Enjoying retirement
In The Red Rose County
We had a few things to do today and I thought I had scheduled well. First to the Trafford Centre to get a refund at John Lewis. Next to Altrincham to pick up my leather jacket repaired by our Afghan tailor. What a lovely man. I asked him about some photos on his wall and he explained that he made a repair for the director of 'Real Housewives of Cheshire' and had then been invited along to the set and to a party with said very bosomy housewives. We must watch some time! Anyway we were now in Cheshire and on our way to Lyme Hall which is a fantastic NT place we can visit with our National Art Pass. We stopped for lunch at one of the Brunning and Price Group's pubs - the Bull's Head at Mottram. Great lunch, excellent value, terrific service, and all in the sort of pub where you really want to be. What an amazing formula B and P have come up with. Renovation of historic buildings, brilliant ales and food and exemplarary staff. Flagged floors, rugs, books, lots and lots of prints. What more could you ask. And we were served by a delightful girl in fetching shorts. Five-stars from me. On re-checking on my mobile for opening hours at Lyme Hall I discovered that my research had been faulty. Today the hall wasn't open! A quick decision was made to drive across the High Peak to Buxton . The last time we had both separately been there was the Sixties. The scenery on the way was amazing. Having parked we came across the main shopping street. Pedestrianised, and with hanging baskets, it looked the part. However on walking the street we discovered that the shops on offer were predominantly down-market. I counted 3 vape or similar shops, betting shops, charity shops etc. Not at all the Harrogate in the Peaks we expected. Disappointed, our spirits were raised somewhat by then coming to the famous Crescent. And very beautiful it was too. I loved seeing the crisp new stones with which it had been revived in recent times. The Buxton Crescent is an iconic, Grade I-listed, Georgian building; one of the most architecturally significant buildings in the country, and one of the first purpose-built hotels in the country. It was built by the fifth Duke of Devonshire in the 1780s as a centrepiece to establish Buxton as a fashionable Georgian spa town. Designed by John Carr of York, it originally housed two hotels and private lodging houses. Following various uses throughout the 20th Century, it closed in 1992. Essential repair works were carried out in the mid-1990s after which the ‘Buxton Crescent and Thermal Spa project’ was launched. The renovation was completed during the summer of 2020 with the hotel and spa opening, in October 2020. Opposite The Crescent is 'The Slopes' very appropriately named. After wandering up and down we crossed the road to the Pavilion Gardens and went in the Winter Conservatory. several rooms and very nice. At the other end of the conservatory we came across what we thought was an exhibition of classical cars. A huge range of splendid vehicles from Sprites to Maseratis. All had labels giving approximate values from roughly say £10k to 20k which I thought very reasonable. Fascinating to see the tremendous variety of cars and to stick ones nose through windows to smell leather and walnut...... What we hadn't twigged was this wasn't an exhibition but an auction taking place in the grand Octagon building. It was really interesting to see the bids going in, the hands being raised and the tension and excitement. We walked back through the rain via the lovely Pavilion Gardens..... At the back of the Crescent we came across this fine modern statue of the man responsible for it and so much else - William Cavendish the Fifth Duke of Devonshire. But why round the back? Next stop, the Savoy Cinema in Heaton Moor, one of Stockport's more affluent suburbs. And very nice it was too with its plush seats and the sort of toilets with real hand towels. We saw 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' (the book we sold quite well in our shops). One long cliche with Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton as the chief protagonists. But I'm glad we have sen it at last.
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Trafford town hall (I think when we lived here it was Stretford town hall) is opposite Old Trafford and still a fine building. Lancs were playing Northants (or Northamptonshire as they prefer to be known!), and we wanted to see what the new facilities were like - a Member's restaurant and padded seating apparently as part of the new hotel. Both were tried out. Some teething problems but by and large an excellent addition to things. Lancashire did well in the morning getting a few wickets but then Gay held on for his century. We left jst after tea, and as we had to wait for our train found Brown's bar and brasserie in the centre of Manchester, a typical conversion of an old bank. Here is Pevsner....."The banking hall is amongst the most opulent of any of the date surviving in Manchester, and for that matter, in London." A spectacular change of use.
The Ribble looking a bit different with all the rain we've been having...here on our walk round the local sculpture park.
By car then Park and Ride into York to do as much of the snickelways as we could in unpromising weather and visit Fairfax House which we had never done before. Using the Snickelways Guide we started at Bootham Bar. The existing structure is not Roman but it has been around for quite a while. The archway itself dates from the 11th century and the rest of the structure is largely from the 14th century. In 1501 a door knocker was installed as Scots were required to knock first and seek permission from the Lord Mayor to enter the city. The bar was damaged during the siege of York in 1644. Like Micklegate Bar, it was sometimes used to display the heads of traitors, the heads of three rebels opposing Charles II’s restoration were placed here in 1663. Bootham Bar was the last of the gates to lose its barbican, demolished in 1835. Just through Bootham Bar we found our first snickelway next to the Hole in the Wall pub. What a different world exists when you search the snickelways! Hardly anyone to see, and lots of peace and quiet, and stunning buildings.... 2, 3, 4, and 4a Precentor's Court is an historic row of three buildings which are Grade II* listed structures dating to around 1710. Precentor's Court led us to Dean's Park, the site of the Roman fortress, where the surviving remains of the medieval Old Palace include the building that once housed the palace's chapel. Now a Grade I listed building, it was restored in 1810 and was afterwards used as the Minster Library, the largest cathedral library in Britain, it holds over 130,000 items. It houses the library, archives, the Collections Department and conservation studio of York Minster. Dean's Park forms part of the Minster Close..... What was the Purey-Cust nursing home was very recently converted to 9 amazing houses overlooking the Park and the Minster..... In the Park there is also arcading, dating back to the twelfth century, with some superb modern restoration, which now serves as a memorial to the Second Infantry Division who prevented the Japanese from invading India. The structure has seven arches, in the central one is a bronze laurel wreath which contains the Kohima epitaph- "When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today". The magnificent Deanery is from 1938-9....... Walking along characterful Ogleforth we passed the statue of St Peter from about 1400 which until 2013 occupied the central niche over the great East Window of the Minster. Next to the Treasurer's House, a Grade I listed historic house owned by the National Trust, who also maintain its garden. Thomas Young, Archbishop between 1561 and 1568, and his descendants are responsible for the structure of house as it is today. In the early 17th century the Young family added the symmetrical front and almost entirely rebuilt the house. Behind the Treasurer's House is Gray's Court a Grade I listed house. Dating back in part to 1080 and commissioned by the first Norman Archbishop of York to provide the official residence for the Treasurers of York Minster, it is one of the oldest continuously occupied dwellings in the United Kingdom.Now a luxurious hotel, we decided to investigate and saw a small notice attached to the gate which said the public were welcome to look at the gardens on request. We entered by the characterful front door..... through the Jacobean Long Gallery to the fabulous gardens which, unusually, access the walls direct........ Among a little huddle of similarly historic homes on Ogleforth is Tower House, the oldest parts dating from the 1700's. On the other side of the street the Old Brewery, now apartments and Airbnbs....... The Dutch House is a listed building believed to be York’s oldest brick built house dating from 1648.......... Ogleforth led us out briefly to Goodramgate....... ........where we found our next snickelway Bedern. The area of Bedern has a very chequered history being an area of appalling slums around the 1840s. Now some very sensitive housing has replaced the slums. The Bedern College was founded in 1252, to house 36 vicars choral associated with York Minster and its last surviving buildings are the chapel, built around 1252........ and the hall, mid fourteenth century. We eventually exited in King's Square thence via Petergate and Stonegate.... to our lunch destination, officially opened by our new King and Queen a couple of weeks ago, York Minster Refectory.....a beautiful building in every way. It used to be the York Minster School, established in 1903 in a building that was initially built for St Peter’s School within the Minster’s Precinct in 1833. lovely, but not cheap..... Rain meant no more snickelways..... .....and we just about made it to Fairfax House which in our time in York we had never visited....The Fairfaxes were a long established Yorkshire Catholic family who owned extensive land and property in the county. Their principal residence was Gilling Castle, 20 miles north of York. Charles Gregory Fairfax, ninth Viscount of Emley (1700-1772), who commissioned the re-modelling of Fairfax House, inherited his title and estates in 1738 upon the death of his father William Fairfax, the eighth Viscount. The Viscount married twice, losing his first wife Elizabeth Constable (nee Clifford) within a year of their marriage in 1721. His second marriage to Mary Fairfax, a not so distant cousin, produced nine children – seven of whom died in infancy – with Mary surviving barely two years after the birth of their last child. A further daughter, Elizabeth, died aged 17, so that by 1753 the Viscount had only one remaining daughter, Anne. It was they who used Fairfax House as their winter house. An exceptional collection from the golden age of English cabinet-making and clock-making forms the centrepiece to the Noel Terry Collection which adorns the house. Born in York in 1889, Noel Terry was the longstanding chairman and great grandson of the founder of the confectionery business, Terry’s of York. I interviewed him in the Seventies as part of my logistics project on the confectionery industry, and found him courteous and very interesting, with an in-depth knowledge of the industry. I drew his attention to the neglect of the family graves in York Cemetery, and he wrote a nice letter to me saying he would see to it! Anyhow over the course of his lifetime he formed an outstanding collection of Georgian domestic furniture and clocks which Christie’s have stated to be one of the best private collections of mid-eighteenth-century English furniture. The collection was originally housed at Goddards, Noel and Kathleen Terry’s Arts and Crafts style-home. He bought each piece on its own merit and was not interested in creating interiors in the style of the eighteenth century. Terry’s tastes in collecting furniture were particular and surprisingly consistent, a dislike of gilding and anything too ornate, coupled with a demand for excellent quality. The collection, however, is not only significant because of its exceptional quality, but also because of its provenance. Indeed, its completeness as a collection (kept together in nearly its full entirety) helps to illustrate Terry’s collecting passions, the development of his taste and the evolutions which took place in the process of collecting in the 20th century. A passionate lover of the city of his birth, in 1946 Terry was one of the four Founders of York Civic Trust, for which he served as Honorary Treasurer for twenty five years. It was this that led to his determination that the collection should remain for the benefit of the City of York and, after his death in 1979, his trustees offered the collection to the Civic Trust as a gift on the proviso that it was placed on permanent display. Opposite Fairfax House is another Grade I listed Georgian house, Castlegate House.
The house was commissioned by Peter Johnson, who served as Recorder of York from 1759 to 1789. The site was previously occupied by a number of small houses and, prior to that, had formed the principal part of the grounds of a Franciscan priory. The house was designed by John Carr, a prolific local architect working in the Palladian style, who was considered to be the leading architect of the era in the north of England. Although its completion date is not known with certainty, it has often been estimated at 1763, as this date appears on a rainwater head at the rear of the property. The house consists of five bays, and it has three stories above ground, in addition to a basement. It is constructed of orange-brown bricks, and has a hipped roof covered with slate. The main entrance is through a Doric porch, up a short flight of steps. Although altered, much of Carr's original interior design survives, including staircases and plaster decoration. It seems to be now used as a Masonic Hall. Visits to Katherine and David started off in Glasgow with a trip to The Glasgow Science Centre, a pretty impressive building. And the first thing we saw inside was a view out of the windows of a sea plane landing jetty - most unusual. The Centre itself was absolutely brilliant, loads of very clever interactive displays always well explained and all great fun. Usually at something like this a lot of the 'gadgets' would be broken, but not here. Splendid views of Glasgow across the water too........ I would give the Centre top marks, great fun was had by all of us. It is set in a conglomeration of modern buildings which as a group are very interesting indeed. Anyway, lunch beckoned. On the way we passed an Orange Centre with flags flying...... And our destination was 111 Restaurant run by a Senegalese refugee. You have a tasting menu. Often these are pretentious and expensive. Here, not a bit of it....5 courses for £30, and you have the option of guessing every dish which we did quite successfully I might add. On every dish there were a host of flavours each of which stood out individually, the mark of a great cook. An amazing place, amazing value. Next to a Banksy exhibition at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. Great fun and long queues..... Pics not allowed but in the exit hall scribblers were allowed. Like a lot of modern cities there is in Glasgow a blend of old and new. The impression we formed in our brief visit was very favourable indeed. Here's where I lost my first £5 bet. I wagered Aiisha she couldn't get grandma to do a public dance on Glasgow station.......and lost. Next day we went on the train to Aberdour..... past Murrayfield (built like a fortress)..... some nice buildings....... ....and over the Forth Bridge. At Aberdour we walked to Silversands beach and, on this changeable day, had a bit of fun .....and a mediterranean-style lunch..... We then decided to walk along the Fife coastal path to Burntisland.....very pretty too. On our way the Royal Scot sped past complete with old-fashioned Pullman carriages - this is just after! Burntisland was a bit of a mixture of historic buildings, independent shops, and some truly awful Sixties or Seventies concrete blocks designed with slit windows more appropriate to a high-security prison. That didn't bother us as we were off to the fair for Aiisha to spend the two wagers I had lost, and money kindly provided by her Dad. Not only was the fair good but Aiisha won a friend. And talking of friends the fairground people were the friendliest we have ever come across, allowing her extra time and rides and goes..... After a fair what better than an icecream? At the fair Aiisha also won two pop-ups, so an opportunity to gather all of her collection together at home..... Roxie has to have walks even in the rain. Still good views though. On our last morning, avoiding the second Coronation as best we could, we took Aiisha and friend Eva to Leith to the skating rink. A wander around Leith to our lunch showed us that it is still a working port........ and has many fine buildings of its own. Next, to London. The rail journey on the East Coast is quick and scenic........here we speed past Alnmouth. Our first destination - Wimbledon, where this year we had tickets for Number One court. What an amazing place Wimbledon is....everything neat, tidy, ordered and beautiful. The atmosphere is like nowhere else on earth - middle-class england enjoying a day out watching sport of the highest quality. We saw that Court 12 right at the far end of the Wimbledon complex seemed to have the best mix of matches so we queued (only for 10 minutes) to get on. The anticipation is great. We were rewarded by seeing Muchova v Neimeir and the finish of a match involving the charismatic Berrittini. We were really lucky to gain seats right at the front - you could almost touch the players. We were also lucky to see Katie Boulter win. The Brits wouldn't last much longer however.... Lunch at the Bistro - salmon and a nice glass of white wine - was delicious. Great service too and we were told that where we were sitting was usually a tennis court - close to the action again! Late afternoon we eventually used our expensive Court Number One seats. Again superb positions right behind the Press section........ We had never queued for general entry but we had enjoyed the day so much that we arrived reasonably early the next day to see if we could get in. The answer was no. A steward advised us that the queue was six hours long and the ground was already at capacity! Off we went on the bus to Twickenham and Marble Hill House. Marble Hill was built in the 1720s for Henrietta Howard, mistress of King George II when he was Prince of Wales, as a retreat from court life. Both house and garden were designed with advice from the most fashionable gentlemen of early Georgian England. Saved from destruction and development by an Act of Parliament in 1902, Marble Hill is the last complete survivor of the elegant villas and gardens that once bordered this part of the Thames. The villa is an important and relatively rare example of a house built for and by a woman in Georgian England. It’s a textbook example of Palladian architecture, the fashionable style based on classical principles and inspired by the 16th-century Italian architect Palladio. Henrietta and her home became a magnet for London’s cultural and political élite – including her neighbours Alexander Pope, John Gay and Horace Walpole – on a scale said to rival the royal court. Here is Henrietta........Henrietta Howard was born in 1689 into a titled and respected family, the Hobarts of Blickling Hall in Norfolk. However, her early life was far from easy. By the time she was 12 she had lost her father in a duel and her mother to illness, and the family was burdened with mounting debts. In the hope of finding some security, in 1706 she married Charles Howard, the youngest son of the 5th Earl of Suffolk. This was a disastrous match, as a contemporary observed: ‘Thus they loved, thus they married, and thus they hated each other for the rest of their lives.’ Charles was described as ‘ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, brutal’, and soon squandered what money the couple had on drinking, gambling and whoring. Henrietta was left in fear of creditors and, as she noted in one letter, for her own safety. Although trapped in an abusive marriage and plunged into poverty, Henrietta refused to accept her dire circumstances. She raised funds to travel with Charles to the Hanoverian court, in the hope of currying favour with the dynasty which would inherit the throne of Great Britain on Queen Anne’s death. Her plan was a success. On the accession of the Elector of Hanover as George I of Great Britain in August 1714, Henrietta returned to England and was made Woman of the Bedchamber to Caroline, Princess of Wales. Soon afterwards she also became mistress to the Prince of Wales (later George II). Her dual roles of mistress and servant were not always easy to reconcile, requiring great tact and diplomacy. Described by her contemporaries as handsome, witty and intelligent, Henrietta attracted the attention not only of the king but also of many notable writers, politicians and courtiers. A Chinese lacquer screen is one of the few remaining objects from Henrietta’s own collection because the contents of the house were dispersed before the property came into public ownership in 1902. However, there was a remarkable reunion in the 1980s when a series of Italian decorative paintings by Giovanni Paolo Panini returned to their original home. Otherwise the paintings, furniture and porcelain on display in the house today (much on loan from the V and A) still evoke the 18th-century love of the Orient, and suit Henrietta Howard’s taste and status pretty well. The house has only been open a few months and is still being restored - indeed one of the guides showed us into a room undergoing restoration and not yet open. The grounds are also being restored. We spotted this black walnut tree. The grounds lead down to the river, and here we sat for a little refreshment. Very pleasant. We decided to walk along the Thames Path to Twickenham, and what a lovely walk we had. Truly 'Rus in urbe'. Another grand house along our path is Orleans House now an art gallery........ The fringes of Twickenham were delightful........... And we couldn't resist a stop here at the charcterful White Swan. The church wasn't open, but if it had been and we had been able to climb the tower this is the view. Fabulous. The pedestrianised Church Street was a wonderful end to our walk....... In the evening David took us to an area we didn't know along the Thames from Chiswick and Turnham Geen to Hammersmith Bridge. Wonderful houses and architecture, brilliant pubs, restaurants and delis and great shops...... The next day we drove to Hastings, a place I had always wanted to visit. The net drying sheds were unique. And there was one road full of interesting houses, albeit a main road.......but, apart from that, Hastings was a rather sad seaside place, down in the dumps. Very disappointing. We therefore sought out nearby Rye (like Hastings one of the old Cinque ports but now inland). And what a contrast. If there is a prettier town in England I'd like to see it. Every step you take is a delight with wonderful old houses and architecture, brilliant pubs and shops, cobbled streets, alleyways and more. It is Five Star. Here the quirky 'House With Two Front Doors'. We lunched at The Standard Inn - brimming with character, great service too. The Rye Marsh lamb I had was the best ever - fat, succulent, very tasty. The sticky toffee puddings we had were like wise the best ever. What a great and lucky choice. And there were bits of Rye we didn't see, here Church Square.... the gateway.... and Ypres Tower...... We drove across the marshes to nearby Camber Sands........looked great, but windy and cold today. One more stop on the way back to see The Pantiles at Tunbridge Wells, again on my bucket list and certainly more than worth the short diversion through the beautiful countryside. I haven't mentioned the Kent oast houses, many converted into residential places of great character like these. On our last day, once more in the sun (typical English weather) we lunched outside in the cafe at Acton Park looking at the beautiful crazy golf course........all in all a wonderful week.
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August 2023
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