Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Category: UK

  • Streets of Norwich – Broadsman Close

    Part of my Streets of Norwich project…..

    There’s not much to Broadsman Close, although since I’ve decided to visit every road in the city, this had to be included. Unfortunately, there’s not a great deal that can be written about this short stretch of road.

    This is pretty much the limit of the road, an access to the railway sidings and also to a couple of retail outlets. There isn’t much history to this area either as this was once just railway land between one end of the coal yard and the the shunting area for freight trains. Before it was owned by the railways, it was just fields.

    And another view to the entrance of the close. The road was created during the whole Riverside development complex, so somewhere around 2001.

    The Broadsman was a passenger train operated by British Rail which ran from London Liverpool Street to Sheringham between 1950 and 1962. On this point, I’d quite like for services to be named in this manner again, in a similar way to the way that American train services are. The Sheringham Zephyr has a certain ring to it….

  • Streets of Norwich – Stracey Road

    Part of my Streets of Norwich project….

    This is Stracey Road, located off of Thorpe Road and connecting to Lower Clarence Road.

    There’s not really much change to the layout of this area over the last 125 years, with the church behind the properties off Stracey Road still there.

    This building at the end of the road and in the photo above is Marlborough House, which was turned from a private residence into a guest house in 1969. It was also though a dwelling house in the past, as is in March 1909 a William Coxall broke into the property and stole an overcoat, gloves and half a cake. No point going hungry if you plan to go burgling I suppose…..

    These were quite decent houses at the beginning of the twentieth century (I’m sure they are now as well) and there’s a reminder of this as many of them employed servants and maids. The residence at number 10 was looking for a “mother’s help” in December 1902 and they promised that the accommodation for the applicant wouldn’t be in the cellar or attic.

    I had better not upload every single one of the 1939 registers as part of this project, as that might be seen as too much of an infringement of copyright. But, in 1939, there was an inspector of taxes, a surgeon, a children’s nurse, a retired LNER inspector, a railway clerk, a warehouse goods clerk and an inspector for the LNER who all lived on the street.

    On the issue of the street name, I don’t know why it took the name Stracey Road, although the Stracey baronetcy is a local title and the family were important figures in Norwich during the nineteenth century.

  • Streets of Norwich…..

    I was reading recently about Matt Green, who has a project to walk every single street in New York. All told, and including walking some other pedestrian routes in the city, he thinks that this will total around 12,000 kilometres of walking. I’d looked at this project a few years ago, but I was reminded about it by a film which was recently released about Green, entitled “I’m just walkin’”.

    Green writes about his project:

    “In many ways, this is an exhaustive approach to getting to know a place. By the time I’m finished, I’ll have seen as much of New York as anyone ever has. And yet, the sum total of my experiences over these thousands of miles will be just a tiny speck, imperceptible against the immensity of this city.

    What kind of truth can I hope to find? Every step I take will be deeply colored by many transient factors — the weather, the time of day, my mood, the people around me. I could go back to any given spot the next day and have an entirely different experience. Who knows how many fascinating things I’ll totally overlook? Maybe I’ll be facing the other way as I pass by, or maybe the fascination lies in some story or context that I won’t be aware of. There are countless indoor spaces that I’ll never see. My walking experience will be largely confined to street level, even though much of what makes New York New York exists above the first floor.

    If you try to make this quest into a conquest — an attempt to subjugate the bewildering vastness of this metropolis beneath the well-worn heels of my boots — then perhaps it seems dispiriting to contemplate how little of the city I’ll have actually seen and experienced after my extensive journey. But why would you ever want to know a place completely? The excitement of New York, and the whole world for that matter, is that there’s always something else to see, and something else to learn, no matter how long you’ve been around. To me it is profoundly encouraging to think how many secrets will still lie undiscovered after I’ve walked every last one of these goddamned streets. At its core, my walk is an oxymoron: an exhaustive journey through an inexhaustible city.”

    And, I like this as a project, the always seeing something new. So, not wanting to miss out on this transcendental experience, I’ve decided to do the same for Norwich. Not the being followed by a film crew bit, since I can’t imagine even the media giants of Look East would want to follow this rubbish, but simply completing a walking project which aims to enable me to see as much of Norwich as anyone else has.

    Most historians of Norfolk will be aware of the photographs by George Plunkett, an amazing archive of photos that he took over many decades. This has meant that I have an additional angle to look at my meanderings from, as he has photographed many of the locations where I’ll eventually be walking.

    By my estimation, starting as I am in August 2019, I’ll either finish this little project by the end of 2020 or I’ll have got bored of it and so there will be an incomplete set of streets listed. I’ll be surprised though if I don’t find out a lot more about Norwich and it history, which can only be an exciting thing…..

  • Birmingham – Barber Institute of Fine Arts (An Old Woman by Bernardo Strozzi)

    This artwork was painted by Bernardo Strozzi in Genoa in the 1620s and it’s not actually of anyone in particular. Instead it’s a study of old age and so wasn’t funded by some wealthy trader or influential politician from the period. The artist was also called il Cappuccino, likely derived from the Capuchin monks, as the coffee didn’t receive its name until much more recently.

    There doesn’t seem to be much provenance listed for this work, although the Barber Institute purchased it for £2,000 from the Hazlitt Gallery in 1966. I’m not very well placed to be an art critic, since I don’t know anything about art, but I thought that it was quite an eye-catching and powerful portrayal of the individual.

  • Sittingbourne – The Bargeman

    This interesting statue is located along the main street which runs through Sittingbourne, which was once Watling Street. This sculpture was designed by Jill Tweed and was unveiled in 1996 to commemorate the work of the local bargemen. Not particularly clear in this photo is that the bargeman’s dog is standing by his foot and is helping his master.

  • Birmingham – Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (HP Sign)

    One of the HP signs which used to be on the company’s Aston Cross factory in Birmingham. The factory originally opened in 1875 and the iconic HP sauce first went on sale in 1903. This all went marvellously until 2007 when HP was bought out and production was moved to the Netherlands to save money, with the last production line closing on 16 March 2007. The factory was demolished and this sign is one of the few reminders of the site.

  • Birmingham – Barber Institute of Fine Arts (A Portrait of a Boy by Giovanni Bellini)

    This artwork was originally used as part of a lid of an inheritance chest and was painted in Venice in around 1475. I’m not entirely sure what an inheritance chest is (as opposed to any other chest) and an on-line search for the term just finds the description that the gallery have for this artwork. The information provided by the gallery does though add that the chest was constructed to hold the marble bust of Angelo Probi who died in 1474.

    Bellini was a Venetian artist who lived from 1430 until 1516 and I assume that he was quite prolific given how many of his artworks that still exist. The artwork was owned by the Holford family from at least the mid-eighteenth century and it was acquired by the Barber Institute in 1946 for £9,500.

  • Norwich – Ice Cream

    How lovely – a free ice cream from Tesco and Vodafone…… I’m easily pleased.

  • Birmingham – Barber Institute of Fine Arts (Joseph Distributing Corn in Egypt by Bartholomeus Breenbergh)

    This artwork was painted by the Dutch artist Bartholomeus Breenbergh in 1655 and was purchased by the gallery in 1963. It shows Joseph distributing corn and it’s known that the location is in Egypt because of the obelisk. There’s another very similar painting to this which the artist painted in the previous year, although that artwork is now in private hands.

    There’s some provenance to this artwork, likely sold at an auction in Amsterdam during 1702 when works owned by the merchant and art collector Jan Agges were sold following his death. It was later purchased by P. Laendert de Neufville in 1756 who at the time was a wealthy merchant in Amsterdam, but he suffered severe financial difficulty in 1763 and after trying to pay his debts for some years the whole house of cards fell down in 1770. This explains the sale of the painting in 1771 to Fouquet and was later sold again in 1844.

    I still find the whole provenance of artworks such as this fascinating, as the route for this painting to end up in Birmingham is a long and complex one determined by some many different factors.

  • Birmingham – Barber Institute of Fine Arts (The Loggetta, Venice by Canaletto)

    I thought that this was a bemusing painting by Canaletto as he’s one of my favourite artists and this looks ridiculous. However, the information panel by the painting revealed the truth, which is that the top of the artwork was at some stage cut off. Bloody vandals…. It’s thought that it was to fit the painting above a door, with the top section of the Loggetta being painted out. The information panel doesn’t say, but I assume that it was cut down on the left hand side as well, as it looking irritatingly uncentred.

    The artwork was purchased by the Barber Institute in 1954 and it was during cleaning of the painting in 1964 that the painted out section at the top was revealed and then restored. The Loggetta, or bell tower, was constructed between 1537 and 1540 and the artwork was painted in the mid 1730s.

    I like paintings with provenance, and this is fortunately available for this one from throughout some of its history. It was purchased by the gallery from the art dealer Mr Edward Speelman in 1954 for £3,000 and it had been purchased at Sotheby’s in May the year before by a Mr. Murray for £2,300. Before that it had been owned by Sir Robert Mond who was an archaeologist and then before that it was owned by G. A. F. Cavendish-Bentinck MP, a prominent Conservative politician, who had sourced the painting from the art dealer Martin Colnaghi. Before that the artwork was owned by James Whatman who was the Liberal MP for Maidstone and West Kent and before that it was owned by George Gee.