Ale and Arty

If you want to drink in an historic pub around Fleet Street, you won’t go thirsty, that’s for sure.

The place is literally awash with them. Probably the most famous of ‘em all is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese; rebuilt shortly after the Great Fire of London, Grade II listed, supposedly patronised by Dickens, Pepys and other authors (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1064662), but there are others probably just as historic and interesting, if slightly less subterranean in feel:

The Old Bell, Grade II listed, supposedly built by Sir Christopher Wren to house stonemasons working on St Bride’s church (the wedding cake spire one) (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1064658);

The Punch Tavern, also Grade II listed, 19th century, stunning tiles and lovely interior (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1268142);

Ye Olde Cock Tavern, also Grade II listed (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1192621);

The Tipperary – Grade II listed too (https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1251734), but, apparently, nowhere near as historical as it claims to be: http://zythophile.co.uk/2018/09/27/the-tipperary-fleet-street-its-a-long-long-way-from-accurate-history/

But seeing as this series of posts is about ‘alternatives’ I’m going to big up two that maybe don’t have the same historical credentials as the others, but are outstanding for different reasons.

The first is pretty bog standard(ish) – it’s a Wetherspoons, for goodness sake! But its bogs are anything but standard: take a butchers* at these:

They are the pretty awesome ladies toilets in the Knights Templar on Chancery Lane. I can’t comment on the gents in this gaff, but my (male) mate was rather jealous when I showed him my pics of the ladies, so I’m guessing the gents isn’t quite as grand.

As far as I’m concerned, the pub’s worth visiting for the toilets alone, but then I am obsessed with toilets; maybe someone more discriminating than me would disagree…

And now for a pub with decor accessible to everyone, not just females desperate for a wee: The Blackfriar, by Blackfriars station:

It’s not as old as (some of) the pubs roundabout, by a long chalk, but, well, how’s this for an interior?

And the exterior’s not bad either:

You won’t be surprised to learn that it too is listed – Grade II*, in fact, which is posher than the Grade II of the pubs above. Here’s the Historic England listing: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1285723

Unbelievably, it was threatened with demolition in the 1960s, until (poet) Sir John Betjeman started campaigning to save it.

And you would think that the Blackfriar’s owners, Nicholsons Pubs, would make more of a deal of the stunning interior on the pub’s page/s on the corporate website, wouldn’t you? But, they don’t: https://www.nicholsonspubs.co.uk/restaurants/london/theblackfriarblackfriarslondon/ So if you get chance, do try to check it out for yourself, in person.

(*Butcher’s hook – or Cockney rhyming slang for “look”.)

Just me and the sea and a place for Christianity

If I had to sum up this day in just one word it would probably be “clarity”.

It was towards the end of September; warm, but not hot, and the light was what I would describe as ‘clear’: bright enough to illuminate everything properly, but not strong enough to dazzle.

The cycle ride from the railway station was flat, quiet and comfortable; just perfect for working through any complicated thoughts clouding the brain.

And my destination, when I reached it, was simplicity itself. And I had it all to myself as well.

It was the chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, a 7th Century church on the edge of the North Sea, on the Dengie peninsula in Essex.

I can’t remember how or when I first learned about the chapel, but I’d wanted to see it ever since then.

I’m a bit of a heathen, but I love what I suppose you could call ‘primitive’ religious places – very simple, and, especially, very early. I love the way you can feel a direct link to the people who built them umpteen centuries ago; ancient worshippers, whose faith was simple and strong – it gave them a reason why the sun rose in the morning, for example – and who were brave enough to believe when Christianity was still ‘new’, and they were likely regarded as freaks – or worse.

Anglo-Saxon chapels in the middle of nowhere don’t exactly feature on tour group itineraries, even Grade I-listed ones such as this, and it didn’t look like this place could be on a bus route either, so I reckoned getting there wouldn’t be exactly easy.

But then I found myself working in London, and I was presented with the perfect opportunity for an adventure. It involved taking my bike on the train to Southminster, the end of the line from Liverpool Street station and the nearest station to Bradwell-on-Sea, where the chapel is, and cycling from there.

I was a bit apprehensive, as I didn’t really know what to expect of the cycle ride, and, from the map, it looked like the chapel was down probably uninhabited dirt tracks, rather than roads.

But the ride itself was actually really pleasant, much of it through civilisation, including a village where I stopped to use a public toilet – and found myself sharing the car park with a horse-drawn hearse. Which was actually rather appropriate, seeing as the village looked like a location for the TV programme Midsomer Murders.

While the chapel is indeed lone and proud on a headland, the roads leading to it are, until probably the last mile or so, populated – there’s even a caravan park not so far away.

And although I didn’t realise it at the time, I’ve just seen on GoogleMaps that there’s some sort of religious community only around half a mile away from the chapel on one side, and a Grade II-listed bird hide/historic cottage (yes, really!) almost as close on the other side. (It’s known as Linnet’s Cottage, and is interesting enough – to me, anyway – to deserve a post of its own, here.)

But even though civilization was so close, not a single person arrived at the chapel the whole time I was there.

It wasn’t what I would call breath-taking, or stunning, it was just very plain and very simple – and so restful and calming. And the stones screamed – ok, whispered is more appropriate – of history: I could trace umpteen different stages of its (long, very long) life in the bare walls.

The full story of the chapel is available on its own website: https://www.bradwellchapel.org/home.html

The only downside was that I couldn’t explore outside as much as I would have liked; I don’t know if it was the same everywhere in London, but at the time the train company had banned bikes, apart from folding ones, from all trains between 4pm and 7pm. Having been through the misery of experiencing rush-hour trains I could see that this made sense, but it did mean that I was a bit tied for time.

So I did a brief circuit of the chapel, taking in the expansive sky and view across the salt marshes (that explains the bird hide, then), and set off back for Southminster.

The biggest disappointment about my adventure was not having enough time to make the most of it, not just the chapel but the rest of Bradwell-on-Sea as well, which looks pretty interesting too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of Linnets and Listings

“Why did a bird hide get listed?” I asked myself while writing my post on St Peter-on-the-Wall chapel in Bradwell-on-Sea.

I set out to find out a bit more about the Grade II-listed “Linnet’s Cottage”, and it was so interesting I thought it was worth sharing here.

The factual stuff about listing can be found on the historic England website here: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1146868

But for the story/ies about the human/s connected with the cottage, there’s a great, but sadly anonymous, piece on the website of the Essex Field Club (for wildlife enthusiasts).

I’ve reproduced the relevant stuff below, but the whole thing is available here: http://www.essexfieldclub.org.uk/portal/p/February+1st+-+28th

When I first began bird-watching along the Essex coast in the early 1960s the global population of Dark-bellied Brent Geese was around 30,000 and it was considered to be under serious threat. They were seldom seen on the fields but spent most of their time feeding on the beds of Eel Grass way out on the mudflats.

It was only when these beds were decimated by pollution or disease later in the decade that they moved inland in search of an alternative food supply. Since then they have been protected throughout their range and numbers rose to around 150,000 in the 1990s and 250,000 today (2016).

The reason numbers had fallen so low is that they were considered fair game in a previous era when, on the Dengie coast alone, dozens of professional wildfowlers (or Marsh Men as they were then known) made a living from shooting wildfowl and waders, fishing, ‘cockling’, and harvesting Marsh Samphire and other products of the estuary.

One such was Walter Linnett, who lived in a tiny cottage on the edge of the saltmarsh at Bradwell St Peter’s.

The cottage was built around 1798 by the Admiralty in order to house two naval officers – a lieutenant and a midshipman – whose job it was, along with two ordinary seamen, to man a signalling station on high ground nearby. The boredom engendered by the site’s isolation, coupled with having to live cheek by jowl in cold cramped quarters, not to mention the ever present threat of being laid low by the dreaded Essex ague (a form of malaria) must have made this the posting from hell.

A surviving letter from November 1810 written by one Lieutenant John Leckie to their Lordships about the midshipman under his command states that:

“…….he went from the station without asking leave and stayd all night, did not return until nine this Next morning, and was then obliged to go to bed; I talked to him on that business, and he told me that he did not know that he was supposed to ask leave but promised to do so no more, on Thursday last he asked leave to go up to the village which he did, on the next morning he asked leave again which I granted him, and last evening he went away again without leave, and did not return again until one past ten, this forenoon and so drunk, that he went to bed immediately, he is without exception the most stupid man I ever had or saw……..”

Winters must have been fun in such company!

At the end of the Napoleonic wars the signal station was closed down. The Linnett family are thought to have taken up residence in the middle of the century and remained in occupation until 1958 when the last member of their family to live there, Walter Linnett, died at the age of 80.

He and his wife raised eight children there and it is rumoured that the babes in arms were put to bed in boxes in the cupboards. From the moment they could toddle much of their lives would have been spent out of doors.

Walter’s father is likely to have been among the thirty-two punt gunners who are reputed to have fired simultaneously into a flock of Brent Geese on the Dengie flats in around 1860, killing at least 704 of them.

Several other huge bags of geese were also reported from the area at around this time. The same era saw over 3000 Lapwing eggs sent to market one summer from a single Norfolk estate alone, not just the original clutch of each pair being taken but all the replacement clutches as well. They weren’t into sustainability at that time either!

It was probably Walter Linnet who planted the fruit trees in and around his cottage garden – apple, damson, bullus, plum and greengage-the last of which, following a mild spring, often sag with fruit in August. Warmed by the summer sun they have sweetness and flavour that is bliss both to both the taste buds and the mind, no matter that there is a little added protein in some of them.

Now, alas, they are succumbing to a white rot caused by the bracket fungus Phellinus pomaceus, which destroys the lignin (one of the main building materials in woody plants), leaving a soft and spongy white mess behind. They have perished, each one, branch by branch over the past decade and now only a few healthy boughs remain, perhaps sufficient this autumn to produce a last lingering memory of one of the simple pleasures of my life.

There’s a picture of the cottage as well, here: http://www.essexfieldclub.org.uk/portal/p/Picture/r/view/s/Linnet’s+Cottage+Bradwell

And another here: https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/101146868-linnetts-cottage-approximately-100-meters-south-east-of-st-peters-on-the-wall-bradwell-on-sea

Dinner for Dinosaurs

IS it truly wicked of me to wonder whether – ok, hope that – some poor person has wandered unsuspecting, and possibly tipsy, into Crystal Palace Park one evening and found themselves face-to-face with this?

Handsome here is one of 30 or so dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures that have graced the south London park for more than a century and a half.

They were created by sculptor and wildlife artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and they were the first ever attempt anywhere in the world to model extinct animals as full-scale, three-dimensional creatures from fossil remains.

We know now, thanks to all the discoveries and research done since, that they’re not entirely (ahem) accurate, but they are still important enough for Historic England to list them as Grade I historic structures.

The dinosaurs are, apparently, rather famous (although not famous enough for me to have heard about them when I was accommodation hunting in Crystal Palace when I was working in London a few years ago!).

My reason for writing about them just now is a leaflet I picked up when I stayed in Crystal Palace earlier this year. It was about a Palaeo Planting Project being organised by the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs. The idea is to recreate the environment in which the (live) dinosaurs might have lived (and fed), using “appropriate” plants.

After reading the leaflet I started wondering: how you know what “appropriate” plants are? Who knows what they are? Where do you get them from? (The 14-million-year-old garden centre?) etc etc.

Thankfully, the Friends have a website, which answered some of my questions, and last October, they organised a talk by Sir Peter Crane, former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which answered pretty much every other question I had left.

And even better, you can listen to it (streaming and download) here: https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2018/08/peter-crane-dinosaur-landscapes-and-the-beginnings-of-flowers/