A Day Out for Mutti (3)

The third set of photographs from yesterday, showing (in order) the place we had lunch; the party waiting to order (minus myself, since I can't be in my own photograph); the main entrance to Hampton Court; the facade of the Tudor Palace (originally constructed by and for Cardinal Wolsey, who fell from grace in 1529 following his failure to obtain the Pope's consent to Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and had all his properties and possessions confiscated by the king); and Gail, Mutti, Lynn and Chris strolling in the rose garden (Judith was there too, but had just darted away to look at some other flower).

A Day Out for Mutti (2)

As you might just possibly expect (especially if, like Zena, you have a desirable harbourside view), houses along the river cost a large amount of money (but they'll all be flooded out by global warming, thus demonstrating that money can't buy total immunity, ha ha) -- and if you can afford such a house then (as the first two photographs below show) you can afford to park a boat at the end of the garden as well. Although if you look closely, you might notice that some of these houses appear not unlike heavily modified beach shacks....

The third photograph, by contrast, shows a slightly grittier side of river life -- it may call itself a marina, but it seems unlikely that champagne would be quaffed in any quantity in such an establishment.

The fourth photograph shows our first glimpse of Hampton Court -- specifically, the baroque wing built in the 1690s for William and Mary -- and the fifth shows people disembarking from the boat at the Hampton Court landing stage (while others wait to board for the journey back to Kingston).

A Day Out for Mutti (1)

Vati died a year ago this weekend; so for a commemorative event yesterday, we and (some of) my siblings went to Hampton Court for lunch and a stroll in the gardens. Mutti was staying with Gail and Frank in Kingston-on-Thames; it therefore made sense for us to make the journey to Hampton Court by boat. Here's the first set of photographs of the day, showing (in order) Chris (Lynn's husband), Mutti and Judith; Lynn and Gail (Frank had to stay behind to take their daughter to and from her stage and ballet lessons); the bridge at Kingston-on-Thames; and two boats seen along the river. Hampton Court is in fact just across the river from Kingston, and one could drive there in a couple of minutes; but the river (running north-south at this point) makes a big curve away to the west, meaning that the journey time by boat is around 35 minutes. But on a cloudless sunny day like yesterday,a trip on the river seemed like a very good idea indeed.

In the next set of photographs: some views along the river.

Photographs of Whitstable (3)

A third tranche of photographs from our visit to Whitstable a couple of weekends ago. All of the buildings in these images exist along the sea wall which was built to protect the town against a recurrence of the 1953 flood event, referred to in the notes which accompanied the first set of photographs. The wall isn't very high, but then it doesn't need to be: this is a flat estuary landscape (created during the last Ice Age, in fact) and when the tide goes out it goes out a ver-r-r-y long-g-g-g way-y-y-y indeed. Ergo, any tidal surge is only a metre or so high.

The first photograph (directly above this text) shows the yacht club, with Judith lounging against the sea wall as she waits for me to take its picture. The second photograph (immediately below) shows a couple of old clapboard houses (and a couple of tourists eating ice cream in the foreground, but we won't mention them); and the third shows one of Whitstable's "lost shipyards", one of the places just behind the beach (and now just behind the sea wall) where the houses were set far enough apart for an inshore fishing lugger to be constructed (although if you zoom in on the name of the old boat now hauled up there you'll see that it's actually registered in Faversham, an inland town further to the west which was an important medieval port until the silting up of the river on which it lies).

Immediately below this caption is the restaurant where we had an early dinner of oysters and, er, oysters before returning to London (as written about in my first post about our visit to Margate and Whitstable). The final photograph shows what may be the oldest pub in the town, built almost on the beach, where the sea wall is thus required to loop around it (because it was of course Much Too Historic to demolish just because the sea invaded the ground floor half a century ago. And quite right too!).

Photographs of Whitstable (2)

Rapidly following up my previous five photographs of Whitstable, here's five more: a Thames barge drawing into the Old Harbour; a photograph of the Old Harbour itself; former net sheds now used for the display and sale of crafts and other yuppery; and fisherman's huts converted into bijou holiday accommodation. The last three are perhaps the finest demonstration imaginable of the collapse and implosion of British manufacturing: once we sold people actual things, now we sell people an ersatz experience of encountering things. How are the mighty fallen, etc. etc..

Photographs of Whitstable (1)

Belatedly picking up from the end of the previous three posts about Margate, here is the first tranche of photographs of Whitstable, the town at which we broke our journey on the way back to London. Whitstable has been famous for its oysters since at least Roman times, although the archaeological evidence suggests that people have been harvesting shellfish there for thousands of years before that. The first photograph shows the intricately painted jetty of a house behind the shoreline to the east of the town. There's probably nothing remotely historical about it, but it looks very attractive.

The remaining four photographs show the gaudily painted chalets on the front to the east of the town. Although they sit on a slight rise in the ground, they are -- as the sign in the third photograph indicates -- vulnerable to flooding; indeed, the wall in front of them (which continues along much of the rest of the seaside frontage, as we'll see in other photographs) was constructed following the 1953 flood event, which is typically remembered as overrunning Canvey Island and other low-lying land on the northern shore of the Thames Estuary but whose impact on the southern shores seems to have been written out of popular consciousness. Perhaps this accounts for the popularity of these chalets: a sign on one of them indicated that it was for sale for £20,000. (£20,000! For a wooden shack! Jesus *!£$%^!* Christ!)

In the next post: a Thames barge, remodelled net sheds, and fishermen's huts converted for holiday accommodation.

Photographs of Margate (3)

Might as well add a third tranche of photographs while I'm at it! This first photograph shows Margate's oldest building -- the Tudor House, in King Street. Despite its name, this is late medieval rather than Tudor; originally a farmstead on the edge of town, and rather over-enthusiastically restored in the 1950s (the sort of restoration where the people concerned put in what they thought should be there rather than what the documentary evidence said was there, which would be heavily frowned on today).

This second photograph shows a small cottage in Market Street -- not perhaps the most elegant of dwellings, but one that is quietly proud of its modest contribution to the heritage streetscape (etc. etc. -- add posy wanky architectural criticism to taste).

This and the next photograph show the Margate Museum and the Town Hall (connected by an enclosed passage at first floor level) in the Market Place. The Town Hall was formerly the police station and magistrate's court, in the latter of which (I quote from the Margate Heritage Trail leaflet) "Dr George Simpson JP, Chairman of the Margate Bench, made his famous Sawdust Caesars speech during the Mods and Rockers Trial in 1964". There is a brief Wikipedia entry which covers this here.

Finally, India House in Hawley Street, built in 1767 for Captain John Gould, "late of Calcutta", who is said to be the first known example of a man "retiring to the seaside". There seems to be no record of how much longer he lived after so retiring, which is a bit of a shame.

Next time: the first photographs of Whitstable!

Photographs of Margate (2)

A second tranche of photographs from our visit to Margate on Saturday.... The first photograph shows a general view of the town from the pier. The figure in the foreground, in the green jacket and dark blue hat with her back to the camera, is indeed The Wugster.

A building in King Street, in the old (Georgian and Regency) part of the town. The painted sign on the window, reading "Vintage Goods", is to some extent a heroic attempt to pretend that this is not just another second-hand shop (although to be fair it does have some more upmarket and outre items than most -- spats, anyone?).

Some late Victorian exuberance, just because it is so irresistible.

This and the next photograph show the palatial (for the time) home occupied by the rich and successful local businessman and financier Francis Cobb. Indeed, he was so rich and successful that for a time he had his own bank, next door to his home in the white-fronted building visible on the left of the picture.

Photographs of Margate (1)

As promised in the previous post, some photographs of Margate. The Surfboat Memorial, commemorating those who died in an attempt to rescue the crew of a foundering ship in December 1897 (ironically, Margate now has no inshore lifeboat rescue facility, that having moved to Whitstable many years ago):

The open-air seawater swimming pool, a notable feature of Margate's beach front -- its date of construction is uncertain, but late 1890s-1900s seems about right:

Margate advertises itself as having the best sands in the world. This image, looking across the beach towards the harbour, shows both the Turner Contemporary Gallery (in the distance) and (in the foreground) a member of the beach clean-up crew at work on the day we visited. And (in between) the best sands in the world (possibly).

The town's clock-tower -- built to mark Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, as were so many clock towers which appeared throughout the UK at around the same time. One wonders whether the same will attend Brenda's jubilee in a month or so's time....and hopes not.

Once the office for all arriving and departing ships, where they were required to get their paperwork stamped before they could proceed to sea, this imposing buiding is now Margate's tourist information office.

A Grand Day Out

Today we went to Margate and Whitstable -- Margate because it is the home of the Turner Contemporary Gallery which is hosting an exhibition of watercolours by noted Regency and Victorian painter J M W Turner (the exhibition in fact closes tomorrow); and Whitstable (breaking our return journey to London) because it is a historic fishing town with an oyster processing and consuming trade which predates the arrival of the Romans in Britain. As ever, I took lots of photographs of the interesting old buildings -- rather more of Margate than I expected to take, because everything one reads about it suggests that it's a post-Victorian seaside resort which has been down on its luck ever since the Second World War; and rather fewer of Whitstable than I expected to take, because it is Overrun With Bloody Tourists who simply get in the way of everything: wobbling along with their vast chip-stuffed bellies and their hideous pasty-faced shrieking children, or if not obese and clad in terylene of mixed pastel and electric shades then rail-thin teenage gels with dyed blond over-straightened hair in skin-tight jeans and the peculiarly dead-eyed expressions which result from permanently welding themselves to their iPods, out for an afternoon of avoiding their parents in the company of their repellent concave-chested shaven-headed boyfriends with their trousers thrust down below their bottoms to show off their manky multicoloured underwear I'm sure I must have posted a rant not unlike this in a previous entry on this blogsite. But since we were in Whitstable we had some oysters for an early dinner, and very nice they were too. I should have taken a photograph of The Wugster (and the oysters) just as she was about to tuck in, to prove that we were there, but unfortunately I was too busy tucking into my own plate to grasp this point. Instead, here's a photograph of the oyster shell midden outside the particular emporium at which we consumed our seafood; and a photograph of The Wugster posing alongside a slightly overlifesized wooden model of a pirate at Whitstable's old harbour (so old that it is still in everyday use and in any case the north Kent coast has never, ever been subject to piracy -- but if you want people to photograph themselves against the supercalifragistilic parts of your town you of course have to provide the requisite props, what what?).

More photographs of Margate and Whitstable in the next post. (Perhaps.)

Forget-Me-Nots

Forget-Me-Nots in our back garden this morning (taken a few minutes ago, in fact). They're at their peak now; within a few days the flowers will start to fade and set seed (and most of them will then have to be pulled out if they're not to crowd everything out next spring).

Mutant Broccoli

Photographed at the allotment this afternoon. This colouration is presumably the consequence of a recessive gene in the plant, and is rather attractive. Unfortunately, grey aphids have found it attractive too, and the broccoli heads themselves are too infested to be eaten. Bum! Bum poo donkey smells!

In the Garden this Morning

A photograph of the Japanese quince in flower against our shady fence, taken a few minutes ago -- just because.