Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Museum Mile – the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Leave a Reply
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

You could quite easily spend an entire rainy week in New York working your way round the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This vast treasure house consists of almost 250 rooms filling something like twenty-one acres of floor-space, roughly two million square feet, and only about a quarter of the permanent collection can be exhibited at one time.

The core of the museum was built by the co-designer of Central Park, Calvert Vaux, in collaboration with Jacob Wrey Mould in 1880 to house a collection that had already outgrown two previous buildings on other sites in ten years: long since buried amid later accretions, the original museum has since been extended on at least eight occasions.

Among the most memorable experiences the Museum can offer are the 1978 Sackler Wing which houses the entire Egyptian Temple of Dendur and the Astor Court which contains a reproduction of a Ming dynasty Chinese garden.

A hint of the wealth of paintings in the Museum’s collection can be found simply by checking the Wikipedia entry’s ‘Selections from the permanent collection of paintings’: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art.

Whenever you become footsore or simply overstimulated by this great world museum, the consummate life-enhancing experience is the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, where the memorable views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan compete with the exhibits.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

Museum Mile – the Frick Collection

1 Reply
Frick Collection, New York City

Frick Collection, New York City

There’s a stretch of New York’s Fifth Avenue, bordering Central Park, that’s known as Museum Mile. It’s actually slightly longer than a mile and boasts, in its official definition between 82nd to 105th Streets, nine major city museums, with another couple further along.

My personal favourite is actually just outside Museum Mile, at 70th Street.

When I first visited New York City courtesy of Freddy Laker’s Skytrain in 1981, I knew only two people who’d ever been there. One was my friend Bill, who had lugged his motorbike aboard a tramp steamer and ridden across the USA both ways, and he made me promise that while I was in the Big Apple I’d go and sit by the fountain in the Frick Collection.

This I duly did, and every time I’ve returned to the city I make a point, if possible, of sending Bill a postcard from the Frick.

Built in Louis XVI style by Carrer & Hastings (1912-14), this was the town-house of Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the unlikeable and notably unpopular chairman of the Carnegie Steel Corporation. After the death of Frick’s widow in 1931 the building was adapted as a museum which opened in 1935.

Of all the city’s many museums and galleries, the Frick is intimate and reassuringly calm. The Fountain Court created by John Russell Pope in the 1930s refurbishment must be among the most congenial places to sit and relax in the whole of New York City.

The core collection reflects Henry Clay Frick’s personal taste. I remember standing in front of a fireplace, looking at the Holbein of Sir Thomas More on one side and the same painter’s portrait of More’s nemesis, Thomas Cromwell, on the other.

There’s nowhere in the world quite like the Frick.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

158 Squadron Bomber Command

1 Reply
185 Squadron Memorial, Lissett, East Yorkshire

185 Squadron Memorial, Lissett, East Yorkshire

I was privileged to be a guest when the Derwent Decorative & Fine Arts Society listened to a presentation about the 158 Squadron RAF Memorial on the site of RAF Lissett, by the artist Peter Naylor.

The story of 158 Squadron encapsulates the sacrifice of the men of Bomber Command in the Second World War. 851 personnel of the squadron were killed while based at RAF Lissett. Across Bomber Command as a whole, nearly 65% of those who flew didn’t come back. Their average age was 22. They were all volunteers.

Located on the East Yorkshire coast south of Bridlington, Lissett was the closest Yorkshire RAF base to Germany. It operated from February 1943 and was abandoned at the end of the War when 158 Squadron became part of Transport Command.

When Novera Energy PLC took over the site for a wind-farm in 2007, they agreed to finance a memorial to 158 Squadron, and the design competition was won by the Beverley artist Peter Wallwork Naylor: http://www.peternaylor.co.uk/public/158_Squadron_Memorial.html.

His vision is a silhouette in 15mm weathering steel of a seven-man bomber crew, based on a photograph. The figures are eight feet high, and the composition is curved so that on the seaward, convex side, the men are marching out to fight, and on the landward, concave side, they are returning home – as so many of them were unable to do.

On the steel are engraved the names of the 851 personnel who lost their lives, placed randomly rather than in alphabetical order, with the added phrase “And for all who served with 158 Squadron”.

It’s a particularly powerful image to come across, driving down a quiet lane in the depths of East Yorkshire: http://www.158squadron.co.uk/158_Squadron_pages/158_Memorial.html.

There’s a lay-by with informative interpretation boards.

In the fields behind the memorial are Novera Energy’s twelve huge wind-turbines, made in Germany.

Petra rocks

Leave a Reply
Al Khazneh or The Treasury, Petra

Al Khazneh or The Treasury, Petra

It was the picture of Petra on the front of the holiday brochure that attracted me to book Christmas in Jordan.

In fact, there’s a great deal more to see across Jordan – the Roman city of Jerash, where you can visualise the proportions of streets and buildings and temples and climb to the top of the theatre and look down to the stage and the frons scenae like sitting in the gods at the Hackney Empire, the great Crusader castle of Kerak, and the Omayyad desert castles, none of which are actually castles – Qasr-al- Kharana (which is a 7th-century hotel for caravanserai), Qasr Amra (which is a bath-house, of all things, in the middle of nowhere) and Qasr Azraq (not so much a castle as a fort, Roman, even to its stone doors, last operational when T E Lawrence was about).

But Petra is what I’d come for, and Petra is what it’s all about – “the rose-red city, half as old as time”.

(It’s often said that Guy Burgess, the Cambridge spy, maliciously picked up Rev John William Burgon’s poetic phrase about Petra and twisted it mischievously to describe Harold Nicolson as “a rose-red sissy, half as old as time”. In fact L A Brooke of Wolverhampton, writing in The Sunday Times (August 10th 1997), refers to a slim book of poems by William Plomer, entitled The Dorking Thigh…published either in the late 1940s or the early 1950s. The poem begins: “Aloft in Heavenly Mansions W1. / Heavenly? well certainly sublime, / one finds the abode of D’Arcy Honeybun, / a rose-red sissy half as old as time.”)

You set off down a ravine, through a cleft in the rock, called a Siq, barely ten feet across in places and anything up to a couple of hundred feet high.

And there at the end – though you know it’s coming from the travel-posters, it’s still a surprise – peeps the pink stone façade of what is called the Treasury. It’s bigger than a two-storey building, in crisp clean Classical lines, dating from the 1st or 2nd century AD: it’s actually a tomb, carved from the rock from top to bottom, with three huge chambers behind, which are plain and completely without decoration.

From that grand-slam aesthetic experience the walk down into a widening valley, impregnable from the outside world, is punctuated by lesser but still remarkable surprises – a rock-cut theatre, the Urn Monument, the Corinthian Monument, a gigantic temple to some Nabatean (pre-Roman) god.

The sandstone is not all pink, but in some places has so many different colours in the sediments that it has a rainbow effect. (So the Bedouins make sand-bottles, rather like the Isle of Wight but with camels in the design. I endlessly refused to buy, because not only did the concept feel unutterably naff but some of the bottles were HP.)

The loos were surprisingly salubrious. We stopped for coffee at a tent where the Bedouin in charge turned out to have the most outrageously accurate East London accent, which he claimed to have learnt from a tourist. I didn’t see a fraction of what there is to explore, though I stayed long enough to see the Bedouin souvenir-sellers climbing into their Toyotas at the end of the afternoon, ostensibly to return to their houses on the hills behind. So I’ll have to go back again one day.

Christmas in the desert

Leave a Reply
Wadi Rum, Jordan

Wadi Rum, Jordan

In the autumn of 1997, well before I was up to speed with the internet, I tried to book a Christmas holiday in Florida, only to find that Florida was full.

So instead I gazed at the travel agent’s display of brochures, pointed to a picture of Petra, and said, “I’ll go there instead.”

After a lifetime of running tours of one kind or another, I like an occasional mystery tour, so I declined to read up on Jordan beforehand. I was entirely content to trust the tour-company, Bales [http://www.balesworldwide.com], and they lived up to their reputation.

My Uncle Frank, who’d been to Jordan on his National Service, warned me it’d be cold. I didn’t really appreciate that, though the sun is bright, the December wind across the desert is chilly, and each day I wore the one sweater I’d brought on top of layers of T-shirts.

I was particularly glad of my keffiyeh scarf, especially when I realised that while the Egyptians use them as headgear to keep off the desert sands, the Jordanians use them as multi-purpose scarves à la Pavarotti.

On Christmas Day we went to Wadi Rum, the desert area which is not only associated with the real T E Lawrence but was a prime location for David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia.

Noël Coward thought Peter O’Toole too pretty for the part: “It should be called Florence of Arabia,” he said. Noël Coward knew Lawrence personally, and when the hero of Arabia went into hiding in the Royal Air Force as Aircraftsman T E Shaw No 338171, famously wrote to him beginning, “May I call you 338…?”

Wadi Rum was magnificent: I could watch the colours changing on the hills and the sand all day and into the night. We drove about in 4×4 open trucks, me wrapped up in my woolly sweater and Yasser-Arafat/Pavarotti gear.

The desert air made me ravenous. Three times a day I said to myself I must not eat such insane amounts of food, and at the next opportunity there I was tucking into yet another enormous buffet – salads awash with olive oil, meats cooked in interesting things like yoghurt, astonishing sweets such as Om Ali which is an Arabian bread-and-butter pudding beyond any Briton’s wildest dreams of custard.

I seriously feared for my waistline but I found on my return that I hadn’t gained a pound. As I met my familiar friends they declared without exception how well I looked, so I concluded my trousers must have shrunk at the dry-cleaner’s.

Porth-y-Nant

Leave a Reply
Porth-y-Nant, Gwynedd (1979)

Porth-y-Nant, Gwynedd (1979)

Way back in 1980 I had a holiday in North Wales with a bunch of mates and someone mentioned a lost village on the coast of the Llŷn Peninsula.

With no more information than an Ordnance Survey map we located the unbelievably steep valley of Nant Gwrtheyrn and trekked in the afternoon sun down the precipitous road to the abandoned terraces of the quarry village of Porth-y-Nant.

The granite quarry which overlooks the wide bay was opened in 1861 by a Liverpool company, Kneeshaw & Lupton. In its heyday the place provided granite setts for roadways; latterly it produced larger blocks for civil engineering works and ballast for railways.   All of the output and many of the supplies were transported by sea; the roadway was unfit anything but pedestrians and horse-drawn sledges.

The initial small group of quarrymen’s houses was supplemented in 1878 by two larger terraces, Sea View and Mountain View, which housed families. The chapel, which bears the same date, accommodated a school which in the 1930s consisted of around twenty pupils and one teacher.

The quarry closed early in the Second World War and by 1954 only three inhabitants remained.

Thereafter the village buildings fell derelict, and this is what we stumbled on in 1980. The walk back, up one-in-three gradients and round hairpin bends in the gathering dusk, was not pleasant.

At the time only a notice on a ruined building told us that the place had been purchased by a trust, pioneered by a local GP, Dr Carl Clowes, which transformed the ruins into a thriving Welsh-language teaching centre, Nant Gwrtheyrn: http://www.nantgwrtheyrn.org/default.aspx.

There is an outline of the gestation of this enterprise at http://www.forachange.net/browse/article/1950.html.

There is remarkable film footage of the first motor-car ever to traverse successfully the steep access road (now, thankfully, much improved) in 1934: http://www.britishpathe.com/video/climbing-the-unclimbable/query/wales+hill.

Look, no hands

Leave a Reply
Violana, Musical Museum, Brentford (detail)

Violana, Musical Museum, Brentford (detail)

A couple of hundred yards down the road from the London Museum of Water & Steam (formerly Kew Bridge Steam Museum) stands the modernist home of the Musical Museum, Brentford: http://www.musicalmuseum.co.uk.

This rich collection of mechanical musical instruments deserves at least a couple of hours.

I was taken round by Ron, who’s been involved in collecting these intricate and temperamental machines for six decades. He’s a mine of information, and tells you more if you ask relevant questions.

The collection, which was started in 1963 by Frank Holland MBE (1910-89) as the British Piano Museum, extends from tiny clockwork musical boxes, through barrel organs and player pianos to vast orchestrions – pipe-organs that were designed to reproduce the effects of a full orchestra.

I learned a lot. A pianola, for example, was not an entire musical instrument but rather the interface between the player roll and the keyboard of a piano or organ.

Eventually the recording of performances became sufficiently sophisticated to reproduce the playing of great musicians. Ron allowed us to listen to Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) playing Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ on a grand piano.

A particularly fascinating rarity on show is the violana (or violano), a mechanical violin-player which self-rosinates: http://www.jonroseweb.com/f_projects_violano.html.

The Brentford collection also covers sound recordings from the earliest phonographs onwards. I learned that the only way to quieten the sort of machine that Nipper the dog listened to was, literally, to put a sock in it.

The climax of this collection of mechanical music-making is a mighty Wurlitzer, formerly installed in the Regal Cinema, Kingston-on-Thames. Now it is installed in an upstairs theatre, where it can be hooked to a paper-roll player.

One of the participants in the visit I joined was an accomplished Wurlitzer player, who gave us a quick tour of the instrument.

The Wurlitzer is hired out for £30.00 an hour – an ideal Christmas present for an organist: http://www.musicalmuseum.co.uk/page/30-wurlitzer.

Going to Scarborough Fair

Leave a Reply
Scarborough Fair Collection, Lebberston, North Yorkshire

Scarborough Fair Collection, Lebberston, North Yorkshire

There is a pattern of successful entrepreneurs with a weakness for steam engines collecting historic artefacts as an adjunct to their main business.

George Cushing (1904-2003) at Thursford and Alan Bloom (1906-2005) at Bressingham are fellows in spirit with Graham Atkinson, whose Flower of May Caravan Site at Lebberston, near Scarborough, is the home of the Scarborough Fair Collection, an enjoyable assembly of fairground rides, steam engines, cars, motorbikes and commercial vehicles, embellished with a fine café and a dance hall with two mighty Wurtlitzer cinema organs: http://www.scarboroughfaircollection.com.

Unlike Thursford, which is dark and theatrical, the Scarborough Fair Collection is top lit in daylight. Its rides – including a set of gallopers (c1893), a Noah’s Ark, a set of dodgems and a ghost train – are spread around the building, with helpful notices indicating what time they run. The vehicles and other artefacts are thoroughly labelled, so that it’s possible to understand their significance – and in some cases, considerable rarity – even if you’re not an aficionado.

Among its treasures it boasts four showmen’s engines (one of them The Iron Maiden, star of the 1962 film of the same name), a Foden steam wagon, a magnificent 1937 Scammell showman’s tractor, The Moonraker, and a fully restored showman’s caravan.

There are several mechanical organs,–

  • a 72-key Verbeeck concert organ
  • the 89-key Marenghi organ of Irvins of Ashford, Middlesex
  • the 97-key Gavioli/Voigt Die Münchner Oktoberfest-Orgel
  • a 100-key ‘Condor’ organ (originally 97 keys) by the Hooghuys family

– as well as a small example of a calliope, originally a fearsome contraption that could be heard for miles made for riverboats from locomotive whistles.

Tea dances take place on Wednesday afternoons, using the two Wurlitzers. They are an interesting pair, respectively from the Granada cinemas at Mansfield, Nottinghamshire (1936) and Greenford, west London (1937).

Both are the same size – 3 manuals, 8 ranks – but with contrasting specifications. The voicing of the Mansfield instrument is close to the usual specification of a contemporary church organ (Style ‘D’ Trumpet, Diapason, Tibia Clausa, Clarinet, Violin, Violin Celeste, Vox Humana and Flute) while the Greenford organ is altogether more theatrical (English Horn, Tuba, Diapason, Tibia Clausa, Saxophone, Gamba, Gamba Celeste and Flute).

The Scarborough Fair Collection has much to fascinate enthusiasts for steam, motor vehicles, mechanical music, organs and all the fun of the fair, while at the same time entertaining those who enjoy wallowing in nostalgia over a cup of tea and a cake.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Big boys’ toys

Leave a Reply

Bressingham Steam & Gardens, Norfolk: 2ft-gauge loco 'George Sholto'

Bressingham Steam & Gardens, Norfolk: 2ft-gauge loco ‘George Sholto’

If you’re going to have a train set you might as well have a big one. And if you can afford it, why not have three?

Alan Bloom MBE (1906-2005) was a significant figure in the world of horticulture, the son of a market gardener, an innovator who developed new plants and new ways of planting after he bought the 228-acre Bressingham Hall estate in Norfolk in 1946.

By the 1960s his nursery business and associated display garden were sufficiently successful for him to indulge his other love – live steam. He initially bought a traction engine to assist garden construction:  he ended up with fourteen.

Unlike his distant neighbour and near contemporary George Cushing (1904-2003), who concentrated on collecting road engines and showmen’s equipment at Thursford, Alan Bloom had a particular liking for rail-borne steam.

He subsequently built a miniature railway around the periphery of the garden. Then, in the late 1960s he installed a fine set of gallopers and began to collect standard-gauge steam locomotives.

By the time of his death, the Bressingham Steam Centre, now Bressingham Steam & Gardens, had three separate narrow-gauge railways, the 10¼-inch gauge Garden Railway, the fifteen-inch Waveney Valley Railway, and the 2½-mile two-foot gauge Nursery Railway.

The standard-gauge collection includes some significant items loaned from the National Collection including Great Northern Railway 990 Henry Oakley, London, Tilbury & Southend Railway 80 Thundersley and a London, Brighton & South Coast Railway “Terrier” tank, Martello, in its guise as British Railways 32662 – all of them static.

The museum also owns the last surviving standard-gauge Garratt locomotive in Britain and a vast German post-war Class 52 Kriegslokomotiven (“war-locomotive”), found mothballed in a Norwegian railway tunnel, with a cab the size of a small bedsit.

Like George Cushing, Alan Bloom safeguarded his legacy by establishing a charitable trust, with few employees and many volunteers, but Bressingham has none of the pizazz of the Thursford Collection, with its Wurlitzer, its dancing penguins and roller-skating milkmaids.

Bressingham downplays its commercialism. It’s a relaxed affair of trains and gardens, a honeypot for families where you can wander at will. It’s an admirable place for a picnic.

And it’s a memorial to a man whose legacy is to give pleasure to people: http://www.bressingham.co.uk/home.

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

Leave a Reply

Paul Cummins, 'Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red', Tower of London, Saturday August 30th 2014

Paul Cummins, ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, Tower of London, Saturday August 30th 2014

I like art to be accessible.  I like there to be a layer that is understandable without having to read an essay-length label, with as many deeper layers as may be for the onlooker to discover gradually.

There can be no more accessible art installation than Paul Cummins’ Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, 888,246 ceramic poppies currently being installed, in a setting by stage designer Tom Piper, in the moat of the Tower of London:  http://poppies.hrp.org.uk/about-the-installation.

Each poppy represents a British serviceman killed in the Great War.  The total of 888,246 poppies – and lives lost – will be accomplished in time for Remembrance Day 2014.

It’s impossible to stand in front of this growing array and not be conscious of the sheer human cost, and waste, of the great conflict a hundred years ago.

I can’t think of a more powerful way of recognising the reality of the number 888,246 – the population of Greater Liverpool (864,122)?  3½ times the current complement of the British Army plus reserves (865,305)?  Wembley Stadium filled nearly ten times over (900,000)?  No mathematical comparison can make the impact of the spread of red across the green moat of Britain’s oldest fortress.

It’s a work of genius:  http://www.paulcumminsceramics.com/poppies-to-fill-tower-of-london-moat-in-first-world-war-commemoration.