UK Travel - Part 17

England: Elizabethan London

by Andrea Kirkby

Some cities have grown continuously through the ages. They’re like onions, layer on layer of skin which you can unpeel all the way back to the foundations. Rome is like that, for instance, or Venice. But London was scarred forever by one single disruptive event – the Great Fire which laid the city waste in 1666. It’s a city whose history began again with Sir Christopher Wren, a city which lost its past.

So if you want to see the London that Shakespeare knew, the London where John Harvard grew up, you’ll have to look hard. But it can be found – if you try hard enough.

Of course Shakespeare would have known the older medieval buildings of London – the Tower, for instance, and Westminster Abbey. But his London was one in which the great monasteries had disappeared a generation ago, and their buildings had all been privatised – sold off to nobles and gentry, sometimes for use as houses, sometimes just as quarries for building materials.

The City, in particular, was thriving, as London became a great trading centre dominated by an oligopoly of wealthy merchants. There’s almost nothing left in the City itself of Shakespeare’s London – this was where the Great Fire started, and burned most fiercely – but if you head out along Fleet Street or High Holborn towards the Inns of Court, you’ll find a few gems of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture.

Near Chancery Lane tube station, for instance, you can find Staples Inn – a marvelous, long range of fine half timber with huge gables facing the street, and a peaceful little courtyard tucked behind. This was one of the Inns of Court in Shakespeare’s day – the Inns were later reduced to just the four that now exist. The vast majority of buildings in Shakespeare’s London were wooden, like Staples Inn – one reason that the Fire was able to take hold so quickly. Yet wooden buildings didn’t have to be humble or unpretentious – this building shows the immense size that half timber work could achieve, and it’s mightily impressive.

Visit the Victoria & Albert museum and you’ll find an even greater work of half timber – the façade of Sir Paul Pindar’s house from Bishopsgate, in the City, dated about 1600. With its fine oriel windows, expansive glazing, and rich carving, it’s a testament to Pindar’s taste and wealth – he had made a fortune trading with Venice, and was later England’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Imagine a street full of such house fronts and you’ve got an idea of what the richer areas of the City would have looked like at the time.

Another Jacobean house stands at number 17 Fleet Street, by the entrance to the Temple. This fine half timber building was erected in 1610, as a tavern, originally known as ‘The Prince’s Arms’. The way the first floor is jettied out over the street, and the projecting oriel windows, are typical of seventeenth century vernacular architecture. But the house’s real treasure is inside – Prince Henry’s Room, which contains a fine plasterwork ceiling with the three feathers of the Prince of Wales set into a fine geometrical framework.

The name commemorates the investiture of Henry, James I’s oldest son, as Prince of Wales. Had Henry lived to become Henry the Ninth, who knows how English history might have developed – Charles I would never had come to the throne, and there might never have been a Civil War; Oliver Cromwell might have remained a local worthy in Huntingdonshire and never got involved in politics. But Henry died at just eighteen.

The Middle and Inner Temple were not just centres for lawyers’ training in Shakespeare’s day – they were centres of literary culture. The poet John Donne studied here, masques by Middleton and Beaumont were performed here, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was first performed at Middle Temple Hall. Although the Temples are still working environments, occupied by barristers’ chambers, the grounds are open to visitors – like Staples Inn, another oasis of calm in the middle of bustling London.

In Shakespeare’s day, the City was the preserve of trade and commerce, while Westminster was a separate urban area, the seat of the court and of government. Both the City and Westminster were tightly regulated. So to see Shakespeare’s real home, we’ll need to go south of the river, to Southwark – which as it didn’t come under City rules and regulations, but under the personal rule of the Bishop of Winchester, became a free enterprise culture. Here were the coaching inns at the start of the main road south to Kent; here were taverns, and also brothels, bear baiting, bathhouses, and theatres. This was where City apprentices escaped to on their infrequent days off, and courtiers went slumming.

And here you’ll find the Globe Theatre. Not Shakespeare’s original – that stood on a site a few hundred yards away, in Park Street – but a reconstruction, that still hosts plays in the summer. There’s a museum you can visit, but I find it a bit disappointing. The right way to experience the Globe is the way Shakespeare’s audience did – to come to a play here. And if you want to, you can be a ‘groundling’ – standing up throughout the performance in the open centre of the auditorium; though if it rains, you may be in for a soaking.

Shakespeare Walking Tour in London

If You Go:

www.elizabethan.org/compendium/27.html – Map and history of Tudor London
www.shakespeares-globe.org

Image credits:

London tower bridge by: Diliff / CC BY-SA
William Shakespeare portrait: Martin Droeshout / Public domain
Sir Paul Pindar’s house: Henry Dixon / Public domain
Middle Temple Hall: Diliff / CC BY-SA

About the author:
Andrea Kirkby is the founder of Podtours, a company which provides downloadable audio tours of European destinations. She is also a travel writer and photographer. The Podtour of Shakespeare’s Southwark takes you through Elizabethan theatre land and can be downloaded from www.podtours.co.uk/Southwark-podtour.htm.

The Coal Pits of Wales

A Tribute to My Family’s Heritage

by W. Ruth Kozak

Big Pit Mine, Wales

Kitted out in a helmet, cap lamp, battery pack and a miner’s belt, I enter the pit-cage and descend 90 meters to a world of shafts, coal faces and underground roadways. Guided by a good-natured ex-miner guide, I am about to experience a real sense of life in the coal pit.

My pit-lamp lights the inky darkness. Along the floor, tracks still remain for the coal trams. I follow the guide through the low-ceilinged, dank tunnels and arrive at one of the air doors. The miner guide instructs everyone to turn off their lamps. I hold my hand in front of my face and can not see it. Now I know the meaning of “pitch-black” darkness.

“That’s what it was like when the lamps blew out,” the guide says. “But of course, the real problem was the rats!”

I am inside the Big Pit Mine, which until its closure in 1980 was the oldest working mine in South Wales. Sunk in 1860, Big Pit forms part of the Blaenafon mine which is now classified as a heritage site and one of the Mining Museums of Wales. The pit’s shaft extends to a depth of 90 meters and at its peak in 1913 employed 1300 men. By 1966 it was the only deep mine left in that area. In 1980 the workforce had declined to 250 and the mine was closed. It reopened in 1983 as a visitor’s centre.

The Welsh Coalfields

As far back as I have traced my Welsh family’s genealogy, most of the men were coal miners. My great-grandfather, and even my great-grandmother, worked in the mines from the age of eight. My father worked in the mines from the age of 14. As a child, I grew up listening to Dad’s mining stories. So on a recent trip to Britain, I decided to visit some of the sites that were part of my family’s heritage.

There were two coal fields in Wales: The South Wales Coalfield, which extended nearly 90 miles from Pontypool in the East to St Bride’s Bay in the West, and the North Wales coalfield which extended from the Point of Ayr south-eastward to Hawarden and Broughton near Chester.

I began by visiting the Big Pit National Mining Museum at Blaenafon. Big Pit located at the head of the Afon Llwyd Valley in the North Gwent uplands, stands on a hillside overlooking the town on the bracken-clad moors. The entire area is covered by early coal opencasts. Iron ore and limestone as well as coal outcrops were found here dating back to medieval times. The opening of the Blaenafon Ironworks in 1789 created an ongoing requirement for coal.

Blaenafon

The town of Blaenafon, founded in the 1700’s, is one of the best surviving examples of a Welsh industrial community, and still retains many characteristic features from the 19th century such as terraced housing, shops, chapels, and a Workman’s Hall. On the hillside near the town, Big Pit stands on the site of an earlier mine, Kearsley Pit. The original 40- metre shaft, sunk in 1860 was extended to a depth of 90 meters. The colliery produced more than 100,000 tonnes of coal from an area of about twelve square miles, from nine different coal seams.

Like all mines in South Wales, coal was cut by hand and the mine employed both men and women. Until the child-labour laws came into affect at the turn of the 20th century, even children as young as four worked in the pits. In 1908 a mechanical conveyor was installed at Big Pit and it was the first one electrified. The winding gear was driven by a steam engine until 1953 when a mechanical cutter and loader pulled it along by a chain.

The hour-long tour of Big Pit Mine takes you down in the pit cage into the underground roadways, through air doors, to explore traditional and modern mining methods. On the surface you can explore the colliery buildings: the winding engine-house, blacksmith’s workshop and pithead baths.

Exploring those black tunnels brought the lives of my father and my great-grandfather into a clearer perspective. In the old days, the miners worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. As the miner-guide talks about the mines, both in the past and present times, I recall my father telling me how he would walk to the Bedwas Navigational Mine, five kilometers from his village, Caerphilly, to the pit face in the pre-dawn darkness to emerge hours later in the night. The miners always sang as they walked to and from the collieries, their tenor voices rising in the sweet Welsh treble, songs of their labours, and joyful songs celebrating another day of life. It helped keep their spirits up.

Down in the bowels of Big Pit, as I stand in the impenetrable darkness, my lamp extinguished, the guide explains how the children working as trappers, opened and shut the air doors when the coal trams came down the tracks.

“There were always rats, running along the walls and floor, over the children’s feet,” he says. “ If their lamps went out, they would have to remain there all day in the pitch darkness. It was impossible to relight the lamps once they were extinguished, so they stayed there all day in the dark tunnel, attached to the air door by a cord.”

Children and women were employed to load the trams and clean the pit pony’s stables.It was necessary to keep the stables clean as manure formed the deadly methane gases that caused explosion. The pit ponies lived in the mines for fifty weeks of the year, until there was a Miner’s Holiday, when they would be taken to the surface blindfolded against the glare of the sun. The miners also used caged canaries to detect gas in the tunnels. So long as the canaries sang they knew the air was clean and safe.

Senghenydd Mining Disaster

Unlike other collieries in Wales, Big Pit Mine has the reputation of never having had an explosion or serious accident. No Welsh mining community has ever suffered such a terrible loss as the village of , the home of my great-grandfather. The first disaster was on Friday, May 24, 1901. Between the end of the night shift and beginning of the day shift, just as the last cage full of night shift workers were disembarking at the surface, the men heard a rumble and dashed for the safety of the lamp room. Two quick explosions in succession followed. A column of dust and smoke shrouded the pit accompanied by the sound of splintering woodwork and tearing metal. A third explosion rocked the village. 83 men, including my great-grandfather and two other family members were below ground preparing for the day shift when the disaster occurred. Only one man was brought out alive. William Harris, an ostler, was found alive but severely burned lying by the side of his dead horse.

The Universal Steam Coal Company, one of the deepest mines in the coalfield, had a reputation for being a hot, dry, dusty, gassy mine that produced some of the best steam coal. Many enquiries were made after the 1901 explosion, and recommendations were made but not put into place. Unfortunately, this became the precursor to a much great disaster twelve years later.

On Tuesday, Oct. 14, 1913, after the day shift had been down in the pit for two hours, a massive explosion ripped through the mine, wrecking the pithead gear, shooting the cage into the air. Fires raged underground, fed by the workings of the fans. Fallen roof beams cut off air supplies. Some men who were trapped on the east side were rescued. The rest were not so fortunate. 436 miners were killed in the blast. Only 72 bodies were recovered. No other mining community in Wales had ever suffered such a loss. Every street in the village mourned the death of a relative. One woman lost her husband, three brothers and four sons.

The Universal Mining Company was held responsible for the deaths, but after a long legal battle the site manager and company directors were fined a mere 12 Pounds between them — less than six pence for each death. What a price to pay for coal! The mine was closed in 1928. One survivor said: “There was more fuss if a horse was killed underground than if a man was killed. Men came cheap. They had to buy horses.”

Senghenydd, located in the Aber Valley, south of Blaenafon, was just a small mining village at the time of the explosions, and it has not grown much since the Universal colliery closed. I had no trouble finding information about the mine where my great-grandfather had died. A friendly shopkeeper directed me to a tiny community centre, which had once been the miner’s social club. On the walls are photos of the disaster and the retired miner at the Centre was happy to provide details.

I found my great-grandfather’s name listed in the memorial book of the Universal disasters, among the others killed. George Filer, age 73, the oldest man to die in the pit that fateful day. Great-grandfather’s address is also listed in the memorial book, and amazingly I was able to find his house on the High Street. Nearby is the memorial for the miners killed in the two disasters, a reconstruction of the winding gear used at the Universal Collieries.

Bedwas Navigational Colliers, Caerphilly Wales

My father, Fred Filer, was born in Caerphilly a year after his grandfather died. Caerphilly, was then a small mining village employing men in the nearby Bedwas Navigational Collieries. This mine, which produced both steam and house coal, was at its peak output in 1913, but after several bitter industrial struggles the colliery closed. My father began working in Bedwas Colliery when he was fourteen. By 1928 the miners, refusing to take wage cuts, forced the mine to close for two months. It reopened with scab workers and the South Wales Miners Federation, which had sought better wages and improved working conditions in the mine, was banned. There were further conflicts in the early 1930’s including riots. My father, a union activist, as well as many other miners involved had their mining cards confiscated during the dispute. Later the Mining Federation was reinstated. My father immigrated to Canada after losing his mining card, and became a Baptist minister. He was sent as a circuit preacher to Estevan, Saskatchewan to work alongside his friend, a young Scottish-born Baptist minister and future Premier Tommy Douglas, to help the troubled mining communities of southern Saskatchewan.

Nothing is left of the coal pits at Bedwas. The colliery closed, along with others in South Wales, during the miner’s strike of 1984/85 and was never reopened due to damage of two coalfaces during the strike. When I first visited it several years ago, there were still ruined buildings at the pit site. Now the slagheaps, long overgrown with grass, have sprouted new housing developments.

Caerphilly, most noted for it’s well-restored Norman castle, still boasts many of the original buildings of my father’s time, including the school he attended, the mining chapels where he often spoke. The family home on Windsor Street is now converted to a law office. In the cemetery of St. Martin’s Church are many graves of those killed in the Senghenydd explosion: fathers and sons, brothers and uncles. Ironically, one of my cousins lives in what was once the posh district of Caerphilly, in a newly renovated mansion formerly belonging to one of the mining bosses.

Mining, once Wales’ former major industry is now almost extinct. Only one deep mine is still working: the Tower Colliery, at Hirwaun, Glamorgan, operated by the Miner’s Co-operative since 1984. There are other small mines still in existence including Blaenant drift mine, which is located next to the Cefn Coed Colliery Museum at Neath, near Swansea.

If You Go:

INFORMATION ABOUT THE BIG PIT MINE:

Big Pit National Mining Museum,
Blaenafon, Torfaen NP4PXP
Open 7 days a week, March – November, 9.30 – 5 pm
For winter times, please telephone.
No charge for entry.
Visitors must be 5 years of age or at least 1 metre tall to go underground.
Wear warm clothing and suitable footwear.
No electrical devices, flash cameras or lighters are allowed in the underground
Tel: 01495-790311 – Fax: 01395- 792618

Movie tour of Big Pit Mine

MORE INFORMATION ABOUT MINES AND MINING MUSEUMS
www.theheritagetrail.co.uk/industrial

RHONDDA HERITAGE PARK (Lewis Methyr Colliery)
www.netwales.co.uk/rhondda-heritage

WELSH SLATE MUSEUM
www.nmgw.ac.uk/wsm

BEDWAS NAVIGATIONAL COLLIERY
www.users.waitrose.com

TOWER COLLIERY
www.minersadvice.co.uk/tower.htm

SENGHENYDD UNIVERSAL COLLIERY
www.welshcoalminers.co.uk/GlamEast/Senghenydd.htm

CEFN COED COLLIERY MUSEUM
www.aboutbritain.com/CefnCoedCollieryMuseum.htm

SOUTH WALES MINING MUSEUM, near Port Talbot
www.neath-porttalbot.gov.uk/tourism/heritage

About the author:
W. Ruth Kozak grew up hearing her father’s mining stories so the opportunity to actually experience what it was like down in the coal pits was a remarkable adventure. Ruth recently toured the Britannia Mine Museum and mine site near Squamish B.C. once the largest copper mine in the British Empire. The recent rescue of the Chilean miners from their 68 days of entrapment were are reminder of the dangerous lives her family members once lived.

Photo credits:
First Blaenavon Big Pit photo by: Steinsky / CC BY-SA
All other photographs by W. Ruth Kozak.

The Petrie Museum: Everyday Life of Ancient Egypt

London, England

by Angela Kirkby

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an Egyptologist. I adored the mummy cases in the British Museum, bright gilt and the intensely saturated blue of lapis lazuli; the faces with their serious kohl-outlined eyes, the dreadlocked wigs and little fake beards. I loved the huge porphyry and granite statues of long dead kings. I wanted to dig up tombs, and climb pyramids, and read the Book of the Dead.

Well, that’s the British Museum for you. Lots of Egyptian bling and Pharaonic excess; but not, perhaps, much of a feel for the way most Egyptians lived their everyday lives. (Though there is a cute toy lion on wheels in one of the rooms, with a hinged jaw that would have gone up and down when a little Egyptian child pulled it across the floor.) To get the sand of Ancient Egypt right between your toes, you’ll need to visit the Petrie Museum.

Sir Flinders Petrie was the first professor of Egyptology in the UK, and is considered one of the founders of scientific archaeology. He was the first to use seriation as a means of dating Egyptian artifacts, and his excavations included work at Amarna, Tanis, and Abydos. He saw himself as ‘a salvage man’ – he’d been appalled by the destruction of ancient artifacts, and was concerned to save what he could.

Besides, he wasn’t just interested in the Pharoahs. When he excavated at Fayum, he was particularly interested in late Roman era burials, which had not been properly studied before, and it’s down to Petrie that we have such a fine collection of Fayum mummy-portraits. It was on this dig that he also found the Pharaonic tomb-builders’ village – evidence of working class Egyptian life. It’s his work, together with that of Amelia Edwards, who founded the chair of Egyptology at UCL and gave her own antiquities as the nucleus of the museum, that created the core of this collection.

I’ve been told that the Petrie museum contains 80,000 separate objects. I couldn’t begin to count them. But hold that number in your head and just think, if you had to collect 80,000 objects to represent your own life, what would you include? A Tetrapak of milk? An iPod? One of those coffee mugs with ‘Dad’ written on it, or perhaps a much loved fountain pen, or an old pair of trainers? You’d end up with a fascinating collection of bits and pieces – some bling, some fine art, some things that we find utterly boring but which, in 7,000 years’ time, will come to seem amazing and rare. 80,000 objects, 7,000 years old; these are huge numbers.

And it’s true that as soon as you step into the museum, you’re overwhelmed by the sheer size of the collection. It’s piled up, heaped up, hugger-mugger, not displayed in that nice minimalist way modern museums seem to love.

But the thing that really amazes me in the Petrie is how quickly – despite those big numbers – you find a single object, and suddenly you can feel the past actually there with you. You can almost taste it, smell it, touch it. For instance, there’s a piece of linen dating from about 5,000 BC – one of the earliest textile remains ever found; its sheer age makes it precious. Or there’s something I find absolutely fascinating, an architectural drawing of a shrine that dates from 1300 BC; thin, faded lines on papyrus, yet it seems to me I can almost trace the way that scribe’s hand traveled over the surface.

There are pots and pans, there are ancient sandals and socks and hair curlers, there’s a horse harness and if the horse got sick, there’s a veterinary papyrus explaining how to heal various animal hurts – the only one of its type that still exists. There’s a gynecological papyrus, too, the oldest known – the ancient Egyptians might not have had Prozac or CAT scans, but their medical knowledge was more advanced than you might think.

There are things that look silly, like the gilded toe cover for a mummy from the early Roman period. Ordinary Egyptians couldn’t afford golden coffins, so they made them out of papier maché – or rather, cartonnage, textile wrappings with plaster laid on top. If you were reasonably well off you had an entire lid made out of cartonnage – if you weren’t, you got a mask, a breastplate, and yes, those toe-covers.

One of my favourite macabre displays anywhere sits in a corner; the four thousand year old skeleton sitting upright in a huge earthenware pot.

And there’s one exhibit that particularly appeals to me because of its amazing beauty – and because I want to wear it; a painstakingly reconstructed, calf-length beaded dress.

Unlike many collections, the Petrie Museum contains artifacts from every period of Egypt’s history. There are prehistoric mace heads, for instance, in gleaming polished stone. (Later, the mace became a ceremonial weapon, often decorated with scenes of the victorious Pharaoh. In prehistoric Egypt, though, it was still a functional weapon; even so, some of these pear-shaped or disk-shaped maces are of astonishing beauty.) From later Egypt come Coptic textiles, with bright colours and lively designs. The collection includes more recent artifacts from Islamic Egypt, and the museum has even started to amass a small selection of objects from the present day.

The Petrie museum isn’t just a space full of interesting objects. It’s a research collection, and it takes outreach very seriously, too. Recently, it’s been working with black and north African communities in London – the acquisition of modern artifacts partly stems from a desire to put Ancient Egypt in a modern perspective, and is one of the results of this programme. The Petrie museum has also taken part in LGBT history month for the past three years, with talks on alternative sexuality in ancient Greece and Egypt, and most recently with an LGBT ‘trail’ through the collection.

The museum hosts some really quirky events, too. For instance if you want to give yourself the shivers, you can attend a Hammer Horror film screening – starring, naturally, a malevolent Egyptian mummy. (I wish they’d show Carry On Cleo, though.) There are object handling seminars; one a little while ago gave attendees the chance to hold a two-thousand-year-old basket and work out how it had been woven. The title of a talk last year shows just how intimately archaeologists now know the people of ancient Egypt – “Pinch pots and nappy rash – early childhood at Lahun”.

Or you can learn how to knit Coptic socks. (I’m not kidding.)

The whole collection – or at least, as much as the curators can manage to put on display – is crammed into just a couple of large rooms. The museum doesn’t look like much on the outside – apparently it was once a stable – and it won’t win prizes for interior décor, but it’s just stuffed with things, in stunning abundance. You don’t visit this museum so much as you explore it; staff will even give you a torch so that you can penetrate the dark recesses of some of the display cases.

That will change, I’m afraid; there are plans for a new museum to display the whole collection. But for the time being, if you want to pretend to be Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ankh (sorry!), this is the place to be!

Private Guided Tour of the British Museum in London

If You Go:

The Petrie Museum, University College London, Malet Place, London WC1E 6BT
Closed Sunday and Monday; Tuesday – Friday 13:00 – 19:00 and Saturday 11:00 – 14:00

About the author:
Andrea Kirkby has been traveling since the age of nine and has racked up four continents and over 30 countries. Having tired of a career in financial markets, she is now a full time writer and has less free time than ever.

Photo credits:
Petrie Museum exterior, both hieroglyphics and statues by Nic McPhee
Museum interior by Ann Wuyts
All photos are licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

England: The Gloucester and Sharpness Canal

by Keith Kellett

I recently took a short cruise on the Edward Elgar along the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. This parallels the lower reaches of the river, which is tidal, so was by-passed by the canal. The canal also did away with ships needing to negotiate a dangerous bend in the river. They would sail through the Sharpness Lock, to be man-hauled along the canal to Gloucester.

It was a ship canal, and therefore much wider than the usual English narrow-boat canal. So, it presented no obstacle to the 18-foot-wide Edward Elgar. Neither are there any locks, except at either end of the canal. There are swing bridges, but these are operated by professional bridge-keepers. Indeed, each bridge has a notice threatening dire penalties for unauthorised people attempting to operate it.

And, nothing was allowed to pass over the canal below 250 feet; which is a reason that the electricity pylons passing over it are twice the height of normal ones.

The task of hauling the ships along the canal was eventually taken over by draught horses … but not before a minor revolution, led by one Tom Jones. The men hauling the ships feared they would be put out of work, so sabotaged the horses by mixing herbs with their feed which gave them stomach pains and diarrhea.

Only a short walk from the canal is the world-famous Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s reserve at Slimbridge, which we couldn’t miss visiting. It was founded by the famous naturalist Sir Peter Scott, the son of the explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Here, a vast variety of waterbirds can be seen. Some of them are permanent residents of the reserve; others are migrants, free to come and go as they please … as they’ve been doing for centuries, before the Reserve was founded.

But, however far they travel, their instinctive memory brings them back to the Severn Estuary and Slimbridge, and the wetland habitat in which they thrive.

At Purton, the canal runs only a few paces from the Severn, and, in 1909, a collapse in the bank of the river called for a wall to be built, to protect the canal. But, it was no ordinary wall. The Chief Engineer, one A.J. Cullis, arranged for several redundant ships and barges to be beached at high tide, and gradually fill with silt and form a wall, to protect the canal from further erosion.

Over the years, the hulks were added to. The most famous was the schooner Katherine Ellen, impounded in 1921 for running guns to the IRA. And, several concrete barges were added during WWII.

Concrete barges?

You would think, as many people did at the time, that such a vessel would go straight to the bottom … but, that’s precisely the same opposition faced by ironmaster John Wilkinson, when he launched the first iron ship boat in 1787! But, it worked; the Captain of the Edward Elgar recalled bringing a concrete barge down the canal to its final resting place in the early 1970s.

Early in the morning, I was able to inspect the Purton Hulks, as they’re called, more closely. I hadn’t intended to; I went to photograph the boat at its moorings, and forgot to take my key. But, we were moored only a few steps from the Hulks, and it was a good way to fill in the time until someone else got up, to let me in.

The ships aren’t forgotten; a plaque records the name of each, and some are sponsored by individuals and businesses in the area.

As we approached Gloucester at the end of our short cruise later that afternoon, we passed several dilapidated buildings on the canal bank; signs of former industry. But, there are still several timber yards on the canal banks, for timber, from the nearby Forest of Dean was Gloucester’s main export. The docks themselves have been refurbished and restored to house several businesses, including English Holiday Cruises.

London Thames River Afternoon Tea Cruise

If You Go:

Gloucester can be reached by train from London (Paddington); trains leave approximately every hour, and journey time is about two hours. (www.thetrainline.com)
National Express coaches leave Victoria coach station, London, at about two-hourly intervals, taking approx. three hours en route. (www.nationalexpress.com)
Cruises along the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal and/or the River Severn on board the Edward Elgar (Capacity 22) by English Holiday Cruises (www.englishholidaycruises.co.uk)
Day cruises on the Eagle Spirit wide-beam canal boat … longer cruises are possible, but the boat only has accommodation for one couple. (www.cruiseeaglespirit.com)

Having written as a hobby for many years while serving in the Royal Air Force, Keith Kellett saw no reason to discontinue his hobby when he retired. With time on his hands, he produced more work, and found, to his surprise, it ‘grew and grew’ and was good enough to finance his other hobbies; travelling, photography and computers. He is trying hard to prevent it from becoming a full-time job! He has published in many UK and overseas print magazines, and on the Web. He is presently trying to get his head around blogging, podcasting and video. Disclosure: Mr. Kellett cruised on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal as the guest of English Holiday Cruises.

All photos are by Keith Kellett.

England: A Literary Stay in London

by Susan Radcliffe

London, city of Shakespeare, has an illustrious literary history. If you’re taking a trip to England’s capital on the trail of your favourite writers, you might like to stay in a hotel with some kind of literary connection. There are several of these to be discovered if you know where to look.

Brown’s Hotel

This is a quintessentially English place, in the heart of Mayfair. It opened in 1837 to provide accommodation for genteel people and is said to be the oldest hotel in London. Going inside this Georgian building is a little like stepping back in time; you can take a traditional afternoon tea with scones and sandwiches whilst listening to the sounds of the Baby Grand Piano.

It’s the perfect setting for a period story and you can see why it inspired Agatha Christie to write the murder mystery “At Bertam’s Hotel.” This is Brown’s Hotel, disguised beneath a layer of fiction. Christie often stayed here, and her novel delves into the lives of the upper class guests and the darker secrets hidden beneath the highly polished veneer.

The Cadogan

This Edwardian town house in Knightsbridge has been a hotel for more than 100 years. Outwardly elegant and respectable, it was the setting for some scandalous and controversial events during Victorian times. Modern guests climbing under the velvet-edged bouclé bedspreads can remember the stories of forbidden love that have flourished inside the damask papered walls. It was here that the future King of England, Edward, carried on an affair with the courtesan and actress Lillie Langtry. And it was here that the writer Oscar Wilde was arrested for having a relationship with another man. Until then, he had been enjoying the critical and financial success of his plays, such as “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” In happier times, he made frequent and decadent visits to the hotel, always accompanied by plenty of Perrier Jouët Champagne and Green Carnations. But this would all come to an end in 1895, as he awaited the police in room 118, where he was arrested on a charge of gross indecency. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Before his trial, Wilde had been a celebrated and successful artist; after his release, he was a broken man, and he never recovered his creative powers.

Hazlitt’s Hotel

This hotel occupies a Georgian building off Soho Square. It was once the home of the famous essayist William Hazlitt. He was a contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge and, during the early 19th century, he published books on philosophy and grammar; he was also a gifted political journalist, art and literary critic. Many features that he would recognise have been preserved in the hotel. All the guest bedrooms and suites are kept in traditional style, with paneled walls and antique furniture. Many of them have four poster beds. They’re named after other writers like Jonathan Swift, as well as Hazlitt’s friends, associates and lovers. One of the suites bears the name of Teresa Cornelys, a beautiful courtesan. As you might expect, it features a show-stopper of a bed, decorated with hand carved gilded cherubs. There’s another treat in the bathroom, which has a period bathing machine, designed to squirt water onto surprising parts of your anatomy. Hazlitt’s is still a favourite with writers today; JK Rowling of “Harry Potter” fame likes to stay in the Lady Frances Hewitt room when she visits London.

The Kingsley

A stay at this hotel will bring you a little closer to the legacy of the Bloomsbury Group, who lived, worked and studied in this area of London between the turn of the 20th century and World War II. It was a hotbed of revolutionary thought and creativity, with writers, intellectuals and artists producing work that would have a lasting influence on literature, aesthetics and economics, as well as shaping progressive attitudes towards feminism and sexuality. The hotel is named after the author Charles Kingsley. It was known for a time as the Thistle Bloomsbury, but has reverted to its original name. E M Forster, one the Bloomsbury Group’s most distinguished members, lived here between 1902 and 1904. The hotel’s beautiful Edwardian façade has recently been restored, but inside the building has been made over with new décor and furnishings, so it’s perfect for those who like a little modern comfort along with their history.

London Literary Walking Tour Of Bloomsbury

If You Go:

www.brownshotel.com
Nearest tube station is Green Park.

www.cadogan.com
Nearest tube stations are Knightsbridge and Sloane Square

www.hazlittshotel.com
Nearest tube station is Tottenham Court Road

www.kingsleyhotel.com
Nearest tube station is Holborn.

About the author:
Susan Radcliffe is a writer and researcher, with a passion for travel. She lives in London and loves to share her knowledge of its historic sights and hotels with visitors. She writes for London Hotels, a price comparison site for London hotels.

Photo credits:
London by Seoyeon Choi on Unsplash
Brown’s Hotel by CVB / CC BY-SA
Cadogan Hotel by Spudgun67 / CC BY-SA
Hazlitt’s Hotel by See page for author / CC BY-SA
Kingsley Hotel by Jim Linwood via CC BY 2.0