Category Archives: Life-enhancing experiences

Exploring Australia 5: The Ghan

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The Ghan

The Ghan

The Ghan backtracks over the route that brings the Indian Pacific into Adelaide, including the section from Tarcoola that the Indian Pacific traverses in darkness.  For someone who watches train-journeys like other people watch movies, this is like watching the last bit of DVD that you missed when you fell asleep – but backwards.

This is the great outback railway, originally opened between Oodnadatta and Alice Springs in 1929, along an alignment that proved prone to flash floods which regularly washed the track away.  Apparently the surveyors never saw any rain in all the time they were planning the route;  the rain only came when it was too late to divert the line.  The idea was always to link Adelaide with Darwin, but in the 1930s this made no financial sense.

In 1980 a new standard-gauge flood-free western route replaced the old narrow-gauge Ghan as far as Alice Springs, and the long-intended link to Darwin, via Katherine, was opened in 2004.

Heading northwards from the suburbs and satellite towns of Adelaide, the line runs through a huge plain of agricultural land – market gardens, crops, the occasional herd of cows, racehorses with coats on to protect them from the sun.  At some point in the past, someone cleared all this acreage to make agriculture possible, probably with no more than horse- and man-power at their disposal.

As the afternoon wore on, and the train glided effortlessly across mile after empty mile, I was aware that this vast landscape was initially explored by nineteenth-century pioneers on horseback, working out what there was and where it led from the vantage point of a saddle.  Before them, this land was the home of the Aboriginal peoples who, according to a self-serving 1938 writer quoted by Bill Bryson, “can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation – but…cannot withstand civilisation.”  The conflict between the two ways of life lies heavy still on the national consciousness.

I’ve now learned, having travelled on both the Indian Pacific and The Ghan, that the “welcome reception” is a compromise between the attraction of a free glass of champagne and the agony of a badly-handled radio mike with feedback.  Throughout the journey, whoever was in control of the on-board PA system wasn’t:  announcements and music cut in and out without warning and on at least one occasion photographers were told the train would slow down for a landmark in ten minutes’ time and it didn’t – leaving people gazing through windows bemused as whatever it was flashed by.

On this journey, though, the bonus was that I happened to meet a couple, Gabriel and Cornelia, with whom I struck up instant rapport.  They were in the midst of moving house between Melbourne and Darwin, using The Ghan as the easiest way of transporting a car full of luggage while the furniture took a slower route by road.  We share an interest in Victorian history (in the chronological, more than just the Australian geographical sense) and photography, and Gabriel promised me a list of things to see in Melbourne, a privilege I couldn’t otherwise have hoped for.

There was a brief stop at Port Augusta, where the 1980 Ghan route diverges from the original, ill-advised 1929 alignment.  This prompts me to plan to return some day, to ride the Pichi-Richi Railroad [http://www.prr.org.au/cms/index.php], which offers a 1¾-hour ride, often steam-hauled, along the original route in vintage 3ft 6in-gauge rolling-stock.

(Footage of the final journey on the narrow-gauge Ghan can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIIJSxSCX8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PztgicynYVw.  A more extensive Channel 7 documentary of 1978 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2Jb_f5XCE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoWBObzkJE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94w94BdCUc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaB0D2Q7How.)

The Pichi-Richi people take the view that the name ‘Ghan’ derives from a passenger on the inaugural sleeping-car run in 1929 who, at an evening stop, rushed on to the platform to place his prayer-mat in the direction of Mecca:  the Australian crew assumed, it is said, that he was an Afghan.  The Great Southern Railway Company prefers to ascribe the name to the Afghan camel-trains which the railway replaced.

Port Augusta is the “gateway to the Outback”:  from there on, the landscape is as arid as the Nullarbor Plain, but more varied.  There are gentle contours, distant mountain ridges, a vast snowy white salt lake, river beds – one, the Finke River, a three-hundred-yard wide channel of bone-dry sand.  The landmarks are minor and far between – a stone marker for the border between South Australia and the Northern Territory, a statue, the Iron Man, commemorating the laying of the millionth sleeper on the 1980 route and, eventually, the MacDonnell Range which marks the location of Alice Springs.

Exploring Australia 4: Adelaide

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A Day Out (The Pigs) – Horatio, Truffles, Augusta and Oliver – by Marguerite Derricourt (1999), Rundle Mall, Adelaide, Australia

A Day Out (The Pigs) – Horatio, Truffles, Augusta and Oliver – by Marguerite Derricourt
(1999), Rundle Mall, Adelaide, Australia

The city of Adelaide is really simple to navigate.  Its original surveyor, Colonel William Light, oriented the gridiron street-plan exactly to the compass points.  The periphery of this area consists of four streets, North, East, South and West Terraces, which face the East, South and West Parklands and the Torrens River.  The axial north-south street is King William Street (that is, William IV, after whose consort the city is named).  In the exact centre is Victoria Square.

In fact, most of the major tourist sites sit on the river-side of North Parade, the Old Parliament House, Parliament House, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the South Australian Museum, the Migration Museum, Ayers Historic House (home of an early prime minister of South Australia) and the Botanical Gardens.  There’s enough there to occupy a visitor for a day or two.

Another attraction is to take the tram to Glenelg, Adelaide’s beach resort.  This is a second-generation Light Rapid Transit which glides effortlessly through the Australian suburban dream.  A day rider ticket (A$8.30 – just over £5) gives unlimited travel until midnight on all tram, bus and rail services in the city, though in fact anyone needing only to ride between South Terrace and North Terrace in central Adelaide can travel on the tram for free.  Easy.

At the Glenelg end of the line a vintage first-generation tram provides free rides up and down in between the regular services.  Alongside the beach, the shops and the numerous opportunities for food and drink, there is a superb museum in the Town Hall, the Bay Discovery Centre, covering the story of the establishment of the state of South Australia by the first governor, Captain John Hindmarsh, at what was then called Holdfast Bay in 1836, and the subsequent growth of Glenelg as a resort through to the present day.

I spent much of a day in Port Adelaide, where I was underwhelmed by the Maritime Museum, simply because in a small space it seemed to be trying to do too much.  Jamming in the stories of the founding of the port, the shipping, the immigrants, the growth of Port Adelaide as a community, the industrial conflicts, the natural history and something for the children deserved at least as much space as, say the Maritime Museum in Liverpool’s Albert Dock.

In contrast, the South Australian National Railway Museum fills two great hangars and a lengthy goods shed with gigantic locomotives and other rolling stock, clearly explains the engineering in layman’s terms and narrates the epic sagas of building lines in a medley of gauges from South Australia across the continent and then, mostly, rebuilding them in standard gauge so that people could travel from Sydney to Perth or Adelaide to Darwin without repeatedly changing trains or climbing on board a camel train.

The locomotives are clearly from different stables:  many were Australian built, and others carry builder’s plates from Beyer Peacock & Co Ltd of Gorton, Manchester, Metropolitan Vickers of Manchester and Sheffield and the Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, USA.  One loco is described as based on a British Great Western design, and – sure enough – it has a copper-capped chimney.

This museum encourages people to climb on some of the locomotive footplates and to step into many of the railway carriages:  these range from the luxurious to the penitential, many without any kind of lavatory provision.  The collection includes some of the rolling stock of the Tea & Sugar train which until 1997 supplied settlements along the Nullabor Plain, complete with a bank and a butcher’s van.

In the heat of Port Adelaide in high summer, I was particularly grateful to Eric and Joan Kirkham, friends of an old friend, for taking me to lunch at the Port Dock Brewery Hotel [www.portdockbreweryhotel.com.au], where we were given an informative tour of the brewery by the 28-year-old brewery manager, a man I admired for drinking Guinness the last thing before he left Australia, drinking Guinness again in the half-hour he spent in England before arriving in Ireland to drink Guinness again, proving to himself that it really does taste different in the three countries.  We drank refreshing alcoholic ginger beer, and ate kangaroo steaks with a wild plum reduction and Asian vegetables – in effect, green leaves in runny red jam.

In the city-centre, round the corner from Victoria Square, I stumbled upon Stanley’s, billed as “the great Aussie Fish Caf [sic]”, http://stanleysfishcaf.com.au/1901.html, where I ate great Aussie fish – a platter of whiting, garfish and barramundi, running from sweet to fishy in that order.  Here is all God’s plenty from the southern seas – bugs (giant prawns, served with garlic, chilli or curry sauce, or in their shells topped with garlic butter and bacon), snapper and calamari.

Another night, across the road from Stanley’s on Gouger Street, I ate at A Taste of Asia [no website, apparently, but e-mails to tasteofspice@adam.com.au], which combines Malaysian food with New Orleans jazz discreetly played in the background.  I tucked into crispy wontons and chilli roast duck, while noting an encouraging proportion of Asian customers, many of whom knew the proprietor and staff and were clearly regulars.  It’s always worth eating where the regulars are of the same ethnicity as the food.

 

Tea at the Raffles Hotel

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Raffles Hotel, Singapore

Raffles Hotel, Singapore

It’s worth taking time to have afternoon tea at the Raffles Hotel [http://www.raffles.com/EN_RA/Property/RHS], Singapore’s most venerable pit-stop.

Afternoon tea here is not just a snack, or even a meal, but an occasion, with all that you might expect from a top-of-the-range internationally famous institution – elegant classical decor, white tablecloth, cake-stand, napkin carefully placed on your lap not once but every time you leave the table, and a harpist.  Lots of attentive waiters and waitresses, all of them clued in to the fact that I’d ordered Assam tea, which came in a dainty silver pot that poured slowly and with dignity.  Because I was on my own, someone brought me a magazine, unsolicited, in case I got bored.

The cake stand was, I was told, simply to start things off.  The buffet included hot dishes, of which the most remarkable was a savoury carrot cake with dried squid.  (I can remember being astonished, around 1985, to discover that carrots will make a sweet cake, to which I was introduced by a Canadian lady called Cathy;  here the concept goes full circle.)

It’s important in these circumstances to pace oneself:  the sandwiches (inevitably with the crusts cut off) are moreish;  the cakes even moreish, and a man comes round with a basket of scones at regular intervals.  I lost track of the number of small pots of Assam that came my way as I gazed at the elaborate cast-iron Victorian fountain outside the window.

It was one of the afternoon teas of a lifetime:  the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town offers more variety;  in my limited experience the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate comes nearest to the Raffles.

This is the sort of life-enhancing moment for which you simply don’t ask the price.  When the bill came it was S$57.65, which my credit-card company translated as £26.29.

A bargain.

 

Weekend in Singapore

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St Andrew's Cathedral, Singapore

St Andrew’s Cathedral, Singapore

There’s something reassuring for a Brit about landing in a former British colony like Singapore.  Somehow, the footprint remains almost half a century after the Union Flag came down.

Not only are there evocatively British street names (Clive, Kitchener, Mountbatten), but the traffic drives on the left, the car-registration plates are distinctly British in shape and dimensions (mostly with the white characters on a black background that died out in the UK in the 1970s) and – most useful and endearing of all – the power-sockets are British square-pin standard, so there’s no need to fiddle about with adaptors.

It’s fascinating to discover, patched in between the mainly undistinguished post-war buildings, vestiges of the colonial past.

St Andrew’s Cathedral, for example, is an immediately recognisable, rather blocky Commissioner’s-Gothic Anglican church with a squat English-cathedral spire, painted in brilliant white, designed by Colonel Ronald MacPherson, a military engineer who could clearly turn his hand to any constructional task, and built by Indian convict labourers.  Opened in 1862, it became a cathedral in 1870.  Its aisles are dotted with generous memorials to men, women and children who spent their lives in this sticky, remote and dangerous place:  some died here;  others died back in Britain but were memorialised by the colonial community.

Rather more surprising is the Armenian Apostolic Church of St Gregory the Illuminator, a compact cruciform classical design of 1835, its original onion dome replaced by a gothic spire that sits incongruously on top of a pediment.  Its churchyard is littered with modern statuary, and the church itself is a compact circular space, with doorways open to breezes on three sides.

Elsewhere, British eyes lock on to the 1930s central fire-station which would look entirely at home in Birmingham and a Masonic hall, bristling with compass-and-square symbols.  A half-day city tour showed me that there’s much more to see than can fit into a jet-lagged weekend – every possible kind of place of worship, a carefully conserved Chinatown and a thriving Little India, all reflecting the polyglot energy of the place.

Singapore is a very comfortable place to be, if you can cope with the climate.  The only delinquency I saw was economic – touts trying to lure people into shops.  The policemen smile and greet visitors:  the only time I saw a policeman act aggressively was when a woman tried to cross the road instead of using an underpass.  The police apparently hand out tickets for good driving, with rewards a bit like air miles.

Posters exhort Singapore citizens to promote “graciousness”, and there are notices at the top of escalators reminding people to use the escalator “correctly”.  The Straits Times has the language and attitudes of a 1960s grammar-school magazine.

When I walked into the headquarters of the Singapore Cricket Club at eight o’clock on Sunday morning and asked, as is my habit, for a restroom, I was treated promptly and courteously – and it was an exceptionally fine restroom.  I wonder if I’d get away with that at Lord’s or the Oval.  I hope so.

Singaporeans are notoriously picky about litter:  in the hotel, a magnificent lady reception greeter in a split skirt and full make-up picked up specks from the carpet and fetched a cloth to wipe smears from the marble floor;  I even saw two men in a small boat sweeping the harbour.

And, they disapprove of tipping.

 

Genius of the knife, fork and spoon

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David Mellor Factory, Hathersage, Derbyshire

David Mellor Factory, Hathersage, Derbyshire

My friends Doug and Marion, who share my appetite for life-enhancing experiences, took me to the David Mellor Factory  [http://www.davidmellordesign.com/visitor-centre] at Hathersage, in Derbyshire, recently.

David Mellor (1930-2009) is a fascinating figure.  A Sheffield lad, the son of a toolmaker, he was the beneficiary of an education system that allowed him to begin training at art school in metalwork, pottery, woodwork, painting and decorating at the age of eleven.

As a teenage student at the Royal College of Art he designed his first cutlery, ‘Pride’, which was manufactured by the Sheffield company, Walker & Hall, in 1953, and remains David Mellor Designs’ best-selling range.  Later cutlery designs include ‘Symbol’ (1963), the first stainless-steel mass-produced cutlery, for Walker & Hall, ‘Embassy’ (1963) for use in UK embassies across the world, and ‘Thrift’ (1965), a further Government commission which combined economy with good design by reducing the number of items in a place-setting from eleven to five for bulk institutional orders ranging from prisons to railway buffets.

He made Sheffield his base, and became famous not only for cutlery, but also for Eclipse saws for James Neil, garden shears for Burgon & Ball, and much, much else.  Working with the Abacus company, he redesigned the standard British traffic-light and pedestrian crossing (1965-70).  He devised a bus shelter that ran to 140,000 units and, at the request of the Postmaster General, Tony Benn, rethought the traditional post-box:  his square design was intended to be easier to empty, but encountered much public resistance because it wasn’t round.  A letter-writer to the Scotsman newspaper complained that it would endanger passing drunks.

His first customised workshop building in Park Lane, Sheffield, was designed by Patric Guest in the early 1960s and is now a listed building.  He then took over the derelict Broom Hall, once the home of the Jessop family and dating back to the late fifteenth century, and turned it into a integrated living space and workshop, described in his Guardian obituary as “a rare example of a family house containing a 55-ton blanking press, a 180-ton coining press and two grinding machines”.

Then, in 1990, he moved his business out to the Peak District National Park, taking over the site of the former Hathersage gasworks:  here the factory, the famous Round Building, was built on the base of the demolished gasholder with a roof derived from the principle of the bicycle wheel, upending the Sheffield tradition of fragmented cutlery manufacture so that the processes were integrated within a single space.

The architect was David Mellor’s friend, Sir Michael Hopkins (1935-2023), whose other work includes Portcullis House opposite the Houses of Parliament, the Mound Stand at Lord’s, and the Inland Revenue building and the initial phase of the University Jubilee Campus in Nottingham.

Hopkins returned to Hathersage to convert the retort house and other ancillary buildings on the site into a shop, a restaurant and the David Mellor Design Museum, opened in 2006.

David Mellor married Fiona MacCarthy (1940-2020), the biographer:  their son Corin Mellor (b 1966) is now Creative Director of David Mellor Design, while their daughter Clare (b 1970) is a graphic designer.

David Mellor’s Sheffield-born near-contemporary, Roy Hattersley, added this comment to the Guardian obituary:  “William Morris urged his followers:  ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’  Mellor extended that precept to Britain’s streets.  In the argot of Mellor’s home town, ‘he did all right’.”

The David Mellor Factory is on the B6001 south of Hathersage, just beyond the railway station.  The café is excellent and the design museum fascinating;  factory tours are held at the weekend.

The David Mellor Factory opened a new Street Scene exhibition in September 2013:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23977482.

The most comprehensive account of David Mellor’s life and work is Fiona MacCarthy’s David Mellor Master Metalworker (David Mellor Design 2013).

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley 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.

Chatelaine of Chatsworth

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Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire: south front (detail)

There was a time when Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire could claim to be non-literary.  When her friend Evelyn Waugh sent her a copy of his biography of the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, he inscribed it “For Darling Debo, with love from Evelyn.  You will not find a word in this to offend your Protestant sympathies”, and she noticed that every page was blank – “the perfect present,” as she described it, “for a non-reader”.

Her two masterly descriptions of her home, The House:  a portrait of Chatsworth (Macmillan 1982) and The Estate:  a view from Chatsworth (Macmillan 1990), showed her to be a charming, lucid and informative writer, with an unerring facility for the apt anecdote.

Since that time she has written extensively and has published an autobiography, Wait for me!  Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (John Murray 2010), which is characterised by the candour that contemporary memoirs allow, discussing her miscarriages and her husband’s alcoholism, with the comment, “Sixty years ago none of this would have been discussed:  it would have been swept under the carpet…in the pretence that it was not happening”.

(Andrew Devonshire, shortly before his death, wrote his own memoir, Accidents of Fortune [Michael Russell 2004], honest and modest, as befits a man who declared he won his Military Cross “for being cheerful”.)

In everything the Duchess writes, and in the interviews she gives, there is a characteristic astute common-sense, tipped with asperity – wondering, in a Sunday Times interview with Rosie Millard [September 7th 2008], if the media reporters who hounded her nephew Max Mosley had dull private lives, and vastly preferring Attlee to Blair among Labour prime ministers.

The survival of Chatsworth as a great house and a functioning landed estate is entirely attributable to the courage of Andrew, 11th Duke and to the business acumen of his duchess, Deborah.  When Edward, 10th Duke, died in 1950 four months too soon to escape death duties, it would have been an easy option for his son to sell up, pay the 80% duty and live the life of a prosperous publisher.

Instead, Andrew Devonshire took the view that he and his wife were “life custodians of what has been at Chatsworth for centuries”:  he sold outlying land, handed over Hardwick Hall to the National Trust and gave items from the Chatsworth collection worth four-fifths of the duty owed.  The debt on the actual death duty was settled by 1967;  paying off the accrued interest took until 1974.  Then, with a further sale of a single Poussin and a collection of 69 Old Master drawings, he set up a £21 million trust to maintain Chatsworth.  Visitor entry pays about one-third of the running costs;  the rest is met by the Chatsworth House Trust.

His Grace was always the first to give credit for the way his Duchess turned the estate into an extremely effective cash generator.  She took great pride in the fact that “there are no merry-go-rounds”;  her personal interest has always been in making the house and the estate popular and good value:  “I love shopkeeping better than anything.”

It’s Her Grace’s flair that created the Chatsworth Farm Shop [http://www.chatsworth.org/shop-eat/the-farm-shop], the Cavendish Hotel and Restaurant in Baslow [http://www.cavendish-hotel.net] and the Devonshire Arms Hotel, Bolton Abbey [http://www.thedevonshirearms.co.uk].

When the 11th Duke died in 2004 the title and the Devonshire estate passed to his son, Peregrine, and his wife Amanda.  They are now making their own mark on the house and the estate:  details of the Chatsworth Masterplan can be found at http://www.chatsworth.org/the-chatsworth-masterplan.

Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire died on September 24th 2014 at the age of 94, and is buried with her husband at Edensor on the Chatsworth estate.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 The Derbyshire Derwent Valley 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.

Cosy curry

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Brunswick Inn, Railway Village, Derby

Brunswick Inn, Railway Village, Derby

The other rite-of-passage at the age of sixty, after the bus pass, is the Senior Railcard.  It has to be after the bus pass because there is a cost and it’s not worth having until the first time you use it:  if you buy it the first day you need it, you have more days to use it at the other end (assuming you live that long).

We chose to launch my mate Richard’s railcard by taking the train from Sheffield to Derby, a mere forty minutes, to visit the Brunswick Inn in the Railway Village, three minutes’ walk from the station:  http://www.brunswickderby.co.uk.

Take a close look at the Railway Village houses and it’s obvious that this is polite architecture, not speculative artisan housing – actually by Francis Thompson, company architect of the North Midland Railway – built very early in the railway age, 1840-2.

The pub, occupying the apex of the triangular street-pattern, is distinctly elegant:  apparently it was originally the Brunswick Railway & Commercial Inn – catering for commercial travellers by offering storage for sample-cases, telegram facilities and generous opening hours.

The houses and the pub were scheduled for demolition in 1970, and were rescued by the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust.  The Brunswick reopened in 1987, and a microbrewery was added in 1991:  the place collects awards, including UK Beer Pub of the Year, 2001.

From the Brunswick, we walked round to London Road, where there is a superlative Indian restaurant called Anoki [Derby | Anoki].  Anoki’s chief claims to fame are its superb food – £35 buys a multi-course banquet that leaves you full but not bursting – and its assiduously attentive staff.  The male waiters, who are in a majority, wear the sort of elaborate uniforms I associate with Indian border guards – hats with fans and shoes with curly toes.  The place is high camp:  the immaculate gents is liberally provided with fluffy white towels, the floor scattered with rose-petals.

Its historical claim to fame is that the building is the former Cosy Cinema, built in 1913, and later renamed the Forum (1939) and finally the Cameo (1950).  As the Cameo it featured an adventurous and unsuccessful line in French avant garde films;  better business was done by placing an advertisement at the exit to Derby Midland Station to attract long-distance passing trade.  Occasionally, when the house-lights went up, patrons would be found wearing dressing-gowns and pyjamas, refugees from the Infirmary across the road.

After the cinema closed in 1959 it became a furniture showroom:  installing display windows wrecked the ornate baroque façade.  The restaurant occupies the balcony level, built across to the former proscenium.  The barrel ceiling and caryatides are beautifully decorated and, where the original screen would have been, an endless loop of Bollywood clips is projected.

The place has impeccable style.

Breakfast with the Pudding Ladies

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Sheffield: Bole Hills and Rivelin Valley

Sheffield: Bole Hills and Rivelin Valley

One of the great privileges of reaching the age of sixty is having a bus pass.

When my mate Richard reached his sixtieth birthday we made a point of meeting for breakfast in order to celebrate both his birthday and his new-found freedom.

At some expense (because before 9.30 am you have to pay bus fare even if you’re sixty) we met in the Sheffield suburb of Hillsborough in order to catch the once-every-two-hours bus to Rivelin Post Office.  We travelled in state, because no-one else got on or got off, and from the terminus walked down the picturesque Rivelin Valley, past ponds and waterfalls that in the era of water-powered industry had been dams and mills.

Sheffield has a much better known route, the Round Walk, which follows the River Porter through the elegant Victorian western suburbs.  Rivelin, on the north of the city, is much less frequented, but just as attractive.  All it lacks is more thorough interpretation:  we knew we were looking at historically interesting scenery, but only one notice-board told us anything about it.

There are other priorities, however.  Our goal was the Pudding Ladies’ Café [http://www.rivelinparkcafe.co.uk] which offers smoked-salmon and creamed-cheese bagels for breakfast.  (Richard had bacon and creamed cheese, which seemed to me a little eccentric.)  When his wife Janet appeared, she had kippers and scrambled egg.

Janet looked a little surprised when Richard declined a lift back so he could ride home on Supertram for free.

The guy has style.

London Transport Museum Acton Open Day

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London Transport Museum Acton Open Day, March 14th 2010

London Transport Museum Acton Open Day, March 14th 2010

In some circles, the term “anorak” is pejorative, indicating greasy outdoor clothing, a camera and an unhealthy predilection for standing on railway bridges and the ends of station platforms with a notebook.

In a particularly fine evocation of the attraction of watching steel wheels on steel rails, the journalist Mike Carter, [‘Shunted on a branch line to nowhere’, The Observer, June 25th 2000], tells of the reaction when he asked the assistant at W H Smith, Birmingham New Street, if they still sold trainspotting books:  “‘I don’t think we sell that type of thing any more’, she said, looking at this 35-year-old man as if I’d just asked for the latest copy of Nuns in Rubber.”

I argue that the general public and its posterity owe a great debt to those who spend their weekends scraping rusty metal, polishing brass, learning to drive locomotives, trams, buses and cantankerous vintage cars – or making models of long-gone vehicles. If they also spend their evenings arguing over which defunct railway company had the smartest engines, or how many electric dustcarts operated in Birmingham after the last war, there are far worse ways of passing the time.

And without the “anoraks”, where would we now hear the beat of a steam train approaching, admire the sheer craftsmanship of coach-built cars, buses and trams, sail in a paddle-steamer, see in flight the aircraft that fought the Battle of Britain?

I spent an entertaining Sunday in March at the London Transport Museum Acton Depot, where they keep the trams, buses and Underground trains that won’t fit into the Covent Garden museum, along with piles of memorabilia ranging from posters to railway signals.

I was astonished at the range and variety of volunteer-built models on show – highly convincing representations of trams and Underground rolling-stock ranging in size from miniatures you could hold in your hand to models you could ride on.

You can, of course, buy kits or ready-made models if you want a train, bus or tram to put on your mantelpiece.  You can even buy the kits of my fifties childhood – Bayko and Hornby Dublo. But I most admire the craftsmen (mainly, so far as I could see, men) who spend countless hours getting the detail right and making the whole thing work.

They recreate scenes and customs that vanished a couple of generations ago.  One shows, for instance, how the four-track tramway layout at Dog Kennel Hill in East Dulwich operated, and why it was necessary [see http://londonmodeltramways.webs.com/dogkennelhillmodel.htm and http://www.londontramways.net/articles/dog_kennel_hill.php].  Another provides the only opportunity so far to compare the size of first-generation London trams with the vehicles of Croydon Tramlink, because there was a layout running models of both.

It’s essentially a species of entertainment, and well worth a tenner and a few hours’ time.

Future London Transport Museum Acton Depot Open Day arrangements are at http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/museum-depot/events.

Silversmiths

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Former George Ellis (Silversmiths) Ltd, Arundel Street, Sheffield (2010)

Former George Ellis (Silversmiths) Ltd, Arundel Street, Sheffield (2010)

Sheffield’s proud cutlery industry is based on the work of the “little mesters”, small – often one-man – crafts businesses that divided up the multiplicity of tasks involved in creating tableware, kitchenware and cutting tools.  Some of these businesses prospered and grew, sometimes into very large, ultimately world-famous enterprises such as Mappin & Webb [http://www.mappinandwebb.com/content.asp?coid=27].

Around the original town centre there remain tall tenement blocks, often now converted to apartments or offices, which bear the names of long-gone enterprises which imprinted the phrase “Made in Sheffield” as a mark of quality on the best cutlery in the world.  These are areas very like the better known Birmingham Jewellery Quarter.  There is an excellent account of these characteristic Sheffield buildings in Nicola Wray, Bob Hawkins & Colum Giles, One Great Workshop: The buildings of the Sheffield metal trades (English Heritage 2001) [http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Great-Workshop-Buildings-Conservation/dp/1873592663/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353486144&sr=8-1].

One such was George Ellis (Silversmiths) Ltd.  George Ellis (1863-1944) began working in 1895 in a little mesters’ shop in John Street, gained his own hallmark from 1912 and formed a limited company in 1932.  The works on Arundel Street – in what was originally an eighteenth-century house – ceased trading around 1971.

Now, after some encouragement from Gordon Ramsay, the building is Silversmiths [http://www.silversmiths-restaurant.com] , a very modern restaurant with an emphasis on regional food, which in Sheffield includes the resolutely local Henderson’s Relish, the work of another kind of Sheffield “little mester”, Henry Henderson.

My friend Paul, who suggested we visit, was present when Gordon Ramsay gave his encouragement.  This apparently involves lots of cameras, lights and theatricals.

We happened upon Pie Night, with Yorkshire pudding served – as it should be – as a starter with Henderson’s Relish gravy.  The pies were excellent, with chips like miniature house-bricks.  And there was gooseberry fool.

The inimitable Yorkshire journalist, Stephen McClarence, had a less favourable experience of Silversmiths, so – much as I admire Steve’s writing – I’ll draw a veil over his review.  You can find it if you know where to look.