there were plenty of beds, what they didn’t have was a volunteer warden. There were two members of staff who could check in the few of us who had booked well in advance, but no more than that. Their wages were certainly not covered by what we paid, so no wonder the YHA is in trouble.

PS I now know that the same thing happens in Belgium, where the staff at the Mons youth hostel cleared off at 20.45, although there were definitely still beds available.

Norwich – not just an amazing cathedral

Norwich is a lovely city, once the second largest in England, which had a huge number of both pubs and churches, many of which survive – though not all are used for their original purpose. It also has one of the great Gothic cathedrals, which is just as described in the guidebooks and needs no help from me.

The town is dominated by the keep of the Norman castle, one of the finest and most unspoiled remaining (only that of Falaise is comparable) – although the façade of Bath stone was in fact added in 1834-9. It became the city’s museum and art gallery in 1894 (following the museum in Nottingham Castle, opened in 1878) – nowadays the keep is a striking but under-used three-storey space, and the galleries are arranged around the Rotunda, created in 1969 by filling in a courtyard. Over the next two years a major project will reinstate the floor inside the keep and recreate the Great Hall (see below for more on the museum). Until then the basement and Prison Stories gallery are closed.

The city has an interesting history that’s relevant to our own times – it became wealthy and populous through trading with continental Europe, but was also the site of the first blood libel in 1144, when the Jewish community (French-speaking, and closely linked to the Norman rulers) was accused of killing a boy in what was alleged to be a ritual murder. From Norwich this evil notion spread across Europe and has been commonly rolled out in outbreaks of antisemitism.

Rather more uplifting is the story of Julian of Norwich (c1342–c1416), a nun who had mystical visions and whose Revelations of Divine Love is the first book in the English language known to have been written by a woman (yep, Julian, not Julia). In about 1414 she was visited by another female mystic, Margery Kempe (c1373 – after 1438)  from Kings Lynn, who dictated The Book of Margery Kempe, possibly the first autobiography in the English language, telling of her many pilgrimages as well as her mystical conversations with God.

Norwich also received many Protestant refugees from the Low Countries, known as the Strangers, who revitalised the city’s weaving industry with modern know-how, and introduced printing and brewing with hops (until then, English beer was just a safer alternative to water). They also brought canaries with them, hence the nickname of the city’s football team. Alas, the city, already badly hit by the Black Death, lost a third of its population to plague in 1579, including many of the Strangers, but they were reinforced by Huguenots, exiled from France, and the city was effectively tri-lingual (English, French and Dutch) for some time.

Dutch influence in Norwich

Even in the eighteenth century the city had not expanded beyond its medieval walls. It did grow to around 37,000 by 1800, but other cities were growing much faster. However, the Norwich School of Artists (a club more than a teaching establishment), founded in 1803, was the first such body outside London, and benefitted from the area’s historic links with the Netherlands (and the similarity in their landscapes) – many of the local nobs owned paintings by the great Dutch artists. Their fresh realism was striking, but the finest of the Norwich artists, John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) became increasingly impressionist and indeed Turneresque (alas, he was forgotten by the time of his death, and there were no obituaries). In 1814 Colman’s of Norwich was founded and its mustard is still England’s best known – Jeremiah James Colman (1830–98) bought many paintings by the Norwich School’s leading artists, and donated them to the Norwich Castle Museum.

As well as the Norwich School, the museum has odd works by Jacob van Ruisdael, Hobbema, Aert van der Neer and Gainsborough, as well as a Hogarth of a drunken friend vomiting (painted at the wife’s request), a big double portrait by Zoffany and Gilpin of a couple with horses, a Van Loo of Horatio Walpole (younger brother of Sir Robert and a Norfolk MP for 54 years), a David Roberts of Jerusalem and a Burne-Jones Annunciation. There’s also a limited amount of twentieth-century art, notably pieces by Gwen John, Marie Laurencin, Bridget Riley, Maggi Hambling, Sandra Blow, Ana Maria Pacheco and Mary Potter. For some reason the art galleries are also home to Nelson’s hat from the Battle of the Nile and a Spanish admiral’s sword captured at the Battle of Cape St Vincent- there’s no doubt that he was very aware of his image and indeed took care to promote his brand as far as possible.

Other galleries cover natural history, decorative arts, and history, from ancient Egypt via the Snettisham Treasure, Boudica and the Iceni, Roman settlements such as Venta Icenorum (now Caistor St Edmund, three and a half miles south of Norwich) and the Saxon and Viking invasions, to the arrival of the Normans and the foundation of Norwich. It seems to end there, except that, like most of the city museums I’ve visited recently, the local regimental museum has been incorporated, covering the twentieth-century campaigns of what is now the Royal Anglian Regiment. I was interested to learn of the regimental almshouses built in Norwich and Kings Lynn after both world wars, which are still in use.

The huge Market Place is the heart of the city’s commercial core – unusually, it’s filled by a tightly-packed grid of semi-permanent booths, many serving food, and almost all seemingly claiming to be ‘bohemian’ – it’s obvious that anything that claims to be bohemian cannot actually be so. Anyway, it’s dominated by the massive City Hall, a classic Deco block completed in 1938, and on the south side by the church of St Peter Mancroft, the largest of the 32 medieval churches within the city’s walls – it’s known for its superb Perpendicular architecture and 15th-century stained glass (above all in the east window), and also as the burial place of Sir Thomas Browne, who was a doctor in Norwich from 1637 until his death in 1682 and is occasionally remembered as the author of some remarkably polymathic books in majestic but melancholic Baroque prose. The most obviously relevant to Norwich is Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial, a meditation on death, burial practices and the ephemerality of fame, inspired by the discovery in Norfolk of some Bronze Age burials in earthenware vessels. Browne was perhaps the favourite author of another adopted Norfolk writer, WG Sebald, who taught at the University of East Anglia until his death in a car-crash in 2001.

On the north side of the Market Place, the Guildhall (1407-24) was the seat of the city’s civic bodies until the City Hall was built; it looks a bit like a church, with its flint-coated walls. In the maze of largely pedestrianised streets behind the Guildhall are other medieval buildings, such as St Andrew’s Hall, completed in 1449 as the nave of the Blackfriars’ church and used as a public hall ever since the Reformation, and the fifteenth-century church of St John Maddermarket, now maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust and open three days a week, its interior crowded with monuments, Georgian woodwork and Victorian stained glass. Almost as central is the Strangers’ Hall, with its Tudor Great Hall atop a fourteenth-century undercroft – its name comes from the immigrants who were put up there in the sixteenth century. The magnificent staircase and its window and the Walnut Room were added in 1627; it’s now a museum of domestic history, open two to four days a week. Finally, the Dragon Hall, a medieval trading hall built in 1427-30 and known for its spectacular crown-post wooden roof, is now home (the Norfolk and Norwich Heritage Trust having been wound up in 2015) to the National Centre for Writing, but is open roughly monthly for volunteer-led tours. Known as Writer’s Centre Norwich until its relaunch this year, this led the drive for Norwich to become England’s first UNESCO City of Literature in 2012, and now supports both writers and readers in many ways. Of course Norwich’s contemporary literary fame is based on the University of East Anglia’s creative writing courses, established by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson back in 1970.

Speaking of the university, do not fail to make the pilgrimage out west to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a superb building (built by Norman Foster in 1976, one of the best of the high-tech buildings of that period) housing a simply amazing collection in which art from British Columbia and Alaska, Ecuador, Egypt, Mesoamaerica, the Cook Islands and the Marquesas and Africa (for instance) is displayed alongside paintings by Soutine, Modigliani, Giacometti, Moore, Degas and above all Picasso and Bacon, as well as a few oddities by the likes of Zoran Mušič, Edmund de Waal and Mark Gertler. Labels tell of a ‘production place’ rather than a nationality, putting all the artefacts on a level playing field.

And finally… the pubs

There’s only one pub that you have to visit in Norwich – no, I’ll rephrase that, there’s only one pub in Norwich that I own a share in, but it is a goodie. The White Lion has real ales from Milton and elsewhere, but it’s even better as a cider pub, with 19 varieties available when I was last in, and it just feels like a great local pub. It’s just north of the river from the centre, in the area where most of the Strangers settled – known as ‘Over-the-Water’, this is still a slightly odd area, within the walls but still semi-detached from the main part of the city. Nine of its seventeen churches still stand – it’s remarkable that so many of them have been taken over by theatrical or musical groups.

I’ve also enjoyed visiting the King’s Head, which has at least a dozen real ales on tap (and mild is always available, but keg isn’t), and the Vine, right in the centre, which is the city’s smallest pub and serves good beers and better Thai food. For something totally different, the Belgian Monk offers a wide range of, yes, Belgian beers and food (mussels and all that) – it’s more restaurant than pub, but still, pretty authentic and not bad value.

As you’ll recall from my post on Cambridge’s pubs, the dominant breweries in East Anglia are Greene King and Adnams, but there are a couple of smaller ones in the Norwich area. Lacons in Yarmouth was founded in 1760 and closed in 1968; it reopened in 2013, with the original yeast strain retrieved from deep-freeze in the Norwich-based National Collection of Yeast Cultures. I’ve also enjoyed the Weizen (wheat beer) from the Grain Brewery, not in the Isle of Grain but a few miles south of Norwich.

‘My’ pubs in Cambridge

I’ve lived in Cambridge for just over twenty years now, and before that ten miles outside the city – I just washed up here because it’s where my last salaried job was. But I was cycling down Marylebone High Street in London one day in about 1999 when a fellow travel writer (working as a cycle courier) saw me, did a swift U-turn, and told me that he was moving to Cambridge because he had identified it as the best place to start a brewery. He then destroyed my electric drill constructing said brewery, but that’s another story. Richard turned out to be a very good brewer and a better businessman, so when in 2001 he suggested investing in a new pub company I was willing. That too was very successful – our first three pubs, in Peterborough and London, have since been profitably disposed of, and we had to wait ten years to see a dividend, but since then it’s ticked over very nicely. We now have three pubs in Cambridge plus the White Lion in Norwich (another city I’ll be writing about before too long).

The first of our Cambridge pubs to open, in 2010, was the Devonshire Arms, which used to be a Jamaican dive, with a massive sound system, sticky floors and no beer other than Red Stripe – at that stage we pretty much did all the remodelling ourselves, and the amount needed here was massive! But it’s been a very popular and lively pub ever since reopening (although the clientele has got a bit more alternative) – definitely a real ale venue (mainly Milton ales, of course, but plenty of others too, as well as real cider, a Moravian lager, wines and malt whiskies), but there’s decent food (notably pizza). It’s in the so-called ‘beer quarter’ on either side of Mill Road, with other great pubs such as the Cambridge Blue, Kingston Arms, Alexandra Arms and the Live And let Live, as well as the Salisbury Arms (see below), which is a bit more towards the station.

The Dev was followed by the Haymakers in 2013 and the Queen Edith (the only pub that’s anywhere near the huge hospital complex…) in 2015, both of which have a similar offering.
Actually, I’ve been prompted to finally write this post in part by reading Brew Britannia by Boak and Bailey, which I mentioned in my previous post on Penzance – I wasn’t aware that Cambridge had played such a rôle in the real ale revival, with its first beer festival in 1972 and then annually from 1974 (when they offered 25 beers, including Schumacher Alt from Düsseldorf). I was at the 2018 festival a week or two ago, and I couldn’t begin to count the number of beers on offer, or the number of people attending. It turns out in the book that the Salisbury Arms was one of the first pubs to be run by CAMRA’s business arm, opening in 1976 – it has long since been spun off, and is now a very successful Pizzas Pots and Pints pub (along with the Carpenters Arms on Victoria Road and a few others in neighbouring towns) – this is a new brand developed by the Charles Wells brewery in Bedford, who also own my local, the Red Bull on Barton Road (which does good pizza too, with a very popular two-for-one deal on Mondays). I find it interesting that there are several new mini-chains of largely food-led pubs, such as the City Pub Group (Cambridge Brew House, the Mill, the Old Bicycle Shop, the Waterman and the Petersfield, all pretty decent). The Old Crown in Girton has just re-opened and is along the same lines (though a bit posher) – it’s owned by Greene King, the dominant regional brewery, but is now run by Stuart Inns, who also manage a select number of other posh pubs across East Anglia, such as the Greyhound in Lavenham and the Swan in Long Melford.

Greene King is unpopular, owing to its grasping way of doing business (driving competitors out of business) and the way it squeezes its pub managers and landlords; Suffolk’s splendid Adnams brewery only has one pub in Cambridge, the Castle Inn, which is very popular with all those who have sworn to avoid Greene King. The days when GK otherwise had a quasi-monopoly of Cambridge’s pubs have long gone – in addition to the Milton pubs, there are other Charles Wells places, such as the Elm Tree, which does an amazing line in Belgian beers (with a huge folder of tasting notes to help you choose). In fact the Elm Tree has been leased by Charles Wells to B&T, a smaller brewery in Shefford, Bedfordshire, but it usually has a beer or two from Charles Wells or Young’s (a historic London brewer), which merged in 2006.

The Elm Tree is very close to the Free Press, in an area called the Kite which was once expected to be cleared and replaced by a massive shopping centre; both pubs closed for a while. but the area survived and gentrified and the pubs are both very popular. The Free Press was for a long time Cambridge’s only non-smoking pub (and the best place to find mild), and I regarded it as my local when I was actually living ten miles south of the city. Again, it’s more food-oriented than it used to be, as its URL reveals, but that’s ok. (Actually, now-Michelin-starred chef Angela Hartnett cooked here way back before I ever came in.)

The other current trend in pub ownership is for them to be closed by the big pub companies and then re-opened in a community buy-out – this is usually because a village is about to lose its last pub (having already lost its shop, post office and bus service) and comes together to save it. Therefore this hasn’t happened in Cambridge itself, but it does apply to the Ancient Shepherds in Fen Ditton, the Hare and Hounds in Harlton and the Green Man in Thriplow, for instance. All well worth supporting.

Other Cambridge pubs worthy of note are the Maypole (known for its great range of beers and for its very affordable cocktails – the only true city-centre pub mentioned here, although the Champion of the Thames is a fine traditional boozer too), the Portland Arms (known for live for music) and the Punter, which doesn’t offer a huge choice of beer but does good food in a pleasant setting, as well as the Blue Ball, the nicest pub in Grantchester and the nearest to Cambridge (my ‘other local’ in a way), which didn’t do food under its previous, rather grumpy, ownership but now offers a few decent dishes. I wanted to like the Thirsty Biergarten, a summer pop-up in a churchyard, but over-priced pasteurised ‘craft beers’ and a food van are really not my thing, though young people seem to like it. Nor am I interested in NOVI, which used to be the Fountain Inn and now is a trendy modern venue serving espresso, craft beer and cocktails. Two pubs have just opened at Cambridge’s main station (yes, we have two stations now, and with luck a third in a few years), but I’m not too bothered. It’s not that I’m dead set against craft beer and keykeg as such, but I can’t see why they cost 20-25% more than cask ale, or why people pay those prices.

2for1 pizza and a pint at the Red Bull, Barton Road (whoops, all gone!)
No comment needed

Penzance

Penzance is, of course, the westernmost town in England and thus the commercial centre of Penwith, the far west of Cornwall – while St Ives is the tourism centre. My sister lived for quite a few years in a lovely Georgian villa in Penzance which is now available on AirBnB, so I used to spend quite a bit of time there. After a rough recession when many shops closed, the town is now seeing a bit of a renaissance, with a well-established artistic community being joined by some excellent food outlets, most notably seafood restaurants such as Shore and Harris’s and just west in Newlyn the Tolcarne Inn. There are some lovely delis, cafés and pubs too. Falmouth, which I wrote about recently, now has a branch of Rick Stein’s Padstow seafood empire, but without a university Penzance is not going to see the rapid gentrification that has recently hit Falmouth, alas.

Apart from restaurants and the county council’s shocking decision to close the heliport (a vital link to the Scilly Isles) in 2012 so the town could have another big supermarket, the most exciting thing to happen in Penzance in years has been the rebirth of the Jubilee Pool – saved by being freed from the dead hand of the county council. Opened in 1935 (the year of George V’s Silver Jubilee), it’s a classic Art Deco lido or salt-water pool, with a triangular pool set against gentle curves and Cubist changing rooms. It was badly damaged in the storms of early 2014 and then more or less abandoned by the county council; however a community group raised funds to restore it and it reopened in 2016 to a chorus of acclaim. The café, relaunched as a social enterprise in 2017, is doing well, and now opens on Friday evenings to serve pizza as well as the usual daytime offering. The big news in 2018 is that they’re drilling to find geothermal water, in order to have a naturally warm pool as well as the ‘brisk’ sea-water.

Community groups are also behind much of the town’s artistic activity (so far from London, the Cornish are used to having to do things for themselves), in particular the revival of its pagan festivals. On December 21 last year the ancient Montol festival celebrated its tenth anniversary (yes, I know…), but the midsummer bonfire festival, Golowan, has taken place annually since, oh, 1991. Actually this was a longstanding tradition that was closed down in the 1890s by the town council for the usual bureaucratic reasons of risk and inadequate insurance. In fact they’re both wonderful events, very lively with locals and not tourists (and nothing like the mobs at the bonfires in Lewes).

Not a pub, alas – this is the Egyptian House.
Drinking in Penzance

I was prompted to finally write this post (which has been brewing for a while…) after being given a copy of Brew Britannia, an excellent account of the recovery of real ale in Britain, by (Jessica) Boak and (Ray) Bailey, a pseudonymous pair who I knew from their fabulous blog about drinking in every pub in Penzance. They have done very well and are now known as ‘the beer blogger’s beer bloggers’ and, alas, have moved to Bristol. But the book is great! (even if they barely mention the Blue Anchor in Helston, 20 minutes from Penzance, which has been brewing its own beer for 600 years or more, and where I passed much of the misspent portion of my youth.) And they don’t really have a bad word to say about any of Penzance’s pubs.

My local here has always been the Crown, because it’s handy and friendly and because they brew their own (not at the pub, in fact just around the corner from where my sister now lives); sometimes they do a decent quiz too. Just down the hill is the Lamp and Whistle, a pleasant but slightly odd place – I went in once and they didn’t have any beer on at all, and even normally they prefer so-called craft beers (on gas) rather than proper hand-pumped real ale. But they certainly do like their Belgian beers and Polish vodkas (and the like).  There are other good pubs, such as the Yacht Inn, a striking Deco treasure near the Jubilee Pool, the Alexandra, with a good selection of beers from smaller Cornish breweries, and the Admiral Benbow, which I actually remember above all for its banana splits when I was a kid. Outside Penzance, the Star Inn in Crowlas also brews its own (Potion No.9 is a great golden session beer), and the White Hart in Ludgvan is a splendid gastro-pub (with plenty of vegetarian options).

Of course the Ginaissance is a big deal here too, with local distillers such as Caspyn Gin, St Ives Gin (producing Cornwall’s first cold-compound gin, flavoured with local gorse flowers) and Curio in Mullion, a little further away, making fabulous quadruple-distilled gins flavoured with rock samphire and other local botanicals.

Railway improvements

And finally… I was told that there was no need for my usual coverage of public transport because ‘the railway ends at Penzance and that’s that’. Well, actually… there are some interesting changes coming this year. Penzance was of course the western terminal of the Great Western Railway’s main line, served since 1904 by the legendary Cornish Riviera Express, which reduced the journey time from nine hours to seven when it was introduced; it is currently timetabled to take just over five hours. The train starts off quickly from London’s Paddington station on the most modern railway in Britain, recently rebuilt for Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) services and electrification to Bristol and Cardiff, but after a 125mph sprint to the splendid new station at Reading it turns off onto a less impressive route which gradually gets twistier and slower; there’s a maximum speed of 110mph, then 100, then just 60 over the southern fringes of Dartmoor and not much faster on through Cornwall (but with more frequent stops, so that you lose the will to live west of Truro). In addition, the signalling on the line through Cornwall is ancient and spaced out in long sections, which has made it impossible to schedule a regular hourly service. However, resignalling in 2018 will allow a consistent ten-minute headway along the main line and let two trains an hour run in each direction.

In addition to the London trains (every couple of hours) and Cross-Country trains to Bristol, Birmingham and beyond (generally northbound in the morning, returning in the afternoon), there are local multiple-unit trains to Plymouth and Exeter. As the long-serving High Speed Trains on the London run are replaced by new bi-mode trains in 2018, they are to be re-formed into so-called GTI trains, with two power cars and just three passenger carriages, to give a huge boost to the local services.

In Penzance station, look up at the row of huge paintings hanging on the south side – they’re by Kurt Jackson, West Cornwall’s finest (and now, alas, most expensive) painter, who does amazing things with landscapes, incorporating words and grit and even feathers in his paint. He’s recently opened a gallery in St Just, which really is virtually the last village in England, a windswept place out on the cliffs between Cape Cornwall and Land’s End.

[August 2021 – Dark, Salt, Clear

When I wrote about Penzance I said very little about its twin town of Newlyn – and now I don’t have to, as Lamorna Ash’s Dark, Salt, Clear has presented a wonderful picture of the town and its fishermen. She skilfully combines accounts of her time spent on various fishing boats with references to writers such as Walter Benjamin, Woolf, Conrad, Elizabeth Bishop (one of whose poems supplies the book’s title) and Barry Lopez, whose writing blew me away when I first moved to Alaska. Also WG Sebald, about whom I wrote here (and even Philip Pullman). Obviously this places her at the literary end of the spectrum of writing about place, or whatever we should call this (it’s not exactly travel writing, I think, nor anthropology), but there’s plenty else to enjoy here.

 A twenty-two-year-old Oxford graduate working on a thesis for a masters in anthropology, she did a textbook job of inserting herself into her subjects’ lives. It’s no life for a non-smoking vegetarian like me, but Lamorna seemed to fit in pretty well, despite being ‘a posh girl from London’ (albeit with a Cornish first name). She’s less good on minor technical details, such as not knowing what a winch is, or thinking that fishing boats run on petrol and that the Torrey Canyon was a container ship – and does she really not know what the Red Arrows are? As ever, of course, I blame the editors. I’m not sure about her grasp of geography outside Newlyn – no-one would ever call St Just north Cornwall, and when she writes about Woolf seeing Lelant beach from Talland House in St Ives, I assume she means Gwithian beach.

 She did most of her research in 2017, but managed to touch only briefly on the Brexit vote – as she notes, Cornwall received roughly £80m a year in EU funding, but voted decisively to leave largely because of fishing issues. She also played a nice little joke on everyone else who knows West Cornwall by seeming not to know about the Penlee lifeboat disaster, finally covering it in Chapter 22 (although there was the odd subtle hint before then) – as she admits, ‘it comes up in nearly every conversation’.]