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Aarhus – Aarhus Theatre

Many of the images on older posts on this blog are missing, a situation which is sub-optimal. Fortunately, I still have them, it’s just going to take a fair while to restore them. But, I understand that my two loyal blog readers demand it, so I will fix the little issue eventually and I’m pleased to note that this page has now been fixed.

The original content of this page is hardly riveting and one of the photos is clearly at a tilt, but it has taken years to fine tune this blog contents to build up my readership of two, so early errors are forgivable. It reminds me of the purpose of this blog though, I’ve nearly entirely forgotten much of my trip to Aarhus and posts like this help me piece it back together…. As an aside, I rather liked the line on their web-site:

“Most performances are aimed at a national audience and performed in Danish. On select days we offer live subtitles in English to your mobile device.”

Maintaining the language whilst still being accessible to foreign speakers (well, English foreign speakers), seems a well thought out compromise.

The city’s grand theatre opened in 1900, replacing a rather tired building on Kannikegade.

There are a variety of decorations on the front of the building, many are in the Jugend style, similar to Art Nouveau.

The stonework was recently restored due to damage from air pollution over the last century.

April 11, 2024
Awards

This means a lot. Thanks to customers and breweries. No more words are needed, love you all!

How lovely.

The marvellous Simon from CAMRA.

April 9, 2024
Graphing Wikipedia – YouTube Video

I have a slight penchant (if those two words actually fit together, but there we go) for cataloguing and understanding big data. This video is about trying to understand how the articles on Wikipedia are grouped and how they interact with each other.

It’s a bit geeky I accept, but I was suitably fascinated by this (click on the image to make it larger). It’s how many clicks you have to make to get from a pre-defined page on Wikipedia to every other page on the site. The vast majority of articles can be reached within six links, which is the principle of the six degrees of separation. There are a few pages where it takes ten or so clicks to reach, but there are very few of them and they’re mostly clumped into a few smaller categories. The most clicks you’d have to make is 166, but that’s for a specific reason relating to how one set of roads are categorised on Wikipedia.

Once again I’ve intrigued myself with something really not that important, but these things happen quite a lot…..

April 4, 2024
Ashley – St. Mary’s Church (the old one)

There’s not really anything to see of the former St. Mary’s Church in Ashley, the low walls that apparently still survive have been taken over by foliage over the last few decades. Ashley, and its neighbour Silverley which it had been merged with, lost both their churches to dereliction and a new one was constructed in Ashley in the 1870s to service the religious needs of the local denizens. More on that in a later post though.

As an aside, I wondered why on the modern landscape there’s a patch of trees near to the church, but the map solves the query, it’s because it was once a chalk pit. It’s possible to walk on a footpath around the church, but there are signs saying to keep out and it didn’t look easy to battle a way in. It all means that the ghosts of the people buried here remain safe from being disturbed. The former church of St. Mary’s isn’t in the village itself, it lies on the Dalham Road around a kilometre to the west. The churches here and in Silverley were made redundant in the middle of the sixteenth century and there were accounts of some laxness with regards to the parishioners attending a church at all. It’s not really a great surprise, but the residents of Ashley were left without a church for 200 years. In the early nineteenth century, the local village schoolroom was pressed into action for the residents, but it was thought that a grand new church was needed and that’s what was delivered in 1872.

The church that now can’t be seen was constructed in the thirteenth century, built with flint rubble and there was a rood loft in the structure. Money was given to save the church in the 1550s and 1560s, but its time was up and it was entirely derelict by the seventeenth century. I would have liked to have seen some evidence of it, as I was able to with Silverley Church, but I’m a few hundred years too late. Sometimes nature just wins on matters such as this, I can’t imagine many people will be able to penetrate the centre of this site to find any walls and leaving it undisturbed seems the most appropriate choice.

April 2, 2024
Streets of Norwich – Stepping Lane

Part of my Streets of Norwich project…. [updated in April 2024]

There’s not much of Stepping Lane left that was here in this 1880s map and it’s now less than half of its previous length. A clumsy post-war rebuilding plan of the area meant that nearly all of the property here was demolished, Scoles Green is under a car park and Rouen Road ploughs right through the middle of the lane’s former route. I have no idea what the mention on the map of ‘site of Hendon’s City House’ is referring to.

The entrance to the lane from King Street, with the plot on the left-hand side once being the Steam Packet public house. George Plunkett, as usual, has a suitable photo here, taken looking back towards King Street. I like the quirky buildings which were once here, at least the older wall on one side has survived.

In March 1873, it was reported in the Norwich Mercury that:

“For auction, all those four cottages, in eight tenements, in Stepping Lane, with garden ground and use of yard, in the occupation of Robert Eagle, Widow North, Samuel Pyne, Widow Edwards, Widow Francis, Widow Southgate, Widow Sword and Widow Thompson, at rental amounting to £31 8s 4d per annum. This lot is leasehold from the Dean and Chapter of Norwich for a term of 40 years from the 7th December 1862.”

And that’s about as far as the lane goes now, running into a lane called Normans Buildings, a throwback to when that was a street with residential properties on. It’s not exactly somewhere to make a special visit to if I’m being honest.

April 2, 2024
Lacons – Meet the Brewer at the Lidgate Star

The latest in the series of ‘meet the brewer’ events at the Star was with Adam from Lacons. Although not the brewer himself, he was still knowledgeable and enthusiastic about beer and the history of Lacons. There was also a tasting of three beers from the brewery, Encore, Old Nogg and Yarmouth Strong.

Lacons was founded in 1760 and started in the sunlit uplands of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. It has some longer origins even than that, beginning in 1640 as a brewery which was owned by the Ward family, passing by marriage into the hands of Paul Lacon. The brewery was a large employer in the nineteenth century with a large estate of pubs particularly in Great Yarmouth, but also across East Anglia. All was well, or mostly well, until Whitbread decided that they would acquire Lacons in 1965, paying £3.2 million for it and they acquired 354 pubs into the bargain. Excited at their new purchase and keen to do more with it, they promptly shut it in 1968. Sub-optimal. However, this amalgamation of brewing had been happening for some time and Lacons themselves had purchased the Diss Brewery in 1897 and shut it down.

But, back to the more recent past, the brewery was brought back in 2009 and the new owners were able to use yeast samples from the National Collection of Yeast Cultures (there’s some forward planning there, setting that up in the first place) to recreate some of the beers. That was useful with the introduction of the brewery’s heritage range, including Old Nogg (a beer name that has been brought back) and Yarmouth Strong. On which point, I thought for reasons of professional research that I should try both of these beers.

Starting with the Old Nogg, this recipe is from 1926 and let’s just say that they evidently knew how to brew beer back then. There’s a bit of chocolate and liquorice to the taste, with a rich aftertaste. This is my favourite beer from the Lacons range so far, I was suitably impressed.

This is the Yarmouth Strong and my beer writing skills were rather limited on Untappd as all I could note is that it was like a strong bitter. I’m not likely to win any beer writing awards soon I’m afraid with that sort of description, although apparently my description wasn’t inaccurate. It’s quite a weighty number at 7% ABV and it’s based on a recipe from 1916.

It was an enjoyable evening to watch proceedings, and I was impressed at how some others remembered some trivia from the evening and won themselves some drinks.

Finally, as part of my riveting blog content, I’ll see if Adam will do a little Q&A for the blog as well, watch this space.

March 25, 2024
Lidgate – Lidgate Star and Any Questions in 1957

I’m always intrigued as to news articles about the Star and in the Bury Free Press on 21 June 1957 it was reported:

“History was made in Lidgate on Thursday when a panel of parsons visited the Star Inn in Lidgate to conduct an “Any Questions” session. This was quite an innovation in the village and the room in which it was held was well filled. The questions referred to the difference between the denominations, varying dates of Easter, the right age for confirmation and the untidyness of some graveyards. Major General RH Dewing was questionmaster”.

I’m not sure which room they were in, but I like the idea of the religious debate that would have taken place in the pub. Major General RH Dewing (1891-1981) was an interesting character and his service history was:

1931-09-05 – 1933-10-01 General Staff Officer 2 Southern Command
1934-XX-XX – 1935-XX-XX Attending the Imperial Defence College
1936-04-03 – 1937-09-30 General Staff Officer 1, War Office
1937-10-01 – 1939-09-04 Instructor at Imperial Defence College
1939-09-05 – 1940-10-26 Director of Military Operations & Plans, War Office
1940-10-27 – 1941-06-20 Chief of Staff Far East Command
1941-11-14 – 1941-12-19 Specially employed
1942-02-22 – 1942-07-26 Head of the British of Army Mission Washington
1942-07-27 – 1942-10-21 Senior Army Liaison Officer in Australia
1942-10-22 – 1944-09-01 Head of Army-RAF Liaison Staff Australia
1945-XX-XX Head Supreme Headquarter Allied Expeditionary Force in Denmark
1945-XX-XX Member British Military Commission in Berlin
1946-05-06 Retired

There’s a much longer detail of his life at http://www.badwellashheritage.co.uk/badwell-ash-soliders/dewing-richard-henry/, I imagine that he would have been an interesting chair and questionmaster of the meeting. I doubt that the Easter question will ever be settled, the complexity of it is explained well at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_for_Easter. Even at a location as auspicious as the Star, it would be unlikely to get any agreement on changing the current system.

March 25, 2024
Ashley – All Saints Church (Silverley)

There’s something quite meaningful about visiting a church which is effectively slowly falling down. Long gone are the sounds of people getting married, the sadness of funerals and the joy (well, generally) of a baby being Christened. This church is near to the village of Ashley, but it’s actually the former parish church of the long gone village of Silverley.

Only the tower remains and that’s in a sub-optimal condition to say the least. The nave, the churchyard and any other remnants of the building’s history have long since gone.

The former church is especially intriguing as the former staircase to the higher levels of the tower is still visible.

I wonder who the last person was to successfully walk up these stairs and whether they had any indication that they would be the last to do so. It’s sealed at the bottom now to prevents any local pesky kids (or adults) from trying to climb up and promptly falling down or something similar.

It has been solidly built to ensure that it stays in even this condition.

It’s partly hidden from the road and I only knew that it was there because of Google Maps indicating that it was there.

There are obviously a whole heap of stories about a church in this condition and it relates to the whole situation with Ashley and Silverley being joint parishes. Silverley was once the larger of the two settlements, but the two villages merged and the last burial at All Saints was in 1564 with nearly nothing of Silverley left today. Not that this helped Ashley, as both churches closed in the sixteenth century and the present church in the village is Victorian. But, once again, I digress and I’ll jump forwards a bit in the story.

There was considerable anger in 1971 when some of the remaining part of the church was demolished. H.E. Thistle of Ousden wrote to the Newmarket Journal noting:

“I was appalled to read in the Journal of the partial destruction of Silverley church tower. It would be bad enough if those responsible for this act of vandalism were under-privileged louts who knew no better, but it seems from the report that those who decided to destroy the tower were people who were in a position to know exactly what they were doing and yet went ahead in cold blood to demolish a very beautiful and ancient landmark.”

The correspondent was rightly angry, the church’s destruction was backed by Bidwells and with the accidental approval of the Department of the Environment who it seems got a bit muddled up. That means it’s perhaps possible to partly blame Peter Walker, the then Secretary of State, but it appears to have been something of an administrative error that five tonnes of stone was carted away. The land agents locally claimed that the building was structurally unsafe, but this was proven to be something of an untruth when the demolition team struggled to demolish the structure. All very much sub-optimal and an unnecessary destruction of an historic building. It’s fair to say that the actions of Bidwells were a disgrace and showed huge contempt to the local population and the heritage of the building. Even after the controversy, Bidwells said “it’s all really a question of economics”. Twas ever thus……

The church had been listed in August 1959 and so should have been protected, although there’s not a vast amount known about its history. It’s thought to have been constructed primarily in the fourteenth century (although it’s likely that there was a religious building on the site before this) and was in use until the sixteenth century when the village faded away, with the building used for a period as a barn. It was though derelict by the seventeenth century, with likely the tower being the only part used. And thank goodness that villagers in 1971 were able to interrupt the demolition to save at least some of the structure. Unfortunately, today the church is I think on private land and there are no interpretation signs or information about the history of the building and bit by bit the structure is likely to slowly fall apart.

March 20, 2024
Lidgate and Dalham – Old Suffolk Road

My posting frequency, and indeed plan to restore a heap of the missing images on this blog, has been a little sub-optimal recently if I’m being honest. I hope to fix that a little now, so riveting content will come pouring out. And what more fascinating place to start than the Old Suffolk Road? It’s the straight line through the middle of the above map, whilst the road had evolved to go through the village of Dalham. It intrigued me as the initial route is a far more sensible one and it also appeared to be higher up, suggesting an ancient route. There are also Roman roads in the area and this track is certainly fairly straight, even though it’s now just grass and there’s no firm surface.

It’s more evident from this more recent Ordnance Survey map from the 1950s (this is out of OS copyright, I’m not randomly stealing their maps).

There’s the northern entrance to it, the width of a road but no evidence that it has even been a firm surface.

It’s certainly a sizeable trackway.

The view over the local countryside, including the windmill at Dalham.

It started to become evident from this that the pathway was an ancient route.

And then it suddenly stops dead and walkers have to cross the field to rejoin the road. It says that it’s a permissive path (well, permitted path here), although there appears to be evidence that this was a footpath and should perhaps be registered before the 2026 deadline, but there don’t appear to be any access issues here anyway.

The tree line to the right is where I walked, straight ahead is where the path stops and to the left there’s still some evidence from the ground where the track went, although it’s hard to see in this photo. What’s also interesting (well, to me anyway) is that this stretch of track is the border between Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, so there must be some historic element for this route for that to be the case.

This route is very near to the Icknield Way, the ancient trackway that went from Norfolk to Wiltshire, much of which is today the Ridgeway and Peddar’s Way. I can’t find out anything in detail yet about the origins of this route, but I’ve decided that for the moment I’m placing it as a pre-Roman road which was an ancient route that has just happened to survive in part in today’s landscape. Quite why much of it hasn’t been ploughed up, I’m not entirely sure, although that’s what has happened to the southern end of it nearer to Lidgate. As usual, I’m over-thinking this no doubt, but I find it all rather intriguing to think that I walked along a route that has been in use for thousands of years.

March 20, 2024
200 Years Ago in Norwich : New Prison on Castle Hill

There are currently quite extensive works going on at Norwich Castle to try and restore the keep to what it might have looked like in medieval times. However, 200 years ago this week, it was decided to approve work on the new prison that would be going into the keep. It was reported in the Norfolk Chronicle:

“At the general Quarter Sessions for this county, held yesterday se’nnight, it was agreed that the whole of Mr Wilkins’s plan for erecting the new gaol on the Castle Hill should be carried into execution and we understand that the entire expence of the gaol and Courts of Justice should not exceed 46,000l”.

I still like the word ‘se’nnight’, meaning week (or seven days and nights), it’s a shame that it’s fallen out of usage.

And, indeed, it fell out of usage in the early nineteenth century.

On that matter, the usage of the word ‘expence’ was soon overtaken by ‘expense’.

As for the new prison, the previous one had only stood for thirty years, but there’s more about this at the Norwich Castle web-site. The new prison was built by William Wilkins and it was designed with the new radial structure, something rather forward thinking for its time. Anyway, I digress once again, I was just intrigued to think that there was an exciting building project 200 years ago to the week that this new one is taking place.

January 29, 2024