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).
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.
You can find some more photos here.
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.
The main reason I wanted to visit Glasgow last October was to go to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and it turned out to be an even better experience than I’d been expecting, in fact I ended up spending most of the day there. The building itself is beautiful inside and out, designed in a Spanish Baroque style in red sandstone by John W. Simpson and E. J. Milner Allen and opened in 1901.
