June
9th - 11th
A
fairly innocuous drive of 40 miles via Preston with torrential rain
throughout. The A565 brings you into Southport from the north and you
drive right through the whole length of the town centre to get to the
site on the south side. Wow! The town is really nice, colonnades and
arcades and giant stone buildings. It's a bit like Tunbridge Wells by
the sea. Definitely anti-Blackpool. I got a bit lost and trawled some
back streets (or should I say 'back boulevards', because there were
the most amazing mansions everywhere). This is definitely
Millionnairesville. Had a quick cycle around after settling, just to
get the lie of the land. This stage is going to depend very much on
the weather. If it's fine tomorrow, Plan A (bus to Crosby to see
'Another Place', Antony Gormley's giant figures standing in the sea).
If wet, Plan B (mooch around the town and hope for fine weather on
Wednesday).
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| Lord Street |
Oh
dear, I've just been tidying up older Blog pages and for some reason
or other the software has moved my first stage (Cambridge in
February) to the front to make it the most recent. So, if it sounds
familiar...................
Had
a pleasant Tuesday walking around Southport. The main avenue, Lord
Street, very wide, is lined with colonnaded shops on one side and
parks and gardens on the other. Also on the 'other' side are the
massive war memorial and the town hall and library and behind them
the main shopping area. I went into British Home Stores to try to get
some more of their brilliant anti-blister socks, but no joy. I shall
have to stick to the Vaseline. Ho, ho! Lots of joy, though, from the
shop itself, which looks to be unchanged, including some of the
staff, since the place was built. No escalators, but three lovely
lifts with Art Deco surrounds.
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| Lord Street again |
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| The Town Hall and Library |
In
the town there are loads of seats for resting and people-watching and
there is a great relaxed atmosphere. One nice arcade contains a
bronze of Red Rum but the others are quite run-down. Red Rum won the
Grand National three times and was second twice and never fell in a
race, an unparalleled record. His trainer, Ginger McCain, was a
Southport car dealer and trained the horse on the beach. His success
is remarkable, given his unusual diet of oven chips. The bronze
wasn't life-size, which rather spoiled it for me and explains why I
didn't take a photo. One arcade, with a splendid Art Deco
stained-glass entrance, contained a huge junk market with loads of
old Dinky Toys and railway models.
 |
| Nice arcade (can you see Red Rum?) |
I
trawled the charity ships and found an interesting novel by a
Colombian author but otherwise drew a blank. There was an awful lot
of chick-lit, especially by the appalling Louise Bagshawe/Mensch.
Maybe this is another place where only the ladies read books and the
gentlemen go to the pub. Or, possibly, play crown-green bowls in
Victoria Park. I sat on a wet bench and watched some playful oldies
enjoying themselves in spite of their execrable dress-sense. One of
them even took the time to explain the rules to me as he went along,
although his broad scouse accent, which is quite common here, was
almost impenetrable. In crown-green the green comes to a point in the
middle and you play across the slope, not straight up and down as in
flat-green. One old bloke was absolutely brilliant and got his wood,
and sometimes both of them, closest to the jack almost every time.
His opponents survived only by concentrating on knocking him out of
the way. You could tell that everyone knew he was The King.
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| Ice cream - or body parts? |
I
passed (and then returned to take a look at) a sweetshop with every
kind, shape, colour and flavour of rock imaginable and a grotesque
display in the window of ice cream studded with assorted fruits and
lumps of confectionery. This bizarre display, obviously intended to
be attractive and to stimulate the sweet-tooth, looked truly
disgusting, a bit like the internal organs of a post mortem subject
laid-out for inspection. The photograph can't do justice to the
horror of the sight. So I bought two scoops. Just kidding.
Well,
my decision to wait until Wednesday to go to Another Place was
proved good. Torrential rainstorms but no thunder and lightning after
I got back home at 2 o'clock and they have continued into the
evening. Tomorrow promises to be fine, so I think I will cycle to
Crosby, twenty-eight miles there and back according to the AA
Routefinder. No rush, take it easy, drink plenty of water and it will
be flat, of course, along the sea front. The atmosphere has wrecked
my TV signal, so no Endeavour or Fast Show
for
me tonight. Bugger.
I shall have to read a book.
I'm
just finishing one of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley
thrillers, possibly her last one, called “The Boy who Followed
Ripley”. There's not really any mystery or puzzle in these books
but a nerve-racking feeling of menace and suspense, ratcheting-up as
the book progresses. You need a lie-down in a dark room when you
finish one.
Wednesday, last day at
Southport, a fine day. Off to Crosby, just outside Liverpool, to see
Another Place, Antony Gormley's sculptures in the sea. The
round trip proved to be forty-eight kilometers, about thirty miles.
It started by passing through the extensive grassy sand hills either
side of the coast road and by skirting Royal Birkdale Golf Club.
The sand dunes here are
the home of the endangered natterjack toad, Britain's rarest
amphibian. Some years ago there was a real possibility of their
extinction, but careful conservation work of the very best kind has
ensured its safety. When the site on which I am camping was extended
there was a risk that one of their habitual areas would be
threatened, and the Environment Agency took a very close interest in
the development. It must be very difficult to inspire interest in
protecting a toad; everybody loves furry creatures but few are
enthusiastic about toads. There is a very good article on this, the
Sefton Coast, on the BBC Countryfile website:-
After the dunes, much
of the journey was taken up by the Formby by-pass, but there were
segregated cycle tracks most of the way and the cycling was
pleasantly relaxed. Just before Crosby I passed through the village
of Little Crosby, eight miles from Liverpool, where the only church
was a large old Catholic church, surely a very rare occurrence in
Britain. The Wikipedia article on Little Crosby is interesting:-
The
village is perhaps the oldest extant Roman Catholic village in
England, the squires being the notable recusant Blundell family. The
village character has changed little from a 17th-century description
that "it had not a beggar, ..an alehouse ..[or] a Protestant in
it..." In 2009 Protestants reside in the village as old values
change - Protestant inhabitants however must be 'vetted' by the local
Squire before occupation of one of the 50 or so dwellings. In 1986 a
senior member of the hamlet was quoted in the Liverpool Echo as
saying "Protestants are discouraged from settling in our
village".
How strange and rather disturbing to read
that about a village in England. I was OK though; I had a book of
papal indulgence vouchers and was allowed to pass through without being vetted by the Squire.
Crosby
itself seemed a bit of a dump, but the brown-sign directions to
Another Place took me north along the coast to Blundellsands,
a very wealthy area. The sculptures themselves were individually
wonderful, looking wistfully out to sea, but the whole scenario was
rather disappointing, with the figures, one hundred of them, quite
widely scattered and the whole not striking the eye with any vivid
impact. I had expected them to be more closely grouped. The fact that
they were gazing at a wind-farm and a drilling rig also detracted
from the magic. To quote from the Visit Liverpool website:-
According
to Antony Gormley, Another Place harnesses the ebb and flow of the
tide to explore man's relationship with nature. He explains: The
seaside is a good place to do this. Here time is tested by tide,
architecture by the elements and the prevalence of sky seems to
question the earth's substance. In this work human life is tested
against planetary time. This sculpture exposes to light and time the
nakedness of a particular and peculiar body. It is no hero, no ideal,
just the industrially reproduced body of a middle-aged man trying to
remain standing and trying to breathe, facing a horizon busy with
ships moving materials and manufactured things around the planet.
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| Another Place |
Well, I may have been
disappointed but I was glad I had been to see them, another little
pilgrimage completed.
The return ride was
easier, but I had to spoil it by an act of random vandalism. I was
buzzing along, plugged-in to Bruce Springsteen and, of course, as
deaf as a proverbial, and didn't hear a racing cyclist trying to
overtake me. My first sight of him was when he burst past me, got his
front wheel (very skinny on a racing bike) on to the rubbly edge of
the track and fell off. I stopped and apologised and he was very
forgiving, but I could hear his teeth grinding (well, I think they
were his teeth, because he was quite old). He remounted and took-off
at high speed and, thankfully, I didn't see him again.
I had a really good nap
when I got back home. I'm very glad I came to Southport; I really
liked it here.
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