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.
Glasgow’s City Chambers, the headquarters of Glasgow City Council, is an imposing building that was completed from 1888. There are (pre-COVID) free public tours twice a day Monday to Friday with tickets handed out on a first come first served basis. I got there about half an hour before the start time and was first in a group of about eight people.
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:
The Hunterian Museum within the University of Glasgow is Scotland’s oldest public museum. Free to enter, the museum began when William Hunter, a Scottish anatomist and physician, died and left his collections to the university. The museum first opened in 1807 at the university’s old campus on the High Street and then moved to the new campus in 1870.
The Memorial Chapel at the University of Glasgow can, in normal times, be visited every weekday from 9 till 5 and when I visited I had the whole place to myself for a few minutes before more people came in. It was completed in 1929 to serve as a memorial for members of the university who had died in both World Wars and interestingly both Protestant, Catholic and humanist marriages can take place there.
The chapel was designed by John James Burnet around 1913 but building was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War. It’s not surprisingly a small building but a lovely space nonetheless and has some wonderful stained glass windows designed and made by Douglas Strachan. He died before he could install all the windows he’d designed, so these were worked on by others from the 1950s to the 1960s.
The University of Glasgow was founded in 1451 making it the fourth oldest university in the UK and second oldest in Scotland. They do run tours of the building for visitors but they weren’t running on the day I went so I did the self-guided tour which can be found on the university’s website.
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