D Kendall

Travelling west through Charmouth and Lyme Regis but also back in time as the landscape is full of memories for me. Slow progress on the bus followed by slow progess on an Exeter-bound train quickening for a while after I join the express to Cornwall, only to slow down again after we cross Brunel’s great bridge across the Tamar and approach the country’s periphery. The end of the journey is still a bit too quick for me as I miss my stop through an ill judged pit stop and travel on to the end of the line in Penzance. But using time and money to correct past mistakes is just part of the game these days and I roll back by taxi to St Ives with unbatted eyelids.

The next day my old schoolfriend whom I haven’t met for almost a half century takes me to see the old undersea tin mines along the coast. The environment is beautiful, the history of the mines less so with stories of broken cables that send over 30 people hurtling to their deaths at the bottom of the shaft, the almost certainly ineffective attempts at self protection by those processing arsenic and forms of ”employment” where miners bid for an area to work on and settle up at the counting house according to the amount extracted.

 

 

 

 

According to the local Marshwood Vale magazine, the joke about the Bridport dagger goes back to Tudor times when Henry Leland, “geographer to Henry VIII” remarked that good daggers were made in Bridport, not realising that the Bridport dagger was slang for the hangman’s noose, made of rope from Bridport.

The town is proud of its rope-making tradition which goes back at least to the 13th century, based on abundant supplies of flax and hemp which grew in the vicinity and water power from the town’s rivers.

It supplied the English Navy with rope until 1610 and  when the navy started to make heavy rope in-house, diversified to other types of cordage and netmaking.

In the early days before water power was replaced by steam and the workers were gathered in factories, there was a lot of outwork, where families received hemp and flax from the merchants and then processed the raw material by spinning it in 100 metre long rope walks.  The traces of this early industrial activity can still be seen  in the odd rectangular plots of land beside the houses, now transformed into gardens.

And the tradition is not completely dead as Amsafe, according to its website, a world leader in aviation restraint technology (airplane safety belts among other things) has a substantial plant in the town (as well as in Phoenix, Arizona).

I spent the morning walking along the river, looking for old mills and rope walks and wandering around the old industrial and pre-industrial quarters. Quite a lot to see but I have to force myself to concentrate as I’m poorly educated and difficult to enthuse when it comes to the technical. But to really understand a place, it’s important to know.

I’d intended to continue with Bridport’s other industries – brewing and tanning but a half day was enough for me and I rushed back to my computer.

Tomorrow will be a long day when I leave for St Ives in Cornwall for the weekend to see an old friend whom I haven’t met for a very long time.

Sources: “Walking Textile History”, The 4 Museums, 2018                                    “The Rope, Net and Twine Industry of Bridport”, Bridport Museum Trust

 

 

All is soft and green when the wind is from the south-west. It’s so restful compared with the Scandinavian winter struggle against the elements. I’m not sure that I could live in the West Country – there’s too much of what I am today that wouldn’t belong. But I love to be reminded of what it feels like to be in this countryside, which was my everyday life in my teens.

I decide to walk to Bothenhampton, a few kilometres from Bridport, past sad no longed served bus stops. It’s deeply rural, quiet with few people about although we are not far from suburban West Bay and the artics on the A35.

I’m pleased to find Prior’s Gothic revival church open and go in to admire the arches.  I’m  becoming very interested in Gothic revival architecture. Once very dismissive, I have now seen both the horrible and the very good and want to know more. I have to make a reading list and integrate this into my plan for 2019 (which is still at the vision stage, although the delay hardly matters as large parts of my plan for 2018 will be recycled).

I manage to do my 10,000 steps, the first time for a while.

I’ve decided to use my time in Bridport to study the local area thoroughly and not wander too far afield in the county. Tomorrow I shall try to see what i can find of Bridport’s industrial heritage, what lies behind the attractive central streets.

 

Half running and the last person to catch the bus, narrowly avoiding being squeezed in the doors, I expect the driver to start with an irritated jerk. Not so. He asks me (jokingly) if I’m too young to have a free pensioners pass and I answer not too young but too foreign. He wants to know where and how long I’ve lived abroad, seemingly oblivious to marginal matters such as passengers. Then he asks about the social situation in Sweden. First I think he wants to know about what social life is like but no he’s interested in pensions and care and so on. I answer him as succinctly as I can and he seems satisfied. Then looks at me and says in a conversational tone, I suppose we’d better get going as if he wanted input from me before taking such a drastic step. And after I confirm his view of the world, off we go. I rather like people who forget about their role (it reminds me of me).

It feels liberating to be on a bus moving through the soft, green, Marshwood Vale through Melplash and on to Beaminster with the Dorset hills in the background. mild and damp and the wind is coming from the south-west.  Until now, I’ve now mostly stayed in my room and worked, sorting out loose ends after six weeks in India and fixing a few bits of translation. It’s refreshing to feel the world of work loosening its grip.

Beaminster is a pleasant small town although its population of just over 3.000 makes it more the size of a village. But it feels like a small town. Pevsner doesn’t have much to say about the secular buildings and I realise that I have to dig more in the archives in Dorchester and visit Beaminster again, preferably in the morning when the light is better..

The church tower is very fine and there is a monument I like with a man and woman discussing a book (where can one sign up for this variant of death…) The church is dedicated to St Mary like Bridport’s parish church. I’d like to know more about dedications and need to get a map of all the parishes in the relevant sees (Sherborne and Salisbury) to see what patterns there may be.

The bus back to Bridport is full of schoolchildren. A boy indicates a vacant seat beside him, which I gratefully take (do I look so lost when I’m just trying to make up my mind?). He then asks me how my day has been and I tell him it’s been OK. He seems a bit flummoxed when I ask him how his day has been. He mumbles an answer which I can’t hear and we proceed more or less peacefully to Bridport.

Built after the First World War, more or less from scratch, Welwyn Garden City is England’s second garden city. After the first city Letchworth’s slow start, the accepted vision was that the creation of garden suburbs rather than cities was the way to go. Welwyn Garden City owes its existence to a great extent to the drive of Ebenezer Howard, author of Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902).

Arriving at the bus station, you soon come across Howard’s shopping centre and a Howard’s gate but other information about the city and its development was not easy to find. There did not seem to be a museum or information centre. The local Waterstones could offer me a more technical book by the architect, Louis de Soissons, a children’s colouring book and a slim volume about garden cities in general (which I bought) and various historical books with pics. At the local library, I found Stephen Ward’s “The Peaceful Path. Building garden cities” (2016) with very interesting information about the early development. But even this book did not tell me much about the social development of the city  (with the proviso that my skim was more intensively interrupted by glances at my watch towards the end).

I wonder who the people were who moved there, what was their social composition. How was the city run when first owned by a company and then a new town development corporation, what did land use and house ownership look like and how did the authorities maintain the architectural consistency of the town (mainly Neo-Georgian), did ideological currents make their presence felt to start with (William Morris, the Fabians). What issues have ruffled feathers  over the years? What is the incidence of crime and vandalism?

And perhaps the big question, why does this city built from scratch seem to work while many other newbuild areas have become dystopic and failed?

The city looks well maintained, the green avenues in the centre of the streets are calm and harmonious. There was hardly any graffiti, it seemed to have been cleaned even from obscure alleyways. Only at the edge of the centre by the library did I find a dingy pedestrian underpass with a hoodie in  residence like som guardian of the gates of hell outside the land of the lotus eaters.

I didn’t find the architecture exciting but the effect here is not unpleasant ( with added security bonus for me who spent several childhood years looking at a Neo-Georgian post office building outside my classroom window…). But I wouldn’t want to live here; the lack of hisorical associations would disturb me – I am a quirk-dependent person.

I would anyway like to know more about the city.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gunilla is away and (unusually for me) I don’t make a rush for the exit. Instead, I went to Oxelösund, (it’s taken me 45 years to get around to it).

Like Kiruna, the town is there because of its industry. The centre has been moved to suit the steelworks’ needs, most of the buildings being from the 1950s and 1960s (presumably a lot of older buildings have been demolished although the town was never large and it’s not an historic town).

The centre feels glum. A few people drift across the square under a brave banner proclaiming “We are Oxelösund”. Business is slack for the duty beggar outside the department store and  I see no money change hands. Together with charity fatigue, Sweden’s rapid abandonment of cash is bad news for beggars.

Fleeing to the more cheerful library, I find Klas Östergren’s “Gangsters” has been purged from stock and is on offer for 5 kronor. The cover blurb has words of praise from an Expressen review by Horace Engdahl (written a good few years before Horace E was given the role of Demon King in the Academy Panto). Klas Östergren is not one of my favourite people just now but I’ve never read anything by him and think I probably ought to. I also pick up a guide to Bulgaria so that I can use my ten kronor coin without pushing my luck and wanting change as well.

Worth looking at in the centre is St Botvid’s church built on a hill to look like a navigation marker. The architect was Rolf Bergh (the same architect who was responsible for St Birgitta’s church in Nockeby). It’s worth a visit but I decide to conserve my energy for the walk to Old Oxelösund, which is doable but some way off. Gränges, the company that later developed the steel works, purchased almost the whole of the peninsula between the modern centre and the coast, just leaving a small enclave of older buildings down by the water.

Although few in number, the old buildings are fine, some exceptionally fine. Oxelösund is a natural harbour and there were pilots living  and working there. It’s still out of season though and the Archipelago Museum is closed as is the café, where a notice informs that, because of a burst pipe in the winter, they are not sure when they will open. My inner picture of sitting on a café verandah sipping coffee while looking at harbour bustle crumbles – no café, no coffee, no bustle.

Hardened by years in Sweden, I concentrate on enjoying sitting on a bench beside the water looking at the steel works. I learn a new Swedish word “båk” (beacon) which pleases me.

The sea is not far away but as usual in these parts, you can feel it but can’t actually see it as there are always a couple (if not ten) islands blocking the view.

Oxelösund is a bigger harbour than I expected. A ship is on its way in from Hull soon, returning there shortly afterwards. In a few days’ time, the Cyprus-registered Mynika, a bulk carrier (presumably coal), will arrive from Hay’s Point in Australia before sailing on to Luleå. I see that it’s now off the Canary Islands – it left Australia in March and must have gone around the Cape.

Retracing my steps is not as painful as I feared. At least I get a long rest at the bus stop waiting for Sörmlands trafik to rescue me while I mull over my reasons for wanting to visit Oxelösund.

We pass seventeenth century Stjärnholms slott on the way back to Nyköping. Owned originally by families of Dutch origin, Louis de Geer grew up there and was later involved in developing Swedish industry a bit further down the coast at Nävekvarn. Also worth a visit but it will have to wait until we can drive there.

 

 

To my 25-year old eyes, Finchley Road was rather swish. I got to know the area through my last English girlfriend, who worked at the library at the nearby Tavistock Clinic. We used to meet there during what I suspect was neither lunch nor an hour, having no memories of restaurants but only of street scenes, the little short cut through the metal gate going up to the library, which is still there. And of standing close to the entrance to Swiss Cottage tube and of her giving me an inscribed copy of a collection of Blake’s poems, which I still have, its bright red now faded to a pale pink, pricking my conscience at not having read it, although always meaning to. I was grateful but puzzled as to why she gave me this gift although looking at the inscription the other day, the “December 1969” ought to have put me on track. I’m not sure that I like David Kendall version 1969 very much but I’m stuck with him.

Since then, I’ve passed through the area a few times and have memories of going to the cinema with a friend at Swiss Cottage.

But now a stay at an air bnb flat close by has changed all that.  The beginning wasn’t promising. I was dead tired after travelling to Paris the day before from Rouen, an early start in Paris, a flight to Bristol, wandering around Bristol Airport with a heavy case to find the administration block to retrieve my lost coat, and then to the city centre, by train to Paddington and taxi to Finchley Road.

I remember I had a letter to post and needed to get tape, I can’t quite remember why. It was getting close to closing time and the sub-Post Office staff were twitchy as I fumbled with my tape. And to Waitrose for provisions and back down Finchley Road, dragging myself forward in the cold, longing to lay down and sleep.

It seemed scruffier than I remembered it, even allowing for tiredness and winter gloom. I realised when I thought about it that one shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about the downfall of England from decrepit high streets but it perhaps tells us more about the concentration of the retail trade, the growing power of the chains, whose idea of a prime retail spot is not on a traffic-choked highway where parking is difficult. And the disappearance of many of the independent retailers leaves the traditional high street a patchwork of small shops, charity shops, estate agents etc. I’m not sure though that my thirst for knowledge extends to spending time hanging around in shopping malls to get a feel of the real England…..

Back in the flat, life felt much more cheerful. It was owned by a university lecturer specialising in Austria-Hungary and Central Europe, with the best collection of books on the Austro-Hungarian empire that I’ve ever seen (and a portrait of the last A-H emperor on the wall). I made the acquaintance of Joseph Roth, whom I’d never heard of before and read the Radetzky March on my return to Sweden. I bought it in German too which I shall try to tackle now I’ve finished the English translation.

The area to the east of the southern end of Finchley Road is pleasant. Once away from the traffic, it’s residential, extending to Primrose Hill in one direction and up to Hampstead in the other.

I didn’t get much time for wandering around this time but am glad to have the Austro-Hungarians and Roth around to keep Blake and my last English girlfriend company.