County Towns of England Part 1

 

The centre of Oxford Town

Many of the county towns of England,  such as York, Lincoln and Worcester, have actually been cities since time immemorial. So what's the difference between a town and a city? In the late middle ages, a new city would be created by royal charter, and it would generally have to have a cathedral. By the twentieth century things had started to become confused and we had towns with cathedrals and cities without cathedrals; some towns wanted to be cities to enhance their status and it eventually reached point the point where any old towns can apply to become a city. For example Milton Keynes, not much more than 50 years in existence anyway, became a city in 2022 as part of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations! The postcard here depicts Carfax in 1960, which is recognised as the centre of Oxford; in the early 1960's I passed by here every day on my journey to and from school. Apart from the pedestrianisation of many of the roads it has changed little since my day. The WH Smith's branch on Cornmarket Street is still there - I bought my copy of Sgt Pepper's there on it's day of release - probably got a detention for being late.

Staying with the music theme in 1962, round about the same time I was on the bus to school going through the centre of the city of Oxford, Bob Dylan was recording one of his finest LP's which included a song entitled 'Oxford Town'. This had nothing whatsoever to do with my Oxford as it was actually referring to Oxford, a town in Mississipi, USA. The song was an account of the riot which broke out when the local university admitted their first black student. Two people were killed including a French journalist covering the event and much damage was done.

Girls on the RAZZ!

On our recent trip Vicky was visiting Oxford for a hen party to which I hadn't been invited, so I spent an afternoon exploring the backstreets with delight, as did a huge number of tourists from every part of the globe. The girls meanwhile hit the Oxford branch of Brown's Restaurant for a boozy lunch followed by Crazy Golf. I later picked Vicky up and,  not having had a drop of ale all day myself, I took her into The Dewdrop Inn in Summertown about a mile out of the city for a pie and a pint - this was apparently the local haunt of Colin Dexter, the author and creator of Inspector Morse. 

That morning we'd run round the University Parks in a very busy parkrun - nearly 600 runners galloped three times round the cricket pitch where in the mid 1960's I watched Australia playing the university side. That's me hanging on behind the young lad in black, I was not quite sure how to pace things having discovered at the start that I'd left my barcode at our hotel over a mile from the start. I ran through the finish and back to the hotel to retrieve that precious bit of plastic and arrived back to have it scanned just as the final park runners were finishing - phew! So, looking back at this post I've described our day rather haphazardly and a little bit back to front but I think you'll agree that we'd packed quite a lot into one day! And at this juncture I'll return to my pondering of the fuzzy boundary regarding the distinctions between towns and cities. When I was young I'd always thought of Oxford as a town and the locals referred to it as a town (e.g. we travelled into the town centre). In fact the phrase 'Town and Gown' originated in Oxford following violent confrontations between students and townspeople back in the 14th century. Fast forward to the 21st century where the people of Reading, who presumably disgruntled that they'd failed to win city status on four occasion no less, have now produced road signs with 'City Centre' written on them! 

March Winds and March Showers

"Puff, pant..."

So there I was charging down the final hill at the British Masters Cross Country Champs at Rhug in Denbighshire. Just look at that lovely close cropped green sward that I'm floating across. The photo doesn't do it justice - 90% of it was a muddy quagmire and I felt as if I'd been running through treacle for the last half an hour! It seemed to be worth it as some time later, revived by a cup of tea and a large picnic lunch, I found that our over 65 team had come third to win some nice shiny bronze medals. Oh the memories will come flooding back in years to come when I show them to the great grandchildren. 

Put that bow and arrow away!

  The venue for this    years race was the  Rhug Estate which is a  12,000 acre farm and  manor house right by  the A5 on its way to  Holyhead. Travellers  flashing by on their way  to catch the Irish ferry  are likely to look twice  as they pass the  spreading pastures for,  having sailed past  plenty  of flocks of  sheep on the Welsh  hillsides, they are likely  to suddenly get a glimpse of a herd of American bison! The current Lord Newborough (a runner himself) has played host to national cross country events several times now and he enjoys welcoming runners and supporters who gather at the estate farm shop and cafe where the farm's organic produce can be purchased. Yes maybe I should have bought a couple of their bison steaks - maybe next time!

The Brewers House.

One week later we  were off to Northern Ireland to take part in the Hillsborough parkrun accompanied and cheered on by our Irish side of the family. Rather a chilly morning it was but over the weekend we were well entertained and fed and watered to a high degree. The pub in the photo is The Brewers House at Donaghmore. This place is over 200 years old and originally brewed ales for the locals, over the years it fell into decline and became a run down boozer. A few years ago it was revived as a pub/restaurant and now serves fine food as we can testify - we chased in convoy down twisty back lanes to find it and then we tucked into a grand family lunch. (I did hear a rumour that they were considering dabbling in the noble art of brewing once more but there was no evidence of this on our visit.)

Before the feed at The Brewers House - working up an appetite.

Shrews or Shrows?

A couple of months ago I uploaded a photo of the Catholic Cathedral of Brisbane as it might have been, the current cathedral had been deemed too small and in the 1930's a larger 4000 capacity edifice was designed which would have been the biggest church in the southern hemisphere. But due to a lack of funds (and the impact of the Second World War) it was never built. Just a few days ago we visited Shrewsbury Cathedral, a modest sized church that is depicted here. It's just that the spire and tower were never built not for want of money but because the ground was found to be too unstable to support such a structure, shame as it would have been a striking addition to the city skyline. Coincidentally this pleasant building was designed by Edward Pugin, whose father Augustus designed the chapel which preceded and still stands next door to, Brisbane Cathedral! So what do the locals say Shroosbury or Shrowsbury? Listenng to people in the city (and as we'd previously gathered form our discussions with other Salopians, it's Shroosbury (well you wouldn't call a shrew a shrow would you!) And the Shropshire Star conducted an online poll which overwhelmingly favoured Shroosbury as the accepted pronunciation, Shrewsbury being an affectation adopted by people form down south who don't know what they're talking about.

They wouldn't have called this one Paddy's Wigwam!

And here's another church - this one hardly got off the drawing board and only the crypt was completed. This would have been the fourth largest church in Christendom back in the 1930's but financial woes meant that the catholics of Liverpool would eventually have to put up with a more modest, (and futuristic) design now known by the locals as Paddy's Wigwam. The crypt still exists underneath the church and is the long running popular venue for the annual Liverpool Beer Festival.

Here's one of the finalists in the 1889 competition to design the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. This enormous construction was, of course, in keeping with the bigger and better ethos of the city. A slightly less ambitious design was ultimately selected and construction commenced a few years late - and it's still not complete! The usual conditions applied - ground that was not solid enough to support the weight of the main tower, shortage of money and interruptions due to the constraints of various world wars. The local nickname for the building is 'St John the Unfinished'.

So, we've done parkruns in Brisbane and Liverpool but not New York, our most recent bit of parkrun tourism was Shrewsbury of course, a lovely route along the river bank in the city centre, Vicky's first in her new age category! Shrewsbury is notable for many reasons, Henry VII stayed there on his way to the Battle Of Bosworth Field where, against the odds, he defeated the Yorkist army once and for all thus ending the War of the Roses and establishing the Tudor Dynasty. He, unlike his son Henry VIII, only had one wife. Following our jog along the river bank we spent the morning pottering around the medieval town centre and came across a busker who'd been halted by the police on his way from John O'Groats to Lands End. Something to do with the fact that the piano he was pulling along wasn't roadworthy.

It's a long way to Lands End!

Footnote: there are estimated to be over 100 billion shrews in the worlds (definitely not pronounced 'show'!!) Here's a picture of one of them:

Looking very shrewd!

Not the Lake District but it's still Cumbria

Can you see what I see?

  If you follow the west coast of England   northwards alongside Lancashire and     then Cumbria the last town you will         encounter before reaching Scotland is     Silloth. It overlooks the Solway Firth       and faces some of the lowland hills of     Scotland just a few miles across the        bay. Unlike some of the other fairly         industrial towns of the Cumberland         coast Silloth is a surprisingly tidy and     well laid out little place, it doubles as a  neat harbour and a seaside resort. It's    not so touristy now and its heyday was    in the Victorian era when trainloads of    Carlisle workers would come over to      enjoy a bit of sea and sun although we    spotted a number of caravan parks on    the town approaches. We were up too    late to come and take part in the    morning's Silloth parkrun so we nipped    in to Maryport, near where we were staying, and did the parkrun there. But on the Saturday afternoon we trundled up to Silloth and took a walk along the very pleasant promenade. The photo is of me and Skip and 'The Big Fella'.

I saw it first!

We're well away from the big Lakeland hills near Gilcrux which is a pleasant village north of Cockermouth. Primarily we've come somewhere fairly remote to escape New Year fireworks - Skip is terrified of all the bangs, you know firework displays years ago were all about the visual display whereas now it's all about the noise, the louder the better! Cockermouth is a well preserved, modest sized, medieval town tucked away in rolling countryside at the junction of the Rivers Derwent and Cocker. Here Vicky was examining an interesting War Memorial display with some odd looking metal daffodils sprouting behind her. You'll also see a wall painting advertising Jennings Ales and behind that building is the fast flowing river.

Until very recently Jennings was the pride of Cockermouth; the large brewery sits in the shadow of the castle and, between the two of them, these buildings dominate the town. In 2005 the brewery owners sold out to the national brewery chain of Marstons based in Staffordshire. "Don't worry," they said "we'll keep the brewery brewing." But the cynics who said they'd heard that before were proved right in 2022 when the brewery was closed and production transferred to a mega brewery in the midlands, sad days indeed. In our very convivial pub which we ran for a while about 20 years ago one of the popular beers that I sourced for our regulars, many of whom were fell runners, was Jennings Fellrunner Ale a beer now consigned to history...... but, hold on, in a local store we spotted some Bowness Brewery Fell Runner Blonde, on our first night in the area we cracked open a couple of bottles of this refreshing brew and remembered past times. Long may Bowness Brewery thrive!

 

City Life in Australia

 

Welcome to the world of house moving Ozzie style. In most other parts of the world house movers move furniture. In the big burgeoning Australian cities such as Brisbane it can mean actually moving the house! Here's a nice Queenslander style property being relocated, quite possibly to a big field (or in Ozzie parlance a paddock) where it can sit with many other old residential buildings until someone comes along, likes the look of it and buys to one it to a pleasant countryside plot with a view. The home seller wins twice over because they have a lovely big plot in a desirable city centre location where a super duper extra large modern house can now be built where the old Queenslander used to sit. Or a developer can build a lucrative block of flats or office building.

Up, up and away!

 Here's another option, if you've bought  a fairly small single storey property in  the city there are plenty of people called  'House Raisers' who will happily jack up  your home onto something that might  look just like a pile of wooden pallets.  Room for more living accommodation to  be built below, maybe even a separate  apartment! Building regulations seem to  be pretty lax in Brisbane, raising the  height of your house also may well  improve the view from your bedroom  quite a bit, so what if it then obstructs  the view of the people behind you,  there doesn't seem to be much they  can  do about it! We saw one fairly  dramatic example of a house where  they'd dug down to give themselves    a subterranean double garage. And  Aussie garages have to be big in order  to  accommodate all those SUV's.

Even further up!

Of course if you want the best views in the city it pays to live near the top of the highest skyscraper in town. This is what you look down on from the 82nd floor of Brisbane's Skytower. To put it into perspective in the centre of this photo is St Stephen's Catholic Cathedral which is a good sized church building. To the left of it you can just about see a smaller building, this is St Stephen's Chapel completed in 1850; at the time there were very few permanent buildings in Brisbane and a mere 2000 folk lived in the city. In due course the chapel became a cathedral but was eventually considered too small for the rapidly growing populace, hence the need for a larger one which was built next door. Incidentally the chapel's architect was a gentleman by the name of Augustin Pugin who designed a number of 19th century churches of architectural merit in the UK (many of which we have been to in recent years!) An even bigger cathedral was designed in the 1930's, this was going to be the Cathedral of the Holy Name and was intended to be the largest place of worship in the southern hemisphere. They started with the crypt which was actually built but costs escalated and money ran out  - it might have been quite something though to judge by the drawings, the dome would have been 60 feet higher than that of St Paul's in London!

Room for 4,000!

Down Underneath

I can see all the way to LA!

Back in Australia we were based in Brisbane where all our lovely grandchildren live. For a treat we headed down over the Queensland border to the New South Wales seaside town of Yamba. This laid back resort is at the head of the Clarence River and in the nineteenth century the harbour needed a lighthouse to guide shipping into the port. A neat little structure was built and served the local sailors for 75 years whereupon a taller lighthouse was erected and a few years later the decommissioned lighthouse was razed to the ground. This must have upset the locals because they raised the money and with the help of teams of volunteers they rebuilt a replica of the original over a number of years. Here's me on a very hot day in my big hat  - you'll see the lighthouse now serves as the studio for the local radio station. No sign of ladies of the night though - apparently this was the spot for picking up girls selling their wares a century ago!

 

One of the requirements when choosing somewhere to stay was the presence of a parkrun and Yamba had a little beauty just a short walk from our apartment. Here's a shot of the parkrun volunteers at the end of the run including young Ted and his mother who were handing out finish tokens. The wonderful green machine on the left arrived while we were running and over the next hour or so was joined by several hundred other vehicles lining up for the Yamba Hot Rod Rally. 

A couple of blue hot rods.

To my mind a hot rod rally involves souped up old bangers racing noisily round a dirt track cheered on by raucous spectators. But surprisingly there was no racing, the drivers and passengers all parked up and spent the day chatting to each other - a thoroughly amiable social event it would seem. And the locals all got the chance to amble round to look at the gleaming cars and chat to the drivers.

And here's a yellow one!

And another green one, this time on the inside lane going home.

Delft Itself

A night on the tiles!

We've both visited The Netherlands many times for business reasons and for holidays but somehow we've missed out on Delft. It's a pretty little town with an old compact centre ringed by canals - in fact it's a bit like a mini Amsterdam. We stayed in a garret for three nights, well it was quite a roomy garret up three very steep flights of stairs overlooking a canal. It did the trick for us being a short walk from the train station, a short walk into the town centre and a slightly longer walk to the parkrun, our first in The Netherlands. Parkrun hasn't quite taken off yet over here but here there were around 60 runners and walkers trundling round a lovely green park,

Early morning stroll - don't fall in the canal!

 Heading to the left of our front door  and over the road took me along a quiet  canal side walk towards the Oud Kerk.  The Nieuwe Kerk (the New Church -  getting on for 400 feet of height in the  town square) is old enough and dates  from 1398 but the old one beats that by  a fair way. At that time most of the  tallest structures in Europe consisted of  church towers in what are now Belgium  and the Netherlands, the burghers of  Delft were keen that their church should  be on the list but when the tower was  over half way built it started to lean at  an angle, apparently they'd built on top  of an old in-filled canal. Undeterred they  built the remaining bit vertically and it's  stayed up ever since - but you can see  there's a kink in it. My photo shows it  leaning a little to the right. Just to pre-  empt any question about the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Oud Kerk tower is about 50 feet higher. We went a bit gung ho on churches in Delft and also visited the ancient St Hippolytus chapel for a mass (in Dutch) and the larger and rather magnificent Catholic church of St Maria Jessekerk, which together with the Oud and Nieuwe churches is also in the top ten tall churches in South Holland.