An Emberley at Pemberley: Michael and Dan in the English Midlands
Daniel Emberley, April 2018
Did you know Michael loves English country houses? We’d been to London; and toured a bit of Scotland and Yorkshire. The heart of England, however, had evaded us, and this is where some of the great estates are located. Dan wanted to see where the Industrial Revolution that created the world he grew up in began. So, two fun weeks in Britain; details follow.
Sunday, April 15
We got a good deal on Virgin Atlantic leaving from National. Virgin teamed up with Delta in what looked like a codeshare arrangement. When we arrived at the airport, however, we discovered that Delta has prostituted itself to at least ten international airlines. We could have gotten ourselves to JFK easier, but eh, we were there. No checked-through luggage, since the two airlines aren’t really working together, but we got our bags in New York, checked them, and caught the trains to Columbia University to have lunch with friends Bonnie and Caleb. A great way to spend an extended layover. Took a cab back to JFK and were en route to Manchester International.
Monday, April 16, Manchester
Manchester Airport is one of the worst we have been in. Not an international hub, more of a large regional airport. Customs kept us standing in line jet lagged for 2.5 hours to answer two questions. On the plus side, our bags were waiting for us at the carousel. A distant but easy walk to the train, and simple ride into Piccadilly Station downtown. We got a little turned around outside the station, which could have been the road layout or maybe just that we were so exhausted. Found the Holiday Inn Oxford Road, freshened up, and started our first city.
Manchester is a little like Chicago; it is absorbing the administrative and economic functions of the rest of the region’s cities. Their original industry, cotton mills, is dead, but the accounting firms that grew up to administer the factories are still vibrant. The street plan is Victorian hodge-podge, like most of Boston; it helps to recognize a few landmarks to get oriented. Very cut up by rail lines, canals, and high-speed roads, so it can be a challenge negotiating a route, but downtown is easily walkable. Friendly and kind people, accent thick but not impenetrable, and most folks could switch to BBC English so we could communicate.
We started in St. Peter’s Square, center of their new light rail system. Over to Albert Square, with a big memorial to Victoria’s Prince Albert, to see the Town Hall. This is one of the great Victorian buildings, like Philadelphia City Hall on steroids. The Mancunians had to prove to London that they had class, culture, and modernity, and Alfred Waterhouse’s Town Hall was one of the ways they did it. Cool Ruskinian Gothic, stained glass, polychrome stone. Sadly, a lot of this covered by massive banners proclaiming that they would be reopening in 2024 after a full renovation. I was disappointed to not see the Ford Maddox Brown murals, but even peering through the construction fence it is impressive. Other features of Albert Square are Edwin Lutyens’ Cenotaph to World War I dead, complete with side memorial to Italian troops, and the Prince Albert Memorial. Lunch at Wagamama, a Brit-based pseudo-Asian noodle chain that was supposed to open last year in D.C. but didn’t. Decent donburi and ramen, but we don’t need it.
John Rylands Library exemplifies a lot of trends in Manchester history. Created by capitalist Methodists with a reforming, socially conscious streak, it is a Victorian temple of self-improvement in Gothic Revival stone. Nice show on pigments and how we get them. Wicked cool antique toilets (even labeled as such on the floor plan) still working after more than a 100 years, amusingly signed “No Photos”. We walked up Deansgate, a major north-south road, to Barton’s Buildings and Arcade, nicely renovated and still a shopping cut through the block. The Cathedral lost its windows in WWII; they have been replaced with inoffensive abstract modern glass that does amazing things with light and color. Decent fountain in stream form flows through Cathedral Gardens, which double as a lunch spot for downtown. We stopped in the Corn Exchange, a stock market renovated into shopping, for a Costa Coffee break. Then around the glass and steel office and retail buildings that fill the site of a 1996 IRA bombing. Up to Chetham’s School of Music, one of the last monastic complexes from the English Middle Ages. It’s had a variety of uses, from monks to private palace to boarding school to music academy. The library was used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to derive their theory of communism. Amazing room, and interesting to see the adaptation of medieval buildings for the school. Our first look at a “chained library”, where books were physically chained to the shelves to prevent theft. I’d always figured this happened in creepy manor houses, but these were from church libraries founded to encourage working class people to read. Guided tours only, our guide was one of the few people who spoke honestly about the economic disparities the South has worked on the rest of the country.
A geographic sidebar. “The South” is basically London and the counties that feed off of it. Think New York City, the state up to Albany, Connecticut, Jersey, Pennsylvania. Maybe even D.C. This is the region that has won the economy since WWII: finance, insurance, technology, data. Cool Britannia. “The North” is industrial Britain that has been losing its economy in the same period. Definitely Scotland and Newcastle, probably Yorkshire and Lancashire. After that the border gets murky. Manchester people said they were in The North, but Birmingham was The Midlands. I suspect no one in Sheffield is granting Manchester that status. It’s like the perverse pride Americans place in our South: Virginia definitely counts, but does Kentucky? Maryland? There’s a mythology of being from The North; blunt, honest, hardworking, like if a coal miner had a baby with the Marlboro Man. I say our trip took place in the Midlands, but that is a personal choice, not a judgement.
And an economic sidebar. Like our Rust Belt, the North has been losing industrial jobs to the rest of the world since WWII. I thought this was sort of natural, like the way U.S. southern states lured manufacturers away from the Great Lakes with union busting and tax incentives. Our Chetham’s guide explained that while that did happen, a much bigger effect was rules adopted by British corporations that forced headquarters to relocate to the Greater London area. Team that up with Margaret Thatcher’s attacks on the coal and steel industries and on the welfare state, and the North was forced to finance its own economic demise. Ugly. Manchester has been able to transform into a northern outpost of the new economy, as has Edinburgh, but the rest of the cities there are still trying to find jobs for their kids.
We watched a journalism team from China take repetitive photos of the desk where the sainted Marx worked, then strolled Santiago Calatrava’s Trinity Bridge over the River Irwell to the People’s History Museum. This is a labor history of Manchester, brilliant. The industrial Revolution took off here because of cotton mills, and cotton could be woven because the humidity was high enough (it always rains) that the fibers would not snap in the machines. The best look at the city’s history we found. The social justice focus includes looks at local struggles of Chinese, immigrants, and for gay rights. A great textile restoration workshop; they have a large collection of the banners people carried in marches for voting reform and women’s rights; and needed to develop the science to keep them from disintegrating. Most of the building is contemporary, but they renovated a pump house from the old water system as a display hall for the banners.
A schlep back to check into the hotel, and dinner at a mediocre pub next door, Revolution. This is a chain, lots of university students splurging on a meal outside the commons. Fish and chips, chicken, calamari. It did introduce us to local hard cider, which we gratefully adopted as the beverage of this trip.
Tuesday, April 17, Manchester
Our hotel was next to a really cool train station. Oxford Road is the first one west of main station Piccadilly. It is a 1958 poem in laminated wood shells. Walked east along the canal into the Gay Village, stopping at the Alan Turing Memorial in Sackville Park. The Chinese Imperial Arch and Chinatown are further east on Faulkner Street, then we turned into downtown to the Manchester Art Gallery. Charles Barry (Houses of Parliament) designed the building in 1824, a classical Greek temple front that explodes into the color of a Victorian entry hall. The museum and collection were smaller than we expected, but it has excellent English art from the 1600’s through Classicism and Pre-Raphaelite. Contemporary artist Anne Louise Kershaw has reinterpreted the traditional hanging with revised wall text from a feminist perspective; insightful and hilarious. Sonia Boyce had a show of video and audio work relating the slave-created wealth of a Barbados sugar plantation and the grand estate Harewood House that it paid for. Continuing the feminist theme, the Museum had a show of work by Sylvia Pankhurst: daughter of the suffragette, an activist herself, and an artist whose work exposed the ills of poverty (like Jacob Riis with a pencil) and advertised equality issues.
Piccadilly Gardens is a major downtown square, with a mediocre fountain by Tadao Ando and lots of crisscrossing light rail lines. Also a Burger King, where we got lunch. The Brits have done a poor job implementing American systems, and this was a good example. No numbers on the receipts; you order, pay, and stand just aside. The same person who took your order fills it and hands it to you, and you have to watch to make sure you get your order, because hey, it’s a Burger King, everyone is getting pretty much the same thing, and it all looks alike. Food was the same as ours, it was just harder to understand the chaos of their process. The burger was good using UK beef, and they have a nice dining area overlooking the square.
The Northern Quarter, just north of downtown, was one of the coolest and funkiest neighborhoods we explored on our trip. If we relocated to England, this is a definite contender for where we would live. Lots of galleries, shops, restaurants and with a very interesting social environment. The Manchester Craft and Design Centre is housed in the former Smithfield Fish & Poultry Market, it’s like Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory with more innovative craft work (jewelry, glass, and ceramic).
We took a long walk past our hotel and up Oxford Road to the Manchester Museum. Oxford Road is the spine of the University of Manchester, one of the premier “red brick universities” that the U.K. created (around the same time as our land grant university system) specifically to teach useful industrial knowledge to middle class children. The Museum shows mainly archaeology and natural history, not the local history we’d hoped to see, but in a lovely Alfred Waterhouse building. Half a mile south on campus is the Whitworth Art Gallery, an 1890’s Waterhouse-influenced building for contemporary art. Well curated and intriguing shows by John Stezacker (photo collage), Grand Tour artists the Cozens, and South Asian artists on the cotton trade. Isaac Julien had a video installation documenting the 2004 Morecambe Bay tragedy of Chinese men who died collecting cockles for a company that was abusing their labor. All this plus Simon Patterson’s hilarious 1992 take on the London Tube Map, The Great Bear, that renames stations after actors, writers, and other celebrities. More than made up for our disappointment at the Manchester Museum.
Michael is treating me to one great meal out each month. For April he took me to Hawksmoor, the Manchester outpost of a London chain of steak houses. Potted smoked mackerel, hake with a tomato salad, smoked haddock with leeks, potatoes cooked in beef dripping with housemade ketchup, spinach, mushrooms, cider, a gin & tonic served gimlet style. The waiter was excellent; when we asked about but didn’t order them he treated us to an order of Royal Jerseys, small potatoes exclusive to the Isle of Jersey with amazing flavor. I just tried to put a “u” into “flavor” to English it up, but Spell Check won’t let me. Peanut shortbread wrapped around melted chocolate with caramel ice cream, like an inside-out Snickers bar, for dessert. The best meal we had on this trip; fresh, local, and well prepared and served.
Back to the hotel by way of the Radisson, built in 1853 as the Free Trade Hall in the style of a Renaissance palazzo. On the site of the Peterloo Massacre, an 1819 democratic protest that was ruthlessly suppressed by the local aristocracy and military.
Wednesday, April 18, Manchester
We picked up the MetroLink at St. Peter’s Square and headed west. The light rail is easy to understand and use, and this line took us over Castlefield. This was the original settlement of Manchester, complete with ruins of the Roman castle. It later became a junction of canals, railroads, and warehouses. Today the warehouses and factories are luxury condos and office buildings. We’d thought about walking through, but had little interest in their Museum of Science and Technology, the primary cultural anchor, so let this aerial overview suffice. Was cool to see the Roman ruins; possibly the el gave us a better view of what existed than if we’d been up close and personal, where all we would have seen was a stone wall in a park.
Across the Irwell from Manchester is Salford. Lots of factories and former industry. The government has tried to rejuvenate the community with culture; Salford Quays is now BBC and ITV production facilities, a shopping mall, a new museum, and an arts center. We started with art: The Lowry is a big flashy performing arts center with two galleries, one dedicated to the work of L.S. Lowry. Lowry was a Lancashire born and based artist who did child-like paintings of the mills and workers of his community. He’s held up as an exemplar of the Northerner who kept his working-class roots despite cultural aspirations. I’m not sure that is quite right; he espoused a primitive style as a conscious choice after years of art school and training. Yes, he worked a day job as a rent collector, but that was so he didn’t have to compromise his vision to support himself. He’s no naïve self-taught visionary. This was a good chance for us to see his oeuvre. Fun work that evokes the bleakness and small joys of industrial Britain, but nothing we’d want to take home on a coffee mug (and trust me, the gift shop REALLY wanted us to do that).
Lots of cool bridges over the canals of the Quays, we took one to the shopping mall, which was a step below a good Simon or Westfield mall in the States. Decent food court where we got our only Pakistani food of the trip, also a Cadbury Outlet. Across another canal to the Imperial War Museum in the North, an annex of London’s museum. A mediocre building by Daniel Liebeskind (he did much better in Berlin and Copenhagen) houses well-presented artifacts and stories of both World Wars, the Cold War, and Afghanistan and Iraq. Lots of intermingling of historical narrative with overarching themes that could have been disorienting but surprisingly worked. Every fifteen minutes the central gallery darkens and turns into a projected experience about something like children in war, or a particular battle, or refugee issues. Cool. Liebeskind designed three interlocking structures, an “earth” hall for exhibits, “sky” tower for views (closed), and “water” pavilion (seemingly now only open to corporate sponsors). Eh. Looked like bad Frank Gehry, honestly.
We caught MetroLink back to Piccadilly Square. We’d discovered that we liked a tea break in the afternoon. Sometimes this was sweet, but more often savory. Our waiter at Hawksmoor had caused a kerfuffle among staff asking for recommendations of the best pie shop in Manchester. The disputed consensus was Pie Minister, in the Northern Quarter. We walked up to try it out, excellent beef and chorizo pie and a surprising elderflower cider. Pie is a touchstone of the North, and a bit of a cult: think savory meat pies, something you could take into the factory for dinner, not sweet desserts. Lovely flaky but dense crusts.
We shopped our way south and east. The Victoria Station adaptation to incorporate light rail was brilliant. Corporation Street, in the architecture guide a place of wonder, turned out to have drab and dull buildings. Martha Schwarz, one of my favorite landscape architects, did good work at Exchange Square with her trademark “grass and fountain above parking”. The Marks and Spencer glass cube by Building Design Partnership was okay, the cylindrical sky bridge by Arup Associates fun. The kind people at Halifax Bank traded my 1997 pounds for contemporary ones painlessly (the Brits did a currency revision a few years back, wasn’t sure if the coins I’d hoarded weren’t just dead weight). The 1914 Beaux Arts Royal Exchange has been a theater for a few decades; we’d considered seeing a show there, but we could not psych ourselves for the bleakness of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days”.
Dinner back on Oxford Road, Backchich did good Lebanese chicken with wonderful hummus and pickles. We liked Manchester: a compact downtown, good transit, friendly and intelligent people. Did not seem expensive to us, but probably would to someone outside D.C. Lots of courtyard style office buildings that reminded us of Berlin apartment blocks. Their adaptation of industrial to finance is iffy, they need to figure out better ways of connecting their neighborhoods using the rail and canal rights-of-way.
Thursday, April 19, Liverpool
We found our platform at Oxford Street Station for the train to Liverpool. Unfortunately, BritRail, or whatever passes for a rail authority after Margaret Thatcher’s privatizations, was canceling trains right and left. We hopped on the next one to Liverpool and found a seat. The car was sort of posh, we think we usurped a first-class seat, but the conductor accepted our tickets as a valid fare.
Lime Street Station is Liverpool’s big rail depot, lovely arched front above a set of stepped platforms down to street level facing St. George’s Hall (what the Parthenon would look like if it had been designed as a concert hall and courthouse). We were staying at the docks, so our bags rolled easily the fifteen-minute walk down to the Mersey. We found our Holiday Inn Express, dropped our bags, and went out to explore.
The Albert Docks were designed in 1843 by Jesse Hartley; they transformed Liverpool into the Empire’s major port. The city successfully filled that role until after World War II, when focus shifted to being part of Europe. Southampton, on the Channel, was a better port for that; they built a container-capable complex, and Liverpool went into the decline it’s still confronting. The Docks are an engineering landmark. They offered the first place in the world where ships could come in (despite crazy Mersey tides), safely moor (in a dock that could be drained for maintenance), next to secure warehousing (so staff could not steal merchandise), that could be loaded and unloaded directly from ship to storage. All in fire-safe brick and cast iron. They were copied north and south along the river, and then around the world. Many older docks have had their basins filled to become a convention center, or housing, or parking. The Albert Docks started being converted into museums, shops, offices, and hotels in 1984; they are like the Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market of England. We were pleased that our hotel was in the old warehouses. Led to some quirky corridors, but large light-filled rooms with vaulted ceilings and views of the basin and museums.
We started with a walk around the docks, where we discovered that the brick wall built to secure the warehouses was still fairly impenetrable: you can see the Mersey, or the basin, but not both. Mattel Play! was at the base of our hotel. We expected it to be lots of Hot Wheels and Barbie, but it was mainly a children’s play space themed around Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder. Fun shop.
James Stirling’s Tate Liverpool was the signature kickoff of the Docks renovation, lots of colossal peach-orange colored columns and long galleries in the warehouses. Good selection of contemporary British and Modern art from the London museum’s holdings. Decent Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, and the sweet “Ken’s Show” of favorite work selected by the man who has been installing the Tate’s collection for decades. Lunch in the museum café, a soup-and-sandwich deal with excellent tomato soup and a chocolate-orange cake.
The shops in the Albert Docks reminded us of Galveston and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor; they are the ones that have successfully weathered forty years of tourist gleaning. Only place we saw Harry & Megan merchandise, which was sadly poorly designed. We know there are cool designers in the U.K., and even Mersey-side; a shame they were not allowed to do something for the commemorative cup and tea towel market.
The Museum of Liverpool is just across a channel from the Docks, on the Pier Head. Not sure why 3XN Kim Herforth Nielsen’s 2011 extruded aluminum box is supposed to represent the city; seems like the worst of self-indulgent architectural caprice. Plus the entrances have been moved several times, so their original design clearly did not function. Eventually figured out how to get in, and were pleased with the exhibits. Brilliant takes on their history from a variety of viewpoints, nice looks at Chinese, Welsh, and gay/lesbian contributions. Coverage of the Docklands Overhead Railway, an el that once covered the waterfront, Tate & Lyle Sugar, Edwin Lutyens original model for the Catholic cathedral, Meccano construction toys. The city’s role in the slave/sugar/rum trade, and China trade. Comprehensive but not overwhelming. We headed back to the hotel and checked in.
The final piece of Albert Docks is its shipping heritage. The Merseyside Maritime Museum and International Slavery Museum share space on different floors of Hartley Quay. The Slavery Museum is excellent, as good as our recently opened African American History Museum, but with an international instead of U.S.-only focus. The Maritime Museum had clearly been a place of dusty ship models; but is refocusing on cultural history. Good shows on gay sailors, life on the great ocean liners, and WWII convoys.
Back into town to explore Liverpool One. This multi-acre section of downtown was handed over to Grosvenor Properties to turn into an open-air shopping complex. It’s only a few years old, dynamic shopping on clean and safe streets, but from a retail perspective dull. We wondered if England is not over-building their retail as we did fifteen years ago, just in time to face competition from online retailers. Highlight is Bluecoat Chambers, a 1716 Georgian school that was turned into an arts center in the 1920’s and shifted to crafts when reconstructed after the war. The building is impressive, gardens calm and lovely. No studios were open, but the gallery and shop at least as good as Houston’s. And as pricey.
The Ropewalks are a bar and club neighborhood on the long blocks that were needed to spin rope for the ships. We had dinner at Tai Pan, a surprisingly decent Chinese buffet. Affordable, at 16 pounds each for all-you-can-eat. Walked past their Queen Victoria Monument in Derby Square (less corpulent than Manchester’s), and Marks & Spencer in the former Compton House, which beats Paris’s Bon Marche to be the first purpose-built grand department store, in 1867. The exterior was under scaffolding for repair, so we missed the palazzo façade, and we’ve been to enough M&S’s to not need to wander the interior.
Friday, April 20, Liverpool
Liverpool is pretty new in British terms, only becoming important with international shipping in the 1700s. The old “pool” on the “Liver” has been long buried under the Pier Head. This is the esplanade where transatlantic passengers disembarked in Europe, greeted by the Three Graces, outstanding Beaux Arts buildings for the Cunard steamship line, the Mersey Docks Board, and the Royal Liver Building. Today you can only get that effect by taking a ferry back from Birkenhead: we skipped the ten-pound fare and Jerry-and-the-Pacemakers’ “Ferry Cross the Mersey” mercilessly piped at tourists. Instead we headed inland, and uphill, to Oriel Chambers, an office building from 1864 with the first metal framed glass curtain wall. It reminded me of early Chicago skyscrapers, complete with Chicago-style three-part windows. Some cool Victorian downtown office buildings that survived the Blitz, then St. John’s Gardens, a mediocre park with a memorial to William Gladstone that terraces up to Liverpool’s historic cultural complex.
The Walker Art Gallery has a great Neoclassical exterior that is better than the bland interior, but a good collection of Old Masters: Italian art up to the Renaissance, Flemish baroque, English from the Middle Ages to today. Best collection of Joseph Wright of Derby I’ve ever seen, good Pre-Raphaelite (Rossetti, Hunt, Brown), Wedgewood. A room where you can dress up as Henry VIII. Lots of space dedicated to the current Moore Prize of dreadful contemporary art, but also a good show by the Singh Twins, South Asian artists who take a critical feminist look at the cotton industry from ancient India through England to China and back to India today. Really lovely and thoughtful work. Not sure the museum is being maintained well, and you can hear the clatter of the cafeteria’s kitchens throughout the galleries.
The World Museum used to be called the Liverpool Museum and Library. An anthropology and natural science museum, most people were queueing up for a show of Chinese terra cotta warriors. We’d seen them at National Geographic on 17th Street. The Egyptian galleries were okay, but the rest of the collection did not grab us.
Walked out for the vista of St. George’s Hall and the 1930 Cenotaph. The latter has an interesting low relief mural of people in 1920’s dress mourning the Great War. Through Ropewalks to the 1811 Church of St. Luke. This was left a burned-out ruin after Nazi bombing, which the town corporation purchased as a park and memorial. Well preserved, and a lovely moment in an area that’s mainly about nightlife and restaurants. Very Holyrood-esque. A short walk to the Chinese Arch and Chinatown restaurants on Nelson Street, then on to Edward Welby Pugin’s Church of St. Vincent de Paul. Pugin was the Victorian who decided churches should be Gothic Revival; if you grew up going to a church with pointed windows, stone sculpture, and stained glass, you can blame him. There’s no Pugin in America; it was cool to see one of his works directly. The building was being renovated; we walked past the painters, checked out the sanctuary, and took off before anyone questioned what we were doing there.
Sir Giles Gilbert Scott designed the classic British telephone box (the TARDIS, for Dr. Who fans), and also Liverpool’s Gothic Revival Anglican Cathedral. It reminded me of Goodhue’s University of Chicago Rockefeller Chapel, but significantly grander. An unimpressive neon Tracy Emin sculpture, “Roman Standard”, greets you as you depart the building. More impressive is the vista up from St. James Cemetery. As you leave the cathedral there’s a path on the right; a stone arch, and a steep descent into a valley in the midst of the city. Heavily wooded, filled with funeral monuments and graves, with a lovely landscaped path leading you through. The rise back to street level was less steep than we feared; and walking up Hope Street looking at the cathedral across the gardens is beautiful. Edinburgh’s memorial cemetery is more impressive, but this one will do.
Hope Street runs on a rise past rows of Regency and Victorian townhouses to the city’s other, Catholic, Metropolitan Cathedral. This was originally designed by Lutyens (we saw the model, above, in the Liverpool Museum), but only the foundation had been dug and built when WWII began. Instead of completing Lutyens plan, which was probably too big to finance even on their pre-War economy, the diocese hired Frederick Gibberd to design a new, steel and glass edifice. Photos make it look like a spaceship descended on the north end of Hope Street, and I expected to HATE it. Instead, it is a lovely piece of post-War Modernism. Monumental steps pass a visitors’ center and bell tower to the Cathedral proper, an enormous round room with the altar in the center. A crown of spires outside supports a cylinder of stained glass inside; you see yellow as you approach the altar which changes to red and blue as you circle it. Blue glass dominates the surrounds of the shallow and less meaningful side chapels. Otherworldly and surprisingly devotional, at least as good as our Coast Guard Chapel in Colorado Springs or Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche.
We wanted to break at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, a famous pub just south on Hope Street. We walked in, checked out the cool Arts and Crafts rooms, but couldn’t get anyone to wait on us or seat us. We left and got ciders at a friendlier pub next door. Up Bold Street and back through Ropewalks to Cavern Walks. This is a shopping mall built in the space that once held the Cavern Club, where the Beatles met Brian Epstein and got their start. We’d been avoiding the Beatles: hard to do in tourist Liverpool. Even the National Trust has tours of their homes, probably the only public housing in Trust ownership. I knew the mall would be touristy trashy, but it was convenient and free. We did a photo at the statue of Cilla Black, skipped past the many poor bronzes of the Fab Four, and discovered the shops themselves were pretty high end: Vivian Westwood, designer boutiques. Huh. Back to the Pierhead for the Open Eye Gallery (cool shows of Chinese confronting technology). Across a plaza is the Royal Institute of British Architects North; they had a great show on Urban Splash, a design and development firm that reinvented historic adaptation and reuse in Britain. They’re responsible for way too many factories that are now luxury condos and restaurant malls; started in Manchester, but now work across the country. I feel like I should hate their work, but it mainly looks fun and successful. Then again, what other photos are you going to show at your tribute from RIBA?
Dinner was at What’s Cooking, the only restaurant remaining from the original Albert Docks renovation. As one would expect from a restaurant that has been around for forty years, it knows its tourist market. It had really decent Mexican food, though, for England, and friendly competent staff.
Walked off our burritos down the docks by the Convention Center. There’s a giant Ferris wheel here which we skipped, but at its base an exhibit by the Royal Geographic Society of Britain from the air. Large boards showed crisp photos of the country, and the issues confronting how Britons are working with their environment in the 21st Century. Unexpected and cool.
Saturday, April 21, Liverpool, Queen’s Birthday
We hopped on a commuter train at James Street Station and headed under the Mersey to Birkenhead and Port Sunlight. The latter was a company town created by Lord Leverhulme in 1888. Lever Brothers, the soap company? Lifebuoy Soap? Skyscraper on Fifth Avenue? Same guy. Sunlight was his dish soap brand in England, it was like calling a suburb Tide, or Palmolive. Leverhulme’s town may have been paternalistic, but it was a beautiful community where his employees had a better quality of life that they could have had in Liverpool. It reminded us of an upscale Colonial Village, or working man’s Chevy Chase. The walk from the train station led through gardens and a park to the Village Museum, where we learned that Lutyens was among the architects who got their start working at Port Sunlight.
After his wife died and Lever was consolidating his four homes he took the best of their art and furniture and moved it into the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Based on examples he saw in New York like the Frick and Morgan Library, he basically donated his art collection to his employees. More Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces, an extensive Wedgewood collection, a room of Napoleon memorabilia, theme rooms, Neoclassical sculpture and great decorative arts. Another good museum café, halloumi salad and prawn sandwich. After lunch we walked back to the Village Museum, where they’ve restored one of the workers’ houses to 1913. It was surprisingly spacious, with three decent sized bedrooms upstairs and a plumbed kitchen and bath. Must have seemed fantastic at the time, when most workers were living in hovels.
We could have caught a bus. Being unwilling to learn the system for just one ride, we called an Uber to take us north to the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead. Michal, our kind Polish driver explained to us that the Wirral was this whole peninsula we were on across from Liverpool. Both Port Sunlight and Birkenhead are towns on the Wirral. The Williamson is the local art museum. It’s more like a community art center, but has a great collection of Merseyside artists, Della Robbia Pottery (Arts and Crafts period, made in a local factory that was named after the Italians), Asian pottery, watercolors, ship models, Victorian furniture. A bit of a grab bag, but fun.
We walked due north to Joseph Paxton’s 1847 Birkenhead Park. This was the first public park planned from scratch for people rather than royalty. Frederick Law Olmsted toured it before planning Central Park, and you can see his ideas in embryo as you walk up curving paths to rockeries and lakes. A Swiss bridge, Roman boathouse, road to carry traffic through the park without impinging on the grounds. Teams of people playing cricket on the lovely lawn in the lovely sunlight. Michal had said we were visiting during Liverpool’s three days of summer, and it certainly seemed fortunate. We got sticky toffee pudding flavored ice cream in the park pavilion, then had a leisurely five-minute stroll north to the train back to Lime Street. Glad we got to see some of the suburban parts of Liverpool, they are important to the city.
We picked up dinner at a Gregg’s, the CVS of British bakeries, with really flaky delicious sausage rolls. A walk south along the Mersey took us to a variety of docks that have been converted to other uses. Kings Docks now hold the Arena and Convention Center, a wet dock has an aquatic skateboard park, and Coburg Docks are boring 1990’s housing.
The attitude of Liverpool was oddly threatening. Not like we were going to be mugged or anything, or too many homeless people. More like testosterone-driven boys trying to impress overly-made-up women wearing too few clothes. Like a Lily Allen song come to life. This was especially prominent as we passed the Arena, where the lads were heading into a prize fight between Amir Khan and Phil Lo Greco. Or as Michael dubbed them, Chaka Khan vs. Echo and the Bunnymen. Retreated to the hotel with no drama, and the thick walls of the Docks silenced the sounds of celebration. We watched the Queen’s Birthday Celebration from the Albert Hall on t.v.: why were Sting and Shaggy performing duets? And does the Queen know who Shaggy is?
We considered Liverpool before we headed out. They have the bluster of Brooklyn, without the economy. Yes, the port is not what it used to be, and that was a blow, but it’s been seventy years. Like, one fifth of their total history – get it together. Their bragging about their music legacy and soccer history is underwhelming, and the food was more chain and not as adventurous as we saw in Manchester.
Sunday, April 22, Chester
BritRail took us easily from Lime Street Station to Manchester Airport. We eventually figured out where to catch the bus to the Rental Car Village, where Michael picked up the Europcar he had reserved. Or rather, a car, not as reserved, after an hour’s wait, that was larger than we wanted. It did have SatNav (GPS), which was a blessing, as Verizon Wireless’s signal became unreliable even before we left the airport.
Stockport was a 45-minute drive from the airport, just long enough for us to start getting used to British driving before breaking at Lyme Park. This is the Legh (pronounced “Lee”) family estate, now in the custody of the National Trust. If you’re going to do English country houses, join the Trust, or at least their American subsidiary, Royal Oak. It pays for itself just in admission fees. Lyme is a typical Trust experience: parking/visitor kiosk, great house with guides in each room but no formal tour, tea house usually in the former kitchens, staff rooms, or stables, and grounds split between formal gardens, rolling landscape, and a “home” farm. There is nothing exceptional about Lyme Park; no masterpiece paintings, name architect, or fantastic gardens. Their draw is that this is where Colin Firth ascended from the pond as Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of “Pride and Prejudice”. So as promised in my title, I’d made it to Pemberley. It’s a beautiful Neoclassical mansion, with interiors that look like Robert Adam but aren’t. Some fine carving that looks like Grinling Gibbons, but isn’t. We saw their Caxton missal, a rare book that only came into the collection recently. Lunch in the Ale Rooms delicious, a Cheshire cheese sandwich (that’s what county we were in), sausage roll with beet pickle, Victoria sponge cake, tea. Walked around the grounds in a drizzle, lovely spring bulbs and blossoming trees. A grand conservatory with roses. The site, on a series of hills, reminded us of Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts.
Back on the motorway heading west before traffic got heavy during rush hour, we passed Liverpool again and headed south to Chester. This was a Roman outpost called Deva, the river here is still called the Dee. The Holiday Inn Express Chester Racecourse was in the track parking lot next to the clubhouse. We parked, checked in, and went to explore. It’s a short walk to Chester’s Roman Walls, which one can stroll to circle the town similar to those in Lucca or Quebec City. Great views into the Georgian townhouses and Victorian emulations of medieval half-timbered buildings, the castle/university, and out to the track, narrow boats, and bridges over the Dee. Lots of bits of Roman ruins now used as parks. We walked halfway around and descended at the Clock Gate to go into town. Most restaurants closed for Sunday, but we found an Italian place that served wonderful antipasto, bruschetta, chicken Milanese, salad with tuna, and tiramisu. The Grosvenor Museum here has a famous collection of Roman antiquities, but we’d arrived too late to take that in. Walked back to the hotel by way of The Rows, elevated pedestrian walkways on the second story of buildings, a predecessor of a two-level shopping mall on a British high street. Lovely town.
Monday, April 23, Shrewsbury, St. George’s Day
Homes and businesses were flying flags with St. George’s red cross on a white field, who knew? We blew by Telford, an Industrial Revolution pilgrimage site where Thomas Telford built the crossing at Ironbridge Gorge, on our way into Wales. Powis Castle was the seat of the Herbert family, who viewed themselves as Wales itself, taking the Welsh dragon as their family crest. The castle of red stone had been transformed into a country estate, filled with portraits of Herberts by Italians, Gainsborough, and Sargent. The Trust is interpreting the property as The House of Portraits, with an audio guide that stresses the family and their representations. Pride of place is held by a miniature of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the sexually ambiguous David Bowie of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. The Herberts were Catholics who supported Charles II, to whom they dedicated their suite of state rooms. Verrio painted the main stairway of Greek mythology, and there’s a great Bernardo Bellotto cityscape. The portraits deserve pride of place, though. Had lunch in the café, chicken & leek pie, beef stew, Welshcakes. Museum dedicated to Clive of India, a Herbert general who subdued vast tracks of the Subcontinent for the Empire.
Okay, but not spectacular. Then we walked into the gardens. These have been described as Baroque, and we weren’t sure what that meant. Walking around we figured it was a garden where the scale has been supersized. Italian terraces descend from the house; each terrace could be a garden itself, and each switchback walk took ten minutes. Centuries-old yew trees have been sculpted into cloud shapes, some of the trees so large that they compete with the castle, sheltering benches in their undergrowth. Frames for climbing vines take the form of arched houses. A formal lawn is framed on one side by a perfectly squared hedge over eight feet tall, so long that it has three arched exits in case you can’t do the whole length. We walked forward into the naturalistic English garden on the right, populated with sheep and cattle to give you a sense of the scale involved. We doubled back to discover formal French gardens on the other side, far enough in extent that they run a shuttle van to take you back uphill to the house. Astounding.
Drove back into England, and on to Shrewsbury, for “the incident”. We were trying to make a three point turn on a little-used park road and an approaching driver didn’t stop. We ran into her driver’s side. Fortunately no one was hurt, it was just body damage. She called her husband, we called our rental company, and since Michael had taken out full insurance we only needed to exchange information. While we were waiting for that conclusion Michael and the couple made conversation, discovered we all loved country houses, traded tips, and we parted shaken but without anger.
Shrewsbury has a fine cathedral, apparently, but we were there for Attingham Park, the Berwick (pronounced “berrick”) family estate. The Lords Berwick have died out, and they deeded their seat to the National Trust. It is a Regency home, interiors that look like Robert Adam but are by George Steuart. Had never heard of him, but he did great Georgian. We raced in fifteen minutes before their scheduled closing; expecting to get a view of the foyer before being shown out. Instead, several guides welcomed us, gave us free run of the state rooms, and when we attempted to let them go insisted on taking us through the upper levels and servants’ quarters for a lightning tour of the home. Lovely John Nash skylights. The Trust is interpreting it in the post-War period when it was a women’s college. We could barely get them to let us go. In the grounds, designed by Humphrey Repton, the Walled Play Garden was closed, but the stables and pleasure grounds are classic examples of English park design.
We checked into the Holiday Inn Express Shrewsbury, then drove across town for Toby’s Carvery. This is a chain we discovered on our Scottish trip; a buffet where they custom carve ham, beef, and turkey, and you get endless Yorkshire pudding and vegetables. Delicious. No more bottomless custard with dessert, but we enjoyed our Eton Mess.
Tuesday, April 24, Birmingham
The drive to Birmingham was tortuous, but mainly, for the first time, motorway (freeway). Oddly, there are moments when everyone on the motorway slows down, then stops. For an hour, then begins crawling forward again. Really? We found parking and set off on foot to explore.
The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is a quirky building. The town council had built it as both the Gas Board headquarters, which the good Victorian manufacturers had taken over for the city, town offices, and a public museum. The latter now uses most of the space. The collection of Pre-Raphaelites is spectacular; one reason American collections are so poor in this area is that the cities of the Midlands have the great canvases. The other European art here is just middling, as good as the collection at a medium-size American museum. Ditto the Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek and Roman holdings. Lunch in the restored Victorian tea rooms, sandwiches with excellent tomato and mushroom soups. Four rooms function as the Museum of Birmingham History; this was fantastic. I thought of Birmingham as an iron and steel center, but it developed and was headquarters for hundreds of industries and trades. Much of the 17th Century exports were used to enslave people who ended up in the Caribbean and America. Lots of ironies, like the Quaker gun manufacturer. HP and Cadbury are based here; the latter’s dark chocolate, Bourneville, is named after the model town their Quaker founders created.
We tried to go to their Art Deco World War I memorial, the Hall of Memory, but it was surrounded by chain link fence in a construction site for new light rail and office towers. Passed through that to the Library of Birmingham. This had been in a great Victorian building, bombed out and replaced by a horrible Brutalist building, replaced by the recent current structure that shares space with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Through all the moves, the Shakespeare Memorial Room has been recreated, this time on the top floor with an outside deck. Good views, and a cool fake-Tudor interior housing a collection of Shakespeariana that competes with our Folger Library.
A quick walk past the Museum took us to St. Philip’s Cathedral. Originally designed in 1709, major extension by J.A. Chatwin in 1883. Brilliant (in many senses) stained glass by Edward Burne-Jones. Over to the Great Western Arcade, still used for shops, and then the Bull Ring Mall. After German bombing this oldest part of the city was rebuilt as a shopping mall that is one of the legends of bad post-War design. It has been broken up and reconfigured, with a signature Selfridges department store by Future Systems, a swooping landmark covered in ceramic dots. The only survivor from before both developments is another Chatwin church, St. Martin in the Bull Ring, with another massive stained-glass window by Burne-Jones. We checked out the church and the mall, but spent more time at the Rag Market, a building that looks like a produce market but once serviced old clothes vendors. Still a lot of fabric stores, but also stands selling tourist tschotchkes, fish and chips, and Chinese food.
We took a break from Holiday Inn with the National Trust’s Back to Backs at 54 Inge Street. A back-to-back was a British version of our tenement housing. Entire blocks of one room deep homes built back to back, kitchen/sitting room on our first floor, two or three levels of bedrooms above that. Small, dark, and claustrophobic, generally with no running water or sanitation. You either faced the street or the alley, and there were advantages (to look on the bright side) of both. Street got you light and access, alley was where the communal toilets, well, and bath shanties were. If you paid more to live on the street you had to walk all around the block to get in line to use the toilets. But at least when you got home you didn’t have to smell them. These had started to disappear even before WWII; what the Nazis did not destroy the housing authorities did. This small block was rescued by the Trust so people would remember how horrible they were. They interpret some as a museum, and rent two of them. We got a full street-front one to ourselves, retrofitted with a contemporary kitchen and bath, restored to the 1930’s (but with WiFi). It was a little like staying overnight in NYC’s Tenement Museum. Crazy insane steep spiral stairs; in addition to the iron rail on one side, metal handles have been screwed into the opposite wall to help you haul yourself up and to catch onto if you slip.
This was once Birmingham’s Gay Village, but that seems to have been supplanted by an expansion of Chinatown. We got dinner at Miu Miu, barely-fried rice, chicken in black bean sauce, salt & chili shrimp, vegetable hot pot. The food was okay, and the service kind but clueless. It will not be there if you visit. We walked over to The Mailbox, a postal sorting facility converted to luxury shopping. We were too late for the stores; they have a Harvey Nick’s and a Heal’s, a design company we fell in love with in London. We walked out the back of the mall and along a redeveloped canal walk to Gas Street Canal Basin, a place people moor their narrowboats when they want to live on the water in Birmingham. Lots of development and bars, but overall it looked cheap. It was also difficult to find our way back due to a lack of lights, street signs, and organization. Must be hell on people who have to accomplish it drunk.
Wednesday, April 25, Derby
This was a day of evil traffic. We realized too late that one should either do the small cities by train, or country houses by car, but not both. It was difficult driving out of Birmingham, and took us two hours to drive to Coventry, a drive that should have taken 45 minutes. In Coventry we discovered that the parking Rick Steve’s recommends was under a bizarre construction project. We were so frustrated that we almost blew off the whole town. Fortunately we stuck with it, a kind parking employee helped us figure out how to call the central office to get a parking ticket/permit, and we set off on foot.
Coventry is a city that the Nazi’s essentially leveled. It’s hard to blame them, it had several auto factories that had been converted to munitions, all integrated with the residential city. That parking? It’s under a ring-road of overpasses that the city erected in an effort to modernize the center. Might have worked if they’d also built the parking decks that were supposed to go alongside, but they didn’t. The main draw is St. Michael’s Cathedral. This was not a bomb target, but the Germans first dropped incendiary bombs to light up the city so they could pinpoint the factories, and the medieval cathedral was collateral damage. Basil Spence was hired to design the new church; he stabilized the ruin and built his modern cathedral adjacent. I expected to loath this, but it integrates beautifully, helped by the fact that the same reddish stone is used for both. A bizarre Jacob Epstein statue of St. Michael conquering Satan marks the entrance; Satan curiously looks like Dobby the House Elf being threatened by an evil wizard. Entering you focus on Graham Sutherland’s very green tapestry of Christ, more notable for its size than artistry, and a pulpit and choir that evoke thorns. When you leave the view is flooded with light from brilliant walls of colored glass.
Each city we’d been in had a university, and Coventry’s looks fairly decent. We had lunch in their student union, an affordable and better than expected Mexican chicken plate and bland bbq. Why can they do Mexican, but not Southern? Maybe we’re more in tune with how much better bbq should be. Coventry University’s Herbert Art Gallery had an excellent show of British Pop Art (Paolozzi, Hamilton, Hockney) and fun gallery dedicated to local girl gone bare Lady Godiva. We need to rent Maureen O’Hara’s movie version. Mediocre Old Master paintings, but a good gallery of the city, focusing on their Medieval and Victorian pasts and the bombing and rebuilding.
Another long motor trek, 2.5 hours to drive to Derby versus the expected one, mainly due to traffic on the M1. It was like sitting motionless for an hour on I-95. Fortunately, the house we had come to visit, Kedleston Hall, was worth the trip. Kedleston was the Derbyshire Estate of the Curzon family, 18th Century leaders of the Tory Party, 20th Century opponents of women’s suffrage. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, agreed to take that job when he realized Government House in New Delhi wouldn’t be too big a shock since architect Lutyens had based it on Kedleston. The home was begun by James “Athenian” Stuart, but completed by our favorite, Robert Adam. We drove over the Trent River on one of Adam’s graceful bridges, and began in the Marble Hall, a massive double-height cubic room lined by columns and Roman sculpture. That leads into a circular room evoking the Pantheon, and a series of spaces with ceilings that look like Wedgewood. It’s the complete Robert Adam crayon box: screens, pilasters, domes, arches, niches, each restrained but covered in pattern. Two curved corridors reach out from the central block; the servants’ wing has gorgeous wooden floors with the boards tapered and laid as expected, from wall to wall. In the grander family corridor the boards (trees?) were curved, so they run the length of the hall in the same perfect curve of the walls. Incredible. One room’s walls were covered in a loud blue brocade, and that same brocade upholstered long gilt sofas, so the sofas blend into the room like Baroque camouflage. Curzon family portraits; views out the windows to sheep, cattle, and pheasants; and a collection of Old Master paintings worthy of a second-tier museum. An India Gallery houses Lady Curzon’s Worth-created Peacock Dress from the Delhi Durbar. We took tea, shopped, and had a drizzly walk around the Pleasure Grounds. A medieval church was incorporated into the house, not sure why.
A half-hour drive across Derby to the Holiday Inn Express, next to the Rolls Royce factory. Given that it was rush hour we were not unhappy with that. Dinner at Harvester, a restaurant across the parking lot: good mixed grill, potato skins, and a decent salad bar. Decent and salad: words I never expected to use together in England. Their food has improved.
Thursday, April 26, Derby
Lovely views of the Derwent Valley and the southern tip of Peak District National Park as we drove up to Chatsworth. This was the Whig party’s counterpart to Kedleston: the Cavendish family in Derbyshire were strong supporters of the American revolutionaries and James Fox. It is one of the few great houses to remain under control of the original family. Deborah Mitford, wife of the 11th Duke of Devonshire, whipped the estate into one of the first to make a profit off of its history, farm, and cultural position. This was helped by the fact that the family had extensive land across England and Ireland; they traded estates to the National Trust for taxes and sold properties to be able to hold on to this one. In the process, they consolidated centuries of great art, sculpture, and decorative arts here; it has been called “The Victoria & Albert Museum of the North”. The current Duke and Duchess still live here, and are still commissioning art, which they’ve hung with the Old Masters and antiques. There’s a Damien Hirst sculpture in the chapel, and contemporary ceramics installations by Edmund De Waal in fireplaces throughout the public rooms. The 11th Duke was friendly with Lucien Freud before the artist became established; amazing family portraits by Freud are some of the contemporary treasures. In addition, they have capitalized on the farm, creating an export business for their meat, dairy, and produce. Finally, Debo mastered the art of creating a theme park, setting up campgrounds and family events for the general public on the grounds, but far enough away to not impinge on the visitor experience.
In short, we were looking forward to this house for a bunch of reasons. We were not disappointed.
We started at the Farmyard Shop, several miles from the house. It’s a gourmet grocery, with much of what’s on sale either grown on property or made especially for the estate. After weeks of avoiding souvenirs, this is where we indulged. A short drive through the grounds took us to the car park.
The main house is a palimpsest of additions and alterations with no architect an American would recognize, starting with Bess of Hardwick under the Tudors. You enter a hall painted floor-to-ceiling by Louis Laguerre, lots of gods and goddesses bumping into the furniture, then up to the State Apartments with ceilings by Antonio Verrio, a favorite of the aristocracy under the Stuarts and William and Mary. The best furniture from the Cavendish homes, arranged with decades of experience figuring out what worked where. Their current interpretation stresses the restoration and what it takes to maintain the home, with displays throughout crediting carpenters, maintenance staff, curators, and everyone who makes the property “go”. As in a Trust property, no tour guides, but definitely a prescribed path through the house. After the State Rooms we asked a guard if it was possible to make a quick escape for lunch; he kindly connected us with several of his peers who led us out a back way.
We’d booked tickets for Chatsworth before we flew to England, and they had prompted us the evening before to make a reservation in one of their restaurants. We chose Cavendish for lunch, in the former stables. It was a bit like English tapas: gammon, lamb, a tear-away bread, Scotch egg, tomato salad, and cider. One of the best meals of the trip.
We snuck back to where we had left the path through the house. The furniture seemed to shift after the State Rooms, from Baroque to Neoclassical, much of it from Devonshire House in London. Including the tromp l’oeil painting of a violin on the back of a door. A stairwell of portraits of the Lords Cavendish. A stray Rembrandt. Even service areas, like public bathrooms, have been designed for both delight and utility, with cool tilework or a painting of a pair of binoculars next to a door as if waiting to be picked up. The sculpture gallery was jam packed with the expected Roman statues brought back from the Grand Tour, but with a Henry Moore thrown in for whimsy.
The gardens were the work of Capability Brown, most of what you see is his. In the 1800’s the family hired Joseph Paxton, so overlaid on the naturalistic English garden are technological Victorian whiz bangs. We especially liked his Conservatory Wall, a series of shallow greenhouses stepping up a slope alongside the historic brick wall. We checked out the view up to the Cascade, but turned right into the rockery and the maze that replaced Paxton’s great greenhouse (pulled down after WWII due to the cost of maintenance). From there we walked the 100 Steps up to the arboretum and along the trout stream (yes, really) to the Greek temple at the top of the Cascade. Each step of the waterfall that descends to the house is shaped to produce a distinctly different sound. We skipped the kitchen garden and Adventure Playground in favor of the Statuary Garden, and a final dash of shopping in the Stables.
We drove back to Derby along the Derwent, passing Richard Arkwright’s 1771 Cromford Mill. This is the factory that really began the Industrial Revolution, combining water power with mechanical spinning and weaving mills. The people who created Waltham, my home town, as a factory center came here to steal their technology. We should have gone back to Harvest for dinner, but made the mistake of trying Chiquito’s next door. Mediocre Mexican, stick with the English restaurant.
Friday, April 27, Manchester Airport
There were several National Trust properties we could have visited on our last day; we chose Shugborough Estate mainly because of its convenience en route back to Manchester. It was a brilliant choice.
We checked out the farm first. The Anson family had been innovative farmers, implementing a series of agricultural and breeding experiments that became mainstream in the U.K. One of these was their Walled Garden, where they specialized in growing pineapples. The Trust cannot afford to rebuild the greenhouses, but they have replicated them in wythes, twisted branches, planted with dahlias. The Park Farm had an innovative and well interpreted grist mill, and breeding pigs and sheep. Lots of spring lambs hobbling around, and heritage chickens. The last Anson to live at Shugborough was Patrick Lichfield, a fashion photographer who took the official portraits of Charles and Diana’s wedding. He had deeded most of the home to the Trust; but retained a wing and several of the upstairs rooms as a personal suite. This was the site of groovy parties in the 1960’s and 70’s where David Hockney, Roman Polanski, Olivia Newton John, and Mick & Bianca hung out. The Trust has kept the apartment as he left it, complete with Jack Daniels bottles on the bar and Stones LP’s on the stereo. Our guide told us a solicitor had once driven up and asked the maid on the front porch to give a packet to the Lord; she rudely told him to give it to him himself. It was Britt Ekland in costume for a film shoot. It would have been fun to see Princess Anne drive up in leather on her motorcycle, a common enough occurrence that it is framed in several portraits on the walls. Lunch in the tea room, in the former stableyard, was a lovely coconut curry, honey scone, sausage & rhubarb roll, salad, potatoes, and cheese flan.
The mansion proper was designed by James “Athenian” Stuart. More Neoclassical wonderment, especially the ceilings, which seem to survive when every other surface gets updated over the centuries. The Trust is interpreting the house as “A Tale of Two Brothers”: Thomas Anson, who inherited the estate and developed most of what we saw, and 2nd son George who went to sea, captured a Spanish treasure ship, and paid for it. Cool way to tell two overlapping stories, and to involve the Horatio Hornblower, China Trade aspect of Georgian England. It was a rainy walk in the grounds, but we got to see many of the monuments the Ansons had put in a circuit to impress guests with their Enlightenment erudition: Chinese temple, false ruin, Tower of the Winds, Shepherd’s Monument, Hadrian’s Arch.
We drove out via Stoke-on-Trent, cool to see exits for Wedgewood, Spode, Royal Doulton and Royal Stafford. Might have been able to squeak in a visit, but played it safe and went directly to the Holiday Inn Express Manchester Airport. I packed while Michael returned the car and figured out the shuttles back.
Saturday, April 28
Virgin got us uneventfully to Atlanta, and Delta to National. Immigration in Atlanta made us appreciate how much easier it was than going the other way into Manchester, but it may just have been Southern friendliness and the ready availability of bathrooms and giant Diet Cokes full of ice.
So, what was great about England’s Midlands?
- Employees at museums, railroads, even car parks friendly and helpful
- Meals at National Trust properties were always good, fresh, and reasonably priced
- More daffodils, tulips, lambs, ducks, fresh grass and trees in bud than you could hope for from a British spring
- Cities are compact, easy to walk, with decent transport for when you get tired
- Fresh vegetables and ice much more available than we’ve seen on previous trips
- Every town seems to have a university, and most of them appear to be flourishing
- Gogglebox is a hysterically trashy t.v. program where they put cameras on a variety of regular Brits watching prime time television over the week, then show their reactions. Their take on the Queen’s birthday was worth the whole trip.
- Hard cider and Wheetabix were our culinary discoveries, they’ll stay with us at home
And what wasn’t?
- They might speak English, but communication is difficult. It’s not the accents, which can be strong but overcome. Rather, their attitudes and habits can be inscrutable. Does one pass on the right or left? Whatever. Most egregiously, “cheers”, which in America we interpret as a Brit “hello!”, can mean anything from “I see you” to “have a pleasant day” to “that’s not how we do things” to “life is good” to “get out of my way”. Cheers, indeed.
- Traffic congestion is dreadful. Our previous driving had been in the rural north, but this is one of the most densely packed parts of the country. We were not prepared for the numbers of cars attempting to negotiate insufficient roads. The main highways, the motorways, especially bad. We figured we were dumb enough to attempt it, but they know better and have access to excellent public transport. Bodes poorly for planners who think increasing time/costs will push people out of cars.
- How do I order in this restaurant? Every one seemed different, we frequently just had to ask where we ordered, where we should pay. The answers seemed commonly enough given that this is not an unusual confusion.
- Chips. As in French fries. With every meal, even Chinese, and not especially good. On the other hand, crisps, as in our chips, often quite tasty.
- Suburban life seems horrible. The architecture makes ours look good. They have the model of really good 1920’s developments in every city, why did they not model their new housing on those, instead of cheap bastardized versions of Los Angeles?
- Lots of homeless people in the cities; clearly the Tories have done away with good chunks of the social contract. Also lots of security cameras, although we didn’t much mind those.
- Manchester Airport is a mess. No easy way to get around it, or away from it, or to it. Customs a nightmare. Frequently one is forced to queue for an elevator because they don’t allow luggage on the escalators. At an airport. Really?
Not sure which column the following goes under. American music is everywhere. In a country that produced Adele, the Beatles, the Stones, and Sam Smith, I expected better, or at least indigenous. Odd to hear Dolly Parton-as-Muzak in Marks & Spencers.
Finally, a story. As we were leaving, I tried to buy a pack of cookies for my backpack, as I’d foolishly packed all ours in checked luggage. This is a good illustration of how poorly the English have adapted technologies that work well in America.
HOW TO BUY A BISCUIT
- First, locate a store that will sell you a cookie in the airport. At Manchester, that’s W.H. Smith, their version of HMS Host.
- Find the least objectionable amongst the milk chocolate, stem ginger, dairy crème options. Settled on some McVittie’s Digestives.
- Find someone to let you pay. At this location, the registers are oddly all the way in the back, and unstaffed. Eh, CVS invented making customers do all the work, this I can handle
- Clear monitor of previous customer’s unclosed transactions, get a fresh screen
- Attempt to scan McVittie’s. These are cylindrical, with the bar code printed the wrong way, so do not scan. Find method to type in code.
- Find staff person to approve your keying in of the code. Yes.
- Scan your boarding pass, which is now wrinkled in your pocket. Umm, why? This is not a duty-free.
- Select “Pay”. Search for the pound coins which you specifically wanted to get rid of, but are now scattered amongst a variety of pockets post-security.
- Give up on cash, select Credit Card. Insert chip first, then hail staff person a second time to print the tape you need to sign with a pen. In manuscript. For $4.
- Teller enters code, but then voids the transaction. Opens the machine, rips off the tape, and discovers transaction had gone through after all. But now has to change the paper tape.
- Teller prints tape for your signature, then walks away without taking what you signed.
- Bag your own items. Leave chuffed.
- I always wondered what “chuffed” meant. Now I know. Please send this country some retail technology experts. Or make them go back to shillings in a cash box.
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We missed the following, but they would also be cool things to see in the area:
Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, Gothic Revival, James Wyatt for Duke of Rutland
Biddulph: Biddulph Grange Garden, Egyptian pyramid, Chinese garden, Himalayan glen
Blenheim Palace: Churchill/Marlborough, Jon Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Grinling Gibbons, Capability Brown, Thornhill
Boughton House, Northamptonshire, “English Versailles”, Montagu family, tromp l’oeil painted hall, water gardens
Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television
Bridgnorth: Dudmaston, estate and modern art galleries
Buckingham: Stowe
Buxton, Georgian spa resort
Cheltenham: Gloucestershire, Regency spa resort, Pittville Pump Room, the Promenade
Derby: Royal Crown Derby Museum, Pickford’s House Museum, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Calke Abbey
Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, Bess
Leominster: Berrington Hall
Lichfield: Letocetum Roman Baths
Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, Bodleian Library, Colleges, Christ Church College Picture Gallery
Stoke-On-Trent: The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Gladstone Pottery Museum, Wedgwood Visitor Centre
Sudbury: Sudbury Hall, Charles II decoration, National Trust Museum of Childhood
Waddesdon Manor: Buckinghamshire, Rothschild, French chateau, French gardens, art, decorative arts
Winchcombe: Sudeley Castle, Catherine Parr, gardens, toys, embroideries
Wolverhampton: Wightwick Manor, Pre-Raphaelites, Arts and Crafts
Worcester: Croome, High Green, Capability Brown, Earl of Coventry
Wrexham: Erddig
