Opposite Liverpool Street Station in London, 162-164 Bishopsgate was built as a fire station in 1885 in a pastiche of the Tudor Gothic style using red brick and Portland stone. A really stunning building with some intricate decoration well above eye level.
Stonebridge City Farm has been a lovely place to visit during all sorts of iterations of lockdown in England. They’ve lost a lot of money having to keep opening and then closing again so if you could donate a little something here that would be great. My last visit pre-Christmas was to see their new calf – Orion – as well as some of the other photogenic residents.
Mersey Chambers in Liverpool was built for the Harrison Shipping Line in 1878 and is now a Grade II listed building.
A few weeks ago we had the first snow of the season. As I had to be out and about that day anyway I decided to head to Woodthorpe Grange Park to take some photos. It was first opened as a park in 1922 but before that started off as grass and arable land that was eventually sold off to a local factory owner, Henry Ashwell. Ashwell built Woodthorpe Grange, pictured below, in 1874 (currently it houses the Sport, Culture and Parks Service of Nottingham City Council and is not open to the public).
As doing any kind of Christmas travelling this year has not been possible I decided to do a round up of some previous trips, using mostly photos I haven’t posted here before. First up is the trip I took with a friend to the Christmas Light Show at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire in 2018.
Oriel Chambers is a Grade 1 listed building in Liverpool that was built in 1864 from a design by Peter Ellis. It’s a particularly striking building and one of the first office buildings in the world to use an iron framed structure – possibly an inspiration for New York’s skyscrapers.
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has one of the best collections of jewellery in the world and back in January I had some time on my hands so I popped into the V&A as I nearly always do when nearby and headed up to the Jewellery Section. I hadn’t been there for ages and so hadn’t seen the new layout which is much better than the slightly cramped set-up I remembered from previous visits.
With some time to kill while in the area (pre-COVID) I ventured into Holy Trinity Church which was designated as the Cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement by Sir John Betjeman. The message of the movement (members included William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) was to revere nature through crafts, painting and architecture as demonstrated by the church which was designed by John Dando Sedding in 1888.
Born into a family of architects, today (9 November) would have been Giles Gilbert Scott’s 140th birthday. He is perhaps most famous for the iconic design of the red telephone box, so here’s a selection of photos of phone boxes taken around the country:
2020 has been a write off in a lot of ways, particularly for travelling, so on the weekend I should have been attending my third Open House London I headed out with my Dad to Colwick Country Park for some walking amongst nature which a lot of people have been appreciating more and more this year. I’m lucky to have a nice back garden to sit in and Nottingham has a lot of green spaces that are walkable from where I live, but a place like Colwick Country Park requires a car to get to for me as I’m still avoiding public transport right now.
