Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Igls tramway

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Igls Bahnhof, Innsbruck, Austria

Igls Bahnhof, Innsbruck, Austria

There’s much to attract the visitor in the Austrian city of Innsbruck.  One of the less likely enjoyments for a first-time visitor is an astonishing curiosity, the Igls tramway [Innsbrucker Mittelgebirgsbahn] – in English, the Innsbruck Central Mountain Railway.

It joins end-on to the Innsbruck city tram-system, which is now a state-of-the-art light rapid transit, with dignified claret-coloured Bombardier trams very similar to the new Blackpool fleet.

The Igls line, which runs as Route 6, climbs sharply away from the streets and disappears into deep forest, climbing steadily by means of cuttings, embankments and hairpin bends to an upland level of pastures, dotted with expensive residences.  It serves two intermediate villages, Aldrans and Lans, and passes a couple of recreational lakes, the Mühlsee [Mill Lake] and Lanser See.  The surviving original Igls Bahnhof building is a generous-sized branch-line station.

It could hardly be a serious tram-route:  its purpose could only be for pleasure, carving its way through the woods, and it has a strong resemblance to the Manx Electric Railway with the practical pointlessness of the Snaefell Mountain Railway.

Surely, I thought, it can’t have run by any other means than electricity.

But it did.  It was conceived as an adhesion steam railway in 1900, and only converted to electric traction in 1936. 8½ kilometres long, it was intended to connect the upland town of Igls with the centre of Innsbruck, yet has never penetrated more than three-quarters of a mile from the centre of Igls, which is now served by buses.

Nevertheless, the tram is more fun than the bus, and is within easy walking distance of coffee and cake.

There’s a detailed history of the line, eccentrically translated into English, at http://www.tmb.at/railways/index.php?lang=de&siteid=6&site=showrailway&id=3.

A more comprehensive study, Roy Deacon, Innsbruck’s Alpine Tramways (LRTA 2011) [http://www.lrta.info/shop/product.php/1101/9/innsbruck_s_alpine_tramways], also describes the Stubaitalbahn line to Fulpmes.

Wentworth Monuments: Hoober Stand

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Wentworth Woodhouse Estate, South Yorkshire: Hoober Stand

Wentworth Woodhouse Estate, South Yorkshire: Hoober Stand

Hoober Stand is an intriguing building, whichever way you look at it.

It’s triangular in plan, pyramidal in profile, with a cupola at the top which always looks off-centre, though in fact it isn’t.

It ostensibly celebrates the victory of King George II at the Battle of Culloden in 1745, while also marking the elevation of the Thomas Watson-Wentworth, 1st Earl of Malton, to the superior title of 1st Marquis of Rockingham.

It was designed by Henry Flitcroft, “Burlington’s Harry”, the super-conventional Palladian designer of the east wing of Wentworth Woodhouse,– here allowed to go a little crazy at the crest of a hill to provide a grandstand view of the mansion and the park of Wentworth Woodhouse,

Like the later Rockingham Mausoleum, it is maintained the Fitzwilliam Wentworth Amenity Trust and opened to the public on Sunday afternoons in the summer:  http://www.wentworthvillage.net/monuments/hoober-stand.

98 feet high, it has 150 steps to the platform.  The view is spectacular.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  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.

The wreck of the Mexico

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RNLI Station, St Annes-on-the-Sea, Lancashire: RNLB Her Majesty The Queen

RNLI Station, St Annes-on-the-Sea, Lancashire: RNLB Her Majesty The Queen

St Annes’ splendid modern £1.3 million lifeboat house, completed in 2003, offers members of the public a view of the boat, currently Her Majesty The Queen.

It is one of ten modern lifeboat stations by the Cornwall-based practice Poynton Bradbury Wynter Cole, who also designed the RNLI College, Poole (2004).

The historical display describes and commemorates the wreck of the Mexico, which resulted in the greatest loss of life in the history of the British lifeboat service on the night of December 9th 1886.

The entire thirteen-man crew of the St Annes lifeboat, Laura Janet, were drowned when it capsized on its way to assist.  Fourteen of the sixteen crew-members of the Southport lifeboat, Eliza Fernley, similarly perished when their boat capsized.

All the twelve crew-members of the German-registered Mexico were rescued by the fifteen-man crew of the Lytham lifeboat, Charles Biggs, on their maiden rescue.

The men who died were fishermen, most of them living in varying degrees of poverty.  They left sixteen widows and fifty orphans.

As a result, Charles Macara, a Manchester businessman who had taken up residence in St Annes, helped to initiate Lifeboat Saturdays, fundraising events which began in Manchester and Salford in 1891 and rapidly spread to other towns and cities.

The RNLI continues to rely entirely on voluntary donations and bequests to support the volunteer crews who continue to save lives at sea throughout Britain:  http://rnli.org/Pages/Default.aspx.

 

Eat your way round Todmorden

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Former Todmorden Industrial & Co-operative Society Limited branch, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Former Todmorden Industrial & Co-operative Society Limited branch, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

When I’m hungry in Todmorden, on the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, I head for the old-fashioned Co-op.  It’s not a co-op any more, though it retains its splendid iron-and-glass two-storey shop front emblazoned with the title ‘Todmorden Industrial & Co-operative Society Limited’.  The building dates from the 1860s, and was refurbished when the Co-operative Society took it over as its haberdashery department in 1910.

Now it’s the Bear Café [http://www.bearco-op.com/cafe], a vehemently wholefood shop and café bringing the very finest local produce in conjunction with the food hub Incredible Edible Todmorden Unlimited:  http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk.

Sometimes you simply can’t get a seat at the Bear Café, so next door is Bramsche Bar [http://www.bramsche.co.uk/about], a little more relaxed and slightly less purist, offering alcohol and meat for those who’re so inclined.  I had eggs Benedictine, which is a combination of the ham and spinach components of Benedict and Florentine.

There used to be a nice little café with interesting posters in the loo which has now been transformed into Hanuman Thai & 3 Wise Monkeys Pub [http://www.hanuman-thai.com/?q=node/1] which might be worth a look.

And that’s just for starters.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Nellie’s

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White Horse, Beverley, East Yorkshire

White Horse, Beverley, East Yorkshire

When I was an undergraduate at Hull University in the late 1960s, what passed for debauchery was a trip on the train to Nellie’s at Beverley.

Once I’d ascertained that Nellie’s was in fact a pub – I was mindful of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), which tells of men who went to the Bear Flag Restaurant for a sandwich – it became, and remains, a favourite.

This famous and memorable hostelry has medieval timbering but has been radically altered in and since the eighteenth century.  It belonged to St Mary’s Church (which stands at the opposite end of the street) probably from 1585, and had become an inn by 1666.

It seems to have changed little since the tenancy was taken on by a sadler, Francis Collinson, in 1887.  Mr Collinson bought the inn in 1927, and after his death it was run by his son, William, and after his death by three of William’s sisters, Nellie (after whom it is now popularly known), Ada and Dorothy, who maintained the ancient tradition of opening their private kitchen to drinkers during the evening, serving from a table beside the hand pumps and washing up with hot water from the coal-fired range.

After the three sisters died in rapid succession during 1975-6 the White Horse was sold to Samuel Smiths of Tadcaster:  under this new ownership the nineteenth-century fittings and gas lighting are lovingly preserved, but not the brick wall that served as the original gents’ lavatory.

There is a grandiose website at http://www.nellies.co.uk/abt.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber 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.

Exploring New South Wales: Newcastle

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Ocean Baths, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Ocean Baths, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Newcastle, New South Wales is a Geordie home-from-home.

The deep-water estuary of the Hunter River was recognised as a source of coal as soon as it was first explored, in 1797.  After it ceased to be a penal settlement in 1822-3, it was colonised primarily by miners from Northumberland and Durham:  it’s slightly unnerving to anyone who knows the north-east England to find that the Australian city has satellites with names such as Gateshead, Hexham, Jesmond, Morpeth, Pelaw, Stockton and Wallsend.

Already exporting the greatest volume of coal of any harbour in the world, Newcastle expected to increase its annual tonnage from 97Mt in 2009-10 to 180Mt by 2013.

Yet the seashore has beaches as fine as any in Great Britain.  Indeed, it’s probably the only place in the world where miners can go surfing at the weekend, if not immediately after work.

As an alternative to surfing, the seashore offers the open-air Ocean Baths (1922) [http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au/recreation/beaches_and_pools/ocean_baths] and the Merewether Baths (1935) [http://envisagedcity.com/2012/02/04], where you can swim in a pool with a sea-view to the horizon.

Like its English counterpart, the Australian Newcastle suffered an economic downturn as the traditional manufacturing industries, particularly steel, went into decline at the end of the last century, but in the past decade the Australian port has been boosted by increases in the prices of coal and iron and easy access to Asian markets.

Newcastle has some of Australia’s finest surviving theatre-buildings, the disused Victoria Theatre (1891) [http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/ahdb/search.pl?mode=place_detail;search=place_name%3Dvictoria%2520theatre%3Bkeyword_PD%3Don%3Bkeyword_SS%3Don%3Bkeyword_PH%3Don%3Blatitude_1dir%3DS%3Blongitude_1dir%3DE%3Blongitude_2dir%3DE%3Blatitude_2dir%3DS%3Bin_region%3Dpart;place_id=100971], the Regent Cinema, Islington (1928) [http://www.abc.net.au/local/photos/2012/05/07/3497267.htm], presently a hardware store, and the still-functioning Civic Theatre (1929) [http://www.civictheatrenewcastle.com.au/index.php?pg_id=26].  Newcastle’s historic theatres and cinemas are listed at http://www.urbaninsider.com.au/uimap/newcastles-hidden-theatres.

Though Newcastle lost some historic buildings in the 1989 earthquake, its most prominent landmark, the Cathedral Church of Christ the King survived.  The Cathedral is such a magnificent building it deserves an article all to itself.

Exploring New South Wales: by rail from Sydney to Newcastle

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View from Noah's on the Beach, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

View from Noah’s on the Beach, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

One of the joys of working for the Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, lecturing on one of their three circuits, was the opportunity to travel to ordinary parts of Australia, away from the tourist tracks, and whenever possible – as I did in New Zealand – I took the opportunity to travel surface so that I could see the landscape.

Accordingly, when I lectured to a succession of societies in New South Wales, I travelled twice by rail on the Main North Line from Sydney to Armidale.

This line was the original connection to Queensland, opened between Newcastle and Wallangarra between 1857 and 1888, and then completed south to Sydney in 1889.

The southern section out of Sydney was the most difficult to construct and is the most spectacular.

Once out of the north Sydney suburbs it shares a route with the freeway, then plunges into the four Boronia Tunnels to Hawkesbury River Station.  From there it disappears into Long Island Tunnel, crosses the thousand-yard Hawkesbury River Bridge (1946, replacing the 1889 original) and immediately enters Mullet Creek Tunnel then skirts the waterside, after Wondabyne Station, into Woy Woy Tunnel, slightly over a mile long.  On the way to Gosford the train provides a panorama of the river, alive with boats.

Beyond Gosford the landscape becomes mundane as the line travels through something we no longer have in Britain – an active coalfield.  There are collieries, a power station, a station with the evocative name Sulphide Junction, and another which was originally Windy Creek but was later renamed, by a popular vote of its Welsh miner inhabitants, Cardiff.

Suburban trains from Sydney actually terminate in the city of Newcastle, but I was booked on the once-a-day, more comfortable CountryLink service and disembarked at Broadmeadow, the out-of-town station in the Newcastle suburbs, to meet my Newcastle DFAS hostess Gwen Hamilton.

The Society booked me into the excellent Noah’s-on-the-Beach [http://www.noahsonthebeach.com.au/page3102/Home-.aspx], to which one day I’ll return.  The only facility it didn’t offer was free wi-fi, for which I trekked to the Bakehouse, 87-89 Hunter Street.

 

Nottingham’s underground 1

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Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham

Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham

Tony Waltham begins his invaluable study of underground Nottingham, Sandstone Caves of Nottingham (East Midlands Geological Society, 2nd edn, 1996), by saying that there are no caves in Nottingham:  all the cavities which honeycomb the historic centre are man-made.

The Sherwood Sandstone strata on which the city stands is so soft that it’s possible to dig a well by hand faster than the aquifer can fill it.  Indeed, the cavities beneath Nottingham have been used as cellars, dwellings, wells and cisterns, access passages, malt kilns and in one possibly unique case a tannery.  Wealthy householders sometimes dug ornamental garden features out of the rock, and from the late eighteenth-century at least sand was mined as an industrial abrasive.

Some of the existing underground sites date as far back as the twelfth century, and centuries before that a Welsh chronicler refers to a locality called ‘Tiggua Cobaucc’ – the place of the caves.

I’m indebted to my friend Stewart for tipping me off about the Nottingham Caves Survey [http://nottinghamcavessurvey.org.uk], which seeks to map all the surviving underground spaces in and around central Nottingham.  The survey uses laser-scanner technology to produce accurate three-dimensional representations for record, and to create fascinating fly-through videos.  The team continues to make new discoveries:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-26816897.

If you’re in Nottingham, of course, some of these fascinating spaces are physically accessible, in some cases for the price of a drink.

The most famous of all, perhaps is the Trip to Jerusalem, a pub which claims a history back to 1189AD, though the buildings are clearly seventeenth-century or later:  http://www.triptojerusalem.com.  Its history is certainly much older than the buildings, because it stands at the foot of the Castle Rock, next to the castle’s Brewhouse Yard.

Drinkers have been calling at the Trip, so it seems, ever since the Crusaders set off to the Holy Land.

 

Exploring New South Wales: Holbrook Submarine Museum

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Submarine Museum, Holbrook, New South Wales, Australia

Submarine Museum, Holbrook, New South Wales, Australia

When I lectured to the Murray River Decorative & Fine Arts Society at Albury-Wodonga on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, I was told over dinner about a town with a submarine, up in the Riverina hills.

I was intrigued, and asked my host Barb Ross to take me to the place where she grew up, Holbrook, which was originally called Ten Mile Creek and then Germanton.

Many Australian-German place-names fell out of favour during the First World War, and the inhabitants of Germanton chose to rename their town in tribute to a naval hero, Lt (latterly Commander) Norman Douglas Holbrook, VC (1888-1976), who took an obsolete British submarine under a minefield to torpedo a Turkish battleship in the Dardanelles in 1915.  He was the first submariner to be awarded the Victoria Cross, and the first recipient of the medal in the First World War.

Commander Holbrook took a personal interest in the little town that had taken his name, and after his death his widow, Mrs Gundula Holbrook, presented the council with his Victoria Cross medal.

In tribute to Commander Holbrook the town council raised funds to purchase a decommissioned Oberon-class Australian submarine, HMAS Otway, in 1995.  Mrs Holbrook contributed A$100,000 to bring the outer shell of the vessel above the waterline to the town, and to establish a small park and the Holbrook Submarine Museum [http://www.holbrooksubmarinemuseum.com] alongside.

This spectacle has surprised at least one driver of a huge Australian road-train, hammering through the foggy night until his headlights picked out the unmistakable shape of a submarine’s bows, four hundred miles from the ocean.

Maybe this disconcerting moment saved him from jumping the only set of traffic lights on the 847km road between Sydney and Melbourne.

There is a further display about Norman Holbrook at the Woolpack Museum:  http://www.woolpackinn.com.au.

 

Another Place

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Antony Gormley's 'Another Place', Crosby Beach, Lancashire

Antony Gormley’s ‘Another Place’, Crosby Beach, Lancashire

Why is it that local councils want to look a gift horse in the mouth when they’re presented with an opportunity to adopt a tourist attraction of international importance?

Bristol City Council was initially dubious about having the SS Great Britain sitting in the otherwise useless harbour in the 1970s.

Bradford failed to support Jonathan Silver’s attempt to bring the Victoria & Albert Museum’s South Asia collection to the derelict Lister Mill in Manningham.

Sefton Council in Merseyside wasn’t at all keen on Antony Gormley’s haunting collection of cast-iron figures, Another Place, staying very long on Crosby Beach.

Another Place originated in 1997, and Gormley’s figures had previously gazed out to sea in Germany, Norway and Belgium before they were brought to the Mersey estuary as a component of the 4th Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the European Capital of Culture event (2008).

They were intended, when the temporary planning permission for their installation ran out, to be taken to New York, but Sefton Council relented and they are now to remain.

They’re by no means universally popular.  They’re considered a hazard to watersports.  Wildlife authorities worry about the effect of visitors on feeding birds, though biologists study with interest the colonisation of the figures by barnacles.

Some people regard them as pornographic, because each has a “simplified” penis.  Whether the objection is to the penis or the simplification is unclear.

The plethora of brown tourist signs directing motorists to Another Place is stark evidence that this mysterious installation has put Sefton on the map.

When all’s said and done, why else would people traipse down to Burbo Bank, but to gaze on Gormley’s iron men?

Nicholas Wroe’s 2005 profile of Antony Gormley is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/jun/25/art.