England

Nottingham Light Night 2023

Light Night is always a highlight of Nottingham’s cultural calendar and this, its 15th year, showcased a lot of new attractions to visit and photograph. It takes part over two days and most things (though not all) are available on both days so usually we just go on the Friday evening. There is a quite handy official app that I use to plan the route around the city (there’s so much going on its impossible to do everything). Our first stop was at Sneinton Market Square where they had these giant bubbles called Evanescent created by Australian artists Atelier Sisu that is I believe touring the country (they were in London last month). They’re quite fun and the changing colours were very pretty.

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Throwback Thursday: Liverpool Town Hall

Liverpool Town Hall, base for the Lord Mayor, was built in 1749 and designed by John Wood.

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Categories: England, Liverpool, Merseyside | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

‘Tis the Season: Christmas Decorations

It’s no secret that I love Christmas. I don’t go too overboard but I do like to decorate the tree and the living room with ornaments I’ve bought on my travels. I often do a round up on Instagram of the newest ones but I thought this year I’d do a post here now that I’ve started travelling a little again. They’re usually a cheap(ish) souvenir and small enough not to take up a lot of room in your bag. The first one is this wonderful (and actually quite expensive) Welsh dragon I bought recently at Conwy Castle in Wales. [Starting next year will be a whole series of posts about what I got up to in a week’s exploration of North Wales – spoiler, it was a lot!]. Although I live in England I’ve been learning Welsh via Duolingo since the first UK Covid lockdown as I thought it would be nice to learn one of the Home Nation’s languages, Wales being the country I’ve visited the most. Amusingly one of the first words you learn is draig, the Welsh for dragon.

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Categories: Bath, England, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wales | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

‘Tis the Season: Christmas at the Exchange, Nottingham

The Exchange building in Nottingham was the city’s first shopping centre, opened in 1929. Found next to the Council House the Christmas decorations and tree have been of the same pretty design for around five years now but it’s worth a quick walk through if you’re visiting the nearby Winter Wonderland.

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Nottingham Winter Wonderland 2022

Tis the season for a lot of Christmas themed activities on the blog. Nottingham Winter Wonderland is back after a slightly disastrous attempt to return during the height of COVID. Lots of the familiar stalls have returned including delicious looking food offerings, several bars and the ice rink, though this year this has been expanded to include The Sky Skate, a covered terrace and ice path above the market, the only one of its kind in the UK, and which was proving very popular. [The official website linked above has better pics than I’d manage]. Winter Wonderland opened on November 15 and runs until December 31.

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The Cosy Club, Nottingham

On Monday I had a lovely lunch with a friend at The Cosy Club, Nottingham. She’d asked me to pick the venue and I chose here because I’ve always been fascinated by this building which is just around the corner from the Market Square in the centre of Nottingham. The Cosy Club, a chain of restaurants, moved in at the beginning of 2020, and then promptly had to close because of COVID. However they’ve now reopened and seem to be doing very well judging by how busy it was (we managed to get a table in the bar area without booking, but absolutely book in advance if there’s a larger group and at dinner time). Prior to this the building had been vacant for nearly 20 years and as you’ll see they’ve done a great job of restoring it to its former glory.

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Bath Christmas Market 2022

I spent the first few days of this week visiting with a friend including a day trip to Bath’s Christmas market. We had been before, a few years before COVID, but only spent a limited time there so on this trip we wanted to get there early and enjoy a full-ish day making a dint in our Christmas shopping. It was easier to drive rather than take the train, particularly with the train strikes and we knew that Bath has a very efficient Park and Ride system, with several sites available around the city. Parking is free, you just pay for the bus ticket (we paid £5.40 for two adults, other combinations of fares are available) and the buses are regular and take about 10 minutes. The weather was extremely foggy which, while making for a slightly eventful drive home, also made for some atmospheric photos, especially later on in the day when the lights started to come on.

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Categories: Bath, England, Somerset | Tags: , , | 5 Comments

Abbey House, Baker Street, London

Abbey House, located at 219-229 Baker Street, London contains part of the central tower and a section of the façade of what was the headquarters for the Abbey Road Building Society (now Abbey National) from 1932 until 2002. The Art Deco styling of the building was designed by J. J. Joass and is original, the rest of the building was rebuilt as residential and commercial units as well as underground parking.

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The Regent’s Park, London

The area that is now Regent’s Park once belonged to the monks of Barking Abbey until Henry VIII dissolved the monastery and turned it into a hunting park. In 1835 it became a public park on the instructions of the future King George IV who at the time was the Prince Regent (ruling in place of his mentally ill father George III until his death in 1820 when he became George IV). That’s why the park is The Regent’s Park, but hardly anyone ever calls it that.

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Tropical House, Woodthorpe Grange Park, Nottingham

On my most recent visit to Woodthorpe Grange Park I went to have a look around the Plant Shop and saw that the Tropical House was open. I haven’t been inside for probably at least a decade because it has had some very odd opening hours, but now I see they are keeping it open at the same time as the shop, so Monday-Sunday 10-4. There’s been a nursery (in the flower sense!) at Woodthorpe since the 1920s and the flower displays that adorn the city during the spring and summer and for the Britain in Bloom and other competitions in Nottingham are grown here; the shop sells off excess stock as well as locally produced gifts.

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