A Grade II listed building Exchange Flags is an office complex and restaurant space in the centre of Liverpool’s commercial district. The name of the building reflects the city’s history in regards to slavery – cotton traders and brokers would meet here to do their buying and selling and exchange a form of business card, hence the name.
The gardens at Rockingham Castle are made up of several different terraces that are divided from the plain Terraced Lawn directly in front of the castle building by the Elephant Hedge – so called because they are sculpted to look like a row of elephants.
Earlier today I went into Nottingham City Centre to photograph the Pride Parade and support the community. I don’t know if numbers have been calculated yet but it certainly seemed like a large turnout, with the parade itself taking over an hour to move around the Market Square with musical performances and dancers along the route and lots of fun costumes, plus some very cute dogs! A few of my photos from the event are below:
George John Vulliamy, the superintending architect of the Metropolitan Board of Water, created these electric lamps that stretch along the Thames in 1870. Although they are referred to as dolphins – possibly because they are supposed to be modelled on dolphin sculptures that are part of the Fontana del Nettuno in Rome – they are actually sturgeons.
After our visit to Canons Ashby we were looking for somewhere to visit to break up our drive back to Nottingham and decided that Rockingham Castle was the perfect choice. It’s still a family home and is only open on certain afternoons throughout the year, so always check the website and pre-book tickets (adult £14.00) if you plan to visit. It’s also worth noting that photography is not allowed inside the building itself.
MOSTYN Art Gallery – the building on the right in the below picture – is a contemporary art gallery in Llandudno, Wales. The history of the gallery begins in 1895 in Conwy with the Gwynedd Ladies’ Art Society. They asked the philanthropist and photographer Lady Augusta Mostyn to secure new premises for them and this building became the home of the society from 1901 to 1903. Women were not permitted in the male artist’s societies so this is possibly the first art gallery dedicated to exclusively exhibiting work by female artists in the world. Interestingly that wasn’t the original intention of Lady Augusta who wanted it to be a space for local people to use (many of the Society members were actually based elsewhere in the UK) and eventually the Society was asked to leave.
Canons Ashby Priory was an Augustinian priory founded in 1147. The priory was built in stone in 1253 and the unusual colour of the outside is because of the use of three different types of stone. The addition of the tower in 1350 demonstrates the wealth of the priory; funds for it were largely raised by charging locals for the use of a well on their land.
Representing Boadicea (or Boudica or Boudicca or any other manner of spellings), the queen of a British Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the Romans in AD 60-61, this sculpture can be found by Westminster Bridge opposite Big Ben. It was created by Thomas Thornycroft with help from his son William and was commissioned in the 1850s but not completed until 1898, over ten years after the sculptor had died. It was installed at the bridge in 1902.
The gardens at Canons Ashby present a lovely first impression of the estate. Edward Dryden, beginning in 1908, was largely responsible for the development of the gardens as it looks today. He wanted to create an organised landscape of geometric shapes.
This striking clock in Colwyn Bay was presented to the town by Andrew Fraser’s parents in 1989. Andrew was a musician who played violin in the Welsh National Youth Orchestra. He died in Brussels in 1984 at the age of 33.
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