TRAILING IN HARLOW

One of the best reasons for spending a Saturday night in the Holiday Inn Express in Harlow is that come the next morning you can have a meander round the Market Square and the Broad Walk.

 

You could, and we sort of did, walk around it on Saturday night, but there was a certain amount of police activity which in an unknown town rather deters the casual boulevardier.  Come the morning at about 9 am the place was all but deserted, although by ten it was starting to get busy, though not in a ‘police activity’ kind of way, just people on their way to Gregg’s, Primark and to the many barbers, and on the way strolling past quite a few closed down establishments.

Such a walk, inescapably, covers part of the Harwich Sculpture Trail.  There are pieces of sculpture around the town, including a Henry Moore and a Rodin, though we by no means saw  them all.

 

The sculptures we saw were great; Meat Porters by Ralph Brown, 1959

 

Trigon, by Lynn Chadwick, 1961

 

Vertex, by Paul Mason 1979

 

But for a man with my specialist enthusiasms they all rather fell by the wayside compared with this fine obelisk, possibly a quasi or broken obelisk by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who was one of the chief begetters of Harlow New Town, as well as architect of the London Central Mosque and the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

 

We also got a look at the bus station, and at Terminus House, which I thought looked all right from the outside, though according to the BBC it’s a ‘Human Warehouse,’ formerly an office block, and now hot bed of drugs and sex crime: we had to take their word for it.

This is Sir Frederick Gibberd in life:

 

and in sculpture:

WET WALKING

 

I often say that the whole point of walking is that you get out there and you see things that you wouldn’t see if you weren’t on foot, or you see old things in a new way.  I’ll happily stand by that as a principle, but I’ve recently done a couple of not quite local walks here in Essex which make me wonder if in fact, however lofty your ideals, however pure your intentions, you often end up seeing and noticing the same old same old.

 

The first of these walks was from Dovercourt train station to the Fryatt hospital, which is officially in Harwich, at most a 25 minute walk.  I was going along to the hospital for some specialized blood test that apparently couldn’t be done in my own doctor’s surgery. I hoped this test itself would take about five minutes, which it did, and so I’d have time to do some drifting.

 

The only problem was that it was absolutely pissing down on the day I went, and so I hurried along there and back, not noticing as much as I’d have liked to because my head was down, my shoulders were hunched, my cap was partly over my eyes, as I careered down the street trying to minimize my soaking.

 

But I wasn’t completely in my own cocoon.  I spotted some of the things I always like to spot, such as blank notice boards:

cars in the wilderness:

These are the kind of things I always enjoy noticing, but just lately, the architectural noticer in me, has been starting to look at external staircases, which are often, though not always, fire escapes.  Like this one:

If it hadn’t been for the rain I’d have walked further, looked around more, seen more, photographed more, but a pedestrian has to play the hand they’re given.  I didn’t mind getting a bit wet but I didn’t want to be soaked to the edge of pneumonia. But in some small mitigation I did  see, in somebody’s front garden, getting far more soaked than I was, this quite comfy looking chair – that felt like something I’d never really looked at properly before:

 

Then, less than a week later, I was walking in Chelmsford, and it was raining again, though not nearly as hard as it had been in Dovercourt. And yes, some of my small obsessions were catered for, an obelisk of sorts by the cathedral:

a bench, proclaiming its place of residence: 

some topiary, an interest I’ve recently picked up from my other half:

 

another fire escape:

 

And so on.  And this I think is my point, you look at the same old things, you have the same old interests and obsessions, but they do change, or change their intensity, over time.  For instance there was a show at the Gareth Gardner Gallery, photographs of hedges. Now I have always noticed hedges and taken the occasional photograph, but now I find I REALLY notice them. Such as this one in Chelmsford:

 

And the thing is, I don’t really expect anybody else to be interested in the things that I am.  I mean, I write this blog, I publish the occasional book, and people read them or they don’t; mostly they don’t, of course.  

 

And once in a while I conduct ‘walking tours,’ usually in the interests of plugging one of my books, and this is always tricky. I see the occasional odd thing I’m interested in and point it out, like this armillary sphere I spotted while leading a tour in Richmond – I love a good armillary sphere.

 

Few, if any, of the group knew what an armillary sphere was, and none of them seemed interested.  Probably best to stick to the Blue plaques.

 

PERMITTED WASTED WALKING

 

You’ll no doubt be wanting to hear more about my flaneuring in Swansea, and no, that isn’t me in the picture above, though I do like his style.  He was just one of the walkers I saw.

 There was a lot of interesting architecture, the old rubbing shoulders with the new, as TV documentarians sometimes used to say.

 

I do love metal buildings of any kind but a chapel or in the two cases below, a former chapel, really floats my  boat.  I might have thought this was corrugated iron but I'm told that in fact it's galvanised steel. 

I always wonder what it must be like being inside in the rain.  Reassuring or scary?  And of course there’s no shortage of rain in Wales, as I discovered.

On a rainy Saturday morning it seemed necessary to get out there and not be a fair-weather drifter.  So first there was this fine structure supporting a road bridge, not far from Harry Secombe Court (honestly).

And then, and this is the beauty part, there was the Danygraig Cemetery with its many, many obelisks.  Below is just a small sample.

You know, flaneurship may have a few things to offer that are more fun and frolicsome that wandering around a cemetery in the rain looking at obelisks, but not so very many, I think.

 

Oh yes, and probably you knew this already; but those Welsh have a different word for everything:

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

 Did you know there’s an area of Norwich called Tombland?

I suppose a lot of people do, but I didn’t until I found myself in Norwich last weekend, having been to a disappointing exhibition, and was looking for entertainment.  And although I wasn’t expecting Tombland to be some sci-fi, horror, zombie theme park, I was still disappointed at first to find that Tombland is pretty much the public square in front of the Cathedral entrance. 

 

In fact Tombland is the Old English or possibly Viking (scholars differ) word for empty space, though of course it’s not as empty as it used to be.  And right there in the middle there’s an obelisk, and I think you already know about my mild but ongoing obelisk obsession.  This one is actually a drinking fountain.

 

So it hadn’t been a wasted afternoon, and then because I’d looked at a map earlier, I’d seen that Rosary Cemetery was nearby, and so (being something off a taphophile) it had to be investigated. We had to walk through Old Library Woods which was not much of a wood, though there was a wayside library and a 'community chatting bench,' and some fine bookish sculptures complete with real live, unsculpted, fungi.

       And then into Rosary Cemetery which was, OMG, obelisk central - far more than you see in these pictures – Obeliskland, if you will.

 

         It was established in 1819 by Thomas Drummond, and various sources say it was the first non-denominational burial ground in Britain, though I’d have thought Bunhill Fields – resting place of Bunyan, Blake and Defoe - first used as a burial ground in 1665 would have some claim on this.  Other sources simply say Rosary was the first private cemetery in England. 

         I like walking in cemeteries, I find it a pleasure, and I do spend a certain amount of time wondering what exactly is the nature of this pleasure.  I don’t think it’s a form of gloating.  I don’t walk around thinking how lucky I am to be alive when all these other folk are dead, because I know that my luck will run out and sooner or later I’ll be joining them.

Partly I enjoy the mysteries of cemeteries. The people in these graves all had complex and nuanced lives and you can only imagine what these were because even the most elaborate headstone never tells you much. And even though an obelisk doesn’t tell you any more, it does make a statement.

 

         In fact I’ve considered buying an obelisk so that I can have it my back garden now while I live, and then loved ones can move it to the cemetery when I’m gone, so that others can walk around the graveyard see my obelisk and think what a great man this Nicholson must have been.  

 

Or I suppose if these same loved ones set up the Nicholson Memorial Museum of Curiosities, we might have something like this:

 

Of course since I’ll be gone I won’t know whether the loved ones have actually done this or not.

 

BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE

 

Does everybody but me know the term ‘backshot’? I took the photograph below, in 

London, somewhere near Limehouse, thinking it was the name of a ‘street artist,’ and I 

suppose it may be, but I now understand it’s also the word for a sexual practice, not an 

especially unfamiliar one, but I had no idea there was a word for it.  Ah London – always an 

education.

Yes I was back in London last week, after (OMG!!!) a 9 month absence.  The best thing I can say is that apart from people wearing masks it didn’t look or feel very different from pre-Lockdown days.  Yes, the pubs offer table service only, but I reckon that’s an improvement.

 

I wasn’t on a walking trip per se but of course I ended up walking all over the place, through Soho to the Photographers Gallery to see two exhibitions, again neither of them specifically about walking, although walking featured in both.  One was titled From Here to Eternity by Sunil Gupta, about being gay in India – apparently it’s a lot easier than it used to be, 

 

though not as easy as it was in New York in the 70s:

 

There was also Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea – Stories from the Russian Arctic which was just fabulous.  I think there’s only a limited amount of walking to be done in those parts, but when you get out there it’s pretty spectacular:

Then a walk with an old mate from Sheffield who took us to the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.  Is it a cemetery?  Is it a park?  It's BOTH!!

    You want obelisks?  They got obelisks.

 

And the next day a walk along the King’s Road to the Chelsea Physic Garden - I had a coupon.  There was a plant sale (if you like that kind of thing). There was also a bloke standing next to a speaker.  

 

I think he had a microphone, but there were no turntables, which was a shame in some ways.  In other ways perhaps not.