Just a quick post to say enjoyed the best beer at both the inside bar and the outside bar at the Wellington last Friday. Inside they had a Thornbridge beer new to me, but delicious – a dark barrel aged slightly sweet beer at 8.5% called Pachamama. Took a little time sipping it before stepping into the yard where the second bar had Oregon Trail, a 5.8% west coast IPA. A proper citrussy and bitter west coast IPA with a full and lasting flavour.
Last chance today for others – like the way it advertises its beer and live music as “Live Ale – Real Music”
It was raining steadily when we set out for the London train on 12th March 2024, but I was nearly dry by teh time we disembarked at Blackfriars station – where the rain was heavier yet. Destination 2 Temple Place, once the UK headquarters of William Waldorf Astor’s property empire, built to his ideas in the last years of the 19th century. The website is worth a look – perhaps start here: https://twotempleplace.org/about-us/
Fortunately only ten minutes walk away, and – by the time we had a coffee at the station – the rain had eased a little. Met Sue there and found empty seats in one of the coffee rooms for a chat before deciding to get amongst the throngs of elderly ladies filling the three main spaces – in the 12 years since they started having exhibitions here this has been by far the busiest, we heard.
This exhibition is called The Glass Heart and it features glass in many (artistic) forms. Apparently two large and delightful multi-panelled stained and painted glass windows in what was once the private office of Mr Astor encouraged a passing freelance curator to propose an exhibition exploring all forms of glass working.
The west window – sunset being the clue. Must be about 10 feet tall.The East window – sunrise (you probably guessed), and probably looking seaward, previous one looking up into the mountains, with a waterfall tumbling towards the river/fiord seen here.
Objects include blown glass in all shapes from glasses and decanters to human hearts and multi-coloured horned bugs not entirely unlike the aliens in ‘Quatermass and the Pit’. The best thing about blown glass is seeing it made, and there are excellent films showing the processes.
But for me the very best are the stained glass windows, not just the pre-existing east and west windows but the Byrne Jones church window showing an angel playing (blowing perhaps) aulos pipes, another pre-Raphaelite piece purporting to be the dove originally over the head of Jesus in a church somewhere but perhaps the most dangerously clawed and beaked raptor-like dove I’ve ever seen.
Sticking with churches there is also a beautiful abstract painted glass panel designed by John Piper in the style of his much larger Coventry cathedral window (80 feet tall by 50 feet wide).
Piper’s piece: Experimental Panel (1965-66)
Piper did not make his glass panels but worked with a craftsman called Patrick Reyntiens who made real Piper’s ideas. There is a great video of Reyntiens discussing the Coventry cathedral window here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G91ge-mSJv0
I would love to have shown you my favourite panel, by a Scot called Pinkie Maclure, called The Soil, and being a central woman gardener urinating onto the pollution damaged earth to bring forth life, which includes plants and insects and a scotch pie and banana! A friend of hers has blogged it though, and its here. I forgot to take a camera to an art exhibition – must be age.
2 Temple Place is free to visit and opens at 11am, The Glass Heart is on until 21st April 2024.
It was raining when we left so we entered the first pub we met as we walked north along an adjacent footpath and up some stone steps. It was the Edgar Wallace (one-time famous author of crime novels and perhaps so named because its very close to the Royal Courts of Justice. Lunch was a tenner for chips, 2 fried eggs and a heap of hand cut deliciously dry ham. Beers include Harveys Best and Timothy Taylors Landlord. And the walls are adorned with posters for every tobacco product available in the sixties and seventies and also a reminder of my 17 years with Tidy Britain, shown in the photo below.
The notice visible through the glazed door has me fascinated, sadly I only saw it when cropping the image at home – must go back and look more closely.
I received a colourful guide to whiskies of the world for my birthday. Seemed rather nice, so I checked whether it had my favourite one (which was also dad’s favourite, so just copying really!). Sadly there was no Highland Park entry, not a good start.
This absence is slightly made up for by a reference to Highland Park in the blending details for my favourite everyday tipple – Famous Grouse. Apparently Highland Park and The Macallan malts are both used in blending Grouse.
After all the pics and text about Scottish, Irish, US, French (!), and Japanese whiskies there is an English one. Curiosity led me to read the details. The English Whisky Company was established in Norfolk in 2006 (and for all I know may have ceased trading since my gift was published in 2013). But the details left me fuming. I learnt that the grain came from Norfolk but the yeast came from Kingston upon Hull IN THE NEIGHBOURING COUNTY OF LINCOLNSHIRE!!. My home city has been shifted from God’s own county (Yorkshire of course) to Lincolnshire.
The book’s cover promises to make me a definitive whisky expert – I have serious doubts about that.
Just a short post, please excuse – but I need to get a drink.
We used to have an elm tree in the street outside our house. It was felled in 2018 because it had become hollow and was considered a risk of falling. Until then it had provided shade in summer and interest all year. Pigeons built skeletal nests and raised young in them – unless the eggs fell between the scarce twigs onto the pavement below! When blue tits fledged from the bird box on the front of our house they would either fly directly into the elm, or land on the ground and climb up the rough bark to safety.
June 2012 and the elm is due for a trimming.
The tree was at its finest in 2012, but it was nearly scratching the windows and it had swayed worryingly during winter storms so the Council decided to cut it back a bit. The result was a bit shocking for a few months, until new leaves grew. The picture below shows it in July 2012, and it reveals the importance of street trees – bringing greenery and habitat into a flat asphalt and paving slab streetscape.
Come 2018 the bulk of the tree was felled, but government cuts had stopped the Council from removing the stump – they could not afford the additional thousands to reinstate the road, kerb and pavement that would be needed. So we got to keep and use the stump a while.
August 2019 sunflowers and nicotiana growing in the stump, meanwhile the tree pushes up suckers all around creating a sparrow-friendly hedge.
Keeping the suckering hedge under control led to many conversations with passers by. Many also stopped to admire the stump-planting. Soon the elm leaves were assaulted by greenfly, and that brought flocks of sparrows, foraging for food.
Hedgerow in summer 2022, plus tomato plant and nasturtium in stump.
Summer 2023 brought a bumper harvest of small yellow tomatoes – several hundred from the single plant as it rambled along the hedge of elm. We encouraged people to help themselves.
Recently a Council person has been and measured around the stump and green space at its base, paint marks have been added to the road and pavement. We fear that we will lose this streetscape bonus – money must have been found for taking the stump away and making good the lifeless tarmac and pavement.
Surely a better use could be found for the thousands of pounds this act of vandalism will cost?
On the 11th January I joined friends to drink in a couple of pubs in the west of Worthing starting at the beautiful timber framed 15th century ‘Parsonage’. This pub is the last building in a short terrace of timber framed properties, but it is the only one which still displays its skeleton of timbers.
Apologies for the carpet fitter’s van and car – on the plus side there is a new carpet in the dining room now.
This is at the south end of Tarring High Street where there are more timber framed houses, but most have had a modernisation make over in the last few centuries resulting in smooth facades. In some cases the true nature can still be seen away from the frontage, as in this cottage below:
Almost certainly built later than the Parsonage, the clue being far fewer timbers. As timber got scarcer it had to be replaced with better engineering. Or perhaps teh Parsonage was just a more prestigious building?
The winding and narrow High Street was bypassed in the 1930s as Worthing expanded – and this may have saved it from demolition.
Just a few yards away from High Street is an even older building, today a community hall, but built as a palace for the Bishops of Canterbury, the whole village having been granted to them by King Athelstan in 939 AD. They had a stone palace built in the 13th century, with a later attachment in the14th. Then, sometime in the 15th century the windows were replaced with those visible today.
The original two storey building is on the left with the later extension on the right, forming the upright of a capital T.
Today perhaps Tarring is just a bit of Worthing, but through most of its history it has been a separate village. In the Domesday Book (1086) it is recorded as being held by the Archbishop of Canterbury and having a population of 41.
Colourful costumes adorned with bells, skipping, calling, clatter of hazel sticks, hanky waving – just the way to welcome the New Year 2024 (with beer as well). The lass serving me said (with a measure of pride) they had sold a whole barrel of Harveys Best (72 pints) in the first 60 minutes of trade.
Cuckoos Nest
Every now and again some motorist wanted to use the road, but seemed content or resigned enough to wait for the dance to finish. Always a busy event outside (and inside) The Pump House, Market Street – possibly the best bit of historic Brighton – complete with an irregular open ‘square’ accessed by narrow roads and footpaths and topped with steep red tiled roofs and small dormers.
Brighton Morris and the left shoulder of a Cuckoos Nest musician
About 2 decades ago I joined Brighton Morris for a practise night. Less than 90 minutes later it became clear to me that I would be learning the basics for months – enough to send me away, after several post-practise beers at a nearly pub. I did though decide to keep my (step) dad’s (lead free) pewter tankard when he died a couple of years ago.
Stick warfare as dance – fingers do get hurt.
After about 90 minutes the promised rain seemed to be approaching so Jackie and I made our way to a pub nearer home with more room inside – the Basketmakers where I drank Fullers London Porter before getting home in the dry.
Borrowed from a friend, I started it thinking I knew nothing about it. Very quickly knew the London suburb he was writing about – not which suburb it was, but the details of its geography. Its set during the ’39 to ’45 war, and the main characters are two young boys (Michael Frayn and his posher neighbour). They live out a semi-fantasy adventure that was very real to them, but they had misinterpreted the real story they investigated.
So why did I know the place? From being a schoolboy myself I was enthusiastic about the development of places, keen reader of Hoskins’ ‘Making of the English Landscape’, collected old maps and explored the changes in the built environment. So I was keen to watch a TV documentary presented by Michael Frayn in 1979 called ‘Three streets in the country’. He walked around the leafy streets where he grew up and explored the way London had expanded into marginal fields paralleling the spread of suburban railways, how builders would buy a field and lay out streets and then develop the site so that the original field systems could be seen in the house details of each builder, how original rights of way were maintained, even if some sections were not part of their plans so became mysterious urban footpaths. All this is in ‘Spies’.
It led me to recalling growing up in Hull – exploring what I now call SLOAP (space left over after planning) and those features of a place often ignored by adults. In the very flat Hull suburbs this included agricultural land drains – engineered open channels taking excess water to the rivers Hull and Humber and still there after housing arrived – as well as grassy spaces beside railway lines, parks after the gates closed, and (being the late ’50s and early ’60s) derelict places undeveloped since wartime air raids.
Friday morning Rowena departed for work and we caught a number 20 bus into town getting off beside the big indoor Moor Market. High points of that visit were the amount of fresh fish, crabs and lobsters for sale so far from the sea, pigs trotters on display at a pork butchers stall (used to be common in Hull when I was young, but I’ve never seen one in Brighton) and a wealth of interesting bottled and canned beers on a specialist beer stall.
We walked on to the city library and the top floor Graves Art Gallery where there was an exhibition of works by ‘The Scottish Colourists’. Four upper middle class boys born between 1871 and 1883, they all spent time in France, Paris especially, and found themselves (to varying degrees) drawn to Monet and Manet, and soon Matisse, with his use of strong colours, led them away from traditional tonal works towards a colourist approach. It has taken me about 20 minutes to create that sentence, I hope you liked it. I confess, it is a vast simplification of their development, but you can read ‘The Scottish Colourists’ by James Knox if you want some details.
Let me show you an example of each of their works, from eldest to youngest:
Luxembourg Gardens (c1910) Samuel John PeploeLa Terrace, Dinard (1900) John Duncan Ferguson (watercolour)Villefranche (1927) Geo. Leslie HunterRoses (c 19130) Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell
My favourite is Peploe, and one in particular pleases me in an extra way – it reminds me of the style of a Brighton friend who died recently, Peter Morris. The use of a black outline in ‘Trees at Cassis’, and that strong light is very Peter Morris.
Trees at Cassis (1913) Peploe
If a city has a tram system I like to try it, so next it was a tram from outside the cathedral towards Kelham Island. I followed our journey on a map, which was good because it let me see that the recorded announcements about ‘the next station is . . .’ was out of synch with the stations, and we could have overshot our destination. I mentioned it to the conductress, she said “yes, its been like that all week”, with apparently no thought that it might confuse newcomers.
Once we found our way to Kelham Island (the signage started us off OK, but then it ceased!) we had lunch and headed to the Kelham Island Museum with its Bessemer Converter front and centre:
This giant steel crucible was filled with molten iron direct from the blast furnace. Then air was blown into the molten mass, which reacted with carbon present in the iron, burning it to carbon dioxide whilst adding extra heat to the liquid iron. Too much carbon in the finished metal makes it brittle, by reducing the carbon to a known small percentage a much tougher malleable steel can be made.
We spent a long time here, enjoying the board-mounted trade displays of Sheffield made knives (made by cutlers, who put on the cutting edge and gave the collective name ‘cutlery’ to knives. The spoons and forks are made from flat metal sheet and pressed to give them their curves – collectively ‘flatware’). Also steam engines, old hand-made cars, 19th century street recreations, artillery and more. But we were due to meet Rowena in the Kelham Island Tavern at 6pm, and I needed to try the beer in the Fat Cat first. Priorities.
The famous Fat Cat pub, once serving beers from the brewery next door which sadly closed down. But Thornbridge brew their beers for them now, so I still got a pint of Pale Rider.
Soon in Kelham Island Tavern which had just hosted a tap takeover by Vibrant Forest so was able to drink (mainly halves of) Pupa, Castanea and Inaudible (the best of those I tried), as well as Marble Brewery’s Mild.
The bar of the Kelham Island Tavern – photo by Rowena, her smartphone is better in low light than my camera (actually an old cast-off of Rowena’s)
Just in case you are interested (I’m eternally optimistic) Kelham Island is not really an island except in a very particular case. Its north side of the ‘island’ is the River Don, and the body of water forming the south side is a small mill leat, taking water from the Don a hundred yards to the west, and returning it to the Don downstream a hundred or so yards. On that basis both the Fat Cat and the Kelham Island Tavern are not on Kelham Island at all, but the museum and the now closed Kelham Island Brewery are.
Jackie and I did some research before setting out for Sheffield by train – pubs, buses, museums, art galleries and a bit of local topography. The last rewarded us first as we spotted the river Sheaf beside our train as we approached Sheffield station. It was early afternoon and a beer seemed appropriate – we made our way to the Old Queens Head – better known for its medieval timber framing than its beers, but when the cask ales from Blue Bee Brewery cost just £3 a pint I felt adequately served. The Ekuanot hopped pale ale was delightful.
The old part of the Old Queens Head
Soon culture called and we found our way (through a multistorey car park, up scores of steps and over a major road) into the cultural heart of the city – a fairly small organ for a place so big, but largely traffic free. The most inspiring built feature was the Winter Garden – a tall glass structure supported by a series of laminated timber catenary arches. (A catenary is the shape taken by a length of chain held, one end in each hand, so it hangs free. The picture below will help)
I recognised and was quick to go over and introduce myself to two Norfolk Island Pines in the tallest section of the Winter Garden – I explained that I had met a relative of theirs high on the moonlike upland of the Canary Island of El Hierro. I’m not sure they understood the detail, but they must have felt my joy and enthusiasm to meet two more such delightful trees all the way from the Antipodes.
Leading off the Winter Garden are a group of rooms called the Millennium Gallery. The first displays items from the Ruskin Collection – a very mixed bag, with little to hold our attention. But John Ruskin’s idea was good – back in the 19th century he saw that working men had little exposure to art and nature, so he determined to establish a series of galleries around England where working people could freely access displays of artistic and natural beauty – Sheffield was as far as the plan got, and the collection runs to several thousands of items. These few rooms hold a changing display drawn from the whole.
We were too late for the main art gallery (on the top floor of the nearby public library) so I suggested we walk to the Sheaf View, a pub where Rowena – niece and our host for the visit – had suggested we meet. Not a short walk, nor yet pretty, but interesting and offering glimpses of the River Sheaf all the way to The Sheaf View – where no view of the Sheaf is available. In addition we passed the Peace Gardens where food stalls abound, a giant covered market (Moor Market), lots of bits of Sheffield Hallam university and a city farm.
The Peace gardens with a tantalising glimpse of hot food stalls beyond the steps and bounding cataracts of water
Whilst the Sheaf View offers no view of the Sheaf it did have beers from Neepsend Brewery including the Citra (and 2 others) hopped Agropelter. The Sheaf View is South Sheffield CAMRA’s pub of the year (2023). The nearby Brothers pub had a delicious Brass Castle brewery chocolate orange stout called Zest4Life. Having got into dessert beers I finished with a half of Benediktiner Weissbier, laden with the heavy scent of banana essence before we all headed to Rowena’s house.
In June I was coming home in the afternoon – a nice sunny day and a lot of traffic but the noise and smell of traffic was moderated by the light coming through the trees along Union Road.
I started seeing the trees, a much more powerful impression than normal, so I kept looking at them. At the end of Union Road I looked south through the trees on the Level.
I just stopped and looked around, enjoying the trees down Lewes Road and in the grounds of Hanover Crescent behind the flint and brick wall.
Across the Lewes Road, almost obscuring the white brick and gothic windowed Wagner Alms houses, yet more trees and shrubs.
Of course this small patch of Brighton has the advantage of lots of private communal gardens, parkland and wide verges complete with some trees.
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