Dulwich - 17 February 2007

A ‘Canaletto in England’ exhibition is currently on in Dulwich, so we decided to base our day in the Dulwich area.

We started the day with a look at the Horniman Museum. This is one of the many legacies left by wealthy Victorian merchants that people in the UK can enjoy today. The free museum is based upon a collection of items from his travels, but subsequently enhanced and expanded.

We followed this with a walk around Dulwich Park and College, passing the only remaining privately owned toll-gate in London. Since 1789, tolls have been collected on a road that runs through the grounds of Dulwich Public School and the proceeds are used to pay for the upkeep of the road.

We finished the walk at the Dulwich Picture Gallery where the Canaletto’s were being displayed, joining the queue just before they put up the 'sold out for the day' sign. While the English pictures are obviously Canaletto’s they don’t quite have the appeal of the Venetian scenes. (Not that we are ever likely to own either sort …)

Snowdrops - 11 February 2007

Sunday cleared to become a beautiful day and we focused on snowdrop gardens, exactly a year since we last went snowdrop 'hunting'.

Our first visit was to Easton Walled Gardens, which had the best snowdrops of the day. These were only opened a few years ago, after becoming totally overgrown, when the large house was pulled down in 1951. Photos of it show a beautiful, gracious house. In the 60 years from 1900 to 1960, over 1700 grand country houses were demolished. What a waste of British history: victims of high taxation post-war labour changes and shortages and, after WWII, shortages of building skills and materials. How much history over the years has been lost as a result of taxes designed to fleece the supposedly wealthy classes?

The second stop was to re-visit Anglesey Abbey Gardens, itself a victim some 500 years ago, under Henry VIII. They have a superb winter garden that features foliage and bark colours only seen in winter that is stunning both in concept and execution. It is such a dramatic feature that we cannot understand why every landscape park garden does not have one.

Finally, we stopped at Audley End House, which had special snowdrop open days. They planted 4,000 bulbs in 2004 and these are making a good show. The normally tranquil dammed river had flooded its banks and was flowing over the lawns even though the overflow channel was a raging torrent. This was, however, a bonus for photography: it is not often that one gets reflections from a lawn!

In stark contrast to the grandeur of Audley End House was Chestnut Cottage, one of the smallest houses in Britain it measures just 3m x 2.4m. We found it the village of Clavering, Essex, on our way home.

Peterborough - 10 February 2007

Peterborough is these days visited by people making in-person applications at the Passport Office, but originally was a religious centre with one of the country’s early Abbey's, dating from 650AD. The Abbey was sacked and rebuilt a couple of times and ultimately dissolved with all the rest by Henry VIII.

The cathedral, about 800 years old, is huge: an impressive statement of its time that, apart from the ‘new’ addition (15th C) at the eastern end is largely the same as it was when first built.

The vaulted ceilings in the ‘new’ addition were, apparently a trial run by the architect who perfected them in the fabulous chapel at King’s College, Cambridge. The wooden ceiling in the nave is original and unique in the UK. Only 3 others from this period (1250) survive in Europe.

The town centre is pedestrianised and consequently very pleasant to wander around.

Stowed away - 4 February 2007

Leaving London languishing in lugubrious layers of low-lying fog we fled its folds for fields afar furnished with forty follies, forty busts and fifty statues, flung fearlessly, and thus fashionably, across the landscape by Lancelot (Capability) Brown.

Stowe Landscape Gardens are the remains of Capability Brown’s first major commission and the size, number and scope of the temples, follies and monuments that he casually scattered across the landscape for the viewing pleasure of the select few on the Duke of Buckingham’s guest list is quite astounding.

We had previously visited the Duke’s mansion, now a school and although this was our third visit to the park it was the first occasion when we had the time to fully explore all the paths inside the ha-ha: the area the National Trust charges admission for, as well as the old Deer Park outside the boundaries.

The wealth involved in building quite sizeable structures (some now lived in) purely to make a distant vista to impress one’s guests is incomprehensible.

Wey to go - 3 February 2007

In a rare departure from a typical British winter’s day, the forecast for the whole of Britain was for fine, balmy weather.



We headed south to walk along part of the Wey Navigation, the first scheme to install locks on a river to create a transport route in the UK. Opened in 1653, it predated the canal building era by around 100 years.

Just near the start of our 10-mile jaunt we viewed the picturesque ruins of Newark Priory: another casualty of Henry VIII, some 114 years earlier.

Not ringing the changes - 27 January 2007

Our London walk this weekend was from Angel station down through Clerkenwell to Barbican. To be brutally honest, it was not that fantastically exciting but we did discover some new areas of London and walked past a building that we believe is used in the Hercule Poirot TV series as the building Hercule lives in.

We then made our way back to East London to finish of the section of Brick Lane that we missed on our last visit before making our way to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

This business holds the record for the longest running manufacturing business in Britain having documented evidence from 1570, although new research suggest the earliest records may go back to 1420. Over 500 years doing nothing other than make bells that typically don’t wear out is not a great business model in this throw-away age but they have managed it somehow, in what is now an incredibly cramped 1/3 acre site.

The most famous bell they have cast is “Big Ben”, the bell that strikes the hour in the Great Clock of Westminster.

They have occupied the current site for over 200 years and at a casual glance one wonders if anything has changed in that time: it is so delightfully quaint and atmospheric. Of course some things have changed: concrete floors, electricity and so forth. But other things have not changed: the mixture for making the casting moulds is still sand, clay, goat’s hair and horse manure.





The guided tour is well worth it and our guide, who had been at the foundry at least since 1956, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the craft and foundry history making the tour both interesting and entertaining.

Wiltshire wanderings - 20 & 21 January 2007

The Wiltshire town of Marlborough has an appealing main street / market square that merited a return visit so off we set on beautiful winter Saturday morning. Our journey took in a few pretty Wiltshire villages before driving through Britain’s only privately owned forest along the longest Avenue in Britain (4 miles), and into Marlborough.

Evidence of the storm that had hit the UK the previous week was all around, not only here in the Savernake Estate but in other places we visited on the weekend.

After walking Marlborough’s square and doing a little shopping we made our way to Wotton Rivers to start a walk that took in a 3-mile section of the Kennet & Avon Canal. Unfortunately the excess rain that the UK has had recently meant that the fields we were walking across could equally have been described as ‘swamps’.

As our walk ended, the sun was dipping, and with it the temperature, so we made our way back to Marlborough for some more shopping.

It was a special day for one of us so we splashed out on a fabulous meal that evening at the Carnarvon Arms Hotel.

After a slow start, Sunday also became a lovely sunny day. We dipped into Swindon to have a look at Steam, the Great Western Railway Museum. The railway workshops where they manufactured engines and rolling stock at Swindon were quite extensive and the Museum is based in the old buildings.

The old workshop buildings are also used for a large shopping complex, decorated in a style sympathetic with its railway heritage.

After a quick jaunt through the shops we set off on tour along the Valley of the White Horse, through a number of cute Berkshire villages: some with the first snowdrops of the season; and over the Berkshire Downs to visit the Aldworth Giants before joining the motorway for the run home.