I’ve not written anything for ages, so, as it’s well into the new year, I thought I should knuckle down. The trouble is that there’s so much “noise” out and about, what with Trump, Musk, et al. Still, life goes on and I can always look away from the awfulness unfolding around me.
Someone posted a photograph on Facebook of an old railway station at Alexandra Palace in North London (UK). It was built right into the main structure of the Palace, too, which caught my eye, not least because I didn’t know there had been a railway there. I have no great connection with Alexandra Palace beyond my living in North London myself for a few years, but I did travel past the place every day when I was commuting from Stevenage in Hertfordshire into London every day in the early 1980s.
Alexandra Palace isn’t a palace in the royal sense, but a palace of entertainment and sports. It’s known affectionately as “Ally Pally”, and because it sits atop a big hill, you can see it for miles around, even in the suburban jungle of North London. It was opened in 1873 and has gone through many iterations in its lifetime, most notably perhaps as the BBC’s first home for a regular television service, starting in 1936. Ally Pally is still functioning, too, as concert, exhibition, and community venue. Curiously, though, despite having seen it every day for years, and lived relatively close by, I’ve never been inside.
But I digress. The station was the terminal point for a broad loop of line coming out from the London to Edinburgh Eastern main line. It must have been quite a slog up the hill with a full load, because it’s some climb up to the Palace. The branch was opened in 1873, along with the venue, but closed in 1954. The track bed is still in use, only now as walking trail, known as the Parkland Walk (North), and still utilises some of the old railway infrastructure to traverse the now busy roads.
I write all of this as a way of both highlighting my total ignorance of the history of North London and it’s many esteemed buildings and infrastructure, and the fact that my trips past Ally Pally were now over forty years ago. Where on earth did the time go? Indeed, this realisation of time past manifested itself on a trip to the UK in 2023. We were on a train going from Hackney Downs into Liverpool Street and I was remarking to the good lady wife that the trains were somewhat improved compared to the ones I’d used on that route in, wait for it, 1981! I hadn’t even begun to consider the passage of time, beyond a decade or two, but four decades and counting? It was no wonder things had changed.
Anyway, enjoy the photographs of Ally Pally station, and check out the links below, while I go away and consider how time passes so darned quickly.
Today was our much anticipated trip to Birmingham and the National Trust Back-to-Back Houses. The good Mrs. Mayne has family connections with Birmingham, and our family tree explorations have led us to see that many of our ancestors lived in the heart of Britain’s industrial cities in the nineteenth century. What better way to fill in some background than to visit some restored examples of houses of that era?
It was also an opportunity to have a train ride, something that’s rare for us in Canada (there’s a whole other story about trains in Canada, but that can wait for another day), although unfortunately that necessitated us getting to London’s Euston station during the rush hour. What fun!
A walk down to Hackney Central station had us boarding the London Overground train to Highbury and Islington, then onward on the tube to Euston. We could have taken the bus to Euston, but that is a wholly unreliable form of transport for anything over about 10 minutes in the rush hour, especially when you have a train to catch. The Overground was, to say the least, packed. I’ve commuted in London before, but the good Mrs. Mayne was a bit uncomfortable being squashed in an extremely full train. Still, it wasn’t far, and while the tube train was also packed, it wasn’t quite as bad.
At Euston, I had a foul up with my Oyster card when the automatic barrier stuck open and didn’t register my “tap” as I went through. I had to go back and get the situation remedied by a helpful member of the station staff or I’d have been charged £9.60 rather than the regular £3 something. Anyway, problem sorted, we waited in the outdoor plaza while our train north was prepared. I hadn’t noticed the outdoor plaza on my last visit to Euston, and I wish I had. Lots of food and drink vendors, plenty of seats, and a good arrivals and departures board for all to see, it was the ideal place to wait, even in the cold, grey morning.
The Avanti West Coast train we were booked on not only wasn’t cancelled, but it was a new and very swish set of wheels that whisked us to Birmingham very quickly. OK, so it was 20 minutes late arriving at New Street, but who cares when there’s no time crunch? We’d paid a little extra to get better seats, and they were fairly comfortable for the nearly two hour run. The train itself was quiet and smooth, equipped with Wi-Fi and power points, which was all a far cry from the trains I remember from when I started work in London. There’s nothing quite like whipping along beside the M1 motorway and passing all the cars and trucks like they were going backwards, all while relaxing and enjoying the ride.
Birmingham New Street station has been rebuilt and incorporated into shopping centre (no surprise there), with a confusing layout and such a paucity of signage, and even public information maps, that it took us a while to find the correct exit. I could see that the designers of the station had sought to separate passengers into four separate areas, which would significantly reduce overcrowding and bottlenecks, but I think they’ve rather assumed that users of the station will be somewhat familiar with the layout, because the signage was definitely lacking.
Finally out of the building, it was an easy walk down Hill Street to the Back-to-Backs, that sit next to the still active Hippodrome theatre. We were early, so dropped in for a swift drink at the Sly Old Fox, then hot footed it over to the day’s excitement.
Back-to-Back housing was the Victorian answer to housing the thousands of people required to work in the factories of the big industrial cities. Birmingham was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, and in the mid-nineteenth century had around 50,000 of these dwellings. Now there are just these four, preserved for posterity, thank goodness. They consist of a house facing onto the street, with another house built onto its back and facing into a courtyard. The houses were one up and one down, or if it had and third floor, a two up one down. They were generally lived in by one family, usually a large family, and often with a lodger or two. There could be as many as twenty-four houses sharing a courtyard, where there was a privy and a drain and not much else. In Birmingham, a central water standpipe in the yard wasn’t provided initially, and a well some distance away was the only water source for hundreds of people. It wasn’t until almost the end of the century that water was piped into the houses themselves.
The National Trust has renovated four of these houses and set them up to depict different periods of time, from the 1860s to the 1980s, finishing up with George Saunders’ tailor’s shop that really was in one of the houses that fronted Hirst Street.
It’s all fascinating stuff, especially as our family tree research has revealed both our nineteenth century families would more than likely have lived in something similar, and Deb’s family actually in Birmingham. Although the standard of accommodation and hygiene was terrible, the Back-to-Backs were actually an improvement on the slums that organically developed when people moved from agricultural work to supposedly better employment in the cities.
We were taken around the houses by a very knowledgeable fellow, a native of Birmingham, who filled in the factual information with a stack of anecdotes, which made the tour even better. He was quick to point out that the restoration of the houses wasn’t absolutely correct, and in some ways these examples of Back-to-Backs were not typical. However, knowing that made the tour all the better. Our little group of visitors, including us, were all of a certain age and spent half the time recognising things that we’d grown up with and the other half puffing and panting as we negotiated the steep and narrow staircases. The Birmingham Back-to-Backs are highly recommended.
After that tour, we made our way through central Birmingham, via a Gregg’s for lunch of course, to the Coffin Works on Fleet Street. We had planned an hour or two self-guided tour in there, only when we arrived we discovered that it was guided tours only on a Thursday, and we’d missed the last one. (2pm, sorry chaps, that’s way too early to shut up shop, even on a November Thursday). The man at the desk there was full of apologies and did explain a little of what went on there (Not actually a coffin manufacturer, but a manufacturer of coffin furniture, handles, clasps, linings, shrouds and the like.), so we at least left with a bit of a flavour of the place. It hinted of Birmingham’s association with anything metal, and the city’s ability to produce high quality, mass-produced items from pen nibs and coffin furniture, to bicycles and guns.
Only mildly disappointed, but with an unexpected couple of hours to kill, we looked awhile at the canal just across the street. I looked in vain for the name of the canal but came to the conclusion that it’s just generically a part of the Birmingham Canal Navigation that linked the factories to the canals coming into the city. We were at the Farmer’s Gate flight of locks, and all down the flight there were places to dock narrow boats, clearly visible even under the modern buildings that line the canal now. It’s easy to see that the Newman Brother’s factory making coffin furniture would have made use of the canal to ship goods in and out. If you’re thinking that the locks look too small (72’ x 7’ with manually operated paddles and gates), just remember that these operate in the same manner and the locks on the Great Lakes canals (776’ x 80’).
We might have visited the museum in town, but were too knackered to do that, so we had a quick mooch around a very busy main shopping (pedestrianised) street, replete with a faux German Christmas market stretching along its length. We had an early supper of a rather fine Pizza and a bottle of wine before repairing to the station, via a pub, for the train home. I should add that we were booked on a specific train, so we were sort of killing time by the end of the trip.
A complaint about pubs, and other businesses, in the UK this trip, is the music they insist on playing all the time. I’m not averse to music, but when it’s loud enough to prevent conversation, at least without having to substantially raise your voice, then it’s just irksome. Yes, I know I sound like an old fart (I am one), but I’ve left shops without spending any money because the music has become too intrusive. I can’t imagine how I would have felt had I been using my hearing aids.
The train trip home was also fast, although the rolling stock a little older and not so swish. We opted to take the bus home from Euston, which was far more direct that the trains, and I’m glad we did. We were driving through still busy streets at nearly 10pm with shops, pubs and restaurants open and doing good business. Indeed, after 15 years in Canada where hardly anyone walks anywhere, the foot traffic in British cities is a sight to behold.
Tomorrow is a down day, so I’m not sure what will occur. We really do need this down day, though, because we are shattered.
Liverpool. Beatle Country. Somewhere we’d always been reluctant to visit, but now having committed to go, the forces of evil tried very hard to prevent us from getting there.
We had planned a train ride from Huddersfield, about half-an-hour’s drive away from Holmfirth, to Liverpool Lime Street station. The day before the trip, though, I had an e-mail to say that the train we were booked on, and the return train, were cancelled. A wise woman of our acquaintance had suggested this might happen, so we were disappointed but not too surprised. The train company did at least offer some alternatives, one of them being a refund, and after some deliberation we decided on that option.
In sorting out a refund, the rail company, Trans-Pennine Express (TPE), demanded that I supply all the relevant information, which I duly lifted, word for word, from the e-mail they sent me. I then had to send them a scan of the evidence. We hadn’t collected our actual tickets, so I sent a PDF scan of the e-mail I’d used to copy down all the information they wanted. The e-mail, that is, that TPE sent to me in the first place. They promised a reply within 28 days. 28 days? They have systems to swiftly take money from you, but giving it back, when it was they who cancelled the train, seems to require a massive amount of nugatory effort on my part. Bastards. *Late news: The refund was approved and paid in under two weeks.
Our alternative plan was to drive to Liverpool South Parkway station, close to Liverpool’s John Lennon airport, where there was a big, free car park that we could leave the car, and enjoy a train ride into the city. Before we set off from Holmfirth, I heard on the news that trains were further disrupted at Huddersfield that morning after a landslip. Driving was the only option then, obviously.
On arrival at Parkway station, there wasn’t a single space left in the car park, not one. I spoke to the fellow at the information desk, and he said that it’s full at 8am every weekday. So much for using public transport.
Yesterday I had gone off the idea of parking in central Liverpool after reading a couple of reviews of car parks there. Liverpool has a poor reputation for petty crime, and stealing from cars was high on the list. However, the good Mrs. M looked at Google again and suggested some of the Waterfront attractions car parks might work. So, Navi reprogrammed, off we set towards the city centre. After a slight issue when we thought there was no parking available at our chosen destination, we saw there was a gated car park, half-empty, right next to the Royal Albert Dock. Undoubtedly it wouldn’t be cheap (it turned out to be £11, the same price as two train tickets), but for the sheer convenience of it, this was going to be worth it.
I’d never been to Liverpool, so to see the regenerated waterfront with plenty of people around, even on a cold and wet November morning, was most encouraging. First things first, though, a visit to a toilet was on the cards, and possibly some refreshment.
We went into a store that sold nothing but Beatles memorabilia, looking for the advertised Fab Four Café. It turned out that both the café and the store were at the end of a Beatles exhibition which we wouldn’t have the time to see. No matter, though, we used the toilets had some coffee (or Fanta) and listened to the endless loop of Beatles music. Even the loos were Beatle-themed, and the music was on a different loop in there.
The waterfront attractions looked good, but I did want to go to Matthew Street, in the town, to see the Cavern Club, where the Beatles first made their mark on the British music scene.
A wet walk through the city was interrupted by an odd visit to a key cutting shop. I’d stopped to admire the huge range of shoe cleaning products there, when the good Mrs. Mayne decided she wanted some big, heavy keys to go on a key ring she’d bought earlier. First she had to persuade the bemused looking key cutter that she wanted to buy two blank keys. I don’t know that anyone had asked for that before, especially not a wet tourist. Having established that she would buy the keys without having them cut, the man behind the counter supplied the keys and we set off into the rain again, leaving the bemused proprietor scratching his head. But it didn’t end there. The good Mrs. Mayne really wanted the blank keys cut, so when I’d found an old key in the recesses of my bag, she hot-footed it back to the shop to have her new keys cut. I wouldn’t go into the shop again, preferring to stand out in the rain and watch the Liverpool office workers on their lunch breaks. Fair play to the missus, though, she now has two keys, cut to a lock that I don’t even know exists still, but at least she’s happy.
Matthew Street and the Cavern Club were a disappointment. The street is narrow but is crammed with all things Beatle. The weather wasn’t great, but it was dark and dingy and, basically, full of tat. The Cavern itself was charging £5 each for entry, plus £2 to take your coat. There were three, yes three, bouncers crowding the tiny lobby, so I decided not to go in. I was happy enough to have my photo taken there. Perhaps I’d go in when there was some live music on, but it all felt a bit crap. I have no doubt that Matthew Street was always a bit shabby, but the Beatles crap everywhere really didn’t help. I guess that’s people making a living, though.
Despite the rain, we walked back to the waterfront. We decided against a trip on the Mersey Ferry (You’re already humming the tune, aren’t you?) and started back towards the Albert Dock. Unusually for me, I got caught short and had to make an unaccustomed dash for the toilets, which were further away than I thought. Relief was achieved, though, so then we made for the International Museum of Slavery, incorporating the Maritime Museum. Liverpool played its part in the Slave Trade, and much of the city’s prosperity came from either trading enslaved Africans, or the cotton and sugar their labours produced. The museum was full of kids on school trips, and rightly so. Many of the kids were themselves of distant African origin (a huge assumption on my part, of course), so it was all as it should be. We didn’t have sufficient time to give the place our full attention, and only skimmed the Maritime Museum, but it was well worth the visit.
Our meal of the day was in the Italian restaurant called Gusto. It’s a chain, but the place was OK with a view over the docks. The food was good, too, with plenty of vegan options on the menu. Our server, a very knowledgeable lady from Sardinia (Italy, but I’m sure she’d claim Sardinian first), who helped us out hugely by pointing out our error in ordering two huge starters when one would do. The final bill wasn’t as awful as I’d thought it would be, either, so well done Gusto Liverpool.
We’d headed off to look at a shop within the dock buildings when I realised that I’d left my phone in the restaurant, which started a major panic. Luckily it was still there when I dashed back. As the great Homer Simpson would say, Doh!
Our final act of our Liverpool day was to spend a king’s ransom in the Beatle memorabilia shop. I mean, who doesn’t want a tiny music box that plays Hey Jude?
We really enjoyed Liverpool, with the possible exception of Matthew Street, and could easily have spent a few days there. The people are friendly, and the city’s architecture is really worth a look. The only thing is that you really have to be able to put up with all things Beatle. The Beatles are everywhere, you cannot escape them. I just hope that Paul and Ringo are getting their cut, and that the estates of John and George are getting theirs, too.
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